There was nothing now. After standing in that position—his hand still on his neck, feeling the wet splodge of the squashed spider gradually dry for minutes, hours, his legs began to tremble with the effort, the inaction. By now he could see enough in the dark to make out the large solid shapes of old wardrobes, broken buckets and bedsteads piled on top of each other around him. He recognized an old bathtub—patches of enamel glimmered at him and at last he lowered himself onto its edge.
He contemplated slipping out of the shed and into the fray. He wondered if it would not be better to be captured by Raghu and be returned to the milling crowd as long as he could be in the sun, the light, the free spaces of the garden and the familiarity of his brothers, sisters and cousins. It would be evening soon. Their games would become legitimate. The parents would sit out on the lawn on cane basket chairs and watch them as they tore around the garden or gathered in knots to share a loot of mulberries or black teeth-splitting jamun from the garden trees. The gardener would fix the hosepipe to the water tap and water would fall lavishly through the air to the ground, soaking the dry yellow grass and the red gravel and arousing the sweet, the intoxicating scent of water on dry earth—that loveliest scent in the world. Ravi sniffed for a whiff of it. He half-rose from the bathtub, then heard the despairing scream of one of the girls as Raghu bore down upon her. There was the sound of a crash, and of rolling about in the bushes, the shrubs, then screams and accusing sobs of, ‘I touched the den—’ ‘You did not—’ ‘I did—’ ‘You liar, you did not’ and then a fading away and silence again. Ravi sat back on the harsh edge of the tub, deciding to hold out a bit longer. What fun if they were all found and caught and he alone left unconquered! He had never known that sensation. Nothing more wonderful had ever happened to him than being taken out by an uncle and bought a whole slab of chocolate all to himself, or being flung into the soda-man’s pony cart and driven up to the gate by the friendly driver with the red beard and pointed ears. To defeat Raghu, that hirsute, hoarse-voiced football champion would be thrilling beyond imagination. He hugged his knees together and smiled to himself almost shyly at the thought of so much victory, such laurels.
There he sat smiling, knocking his heels against the bathtub, now and then getting up and going to the door to put his ear to the broad crack and listening for sounds of the game, the pursuer and the pursued, and then returning to his seat with the dogged determination of the true winner, a breaker of records, a champion.
It grew darker in the shed as the light at the door grew softer, fuzzier, turned to a kind of crumbling yellow pollen that turned to yellow fur, blue fur, grey fur. Evening. Twilight. The sound of water gushing, falling. The scent of earth receiving water, slaking its thirst in great gulps and releasing that green scent of freshness, coolness. Through the crack Ravi saw the long purple shadows of the shed and the garage lying still across the yard. Beyond that, the white walls of the house. The bougainvillea had lost its lividity, hung in dark bundles that quaked and twittered and seethed with masses of humming sparrows. The lawn was shut off from his view. Could he hear the children’s voices? It seemed to him that he could. It seemed to him that he could hear them chanting, singing, laughing. But what about the game? What had happened? Could it be over? How could it when he was still not found?
It then occured to him that he could have slipped out long ago, dashed across the yard to the veranda and touched the ‘den’. It was necessary to do that to win. He had forgotten. He had only remembered the part of hiding and trying to elude the seeker. He had done that so successfully, his success had occupied him so wholly that he had quite forgotten that success had to be clinched by that final dash to victory and the ringing cry of ‘Den!’
With a whimper he burst through the crack, fell on his knees, got up and stumbled on stiff, benumbed legs across the shadowy yard, crying heartily by the time he reached the veranda so that when he flung himself at the white pillar and bawled, ‘Den! Den! Den!’ his voice broke with rage and pity at the disgrace of it all and he felt himself flooded with tears and misery.
Out on the lawn, the children stopped chanting. They all turned to stare at him in amazement. Their faces were pale and triangular in the dusk. The trees and bushes around them stood inky and sepulchral, spilling long shadows across them. They stared, wondering at his reappearance, his passion, his wild animal howling. Their mother rose from her basket chair and came towards him, worried, annoyed, saying, ‘Stop it, stop it, Ravi. Don’t be a baby. Have you hurt yourself?’ Seeing him attended to, the children went back to clasping their hands and chanting ‘The grass is green, the rose is red . . .’
But Ravi would not let them. He tore himself out of his mother’s grasp and pounded across the lawn into their midst, charging at them with his head lowered so that they scattered in surprise. ‘I won, I won, I won,’ he bawled, shaking his head so that the big tears fled. ‘Raghu didn’t find me. I won, I won.’
It took them a minute to grasp what he was saying, even who he was. They had quite forgotten him. Raghu had found all the others long ago. There had been a fight about who was to be It next. It had been so fierce that their mother had emerged from her bath and made them change to another game. Then they had played another and another. Broken mulberries from the tree and eaten them. Helped the driver wash the car when their father returned from work. Helped the gardener water the beds till he roared at them and swore he would complain to their parents. The parents had come out, taken up their positions on the cane chairs. They had begun to play again, sing and chant. All this time no one had remembered Ravi. Having disappeared from the scene, he had disappeared from their minds. Clean.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ Raghu said roughly, pushing him aside, and even Mira said, ‘Stop howling Ravi. If you want to play, you can stand at the end of the line,’ and she put him there very firmly.
The game proceeded. Two pairs of arms reached up and met in an arc. The children trooped under it again and again in a lugubrious circle, ducking their heads and intoning
‘The grass is green,
The rose is red;
Remember me
When I am dead, dead, dead, dead . . .’
And the arc of thin arms trembled in the twilight, and the heads were bowed so sadly, and their feet tramped to that melancholy refrain so mournfully, so helplessly, that Ravi could not bear it. He would not follow them, he would not be included in this funeral game. He had wanted victory and triumph—not a funeral. But he had been forgotten, left out, and he would not join them now. The ignominy of being forgotten—how could he face it? He felt his heart go heavy and ache inside him unbearably. He lay down full length on the damp grass, crushing his face into it, no longer crying, silenced by a terrible sense of his insignificance.
Love Across the Salt Desert
KEKI N. DARUWALLA
The drought in Kutch had lasted for three successive years. Even when clouds were sighted they passed by, ignoring the stricken country. The monsoons had, so to speak, forgotten to land. The Rann lay like a paralysed monster, its back covered with scab and scar-tissue and dried blister-skin. The earth had cracked and it looked as if chunks of it had been baked in a kiln and then embedded in the soil-crust. The cattle became thin and emaciated. The oxen died. The camel alone survived comfortably, feeding on the bawal, camel-thorn. Then one day the clouds rolled in like wineskins and the lightning crackled and the wineskins burst. Though two years have passed since the drought ended, everyone remembers that it first rained on the day when Fatimah entered the village. This is how she came.
What would he not do for her, the daughter of the spice-seller; she who smelt of cloves and cinnamon, whose laughter had the timbre of ankle-bells, whose eyebrows were like black wisps of the night and whose hair was the night itself? For her he would cross the salt desert!
He had stayed the day at Kala Doongar, a black hill capped with basalt, the highest in Kutch. He had set his camel, Allaharakha, free to crop on the bawal trees. At dusk he paid ho
mage to the footprints of the Panchmai Pir on the hilltop. He left some food there and started beating on his thali, according to the custom here. In a few minutes jackals materialized and gobbled up the food. This was auspicious. If they had not turned up he would have considered the ill-effects of the omen serious enough to have cancelled the journey. A lamp was lighted in the Pir’s honour every night on the hilltop and the flame could be seen all the way from Khavda. Over a hundred years earlier the Panchmai Pir had trudged these salt wastes serving the people, accompanied, as legend had it, by a jackal. Reclusive by habit he used to retire to thorn jungles, where apart from his vulpine companions none else dared to disturb his nocturnal trysts. The custom of feeding the jackals had lingered since then.
Najab bowed before the flame and set out. He left behind the camel-thorn shrubs and the area once famous for its savannahs of stunted grass, but now sere and brown as the desert. He had left behind all human habitation, Kuran being the last village. For the next three days he would not be seeing any bhungas, those one-room mud-houses, circular at the base, but tapering into conical thatch-roofs at the top. Now only the sandscapes stretched out before him mile upon mile. Water splashed in the chagals. With the name of the Pir on his lips Najab Hussain set forth.
Najab’s diffidence was notorious among his friends. He was known to have blushed at the mere mention of a girl. A strangely introverted lad with dreamy eyes, no one had ever associated him with any act of bravado. His father, Aftab, would say, ‘All that my ancestors and I have acquired during a hundred years, this lad will squander away, not because he is a spendthrift but because he will be too shy to charge money for what he sells!’
He had crossed the Rann on four occasions earlier, though he had turned twenty only a month ago. But each time he had either accompanied his father or that wily old smuggler, Zaman, the veteran of a hundred illegal trips into Sind. Each time they had taken tendu leaf worth about five hundred and sold it across the border for twelve hundred. But between the pay-off to officials and to the intermediaries who arranged the sale of the bidi leaf, to the man who took the camel out to graze and to the friend or relative who harboured them, there was precious little left. It was just enough to buy some used terylene garments or cloves and then it was time to make the long trek back across the desert. It was during one of these trips that they had stayed with Kaley Shah, the clove-seller. ‘He is a distant relative of your mother,’ his father had told Najab. Kaley Shah was tall, and well-fleshed and his thick-jowled face had a purple tinge about it as if somewhere along the way it had got stuck with a discoloured patch. He always wore a tahmat of black and white checks. Within a day Najab discovered that the fellow was an absolute rogue who drove such a cussed bargain that for the first time in his hearing his father started mouthing obscenities.
But his daughter Fatimah was a hoor with eyes so bright that they would have lit up the darkness of the underworld. She was taken by this quiet, pleasant young man so ready with his smiles. But she could hardly elicit a word out of him. Fatimah had been under pressure to get engaged to someone in the village known for his slurred speech and grotesque stammer. ‘Just my luck to run into mutes,’ she thought. But then, as she caught him staring at her, she laughed back. And in the evening when Fatimah repeated the performance and her face flooded with excitement as if she dared him to take the next step, he had flung his arms around her in a reckless, dizzy moment. Yes, he would come again, he told her, and saw her start with disbelief for he seemed to have answered her inarticulated question: Would he come again? This time he would come alone with no father or uncle to cramp his style. And as he left he looked behind to find her gaze following him, her eyes like a pair of storm lanterns in the dark.
Ever since his return to Khavda, Najab had been straining to get away. What was there about the Rann that he did not know? He could cross the Rann in the daylight, leave alone starlight, a thing none of his elders had dared to do! And one morning Aftab was woken up by a shout from Zaman. What does the old rogue want, he muttered, rubbing his sleepy eyes. Zaman asked about Najab’s whereabouts.
‘The boy has been sulking of late but he should be around. Anyway, what business is it of yours?’ The old man did not hide his irritation.
‘Who are you trying to fool, Aftab Mian?’ asked the smuggler. ‘Don’t you know that Allaharakha is also missing?’
In these border villages the pattern of life was such that if a man was absent along with his camel, it was taken for granted that he had made a foray across the desert into Pakistan.
Aftab went into the mud enclosure where his camel was kept and found it empty. His heart sank. He ran into the house to see if the bundles of tendu leaf he had bought had been taken by the boy. ‘Oh, the fool! That son of a fool! That son of a fool!’ exclaimed Aftab, almost shaking with fury. ‘He has forgotten to take the leaf with him!’
‘Who are you trying to fool with all this drama?’ called out Zaman who was still standing at the door. ‘This son of yours is not as innocent as the world believes. He is a pig and the son of a pig.’
There was no limit to his chagrin. Zaman was the ‘chief’, the man who kept the Rangers across happy. Any one crossing the Rann without his support was running the gauntlet with the law. And here this fledgeling had blundered in without as much as a word to him, or a salaam, or a hundred-rupee note!
‘May Allah bring him safely out of this!’ said the old rogue piously. He means just the opposite, thought Aftab. Nothing would please him more than to see Najab turned into carrion with vultures hovering around.
‘Don’t worry, Zaman, Allah will see him through!’ he said testily and banged the door in the smuggler’s face.
As Zaman stalked off, Aftab went in to break the news of their son’s escapade to his wife. She would faint, he thought. He found her crouching with her back against the mud wall. She did not even blink in surprise, once. She just sat there cowering as if he had just slapped her and was about to do so again. Allah! She knew it! She knew it all the time! She was waist-deep in this conspiracy along with her son and never even breathed a word about it. His eye fell on her bare arm.
‘Where is that gold bangle my father gave you, woman?’
‘You need not worry. Najab will return with cloves.’
The long-striding Allaharakha kept a brisk pace. A strong south wind drove the tang of the Kori creek back into Najab’s nostrils. He followed the stars, the Milky Way flaked with mica, the Great Bear shambling towards the north. Before dawn he had reached his destination, for a sandy elevation palisaded with the bones of dead animals told him that he had arrived at Sarbela, over twenty miles from Kala Doongar. He was already beyond the international boundary. Here he rested. During daylight, movement was impossible. The Indus Rangers would be looking from their bamboo watch-towers. And in the heat everything became a mirage. A depression in the sand looked like a splash of water, a freak, stunted cactus gave the appearance of a grove, and a camel looked like a huge prehistoric animal on the move. Any movement was sure to be noticed through binoculars.
When the sun came up Najab took his first drink of water from his chagal. At noon he had his first meal—dry, stale bread with onion. By now thoughts about Fatimah took a vice-like grip over him. An entire night lay between them, he thought. And the distance was less than ten miles. The thought of it made him writhe even as the sun started beating its hammer on the anvil of the desert. A whiff of the tangy south wind caught his nostrils again. But this time it brought with it a thin, dappled veil of cloud, patches of which lay overlapping like fish scales. Within an hour this corrugated cloud had covered a substantial portion of the sky, looking for all the world like a scretch of wind-rippled sand. Yes, this was the time! He got up and shook the sand from his turban. Even as he harnessed his camel he thought that Allaharakha was looking at him quizzically as if asking what the hell he was up to. At one level of consciousness he knew that this was madness. He knew of overworked camels dying of fatigue, of the patrolling part
ies of the BSF and the Indus Rangers and the mirage-chequered, trackless wastes of the desert. But he succumbed to a rush of blood and the face of Fatimah beckoned him like a mirage.
Najab crossed the International Boundary Pillar Number 1066. He knew the track he had to take, bisecting the two posts of the Indus Rangers at Jagtarai and Vingoor. But he strayed ever so slightly, and from their watch-tower they saw through their binoculars this sleek camel, warped and distorted by the heat-shimmer into a lumbering leviathan. An Indian slipping into their territory with tendu leaf right under their noses, and that too without paying any hush money! They were not going to stand for it. Najab was in a trance now, events flashing past him like figures on a screen. The mile-long chase, the firing from behind, the spent bullets flopping in the sand and then the rising wind which churned the dust into his eyes and then rose between the hunter and the hunted. When the dust settled half-an-hour later he was alone in the Rann.
The next few hours passed in a daze. He was mortally scared that Allaharakha may die of fatigue. To ease him of his burden he now started walking beside him. Within an hour the salt had scraped the callus from his feet and scarred them with agonising cracks. Under a hot tin sky, the Rann was blazing now, throwing up white needles which hurt the eyes. And as the Rann palpitated, it haunted him with its mirages, pools of shadow, scooped half-moons of water. Hours of wandering as if in a trance, attempting to lick the receding edges of the mirage. Then light thinning away, and an hour or two later, dusk and a thin plume of smoke rising from a dung-fire. Allah be praised! He was now within range.
He waited for night to descend and then struck out hobbling on his toes, for his desert odyssey had cost him his heels. Within an hour he was at the clove-seller’s door.
Best Loved Indian Stories of the Century, Volume 1 Page 11