by Bapsi Sidhwa
Jagjeet Singh advised them to leave as soon as they could, but it was already too late.
Ranna’s Story
Late that afternoon the clamor of the monsoon downpour suddenly ceased. Chidda raised her hands from the dough she was kneading and, squatting before the brass tray, turned to her mother-in-law. Sitting by his grandmother, Ranna sensed their tension as the old woman stopped chaffing the wheat. She slowly pushed back her age-brittle hair and, holding her knobby fingers immobile, grew absolutely still.
Chidda stood in their narrow doorway, her eyes nervously scouring the courtyard. Ranna clung to her shalwar, peering out. His cousins, almost naked in their soaking rags, were shouting and splashing in the slush in their courtyard. “Shut up. Oye!” Chidda shouted in a voice that rushed so violently from her strong chest that the children quieted at once and leaned and slid uneasily against the warm black hides of the buffaloes tethered to the rough stumps. The clouds had broken and the sun shot beams that lit up the freshly bathed courtyard.
The other members of the household, Ranna’s older brothers, his uncles, aunts and cousins, were quietly filing into the courtyard. When she saw Khatija and Parveen, Chidda strode to her daughters and pressed them fiercely to her body. The village was so quiet it could be the middle of the night, and from the distance, buffeting the heavy, moisture-laden air, came the wails and the hoarse voices of men shouting.
Already their neighbors’ turbans skimmed the tall mud ramparts of their courtyard, their bare feet squelching on the path the rain had turned into a muddy channel.
I can imagine the old mullah, combing his faded beard with trembling fingers as he watches the villagers converge on the mosque with its uneven green dome. It is perched on an incline; and seen from there the fields, flooded with rain, are the same muddy color as the huts. The mullah drags his cot forward as the villagers, touching their foreheads and greeting him somberly, fill the prayer ground. The chaudhry joins the mullah on his charpoy. The villagers sit on their haunches in uneven rows lifting their confused and frightened faces. There is a murmur of voices. Conjectures. First the name of one village and then of another. The Sikhs have attacked Kot-Rahim. No, it sounds closer... It must be Makipura.
The chaudhry raises his heavy voice slightly: “Dost Mohammad and his party will be here soon ... We’ll know soon enough what’s going on.”
At his reassuring presence the murmuring subsides and the villagers nervously settle down to wait. Some women draw their veils across their faces and, shading their bosoms, impatiently shove their nipples into the mouths of whimpering babies. Grandmothers, mothers and aunts rock restive children on their laps and thump their foreheads to put them to sleep. The children, conditioned to the numbing jolts, grow groggy and their eyes become unfocused. They fall asleep almost at once.
Half an hour later the scouting party, drenched and muddy, the lower halves of their faces wrapped in the ends of their turbans, pick their way through the squatting villagers to the chaudhry.
Removing his wet puggaree and wiping his head with a cloth the mullah hands him, Dost Mohammad turns on his haunches to face the villagers. His skin is gray, as if the rain has bleached the color. Casting a shade across his eyes with a hand that trembles slightly, speaking in a matter-of-fact voice that disguises his ache and fear, he tells the villagers that the Sikhs have attacked at least five villages around Dehra Misri, to their east. Their numbers have swollen enormously. They are like swarms of locusts, moving in marauding bands of thirty and forty thousand. They are killing all Muslims. Setting fires, looting, parading the Muslim women naked through the streets—raping and mutilating them in the center of villages and in mosques. The Bias, flooded by melting snow and the monsoon, is carrying hundreds of corpses. There is an intolerable stench where the bodies, caught in the bends, have piled up.
“What are the police doing?” a man shouts. He is Dost Mohammad’s cousin. One way or another the villagers are related.
“The Muslims in the force have been disarmed at the orders of a Hindu Sub-Inspector; the dog’s penis!” says Dost Mohammad, speaking in the same flat monotone. “The Sikh and Hindu police have joined the mobs.”
The villagers appear visibly to shrink—as if the loss of hope is a physical thing. A woman with a child on her lap slaps her forehead and begins to wail: “Hai! Hai!” The other women join her: “Hai! Hai!” Older women, beating their breasts like hollow drums, cry, “Never mind us ... save the young girls! The children! Hai! Hai!”
Ranna’s two-toothed old grandmother, her frail voice quavering bitterly, shrieks: “We should have gone to Pakistan!”
It was hard to believe that the decision to stay was taken only a month ago. Embedded in the heart of the Punjab, they had felt secure, inviolate. And to uproot themselves from the soil of their ancestors had seemed to them akin to tearing themselves, like ancient trees, from the earth.
And the messages filtering from the outside had been reassuring. Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Tara Singh were telling the peasants to remain where they were. The minorities would be a sacred trust... The communal trouble was being caused by a few mischief-makers and would soon subside—and then there were their brothers, the Sikhs of Dera Tek Singh, who would protect them.
But how many Muslims can the Sikh villagers befriend? The mobs, determined to drive the Muslims out, are prepared for the carnage. Their ranks swollen by thousands of refugees recounting fresh tales of horror they roll towards Pir Pindo like the heedless swells of an ocean.
The chaudhry raises his voice: “How many guns do we have now?”
The women grow quiet.
“Seven or eight,” a man replies from the front.
There is a disappointed silence. They had expected to procure more guns, but every village is holding on to its meager stock of weapons.
“We have our axes, knives, scythes and staves!” a man calls from the back. “Let those bastards come. We’re ready!”
“Yes ... we’re as ready as we’ll ever be,” the chaudhry says, stroking his thick moustache. “You all know what to do... ”
They have been over the plan often enough recently. The women and girls will gather at the chaudhry’s. Rather than face the brutality of the mob they will pour kerosene around the house and burn themselves. The canisters of kerosene are already stored in the barn at the rear of the chaudhry’s sprawling mud house. The young men will engage the Sikhs at the mosque, and at other strategic locations, for as long as they can and give the women a chance to start the fire.
A few men from each family were to shepherd the younger boys and lock themselves into secluded back rooms, hoping to escape detection. They were peaceable peasants, not skilled in such matters, and their plans were sketchy and optimistic. Comforted by each other’s presence, reluctant to disperse, the villagers remained in the prayer yard as dusk gathered about them. The distant wailing and shouting had ceased. Later that night it rained again, and comforted by its seasonal splatter the tired villagers curled up on their mats and slept.
The attack came at dawn. The watch from the mosque’s single minaret hurtled down the winding steps to spread the alarm. The panicked women ran to and fro screaming and snatching up their babies, and the men barely had time to get to their posts. In fifteen minutes the village was swamped by the Sikhs—tall men with streaming hair and thick biceps and thighs, waving full-sized swords and sten-guns, roaring, “Bolay so Nihal! Sat Siri Akal!”
They mowed down the villagers in the mosque with the sten-guns. Shouting “Allah-o-Akbar!” the peasants died of sword and spear wounds in the slushy lanes and courtyards, the screams of women from the chaudhry’s house ringing in their ears, wondering why the house was not burning.
Ranna, abandoned by his mother and sisters halfway to the chaudhry’s house, ran howling into the courtyard. Chidda had spanked his head and pushed him away, shrieking, “Go to your father ! Stay with the men!”
Ranna ran through their house to the room the boys had been instructed to gat
her in. Some of his cousins and uncles were already there. More men stumbled into the dark windowless room—then his two older brothers. There must be at least thirty of them in the small room. It was stifling. He heard his father’s voice and fought his way towards him. Dost Mohammad shouted harshly: “Shut up! They’ll kill you if you make a noise.”
The yelling in the room subsided. Dost Mohammad picked up his son, and Ranna saw his uncle slip out into the gray light and shut the door, plunging the room into darkness. Someone bolted the door from inside, and they heard the heavy thud of cotton bales stacked against the door to disguise the entrance. With luck they would remain undetected and safe.
The shouting and screaming from outside appeared to come in waves: receding and approaching. From all directions. Sometimes Ranna could make out the words and even whole sentences. He heard a woman cry, “Do anything you want with me, but don’t torment me ... For God’s sake, don’t torture me!” And then an intolerable screaming. “Oh God!” a man whispered on a sobbing intake of breath. “Oh God, she is the mullah’s daughter!” The men covered their ears—and the boys’ ears—sobbing unaffectedly like little children.
A teenager, his cracked voice resounding like the honk of geese, started wailing: “I don’t want to die ... I don’t want to die!” Catching his fear, Ranna and the other children set to whimpering: “I don’t want to die ... Abba, I don’t want to die!”
“Hush,” said Dost Mohammad gruffly. “Stop whining like girls!” Then, with words that must have bubbled up from a deep source of strength and compassion, with infinite gentleness, he said, “What’s there to be afraid of? Are you afraid to die? It won’t hurt any more than the sting of a bee.” His voice, unseasonably lighthearted, carried a tenderness that soothed and calmed them. Ranna fell asleep in his father’s arms.
Someone was banging on the door, shouting: “Open up! Open up!”
Ranna awoke with a start. Why was he on the floor?
Why were there so many people about in the dark? He felt the stir of men getting to their feet. The air in the room was oppressive : hot and humid and stinking of sweat. Suddenly Ranna remembered where he was and the darkness became charged with terror.
“We know you’re in there. Come on, open up!” The noise of the banging was deafening in the pitch-black room, drowning the other children’s alarmed cries. “Allah! Allah! Allah!” an old man moaned nonstop.
“Who’s there?” Dost Mohammad called; and putting Ranna down, stumbling over the small bodies, made his way to the door. Ranna, terrified, groping blindly in the dark, tried to follow.
“We’re Sikhs!”
There was a pause in which Ranna’s throat dried up. The old man stopped saying “Allah.” And in the deathly stillness, his voice echoing from his proximity to the door Dost Mohammad said, “Kill us ... Kill us all... but spare the children.”
“Open at once!”
“I beg you in the name of all you hold sacred, don’t kill the little ones,” Ranna heard his father plead. “Make them Sikhs ... Let them live ... they are so little... ”
Suddenly the noon light smote their eyes. Dost Mohammad stepped out and walked three paces. There was a sunlit sweep of curved steel. His head was shorn clear off his neck. Turning once in the air, eyes wide open, it tumbled in the dust. His hands jerked up slashing the air above the bleeding stump of his neck.
Ranna saw his uncles beheaded. His older brothers, his cousins. The Sikhs were among them like hairy vengeful demons, wielding bloodied swords, dragging them out as a sprinkling of Hindus, darting about at the fringes, their faces vaguely familiar, pointed out and identified the Mussulmans by name. He felt a blow cleave the back of his head and the warm flow of blood. Ranna fell just inside the door on a tangled pile of unrecognizable bodies. Someone fell on him, drenching him in blood.
Every time his eyes open the world appears to them to be floating in blood. From the direction of the mosque come the intolerable shrieks and wails of women. It seems to him that a woman is sobbing just outside their courtyard: great anguished sobs—and at intervals she screams: “You’ll kill me! Hai Allah ... Y’all will kill me!”
Ranna wants to tell her, “Don’t be afraid to die ... It will hurt less than the sting of a bee.” But he is hurting so much ... Why isn’t he dead? Where are the bees? Once he thought he saw his eleven-year-old sister, Khatija, run stark naked into their courtyard: her long hair disheveled, her boyish body bruised, her lips cut and swollen and a bloody scab where her front teeth were missing.
Later in the evening he awoke to silence. At once he became fully conscious. He wiggled backwards over the bodies and slipping free of the weight on top of him felt himself sink knee-deep into a viscous fluid. The bodies blocking the entrance had turned the room into a pool of blood.
Keeping to the shadows cast by the mud walls, stepping over the mangled bodies of people he knew, Ranna made his way to the chaudhry’s house. It was dark inside. There was a nauseating stench of kerosene mixed with the smell of spilt curry. He let his eyes get accustomed to the dimness. Carefully he explored the rooms cluttered with smashed clay pots, broken charpoys, spilled grain and chapatties. He had not realized how hungry he was until he saw the pile of stale bread. He crammed the chapatties into his mouth.
His heart gave a lurch. A woman was sleeping on a charpoy. He reached for her and his hand grasped her clammy inert flesh. He realized with a shock she was dead. He walked round the cot to examine her face. It was the chaudhry’s older wife. He discovered three more bodies. In the dim light he turned them over and peered into their faces searching for his mother.
When he emerged from the house it was getting dark. Moving warily, avoiding contact with the bodies he kept stumbling upon, he went to the mosque.
For the first time he heard voices. The whispers of women comforting each other—of women softly weeping. His heart pounding in his chest he crept to one side of the arching mosque entrance. He heard a man groan, then a series of animal-like grunts.
He froze near the body of the mullah. How soon he had become accustomed to thinking of people he had known all his life as bodies. He felt on such easy terms with death. The old mullah’s face was serene in death, his beard pale against the brick plinth. The figures in the covered portion at the rear of the mosque were a dark blur. He was sure he had heard Chidda’s voice. He began inching forward, prepared to dash across the yard to where the women were, when a man yawned and sighed, “Wah Guru!”
“Wah Guru! Wah Guru!” responded three or four male voices, sounding drowsy and replete. Ranna realized that the men in the mosque were Sikhs. A wave of rage and loathing swept his small body. He knew it was wrong of the Sikhs to be in the mosque with the village women. He could not explain why: except that he still slept in his parents’ room.
“Stop whimpering, you bitch, or I’ll bugger you again!” a man said irritably.
Other men laughed. There was much movement. Stifled exclamations and moans. A woman screamed, and swore in Punjabi. There was a loud cracking noise and the rattle of breath from the lungs. Then a moment of horrible stillness.
Ranna fled into the moonless night. Skidding on the slick wet clay, stumbling into the irrigation ditches demarcating the fields, he ran in the direction of his Uncle Iqbal and his Noni chachi’s village. He didn’t stop until deep inside a thicket of sugarcane he stumbled on a slightly elevated slab of drier ground. The clay felt soft and caressing against his exhausted body. It was a safe place to rest. The moment Ranna felt secure his head hurt and he fainted.
Ranna lay unconscious in the cane field all morning. Intermittent showers washed much of the blood and dust off his limbs. Around noon two men walked into the cane field, and at the first rustle of the dried leaves Ranna became fully conscious.
Sliding on his butt to the lower ground, crouching amidst the pricking tangle of stalks and dried leaves, Ranna followed the passage of the men with his ears. They trampled through the field, selecting and cutting the sugarcane with their
kirpans, talking in Punjabi. Ranna picked up an expression that warned him that they were Sikhs. Half-buried in the slush he scarcely breathed as one of the men came so close to him that he saw the blue check on his lungi and the flash of a white singlet. There was a crackling rustle as the man squatted to defecate.
Half an hour later when the men left, Ranna moved cautiously towards the edge of the field. A cluster of about sixty Sikhs in lungis and singlets, their carelessly knotted hair snaking down their backs, stood talking in a fallow field to his right. At some distance, in another field of young green shoots, Sikhs and Hindus were gathered in a much larger bunch. Ranna sensed their presence behind him in the fields he couldn’t see. There must be thousands of them, he thought. Shifting to a safe spot he searched the distance for the green dome of his village mosque. He had traveled too far to spot it. But he knew where his village lay and guessed from the coiling smoke that his village was on fire.
Much later, when it was time for the evening meal, the fields cleared. He could not make out a single human form for miles. As he ran again towards his aunt’s village the red sun, as if engorged with blood, sank into the horizon.
All night he moved, scuttling along the mounds of earth protecting the waterways, running in shallow channels, burrowing like a small animal through the standing crop. When he stopped to catch his breath, he saw the glow from burning villages measuring the night distances out for him.
Ranna arrived at his aunt’s village just after dawn. He watched it from afar, confused by the activity taking place around five or six huge lorries parked in the rutted lanes. Soldiers, holding guns with bayonets sticking out of them, were directing the villagers. The villagers were shouting and running to and fro, carrying on their heads charpoys heaped with their belongings. Some were herding their calves and goats towards the trucks. Others were dumping their household effects in the middle of the lanes in their scramble to climb into the lorries.