We felt relieved, as did our laundry.
When the Congress party assumed power, alcohol was banned. Imported liquor and wines were still available, but home brews could neither be made nor sold. Now, about ninety-nine per cent of dhobis were habitual drinkers. They spent the whole day standing knee-deep in water and their evenings drinking anywhere from a quarter to half a bottle. Liquor had, in a way, become part of their lives. Our dhobi fell ill. He treated the illness with the home-brewed poison that was made illegally and sold surreptitiously, with the result that it ruined his stomach and brought him near death.
I was unusually busy with work in those days. I left early in the morning, at about six, and returned around ten or ten-thirty in the evening. When my wife learned about our dhobi’s life-threatening illness, she took a taxi and went to see him. She had the servant and the taxi driver carry him to the taxi and brought him to a doctor. The doctor was impressed by her concern for the dhobi and refused to accept his fee, but my wife insisted. ‘No, Doctor Sahib, you can’t claim the whole reward by yourself.’
The doctor smiled and said, ‘Well then, let’s split it fifty-fifty.’
He accepted half the fee.
The dhobi received proper medical treatment. A few injections took care of his stomach ailment. Nutritional supplements gradually restored his strength. Within a few months he had completely recovered. He was grateful and invoked God’s blessings on us all the time. ‘Bhagwan make Sab like Saaeed Shaleem Balishtar. Live in Colaba. Have children, lots money. Begum Sab came visit dhobi in car, took him to kila to see big doctor, who has mem. Bhagwan keep Begum Sab happy . . .’
Many years, full of political upheavals, went by, yet the dhobi came every Sunday without fail. He was in robust health now. A long time had passed since his illness but he still remembered the care we had given him and never failed to invoke God’s blessings on us. He had given up drinking completely. Initially he did reminisce about his drinking days, but not at all now. He no longer felt the need for liquor after standing all day in water.
The situation in the country was deteriorating rapidly. Hindu–Muslim rioting followed Partition. Muslims were being slaughtered in Hindu areas and Hindus in Muslim neighbourhoods—not just in the darkness of the night but also in broad daylight. My wife left for Lahore.
When the situation grew even worse I told the dhobi, ‘Look, dhobi, you’d better stop work now. This is a Muslim neighbourhood. God forbid that someone should kill you.’
He smiled. ‘Sab, nobody kill me.’
Our neighbourhood witnessed several killings but the dhobi came regularly.
One Sunday, I was at home reading the newspaper. The sports page carried the cricket scores and the front page the tally of Hindus and Muslims murdered during the rioting. I was still wondering about the frightening similarity between the two counts when the dhobi showed up. I started checking the washed items against the notebook entry. Meanwhile, the dhobi kept chattering away light-heartedly: ‘Saaeed Shaleem Balishtar good man. When he go he give pagri, dhoti, kurta. Your Begum Sab also good person. Gone away, right? Her country, right? When you write her, give my salaam. She come my kholi . . . in car. I had bad diarrhoea. Doctor put needle. Right away I good. When you write her, give my salaam. Say Ram Khilawan want you write him letter—’
I cut him off, rather sharply. ‘Dhobi, have you started drinking again?’
He laughed. ‘Drinking? Sab, find no drink now.’
I didn’t think it was right to say anything more. He gathered the dirty laundry in a bundle, said salaam, and left.
Conditions grew really critical over the next few days. A barrage of wires descended from Lahore making urgent pleas that I drop everything and head straight there. On Saturday I made up my mind to leave the next day. I wanted to leave early in the morning but my clothes were with the dhobi. I decided to go to his place and collect them myself before the onset of curfew. In the evening I set out for Mahalakshmi in a victoria carriage.
The curfew was an hour away. Traffic was still flowing in the streets and trams were rumbling on. When my carriage approached the bridge a commotion erupted and a stampede broke out. It looked as though bulls had come to blows. When the crowd thinned, I saw a whole bunch of club-wielding dhobis in the distance, dancing and making loud noises near the buffaloes. I was headed in that direction but the coachman refused to go. I paid him and started walking. When I came close to the dhobis they abruptly stopped their hullabaloo.
I stepped forward and asked one of them, ‘Where does Ram Khilawan live?’
Another dhobi, brandishing a club, came swaying his head and asked the one I had talked to, ‘What does he want?’
‘Wants to know where Ram Khilawan lives.’
This other fellow, completely inebriated, staggered forward and literally bumped into me in his drunken gait. ‘Who are you?’ he asked brusquely.
‘I? . . . Ram Khilawan is my dhobi.’
‘Ram Khilawan’s your dhobi. And you’re the offspring of which dhobi?’
Some of the others in the group yelled, ‘A Hindu dhobi or a Muslimeen dhobi?’
All the dhobis, drunk to their teeth, gathered around me, ominously pumping their fists and swinging their clubs. I had to answer only one question—was I Muslim or Hindu?
I was frightened to death. It was impossible to get away as they had me completely surrounded. There wasn’t even a policeman anywhere in sight whom I might have called for help. I was at a complete loss, so I started babbling in disjointed sentences: ‘Ram Khilawan is Hindu . . . I’m asking where he lives . . . show me his kholi . . . he is my dhobi for ten years . . . he was very ill . . . we treated him . . . my wife . . . my memsahib came here . . . in a car . . .’
My babble had gone only this far when I felt an immense wave of self-pity wash over me. Embarrassment gripped my heart; how low a man could sink to save his skin. The thought gave me the courage to say, ‘I’m Muslimeen.’
‘Kill him! Kill him!’
The dhobi who was dead drunk threw his glance to one side and shouted, ‘Wait! Let Ram Khilawan kill him!’
I turned around only to find Ram Khilawan standing behind me holding a stubby club in his hand. He looked at me and let loose with a tirade against Muslims, hurling the coarsest obscenities at them in his peculiar dhobi dialect. Raising the club above his head and mouthing abuses, he advanced towards me.
‘Ram Khilawan!’ I called out to him in a commanding voice.
‘Shut up!—you Ram Khilawan’s . . .’ he thundered.
My last hope quickly ebbed away. When he was literally upon me, my throat went dry and I said in a hushed voice, ‘Ram Khilawan, don’t you recognize me?’
He raised his club higher to hit me. All of a sudden his eyes narrowed, dilated and narrowed again in quick succession. He let the club fall from his hand, came nearer, gaped at me and then shouted, ‘Sab!’ He turned to his people and accosted them, ‘No Muslimeen. He my Sab . . . Begum Sab’s Sab. Come to me . . . in car . . . took to doctor . . . he made my diarrhoea good.’
He reasoned with his fellows at length. But would they listen to him? Drunkards all. Soon they were arguing heatedly. A few sided with Ram Khilawan and the brawl escalated into fisticuffs. I quietly slipped away from the scene.
By nine o’clock the next morning my bags were packed and ready, only my boat ticket, which a friend had gone to buy on the black market, needed to arrive.
I was feeling anxious. Strange thoughts were colliding inside my mind. I wanted the ticket to fly over to me so I could set out for the pier at once. Even the slightest delay and I was convinced my flat would take me prisoner for life.
There was a knock at the door. My ticket has arrived, I thought. I quickly opened the door and who do I see—the dhobi.
‘Sab salaam!’
‘Salaam!’
‘May I come in?’
‘Sure.’
He walked in very quietly, took out my clothes from the bundle and laid them on the be
d. Then he wiped his moist eyes and said in a voice hoarse with emotion. ‘You leaving, Sab?’
‘Yes.’
He started to cry. ‘Sab, forgive. It’s liquor doing. Liquor . . . these days . . . free. Seth log give . . . free . . . say drink and kill Muslimeen. Nobody not take free liquor, Sab. Forgive. I drunk. Saaeed Shaleem Balishtar kind man . . . gave pagri, dhoti, kurta . . . Begum Sab save my life. Dying from diarrhoea. Come to me . . . in car . . . took to doctor . . . spent money . . . big money. You go your country, Sab . . . don’t tell Begum Sab . . . Ram Khilawan . . .’
His voice choked. He slung the bundle over his shoulder and made to leave. I stopped him, ‘Wait, Ram Khilawan.’
But he walked out quickly, arranging the front fold of his dhoti.
Sahae
‘Don’t say that one lakh Hindus and one lakh Muslims died; say that two lakh human beings died. That two lakh human beings died is not such a great tragedy after all; the tragedy, in truth, is that those who killed and those who were killed, both have nothing to show for it. After killing one lakh Hindus, the Muslims may have thought that they had finished off Hinduism. But it lives, and will live on. Likewise, after killing one lakh Muslims the Hindus may have exulted over the death of Islam. But the truth is before you: This hasn’t managed to put even a scratch on Islam. Those who think that religions can be killed by guns are foolish. Mazhab, deen, iman, dharm, faith, belief—these are found in our souls, not in our bodies. How can butchers’ cleavers, rioters’ knives and bullets annihilate them?’
Mumtaz was unusually excited that day. Just the three of us had come to see him off at the ship. He was leaving us for an undetermined period of time and was headed for Pakistan—a Pakistan we hadn’t imagined even in our dreams would come into being.
We were Hindus, all three of us. Our relatives in West Punjab had incurred heavy losses in both property and lives—presumably, this was why Mumtaz had decided to leave. Juggal had received a letter from Lahore telling him that his uncle had died in communal riots; the news affected him in a bad way. Still reeling from its impact, he casually said to Mumtaz one day, ‘I’m wondering what I would do if riots broke out in my neighbourhood.’
‘Yes, what would you do?’ Mumtaz asked.
‘I might kill you,’ Juggal said in all seriousness.
Mumtaz fell silent, dead silent. His silence continued for nearly eight days, breaking only when he suddenly announced that he was leaving for Karachi by ship at 3.45 p.m. that very afternoon.
None of us talked to him about his decision. Juggal was feeling contrite that the reason behind Mumtaz’s departure was his comment: ‘I might kill you.’ Perhaps he was still wondering whether in the heat of passion he could really kill Mumtaz or not—Mumtaz who was one of his best friends. That’s why he was now the silent one among the three.
Strangely enough, though, Mumtaz had become unusually talkative, especially in the few hours before his departure. He had begun drinking the moment he got up in the morning. His bags were packed as though he were going on a vacation. He would talk to himself and laugh for no apparent reason. If a stranger had seen him he would have thought that Mumtaz was feeling overwhelming joy at the prospect of leaving Bombay. But the three of us knew well that he was trying hard to deceive both us and himself in order to hide his true feelings.
I very much wanted to ask him about his sudden decision to leave. I even gestured to Juggal to bring up the subject, but Mumtaz never gave us a chance.
After downing three or four drinks Juggal became even quieter and went to lie down in the other room. Braj Mohan and I stayed with Mumtaz. He had quite a few bills to settle, give the doctors their fees, fetch his clothes from the cleaners—all these chores he did light-heartedly and easily enough. But as he was taking a paan from the stall next to the restaurant at the end of the street, his eyes began to well up with tears. When we moved away from the stall he put his hand on Braj Mohan’s shoulder and said softly, ‘You remember, don’t you, how Gobind lent us a rupee ten years ago, when we were down on our luck?’
After this Mumtaz remained silent, but once we returned home he launched another endless stream of small talk—all totally unconnected, but nonetheless so full of feeling that Braj Mohan and I found ourselves fully participating in it. When the time for Mumtaz’s departure drew near, Juggal joined us too. But the moment the taxi started for the docks, a hush fell over everyone.
Mumtaz’s eyes continued to say goodbye to the wide, sprawling bazaars of Bombay, until the taxi pulled into the harbour. The place was terribly crowded. Thousands of refugees, a few of them affluent, most others poor, were leaving—it was a veritable crush of people. And yet Mumtaz alone seemed to me to be leaving, leaving us behind for a place he had never even seen before, a place which, no matter how hard he tried to get used to it, would still remain unfamiliar. That’s what I thought at any rate. I couldn’t tell what was going through Mumtaz’s mind.
After his bags had all been taken to the cabin, Mumtaz took us out on to the deck. For a long time he gazed at the place where sky and sea came together. Then he took Juggal’s hand in his and said, ‘How perfectly deceptive . . . this meeting of the sky and the sea, and yet so incredibly delightful too!’
Juggal remained silent. Perhaps his earlier remark—‘I might kill you’—was still tormenting him.
Mumtaz ordered a brandy from the ship’s bar; that was what he had been drinking since morning. Drinks in hand, we stood against the guardrail. Refugees were piling on to the ship with a lot of noise and commotion, and seagulls were hovering over the water, which looked almost still.
Abruptly Juggal downed his glass in one huge gulp and said rather crudely, ‘Do forgive me, Mumtaz—I think I hurt you the other day.’
Mumtaz paused briefly and asked him, ‘When you uttered those words—“I might kill you”—was that exactly what you were thinking? You arrived at this decision with a cool head?’
Juggal nodded his head, and then said, ‘But I feel sorry.’
‘You’d have felt sorrier had you actually killed me,’ Mumtaz said pensively. ‘But only if you had paused to reflect that you hadn’t killed Mumtaz, a Muslim, a friend, you had killed a human being. If he was a bad man, what you would have killed was not his badness, but the man himself. If he was a Muslim, you wouldn’t have killed his Muslim-ness, but his being. If Muslims had got hold of his dead body, it would have added a grave to the cemetery, but the world would have come up one human being short.’
Stopping to think a bit, he resumed, ‘Perhaps my co-religionists would have anointed me as a martyr, but I swear I would’ve torn through my grave and cried that I didn’t accept the title, that I didn’t want this diploma for which I had taken no exam. Some Muslim murdered your uncle in Lahore, you heard the news in Bombay and murdered me—just tell me: What medals do we deserve for this? What robes of honour do your uncle and his killer back in Lahore deserve?
‘If you ask me, the victims died the miserable death of a pie-dog, and their killers killed in vain, utterly in vain.’
Mumtaz became agitated as he spoke, but the emotional excess was matched by an equal measure of sincerity. His observation that mazhab, deen, iman, dharm, faith, belief—these were found in our souls, not in our bodies, and that they couldn’t be annihilated by cleavers, knives and bullets had made an especially deep impression on me.
So I told him, ‘You’re absolutely right.’
This made Mumtaz think again. He said with some unease, ‘No, I wouldn’t say “absolutely right”. I mean, yes, sure, this is all okay. But perhaps I haven’t been able to say it all clearly, the way I want to. By “religion” I don’t mean this religion, nor this dharm, which afflicts ninety-nine per cent of us. I rather mean that very special thing which sets one individual apart from all others, the special thing which shows that someone is truly a human being. But what is it? Unfortunately I can’t put it on my palm and show it to you.’ A sudden gleam appeared in his eyes and he said, as if to himself, �
��But what exactly was special in him? A staunch Hindu, who worked the most abominable profession, and yet his soul—it couldn’t have been more radiant.’
‘Whose soul?’ I asked.
‘A certain pimp’s.’
The three of us started. Mumtaz’s tone was natural enough, so I asked him in perfect seriousness, ‘A pimp’s?’
Mumtaz nodded in affirmation. ‘What a man! Amazing. And even more amazing that he was, as it is commonly called, a pimp—a procurer of women—and yet had an absolutely clear conscience.’
Mumtaz paused for a few moments, as if refreshing his memory of past events, and then added, ‘I don’t remember his full name. Something Sahae. He came from Benares. And he was extremely particular about cleanliness. It was a smallish place where he lived, but he had elegantly divided it into neat little sections. The customers’ privacy was scrupulously maintained. There were no beds or cots, but instead mattresses and bolsters. The sheets and pillowcases were always clean and spotless. And even though he had a servant, he did all the cleaning and dusting himself. Not just cleaning; he did everything himself, and he always put his heart into it. He was not given to cheating or deception. If it was late at night and only watered-down liquor could be had in the neighbourhood, he would say outright, “Sahib, don’t waste your money.” If he had a suspicion about one of the girls, he’d let you know upfront. He even told me that he had earned twenty thousand rupees in three years, taking a two-and-a-half-rupee commission from every ten. He only wanted to make another ten thousand rupees. Why only that much? Why not more? He told me that after he had made his thirty thousand he would return to Benares and open a fabric shop. I don’t know why he was so keen on opening a fabric shop, of all things.’
My Name Is Radha Page 20