Before sunset the lambardar went up again to see the river. It had risen more since his visit in the afternoon. Some of the clusters of pampas which had been above the water level were now partly submerged. Their stalks had gone limp and their sodden snow-white plumes floated on the water. He had never known the Sutlej to rise so high in so short a time. Mano Majra was still a long way off and the mud dam looked solid and safe. Nevertheless he arranged for watch to be kept all through the night. Four parties of three men each were to take turns and be on the embankment from sunset to sunrise and report every hour. The rest were to stay in their houses.
The lambardar’s decision was a quilt under which the village slept snug and safe. The lambardar himself had little sleep. Soon after midnight the three men on watch came back talking loudly in a high state of excitement. They could not tell in the grey muffled moonlight whether the river had risen more, but they had heard human voices calling for help. The cries came from over the water. They might have been from the other side or from the river itself. The lambardar went out with them. He took his chromium-plated flashlight.
The four men stood on the embankment and surveyed the Sutlej, which looked like a sheet of black. The white beam of the lambardar’s torch scanned the surface of the river. They could see nothing but the swirling water. They held their breath and listened, but they could hear nothing except the noise of the rain falling on the water. Each time the lambardar asked if they were sure that what they had heard were human voices and not jackals, they felt more and more uncertain and had to ask each other: ‘It was clear, wasn’t it, Karnaila?’
‘Oh yes. It was clear enough. “Hai, hai”—like someone in pain.’
The four men sat under a tree, huddled around a hurricane lamp. The gunny sacks they used as raincoats were soaking wet; so were all their clothes. An hour later there was a break in the clouds. The rain slowed down to a drizzle and then stopped. The moon broke through the clouds just above the western horizon. Its reflection on the river made a broad path of shimmering tinfoil running from the opposite bank to the men under the tree. On this shining patch of moonlight even little ripples of water could be seen distinctly.
A black oval object hit the bridge pier and was swept by the stream towards the Mano Majra embankment. It looked like a big drum with sticks on its sides. It moved forward, backward and sideways until the current caught it again and brought it into the silvery path not far from where the men were sitting. It was a dead cow with its belly bloated like a massive barrel and its legs stiffly stretched upward. Then followed some blocks of thatch straw and bundles of clothing.
‘It looks as if some village had been swept away by the flood,’ said the lambardar.
‘Quiet! Listen!’ said one of the villagers in a whisper. The faint sound of a moan was wafted across the waters.
‘Did you hear?’
‘Quiet!’
They held their breath and listened.
No, it could not have been human. There was a rumbling sound. They listened again. Of course, it was a rumble; it was a tram. Its puffing became clearer and clearer. Then they saw the outlines of the engine and the train itself. It had no lights. There was not even a headlight on the engine. Sparks flew out of the engine funnel like fireworks. As the train came over the bridge, cormorants flew silently down the river and terns flew up with shrill cries. The train came to a halt at Mano Majra station. It was from Pakistan.
‘There are no lights on the train.’
‘The engine did not whistle.’
‘It is like a ghost.’
‘In the name of the Lord do not talk like this,’ said the lambardar. ‘It may be a goods train. It must have been the siren you heard. These new American engines wail like someone being murdered.’
‘No, lambardar, we heard the sound more than an hour ago; and again the same one before the train came on,’ replied one of the villagers.
‘You cannot hear it any more. The train is not making any noise now.’
From across the railway line, where some days earlier over a thousand dead bodies had been burned, a jackal sent up a long plaintive howl. A pack joined him. The men shuddered.
‘Must have been the jackals. They sound like women crying when somebody dies,’ said the lambardar.
‘No, no,’ protested the other. ‘No, it was a human voice as clear as you are talking to me now.’
They sat and listened and watched strange indistinguishable forms floating on the floodwaters. The moon went down. After a brief period of darkness the eastern horizon turned grey. Long lines of bats flew across noiselessly. Crows began to caw in their sleep. The shrill cry of a koel came bursting through a clump of trees and all the world was awake.
The clouds had rolled away to the north. Slowly the sun came up and flooded the rain-soaked plain with a dazzling orange brilliance; everything glistened in the sunlight. The river had risen further. Its turbid water carried carts with the bloated carcases of bulls still yoked to them. Horses rolled from side to side as if they were scratching their backs. There were also men and women with their clothes clinging to their bodies; little children sleeping on their bellies with their arms clutching the water and their tiny buttocks dipping in and out. The sky was soon full of kites and vultures. They flew down and landed on the floating carcases. They pecked till the corpses themselves rolled over and shooed them off with hands which rose stiffly into the air and splashed back into the water.
‘Some villages must have been flooded at night,’ said the lambardar gravely.
‘Who yokes bulls to carts at night?’ asked one of his companions.
‘Yes, that is true. Why should the bullocks be yoked?’
More human forms could be seen coming through the arches of the bridge. They rebounded off the piers, paused, pirouetted at the whirlpools, and then came bouncing down the river. The men moved up towards the bridge to see some corpses which had drifted near the bank.
They stood and stared.
‘Lambardar, they were not drowned. They were murdered.’
An old peasant with a grey beard lay flat on the water. His arms were stretched out as if he had been crucified. His mouth was wide open and showed his toothless gums, his eyes were covered with film, his hair floated about his head like a halo. He had a deep wound on his neck which slanted down from the side to the chest. A child’s head butted into the old man’s armpit. There was a hole in its back. There were many others coming down the river like logs hewn on the mountains and cast into streams to be carried down to the plains. A few passed through the middle of the arches and sped onward faster. Others bumped into the piers and turned over to show their wounds till the current turned them over again. Some were without limbs, some had their bellies torn open, many women’s breasts were slashed. They floated down the sunlit river, bobbing up and down. Overhead hung the kites and vultures.
The lambardar and the villagers drew the ends of their turbans across their faces. ‘The Guru have mercy on us,’ someone whispered. ‘There has been a massacre somewhere. We must inform the police.’
‘Police?’ a small man said bitterly. ‘What will they do? Write a First Information Report?’
Sick and with heavy hearts, the party turned back to Mano Majra. They did not know what to say to people when they got back. The river had risen further? Some villages had been flooded? There had been a massacre somewhere upstream? There were hundreds of corpses floating on the Sutlej? Or, just keep quiet?
When they came back to the village nobody was about to hear what they had to say. They were all on the rooftops looking at the station. After two days a train had drawn up at Mano Majra in the daytime. Since the engine faced eastward, it must have come from Pakistan. This time too the place was full of soldiers and policemen and the station had been cordoned off. The news of the corpses on the river was shouted from the housetops. People told each other about the mutilation of women and children. Nobody wanted to know who the dead people were, nor wanted to go to the river to f
ind out. There was a new interest at the station, with promise of worse horrors than the last one.
There was no doubt in anyone’s mind what the train contained. They were sure that the soldiers would come for oil and wood. They had no more oil to spare and the wood they had left was too damp to burn. But the soldiers did not come. Instead, a bulldozer arrived from somewhere. It began dragging its lower jaw into the ground just outside the station on the Mano Majra side. It went along, eating up the earth, chewing it, casting it aside. It did this for several hours, until there was a rectangular trench almost fifty yards long with mounds of earth on either side. Then it paused for a break. The soldiers and policemen who had been idly watching the bulldozer at work were called to order and marched back to the platform. They came back in twos carrying canvas stretchers. They tipped the stretchers into the pit and went back to the train for more. This went on all day till sunset. Then the bulldozer woke up again. It opened its jaws and ate up the earth it had thrown out before and vomitted it into the trench till it was level with the ground. The place looked like the scar of a healed-up wound. Two soldiers were left to guard the grave from the depredations of jackals and badgers.
I Shall Not Hear The Nightingale
I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale is set in Amritsar in 1942–43. The central theme of this richly-textured novel, contained in the extract below, is the agonizing conflict between personal loyalties and the calls of conscience and duty. It is also a remarkably perceptive study of the behaviour of human beings under stress.
The main characters in the novel, most of whom are Sikh, are:
Buta Singh Senior Magistrate
Sabhrai Buta Singh’s wife
Sher Singh Buta Singh’s son, a student leader involved in anti-British activities
Champak Sher Singh’s wife
Beena Buta Singh’s daughter
Jhimma Singh Village headman and police informer
John Taylor British ICS officer, Deputy Commissioner of the district
Dyer Sher Singh’s Alsatian dog
Jhimma Singh was one of many brothers. Being the eldest, he inherited the official function of headman of the village from his father. Thereafter he acquired possession of most of his father’s property. He loved his brothers and arranged marriages and employment for them as farm labourers in newly-colonized lands a few hundred miles away to the north-west. Malicious tongues spread poison and turned the brothers against him. They took him to court to get possession of their share of the land. But providence, assisted by clever lawyers, triumphed over their evil designs. Then tried violence. That too went against them. They were imprisoned on charges of attempted murder and Jhimma Singh was given a revolver to defend himself. He gained the confidence of the local police officials by his hospitality; they let him look after the affairs of the village and Jhimma Singh became virtually its ruler. Anyone who has had to live the hard way, literally fighting for survival at every step, doesn’t set much store by values like truth, honesty, loyalty or patriotism. Neither did Jhimma Singh. Each little success meant more envy and more danger from the envious. He had to seek the help of the police to protect him. In turn they expected him to keep an eye on miscreants. He became a paid informer.
It wasn’t very surprising that for a week no one should have bothered about his disappearance. He was known to go away to the city for two or three days without telling his wives. As in the past, they assumed he had been called away on urgent business. After a week they became anxious and started going round to other homes asking the women to find out from their menfolk if they had seen Jhimma Singh. When no one came forth with any news of him for another week, the anxiety changed to alarm and a report was lodged at the police station by one of the tenants at the urging of Jhimma Singh’s first wife. It mentioned the enmity of his brothers and their previous attempts to murder him. Once again the brothers were arrested, interrogated and beaten up. Nothing came of it. No corpse, no case. They were set at liberty. The police commissioner was notified that the most trusted informer in the district had disappeared—probably murdered by one of his many relations and no trace could be found of either the victim or the murderer. The commissioner sent the file to the deputy commissioner to have the case closed as ‘untraced’. He was a little surprised to find that instead of the usual words ‘Seen. File’, with the illegible initials, there was an order asking him to come over to discuss the case. What followed startled the police commissioner.
The deputy commissioner handed the police commissioner a warrant to search the house of Sardar Buta Singh, the seniormost Indian magistrate of the district. He gave him another one, to arrest Sher Singh. Taylor refused to disclose his source of information. All he said was: ‘Be gentle to the old man. I suggest you send him over to see me and then search the house. You may find something. In any case, take his son to the police station and give him the works. Get some of your tough Anglo-Indian sergeants to handle him. It will not be hard to make him talk.’
~
Buta Singh had firmly decided to speak to his son after the headman had left. That evening Sher Singh came home early but straight away retired to bed complaining of a severe headache. Next morning, he did not turn up for breakfast and Buta Singh went to see him in his room. The boy looked pale and jaundiced and would not speak at all. A doctor was sent for but he could not diagnose anything. Nevertheless it was plain to anyone that he was very sick; one could scarcely bring up a delicate subject with him in that state of health. After many days in bed, his health improved and he started moving about the house. He still wore a sallow, furtive look and avoided meeting people. Buta Singh waited patiently. At last came the first of the month. The father came to the conclusion that matters had been allowed to drift for too long and the time had come to settle the business once and for all. He would talk to his son after the morning ceremony.
Autumn had set in and there was a nip in the morning air. Inside the gurdwara it was cozy because of the thick carpet and the incense. Sher Singh, Champak and Shunno were inside. Mundoo, as usual, was lording it over the children and the dog outside. Buta Singh uncovered the Holy Book to start reading. He saw the figure of a policeman through the chick. He kept his temper under control and proceeded to look for the appropriate passage. He pressed his forehead reverently to the Book and looked up once more. There was yet another policeman outside talking excitedly to Mundoo. He took off his shoes and came into the gurdwara. This was too much for Buta Singh. He hollered angrily at the top of his voice: ‘What is your business?’ The constable saluted and said: ‘Huzoor, the police commissioner is waiting for you outside in his car. The deputy commissioner has sent him to fetch you. It is most urgent. I crave forgiveness for disturbing you in the gurdwara; I was ordered to do so.’
The reference to the police commissioner and Mr Taylor changed Buta Singh’s tone. He did not proceed with the reading. He left at once and asked Champak to carry on. Shunno followed her master; she wasn’t going to be left out of things.
‘You do the reading instead of your father,’ said Champak with a smile.
Sher Singh did not smile back. ‘I can’t. I am not feeling too well.’
‘What is the matter?’ asked Champak.
‘I don’t know. I don’t feel well.’
Champak put her hand on his forehead. ‘You have no fever but you have cold-sweat. I’ll get Mundoo to make your bed. You come and lie down. Mundoo, Oi Mundoo,’ she cried. ‘The policemen seemed to have frightened away the servants.’
She went out and shouted for the boy again. Mundoo came wailing. ‘A policeman beat me. They have come inside the house. When I asked them what they were doing, one fellow slapped me.’
Sher Singh went deathly pale. Had they found out? Had one of the boys told on him? His wife looked at him for some explanation. ‘I will see what is happening,’ he said weakly. ‘You go to your room.’
There were policemen all over the place: in the courtyard and the sitting-room; in the garden and at the gate.
Sher Singh came out in the veranda followed by Dyer. Two white sergeants were sitting in the armchairs with their legs on the table, smoking. A head constable stood by them with handcuffs dangling from his belt. A policewoman in a khaki sari was leaning on a Black Maria in the porch. ‘You want to see my father?’ asked Sher Singh timidly.
‘You Buta Singh’s son?’ asked one of them knocking the ash off his cigarette.
‘Yes . . . sir,’
‘Head constable, search this fellow. And send someone inside to search his woman.’
The two resumed their smoking. The policewoman went inside. The head constable took Sher Singh by the hand. Sher Singh felt he ought to protest. He mustered up all the courage he had and spoke: ‘What is this about? How dare you put your hands on me! What authority . . .’
One of the sergeants got up slowly from his chair and came up to him. ‘You want to know what authority we have to search you?’
‘Yes,’ answered Sher Singh through the spittle that clogged his throat.
‘Man, this bugger wants to know why we want to search him,’ said the sergeant turning to his companion. ‘We better tell him.’
Without warning the sergeant struck his knee sharply into Sher Singh’s privates. As he doubled over with pain, the sergeant hit him on the face with the back of his hand. Sher Singh’s turban came off and fell on the ground; his long hair scattered about his face and shoulders.
‘Cheeky nigger. That’ll teach . . .’
The sergeant could not complete the sentence. Dyer leapt at him with savage fury and knocked him down. He tore the collar off the white man’s coat and went for his throat. The constable lashed out with his iron handcuffs; the other sergeant laid about with his swagger stick and kicked the dog with his hobnailed boots. Policemen came running with their iron-shod bamboo-poles to beat him. At last the Alsatian gave up. Blood flowed from his face and back, the bone of one of his legs had been fractured.
Not a Nice Man to Know Page 39