No Country: A Novel

by Kalyan Ray

  “What’s Wahhabi?” There seemed to be so many groups among grown-ups.

  “A Wahhabi is a pure Muslim—he sticks only to the old Arabic teachings, whatever they are—and hates anyone who does not, for they will all go to Jahannam, where all infidels will burn forever, even those who revere tombs of the saints of Islam—everybody except the mullahs and their followers. They were shouting they would confront the pir’s disciple by the river and ask him if he is on their side. If he is not . . .” Qadir broke off.

  “But Qadir Chacha,” I said, suddenly fearful, “you said that djinns protect Allah’s beloved ones. You said that the pir by the river comforts all human beings, didn’t you? Didn’t you?” He was holding me tight to calm me.

  “Qadir Chacha, let’s go.”

  “No, no, no,” he whispered, “It is so dark!”

  “I know the way,” I assured him, adding, “You can ask him about Burak. He’s sure to know.”

  “Your father . . . would not like that . . .” Qadir muttered, “. . . and I . . . I forbid it absolutely,” his voice quivering with indecision.

  • • •

  AS WE RAN together under the huge red moon, the trees seemed to move about behind us, but we did not dare look back. Qadir Chacha held my palm in a sweaty grip, until I was unsure whether it was to comfort me or to be comforted. “Burak used to be afraid of the full moon,” he panted beside me.

  I rushed on until I was at the wall crusted with dry creepers. A brick dislodged and fell with a clatter, setting off an indignant nightbird, which cackled and swooped above us. I spied the low doorway to the left. Leaving Qadir Chacha, his hands clapped on his ears under the flying cacophony, followed me as I ducked through the courtyard into the mosque’s sanctuary.

  Kalo Pir’s candles were unlit, but the cloth that covered the old pir’s grave was iridescent with curling and dying embers. One or two sparks flew up and were lost in the gloom of the chamber.

  The djinns must be here, I thought inside my thrumming head.

  A charred odour hung in the air. I stepped out of the door and saw a djinn resting on broken cobbles at the far end of the mosque. Under the smudged red moon, the carapace of its wings appeared folded, one over the other. A metallic gleam rose from its midriff like some upright ornament. I moved closer, careful not to wake the still djinn. Overhead, the bird wheeled in a crazy gyre.

  “They burned the mazhar,” panted Qadir, emerging from the sanctuary behind me. “The Wahhabis desecrated the shrine.”

  Hands folded over his chest, feet at an impossible angle, eyes open and opaque, his djellaba caked with dry blood, slashed fingers curled around the impacted blade in his chest, lay Kalo Pir.

  • • •

  THROUGH THE SOILED shadows below the trees we rushed back, Qadir Chacha and I. The grass was heavy with dew, and the old red moon had set. I emerged through the hedges of wild sheora and dhundul behind our bungalow, surprised to see my father sitting beside piles of clothes and books. I thought he would be angry, but a cleft of uncertainty had worked its way onto his forehead, giving him a puzzled look, devoid of authority.

  “Kush . . .” he whispered, as if verifying my presence.

  “Yes, Baba,” I said, longing to tell him where I had been and what I had seen, but he appeared distraught and absentminded.

  “Kush,” he said again. “Go to your mother. See that she gets everything together, but in just one box.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. The first time in my life I was being sent to my mother, and not a word about my nocturnal adventure: Was she worried too? Sushma must have complained about my absence. And what everything needed to be packed into one box? Was I being sent away for my truancy? I entered my mother’s bedroom and smelt its close odour of mourning, and saw a box, open and half-full. All over the floor lay items of clothing, old photos, smaller boxes. On the bed crouched my mother on all fours while Sushma hovered over her, wringing her hands.

  “We have an hour, less,” Sushma croaked at me, as if all this were my fault. I glared back at her.

  “Why?” I asked my mother. All she did was bury her face in the bedclothes and wail.

  “All right, I promise . . .” I began. All this because of a night out without telling her! What did she care? Resentment welled in me.

  “Son, you need to take a few clothes.” My father had come in and stood behind me.

  “Why? Why should I go anywhere?” I burst out.

  “None of us thought it would c-come to this,” he said softly.

  If I had to leave, I would! Would they send Qadir Chacha away too? Fine—I thought angrily—I would go with him to his village in Bihar which he had told me about: yellow wheatfields, lychee trees, the small hills nearby. I would leave with him if my father did not want me either. I looked Baba squarely in the eye. “I don’t need either of you,” I said. “In two more months I will be eight years old.”

  My father blinked. “What do you m-mean?” he muttered, his palms pointing upward. One of them had a scar, long since healed, though he never told me how he had cut himself, no matter how many times I asked.

  “Kush,” he said, now kneeling in front of me, face-to-face. “The c-country is broken. There are k-killings everywhere. We have to get to the city, to C-calcutta.” He stopped, tentatively reaching for my shoulder.

  “A long way? Across the river?”

  “Yes,” he said. “To the west.”

  “When will we come back?”

  He shook his head in silence.

  • • •

  IT RAINED ALL night. The bullock cart on which we sat crowded together swayed and squelched in the mud. The plaited bamboo awning above us held in place a piece of tarred canvas, a ragged sari ineffectually draping the back. It was gloomy inside. I could feel the lurch and pull of the wet, muscular beast, wheezing and trundling us over the unfriendly suck of mud below. The rain fell, lulling us under its drone. Ma sat propped with pillows, her back to the wet driver, who had not spoken a word, while Sushma perched beside her, cramped in an angular crouch, snuffling and moaning. Baba and I huddled together where the mattress sloped outside and grew increasingly soggy.

  In a trench by the night road, I spied a number of bodies piled over each other. Their stretched limbs looked like firewood, pale and stiff. At the lip of that trench lay a dismembered hand, its index finger stiff and pointing.

  I leant out of our cart to see, but Baba pulled me back, roughly for once, drawing the sari closed across the back so Ma would notice nothing. “Hush!” he whispered to me, his hand shaking, his back tense, each time I started to ask him something. He winced everytime he heard the smallest noise, although the dripping rain, the hum of monsoon insects, and the shifting curtains of night hid us as we left our home far behind.

  Every couple of hours the bullock would abruptly stop, impervious to the clicking sound the driver made or the blow or two of his switch, while the reek of manure filled our nostrils. Then the beast would choose a green patch and graze, dumb and insistent. The driver sat resigned, quiet as a stork, while the bullock fed. Finally it would urinate copiously, its sulphurous whiff drifting in the wet breeze, and with great reluctance, would pull us out of the placid space and move unhurriedly on, past village after deserted village. If we were fleeing, we were doing so very slowly indeed.

  The rain stopped near dawn. When I poked my head out from behind the drying sari curtain, I was greeted by a faint aroma of flowers. Looking up, I saw the last white scattered stars, like jasmine overhead. The bullock stopped yet again, and I waited for the familiar whiff of the beast’s offal. But it simply stood. Then I heard the sound of the moving river. Across that was safety. Ma curled asleep, holding close the small box containing all her jewels.

  I stood by our belongings stacked under a peepul tree, its branches heavy with the rains that had swept through the land. A hawk flew high, wheeling in slow circles in the clear sky. I wondered if it could tell the difference between where we were headed—wh
ich Baba now called “our country”—from the land we were leaving behind, because someone had drawn a line on a map in a far country where it was day when here it was night.

  My mother sat on the only suitcase we had, Sushma beside her on the ground, cross-legged. Baba had gone to the hut at the edge of the river. Fishermen lived there, he told us, who could ferry us across the river.

  “Will there be a cart to take us from there?” asked Sushma, querulously. I could see a scowl on my father’s face, and then he looked sideways and said, “Yes, of course.” Mother looked reassured. I realized, for the first time in my life, that he was lying.

  My father came back with a brown whip of a man, and between us, we carried everything except Ma’s mattress, swollen to twice its girth in the rain.

  The fisherman was taciturn. He said his name was Jadab when Baba asked him. “A Hindu name,” my father muttered, as if comforted.

  The boat was just a dugout with a single oar and a ragged sail, its bottom slippery with mud which gave off a fishy stench. Ma began to complain, but at the sight of the groaning river on which torn branches swept along by the slap and tug of water, she fell silent. Sushma looked with great disapproval at the boat, but kept her own counsel.

  My father steadied Sushma into the boat. I scrambled up the side and almost lost my foothold, but Jadab caught me in a sure grip and hoisted me in. Baba cradled my mother carefully in his arms and sat her on the side of the boat, quickly clambering in behind her. My mother had swaddled her small box in a shawl and clung to it.

  “Do not lean over the water,” Baba said anxiously to me, as Jadab shoved off from the shore, but I leant over the swift cobalt water anyway, drawn by its forbidding depth. The fisherman stood at the stern, grasping the shoulder-high oar, his muscles taut and slippery over his hard bones, as he propelled and guided the boat, his eyes slits as he faced the salty wind. The bank, with its large peepul tree beneath which we had sat, receded fast.

  “Calcutta?” Jadab asked.

  “Yes,” nodded my father.

  Jadab paused at his oar and towelled his face with his gamccha, which he then tied about his waist. “Two days’ walk,” he said, pointing at the approaching shore. “One, if you have a cart.”

  “Where can I get one?”

  “You want a cart?”

  Father nodded again.

  “I’ll get someone,” said Jadab, pausing to scratch his neck, “but he will not take money. A piece of jewellery.” My mother clutched the box under her shawl. Jadab turned his head, as if checking the horizon.

  Some trees which grew at the edge of the shore perched on spidery legs. “Mangroves,” my father pointed out. “That means the sea is not very far away.”

  “An hour,” said Jadab, pointing downriver.

  As the boat nosed into the muddy headland, I jumped down with the large suitcase, sprawling in the gum-like mud of what was to become India. I struggled quite ineffectually to stand up.

  Sushma hunched at the back of the boat, her nose wrinkled with distaste at the mud on the shore. Baba climbed down and held out his hands for Ma, but my mother, hugging her shawl-swaddled box, looked around for some other way.

  Swiftly, with one hand, Jadab snatched at the box. Ma cried out as her shawl unraveled, and the box clattered onto the deck. As she leant to retrieve it, Jadab lifted his oar and hit her sidewise, and she plunged screaming into the shallow water. With practiced speed, Jadab thrust the length of the oar into the bank and pushed. The boat rocked and teetered.

  I was stuck in the mud, the suitcase beside me, while Baba was stranded, up to his knees in the same muddy bank. Sushma screeched, perched on the boat, trying to retrieve the jewel box from its stinking bottom. As the lurching boat angled away from the shore, Jadab raised his oar and thrust it again in the water. One more heave and he would catch the swift current, and the boat would be away. I watched as he dipped the oar and rose with it, his rope-like muscles glistening in the early sun.

  My father raised something he had fished out from under the waistfold of his kurta. He held it out slowly, like a sleepwalker, less than a man’s length from the swerving boat. At the sharp report, birds on the mangroves squawked and rose in a body. Jadab’s head snapped back as he fell in a heap, his oar falling on the deck with a clunk, next to the jewel box.

  The current caught the boat in its powerful tug, pulling it sharply downstream, where it rotated out of reach, gathering speed. My father tried to wade out, but by the time he had struggled up, the boat was out of reach. In his frustration, he threw what he held in his hand after it, slipping and falling to his knees in the mud. Sushma was standing now, balanced precariously on the boat, clutching the jewel box she had retrieved, her mouth distended in a scream. We could not hear her over the howls of my mother, thrashing in the water, crying out for her jewels as the boat spun downstream towards the ocean.

  I thought I saw my brother Laub’s arm raised helplessly above the lip of the lost boat.

  • • •

  WE WALKED NUMBLY through the countryside. All I remember was my father plodding ahead, his muddy shoes in front of me. More and more feet joined ours on that hypnotic march, a great and growing stream of the ragged and exhausted, flowing towards Calcutta. We walked doggedly, weighed down with fatigue and bags. We stopped when my mother would cry out in weariness, then sat or lay listlessly under the roadside banyans, tamarinds, and barren mango trees, and when evening came, we ate what little puffed rice Baba had brought. On the second day, I remember the milestones on the side of the road, little tombstones with diminishing numbers printed on them. I stared at the asphalt, fissured like unending maps, until daylight faded into black. We were going slower and slower because Ma was exhausted. We slept under a tree, our hunger turned into a hum of pain. I knew Baba could not help. On the morning of the third day, with no words but just a sip of water which Baba had saved for us, we were on the road again.

  When I looked up a couple of hours later, with the sun high, my head swimming with weariness, I suddenly saw the city all around me. Underfoot, the macadam was cut open by curved tram tracks, while overhead spread spiderwebs of tram cables and electric lines. Writing covered everything: billboards, walls, shops. There had been little to read in our village landscape; but here, the insistent script named everything. Even the trams which trundled past us like small steamers were smothered in print. My mother and I followed Baba into narrow lanes until he walked into a dilapidated house and up a staircase and knocked on a door. During the interminable bargaining among grown-ups, I curled up on the dusty red of the cement landing and fell into a deep sleep.

  When I woke in an unfamiliar room, I could not, for a moment, remember who I was, or where. The room was dim, airless, with a single barred window whose ledge was green with sunless moss. I lay on one of mother’s old saris, in lieu of bedsheets.

  “I’ll g-go to Mr. Aherne,” I heard my father whispering to my mother, “t-to the P-police Headquarters. I knew h-him once.” He looked about for a comb, but not finding one, he used his fingers. “He’ll h-help us.”

  He returned late in the afternoon, stooped with disappointment and fatigue. “I c-could not find him. He has long l-left the p-police,” Baba mumbled, “and they are too busy for my questions.” He took his shoes off. He had no socks, and his blisters were bleeding.

  I realized that this rented room was where we were to stay. In the morning I ate what Baba cooked ineptly on a bucket-oven on the landing. His gold ancestral signet ring was missing from his finger.

  “I will go look for work now,” he said to us as we ate.

  Until early afternoon, I sat in blind boredom. Then, just to test matters, I asked my mother if she wanted some water. She turned her back to me and curled up tighter. I went outside and sat on the stair landing, waiting for Baba. I was thirsty, but past caring. A cat skittered up the stairs. When I stretched out my hand, it sniffed my fingers, then went past me to a frayed mat at the bottom of the stairs and sat cleaning itself. I
watched it hold its hind leg up, like the picture I had once seen of a musician holding his cello. I heard something behind me, and turned, thinking, It is Laub! My mother stood holding out a glass of water, and I took it from her, unable to say a word. She returned to the bed. I came and stood by her and drank half of the water.

  “Are you thirsty, Ma?” I asked.

  She nodded gravely. I gave her my glass to hold, and was about to fetch her a fresh one, when she lifted it to her lips and drained it. She lay down on the bed. Her face was unusually flushed, and a vein pulsed under her forehead and hid itself in her long, unkempt hair, which spooled over the pillow.

  “Come to me, Laub,” she said. Without a word I lay down beside her and closed my eyes. I could smell the musky odour of her hair, and realized I was lying upon it. I kept my eyes closed and felt her fold me in her arms.

  I woke up to a commotion in our room. There were strangers in our small space. I came to know them later: Tewari-babu, who lived next door, and owned the stationery store at the end of our lane, and his wife, Shanta-Auntyji, were leaning over the bed, alongside Baba, who looked dazed. With them was Dr. Gupta, a local homeopath, under the sole electric bulb that hung from our ceiling.

  “No pulse, no pulse,” he muttered, shaking his sweating head, “Big stroke she had, Mitra-ji. Nothing to do now. All over.” The bed was wet, for they had poured water on my mother’s pale and bony face. The men gathered by the window, talking. I slid over to my mother, putting my mouth next to her ear.

  “Laub has left,” I told her, reaching to touch her face. “Ma, I am Kush.” I was shocked how cold she was.

  • • •

  I ACCOMPANIED BABA to Nimtollah Ghat on the Ganges, where Tewari-babu, his grown sons, Manoj and Saroj, and some of their friends had carried Ma, lying on a flimsy wooden bier, upon their shoulders. Now she lay on a bed of logs, by the river, her hair hanging down to touch the ground. On her, they had heaped splinters of wood and kindling, around which circled the chanting priest swathed in an ochre shawl covered with Sanskrit writing. Baba said these were the hundred and eight sacred names of Lord Krishna.