Nimita's Place

by Akshita Nanda

Whether Lahore or Delhi, Lucknow or Karachi, people are forced to find room for countless relatives and friends fleeing violence. Hindu or Muslim or Sikh or whatever, it is a religious duty to protect the helpless. To take more mouths into the household even when oil and wheat are as expensive as gold, and sometimes harder to come by.

  Pratik Lal and Kunti smilingly entertain the guests of their daughter and son-in-law, but these same guests are well aware of the demands they place on the household.

  Only the children are happy. Tony-Baba has Shukla-Bibi to rule over and a neat baby doll, in the form of Urmila-Baby, to play with. Her toddling steps and babble are much more satisfactory than a little brother who only sleeps and cries and monopolises Mummy’s attention. Shukla-Bibi is happy to manage the children in place of a worried Shanti-Bhabhi, her role as childminder adding security to her precarious situation in the new home. Nimita knows Shukla-Bibi and Radheshyam are as much her responsibility as Urmila-Baby and Mummy, but right now she is too exhausted to care.

  For the first three days, after the shock of Karan’s absence sinks in, all Nimita can do is lie in bed and sleep. Those are the best days for once she gets out of bed, she finds herself an extra cog in a fully functional machine that has absolutely no need of her.

  Once, she was mistress of a household, giving orders for things to be bought or stocked or repaired or mended. Once, she barely had enough time each day to ensure her family and servants were fed and cleaned and their spiritual welfare seen to by regular pujas and festival observances. Now there are not even these tasks to distract her from the gaping hole in the centre of her life and even her daughter’s chuckle sometimes seems out of place.

  At night, she can hold her mother tightly and absorb her shaking sobs, but during the day there is no duty for her except to fold her hands and wait for Radheshyam to return from the station. He goes to the railway station every single morning, coming back only after the last trains from Lahore or Jullunder have chugged in. All he ever returns with is news, never the much-longed-for presence of his master.

  The news is enough to wring tears from a stone.

  The very night Nimita left for her parents’ home in Model Town, a crowd of rage-drunk gangsters from Mozang spilled out into the eastern areas and began targeting obvious Hindus and Sikhs. Their first target was a Hindu man in a white dhoti and kurta, a relatively poor man bringing home some shopping. His attackers swarmed over him, thrashing him, taking pains to fracture his limbs and leave him silent in the gutter, the few vegetables in his cloth bag trodden into the mud.

  Maddened by blood, they moved on. Their next target was a labourer on a bicycle, but this man, younger than their first victim, gave them the slip in the narrow gullies of an area he was clearly familiar with.

  Following their prey, the mob reached Temple Road where one of its members spotted the Urdu writing on the wall of the Sachdev bungalow and changed course. The gate was easily smashed open, and the thirty or so men who made up the mob poured in.

  They found only one member of the household at home: Rahim, who was once known as Ramu. Despite the amulet he now wore, containing holy words from the Quran, despite his being somewhat well-known as the newest pupil of that quiet maulvi sahab from Hazrat Baba, the mob focused its wrath on him.

  Perhaps it was because Rahim was well-known as a former kaffir that the mob came for him. If Hindus are going to change their religion and stay on in Lahore, then what is left for the Muslims who were here first?

  The noise of the mob alerted the Bakshi household, who immediately tried calling Inspector Khan’s station. The telephone lines were down so a servant was told to climb out from the side wall and take the message. Pramila Bakshi took herself, her daughter-in-law and her younger son to the upper storey and began parcelling her valuables, while Mohinder Bakshi and his older son waited with guns ready in hand.

  At some point Rahim began screaming. The noise caused the Bakshi daughter-in-law, a tender girl of 16, to go into hysterics. The Bakshis’ younger son too began crying and Pramila found herself with no help in the mammoth task of putting together the family’s jewels and cash in case immediate evacuation became necessary.

  She went to her husband and older son. “You must do something,” she told them.

  Mohinder, not an unkind man, had been thinking along these lines himself. But it would be suicide to attempt to stop this mob, even for two men armed with an elephant gun and an Enfield rifle that had killed more than one robber on the fledgling Uganda railway. The smart thing would be to wait for the servant to return with the police.

  However, much of Lahore was burning that night. The army was stretched thin trying to keep the mobs in line and also stop low-ranking police officers from joining the attackers. Rumours had spread about the magistrate who was arming Muslims and who had set the fire earlier that day in Papar Mandi. The thirty per cent of the police force who were Hindu or Sikh were willing now to lend their guns to civilians of their own religion.

  Rahim screamed again and Pramila looked at her husband. “Do something,” she said.

  The Bakshis’ home was almost a mirror of the Sachdev bungalow, and incorporated on the rooftop a barsati or storage area that could also be used to watch the stars on hot summer nights or enjoy the rains during the too-brief monsoon periods. Given the close relationship between the Bakshis and the Sachdevs, the roofs were left open with only a partly constructed wall to offer a modicum of privacy. The families could speak to each other when gathered on the roof, and had often waged intense and only half-joking battles with flying kites during the Basant festival and summer season.

  Mohinder and his son climbed to the roof and looked down towards the Sachdev compound. A few torches and kerosene lanterns could be seen in the darkness, but did not illuminate the truth behind the screams from the neighbouring bungalow.

  “I’m not a sharpshooter,” Mohinder came down and told his wife. “There is nothing to be done.”

  “I’m not telling you to kill them. Can’t you make a noise and frighten them off?” she said.

  “Are they pigeons? Do you think these are doves or pigeons to be so easily shooed away?”

  “Then why have these big guns?” said Pramila, whose father worked with Mohinder on the Ugandan railways. She had seen an African orderly dragged away by a man-eating lion when she was only 12.

  The large-calibre guns used by hunters to shoot elephants or the huge buffalo of North America are so big that they need two men to carry them. They must be mounted on a sturdy tripod because the recoil can dislocate a shoulder. They have been used in the two world wars—successfully—by men seeking to stop tank battalions in their otherwise relentless tracks. A twenty-millimetre gun can punch a hole through the strongest tempered steel.

  Mohinder and his son lugged the elephant gun up to the roof and rearranged trunks and broken furniture until they had a reasonable stand for the weapon. At best, the gun would point about thirty degrees downwards.

  “I’ll aim for the windows,” Mohinder told his son. “Then afterwards, you fire from the rifle. That should scare them away.” Or bring the police, he hoped.

  The gun, a gift from the British railway superintendent Mohinder had worked with, had last been used twenty years ago. Perhaps I have just forgotten how it sounds, Mohinder thought, seconds after pressing the trigger.

  A controlled explosion on the vast, open savannah echoes very differently from that within a relatively populated, well-built-up city area. Nimita could have recalled her earlier studies and explained why: On the savannah, sound waves dissipate effortlessly in the air. In the city, the sound has buildings and other barriers to reflect the energy, or reverberate and shatter.

  The explosion left Mohinder’s eardrums ringing, while the bullet broke off a heavy branch of the mango tree in the Sachdev compound and also punctured the wooden shutters of the upper floor. The thud of the branch and the cracking of the shutters were followed by absolute silence and then more screams of pain from the men
who saw colleagues felled by a falling log of wood and others who had had splinters from the shutters cut into their cheeks or hair.

  When the Bakshis’ son fired two shots from his rifle aiming generally into the Sachdev garden, Pramila came up with an old whistle from her father’s railway days, blowing it and mimicking the sound of a police unit in hot pursuit.

  Had it been ten or 15 men, their efforts might have been enough. But this mob had thirty, and the 25 who were unwounded ran out onto the road, ready to engage with the forces of law.

  Finding no one on the road, it became obvious that the shots had come from the bungalow next door. Within minutes, the mob was throwing itself against the Bakshi gates and walls. Luckily Pramila had spent the afternoon getting the servants to line the tops of the wall with sharp shards of earthen pots and broken soda water bottles. Mohinder had also designed the gates with tall, spiky iron railings. Both defences kept the marauders at bay just long enough for official reinforcements to arrive.

  “I told you to give me your weapons,” Inspector Khan told the Bakshis, an hour after midnight. “You civilians have no idea how to use them.”

  Mohinder, chest swelling, was about to retort when the inspector added: “Now see? You’ve made yourself a target. What can I do now? Post two guards here all night? And tomorrow night? You are not the only family I must protect.”

  “Don’t worry, Khan Sahib. We are going to Delhi,” Pramila said.

  “Then go as soon as possible, Bhabhiji,” said Inspector Khan. “In these times, we can’t guarantee anyone’s safety.”

  The Bakshis took the Tata Airlines flight to Delhi the very next day and were served orange juice by a stewardess nattily dressed in a blinding white blouse, neatly pressed skirt and matching tricorn cap. After landing, they made their way to a small bungalow in Paharganj that Mohinder had bought as an investment. He had intended to repaint it, then rent it out, but there was no question of that for a few months at least now.

  Pramila got the one watchman on duty to quickly sweep and dust the house before taking one bedroom for herself and her husband, allotting the second to her son and daughter-in-law and the guest room to the younger boy. The watchman was told to spread the word that the Bakshis needed domestic help and then also to take messages to the important Punjabi families in Delhi—the Kauls, the Tiwanas and so on.

  “We’ll be dining out for months on the story of our escape,” Pramila told her daughter-in-law. “Pity we didn’t have a bigger baggage allowance on the flight. Never mind. Kamla Kaul is bound to know a good tailor.”

  The news of the attack on the Bakshis is written about in newspapers around India, because of Mohinder’s political connections. Delhi is full of similar stories that do not make it to the newspapers.

  Radheshyam returns to Pratik Lal Chand’s house with such tales every night. Trains and trains of Hindus and Sikhs are streaming in from Jullunder and Lahore, many to squat for weeks in refugee encampments around the railway station or in old Mughal monuments and tombs for lack of money to rent even the cheapest houses.

  Walking towards the station gate, Radheshyam, in his dusty salwar kurta, is accosted by a lawyer, an accountant and a doctor. All escaped Punjab with only the clothes on their back and families to feed.

  “Do you know of a room to rent? A place to stay?”

  “Our relative who is so and so and who lived at this address, do you know where he is now?”

  “Are you so-and-so’s man come to look for me? My friend said he would come for me.”

  The farmers and labourers, the carpenters and mechanics and others have nothing but stories to sell for sympathy. “We are from Rawalpindi, the Muslims came and drove us out. We are from Lyallpur, they came with knives and took our women and killed our children and drove us out. Do you know somewhere we can stay, a job we can do, a person who can help?”

  Worst still are those who, like Radheshyam, look with hungry eyes at every train that streams in. “My daughter’s family was also coming here. Do you know her husband? He worked as a watchman.” “My son should be here already. Do you know him? He is so tall and his name is Gurinder.”

  In the beginning Radheshyam folded his hands and wept with them. Now he too looks all day, dry-eyed, at the carriages steaming in and out, and comes home with stories that pour out of his mouth like dust from the wind. Shukla-Bibi has forbidden him to tell her these stories, but Nimita listens to them in the kitchen at night, after he has eaten. She has an endless appetite for horror.

  The first time he told her of the village where the women threw themselves into the well to save their honour from Muslim rapists, she felt a twinge in her numb heart, a twinge not for the women who killed themselves in that way, but for the woman who told Radheshyam that story. She feels the pain of the woman who survived because there were too many bodies in the well, because her lust for life made her climb out, instead of waiting to die.

  Nimita too feels the guilt of survival, of being able to live and breathe and eat in relative safety and yes, riches, in this house that is half the size of the one she grew up in.

  This didn’t happen to us, she thinks, as Radheshyam talks of mothers leaving their children behind, of gangs that swoop on the long convoys of refugees on foot, robbing the poor of their final few possessions and raping girls before the eyes of their family members.

  This is what we escaped, she thinks. Why? Why? Why was it my destiny to escape?

  She begs Radheshyam to go earlier and stay later, to talk to everyone coming off the trains from Lahore. It is an impossible task at the best of times and now drives the servant deeper and deeper into himself. He comes home hunched with the weight of the tragedies he has heard, further bowed with shame at his failure to bring home the master.

  The stories fill Nimita’s head until, eyes open or closed, all she can see is that long stretch of the Grand Trunk Road and the human debris trudging along the side. In the months to come, the newspapers will run aerial photos of the worst of it, trains of humans and cattle and carts that stretch almost the length of a country. The Sachdevs did not even see a portion of the great migration of some ten million Indians, now told they were no longer just Indians but could choose, based on religion, to be either Indians or Pakistani. Villagers driven out of fields they tilled all their lives, weeping as they walked towards a nebulous promise of safety.

  No matter that they are allotted plots of land in compensation, the displaced will mourn their lost homes for the rest of their lives. They will call for vengeance on whoever they think was responsible—the politicians, the other religions, the British. Their children will watch them fight for compensation and be rewarded with either nothing or bits of earth too barren to farm or too far away to protect.

  No matter how they left their homes, on foot, on train, on plane, in cars, the displaced will never once say that the line of Partition drew them to a better life. Not the Muslims granted fertile land farmed by Sikhs in the new Pakistan, not the Hindus who occupy the homes and businesses Muslims owned in Delhi. All will mourn what they left behind, just as Nimita dreams every night of her childhood home in flames and her father lost on that pyre.

  When she dreams of Karan, it is of him playing tennis with her or holding Urmila-Baby or reflected in her dressing table mirror, brushing her hair. She dares not dream of the reality of his fate, but it is reflected in her very existence in this house.

  She occupies a ghostly space between guest and family. The dressing table mirror at which she combs her hair is not carved bridal teakwood, but a plain rosewood construction indistinguishable from any dozens of similar pieces of furniture knocked out by a busy carpenter. Kunti-Auntyji has the house and servants well in hand. Even Shukla-Bibi takes orders from her when it comes to the two young boys. Nimita has to ask for permission just to boil some milk for Urmila-Baby.

  Not that the food is begrudged, but this is a stranger’s kitchen and household. The keys jangling on Nimita’s waist are useless, meant for locks in a ho
use she does not know when she can return to. The layout of the pantry is different, the wheat flour and spices not where she would have kept them. The vessels in the kitchen are similar to but very different from hers. There is not even a pressure saucepan, that having proven to be too expensive a gadget for the humble household of a publisher.

  On the 16th day, when Nimita begins to bleed and finds that the cloths she would have usually had on hand for this are almost five hundred kilometres away, she sits down and beats her fists on the dressing table with frustration. Then she goes to the cupboard holding the meagre assortment of clothes she brought for herself and Mummy and sacrifices the cotton kameez she travelled here in. Neatly laundered and ironed by a dhobi, it bears too many travel stains to be seen in public again. She might wear it at home but there is a difference between “at home in a stranger’s house” and “at home in my own home”. One cannot be too casual in the first instance.

  Nimita closes the bedroom door and takes stock of the valuables that have come with them to Delhi. Many of them are on her body: bangles, chain, earrings. She wears them because she does not yet consider herself a widow. In the back of her mind is also the thought, what if we have to run again?

  There is some money here, not much compared with what they have in Lahore, but at least five hundred rupees in cash and coins. There are her two wedding sets of jewellery, the thick gold chain Karan wore at Roshna’s wedding, the silver anklets Charan-Mama sent for Urmila-Baby when she was born. A pearl necklace, the rings Urmila-Mummyji wore and which only came off at her death.

  Mummy is in the sitting room, being entertained or at least quietly observed by Kunti-Auntyji. Nimita walks in and makes conversation. When Kunti-Auntyji is called to the kitchen, she takes her mother by the arm and draws her into the bedroom.

  Her matter-of-fact tone forces Sharada to pay attention. “We can’t keep living here,” Nimita says. “Shanti-Bhabhi is a saint, the kind of person who didn’t want to be a burden on her own brother-in-law and that is why she came to her parents. How can I now take advantage of her generosity for my own daughter?”