‘Stay here,’ Naim said thickly.
‘No,’ she said, and jumped down from a great height. ‘Uff,’ she cried as she landed, looking up at him fixedly again for a moment, as if in terror. Then she got up. Naim climbed down and followed her, running, to the house.
Looking at Naim, a shadow passed over the aunt’s brow, although she only said to Azra gently, ‘You’ve been out in the rain, bibi.’ They had all gone into Pervez’s room, except for Waheed. He stood talking, in his usual conquering-hero style, to Lydia, the Bishop’s daughter, who sat in an armchair below him, gathering up her feet, against the rain coming in with the wind.
CHAPTER 4
IT WAS A small house that Naim’s grandfather had built long ago, and it was inhabited permanently by a distant relative, an old man who had stayed single all his life, a grace-and-favour resident doubling as caretaker and general servant in the house now used by Ayaz Beg on his very occasional visits to the city. Naim lifted the side of the mosquito-net to look. His uncle still lay half-hidden behind his own net, partly covered by a thin cotton sheet, but was already stirring and coughing, a sign that any moment now he would slip his hand under the pillow and take out a packet of his small cigars and light one. He would cough some more, inhaling deeply, and before you knew he would step down from the cot and into the lavatory. In there he would make much noise. Emerging, he would go into the bathroom to make more noise, to cough out the phlegm from his throat and to fiercely blow his nose many times until he was breathing clear, while the half-smoked cigar was left behind on a ledge in the lavatory, slowly turning to ash and spreading all around its acrid smell, which Naim would find both familiarly satisfying and unpleasant as he took his turn in that small space. Ayaz Beg had ordered his life according to regular habits that had hardened into rituals, ceasing to exist as functions of the day in that Naim never noticed them; he simply waited for the day to begin.
He went and stood at the edge of the roof where they had slept through a warm night. Looking emptily down into the street, he saw the milk shops opening to cook a breakfast of halva-poori for their regular customers and street vendors returning from the main market with their pushcarts loaded with green vegetables and fruits of the season. A young lad ran up the street, carrying a jug to collect the day’s milk from the shop with a popular street song loud on his lips, the tune rising along the wall to greet Naim, blinking away the sleep amid bits of early morning dreams and memories still fresh in his mind …
Lighting another cigar after his first cup of tea, Ayaz Beg surprised his nephew with a sudden remark. ‘You have been going to Roshan Mahal every day.’
Naim looked at his uncle’s open face, trying to fathom the meaning of what he had said.
‘I have not visited the place since the evening of the ceremony,’ Ayaz Beg continued. ‘You know why?’
‘No,’ replied Naim.
‘Because our family has been disgraced in Roshan Pur.’
Naim searched for something to say. ‘I didn’t go to see the nawab.’
Ayaz Beg ignored his reply. ‘His children,’ he went on, ‘are the issue of a woman of the street. Ghulam Mohyyeddin married her. Then her sister came to stay. The nawab got interested in her and rivalry began between the sisters. After some time the wife killed herself. Her sister now takes her place – without marriage. But who bothers about that? The masters of land can get away with anything. Ghulam Mohyyeddin, although a man of cultivation, nevertheless listened to his heart instead of his head and introduced rotten blood into his family. It was different for us. Our family was respectable but did not have enough property to cancel the wrong-doing. Your father –’ Ayaz Beg got up in agitation and went to the window that looked out on the street. When he returned to his chair, his voice had calmed down.
‘Your father also followed his heart, bringing ruination upon us.’ He lit another cigar, pulling deeply at it before he spoke again. ‘You are old enough, it is about time you knew what happened. Ours was the only family in Roshan Pur that wasn’t servants of Roshan Agha. Our father, when he went to the big house, sat in a chair and not on the floor. He was a brave and hard-working man. But Niaz Beg, my brother,’ Ayaz Beg stood his cigar on the edge of the ashtray and spread his hands, as in a gesture of remorse, on the table, thick fingers stained with tobacco, ‘oh, he too was a brave and hard-working man. But he had madness in the brain. Along with the workshop that our father had built, my brother also acquired a passion for making things. It wasn’t ordinary fondness for using tools with his hands, he was completely taken with it, absolutely and entirely at one with the job. He started making guns. This is the truth, that the way he made a twelve-bore barrel and fitted the works to it and polished it, even the English guns couldn’t match it. Oh, he was an artist. He made them and kept them with the care and attention that other people reserved for children. I remember the day the police came. They searched our house and found several guns without licence. Niaz Beg was trying to explain, begging them to let go. They grabbed him by his beard and slapped him on the face. They dragged him away with them.’
Ayaz Beg’s hands now rested on the table like two wounded birds, quivering at the tips. ‘A few days later, he returned. The skin on his cheeks was black from blows, and half his beard had been pulled out. Any other man would have stopped. But not my brother, no, sir, not him. As I said, there was madness in his heart. I only want to tell you the truth of how it was, so that you know the real nature of your father and not end up hating him. When he moulded those objects from cold iron, they turned into living things in his hands. It was like love; if he stopped making them, his life would ebb away. How could they take that from him? Soon he was at it again. Roshan Agha the elder said to him, “Niaz Beg, you will bring destruction upon the whole village.” Your father took the tools from the workshop into a room in the house where wheat chaff was stored, shut himself in there and carried on. He made ten-chamber revolvers that nobody had ever seen. Well, this time a whole police guard came with a white officer at the head. It was as if the villagers knew that they were coming. People had disappeared into their houses, shutting the doors behind them, and cattle wandered in the streets unattended. They took all his firearms, got every single thing in the house, including cots and clothes, made a heap outside the house and put a torch to them. My brother spread his hands before them, saying that these were his “toys”, that he only played with them. “No bullets. I make no bullets,” he said, weeping, “I don’t know how to. Not a single bullet has been fired from them. These are toys. My ornaments.” The British officer took his revolver out and fired into the burning heap. “I will burn the whole village down,” he shouted, so that those inside the houses could hear. Then they took him away. In the end he was sentenced to twelve years of rigorous imprisonment, on a charge of mutinous treason, plus confiscation of all our lands, save a few acres.’
Ayaz Beg covered his face and wept silently for several minutes. His voice had been pressing on Naim’s heart as if a massive stone were being lowered slowly on it. He felt relief when that voice broke down. Before he got up to go out of the room, Ayaz Beg spoke his last words. ‘Your parents want to see you. You can go. But you must come back soon. I can’t go. Even today, if the government comes to know that I see him, I will lose any position that I have earned.’
Naim climbed up the stairs to the roof and lay down on his cot. After a while he went to sleep. He woke up only when the sun crept up and started to burn his skin. He dragged his cot to the shade of the parapet. Tossing and turning, he went back to sleep. He was drenched in sweat when he awoke. The sun was setting on a hot day. He took off his shirt, made a ball of it and pressed it on his face and chest to dry himself. Ayaz Beg had come up several times to look while Naim slept. Hearing the noise of his waking, Ayaz Beg climbed up to the roof once again to ask whether Naim would like to accompany him on a stroll. ‘I don’t feel like it,’ was Naim’s answer. He sat on the cot where he had slept for a long time, his limbs feeling lea
den, until the sun went down and stars began to appear one by one in the clear sky. Ayaz Beg was long gone on his evening walk. Naim got up, put on a clean shirt and walked straight out of the house.
Azra was sitting by the fountain out on the lawn reading a book in the light of a table lamp brought out on a long flexible wire.
‘What have you been doing today?’ she asked.
‘Sleeping,’ Naim answered.
‘Sleeeeping!’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘It was hot.’
‘You should have taken a bath,’ she said, laughing. ‘We all waited for you.’
‘Who?’
‘Who what?’
‘Who waited?’
‘Pervez. Jamila.’
‘Not you?’
Azra silently extended her hand to catch the cool drops of the fountain on her fingers.
‘Why not you?’ asked Naim.
‘Why, why!’
They laughed quietly. For the first time in all these days, Naim felt that through the jokey exchange and the low self-conscious laughter they had suddenly become aware of one another as never before.
‘You haven’t even washed your face today,’ Azra said to him.
‘How do you know?’
‘I have good eyesight. Wash it in the fountain. It’s clean water.’
Naim put his hand under the fine drizzle of the arcs the fountain made and wiped it across his face. He went and lay down on the grass beside Azra’s chair and realized that he had walked out of the house wearing only slippers on his feet. Surprisingly, it didn’t bother him. He closed his eyes and felt the cool of the grass through the thin muslin shirt on his back. Behind the dark eyelids he saw, unaccountably, the image of a mountain lake he had never seen.
‘Come here,’ he said.
Azra kept looking at him intently without moving. Resting her elbows on her knees and her chin on the heel of her hand, she sat leaning in her chair in such a position that the wind blew needle-tip drops from the fountain on her face, where they flickered like tiny stars. Naim put his hands on the grass and sat up.
‘Have you ever seen a harbour?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said.
‘It’s wonderful. Thousands of lights swimming in water.’
‘I wish I could go and see them.’
‘I want to go and live on a ship,’ Naim said.
‘How can you live on a ship?’
‘I can join a merchant ship. What I really want to do is join up with the Navy.’
‘Oh, but –’ Azra checked herself.
‘Will you come with me?’
‘Where?’
‘When I join the Navy?’
‘Women can’t go and live on a ship,’ Azra said. She took out a pen and began to draw lines with its tip on her fingernails.
Roshan Agha appeared in the veranda from the left wing, glanced at the two of them and passed through another door a few paces down.
‘Roshan Agha is unhappy today,’ Azra said.
‘What about?’
‘Pervez’s marriage. Everybody wants him to marry Jamila. He says no.’
‘Why?’
‘He doesn’t say. Except that he has known Jamila from childhood as a relative and not as a wife.’ She uttered her short laugh and went back to the pen on her fingernails.
With the nightfall the delicate, slim-fingered leaves of the shreen tree had closed up around each other and hung limply like an empty glove, the heavy, damp fragrance of its flowers spreading the feel of summer in the dark. Out on the road, behind the tall hedge of the lawn, a bullock-cart was passing on its slow journey, the lazy-toned peasant voices of its passengers rising above the creaking of the cart’s wheels. The wind passing gently over the wet grass was pleasantly warm. ‘Will you?’ Naim asked.
‘Will I what?’
‘Come with me to the sea?’
Without looking up from her nails, Azra paused before speaking. ‘Will you go to Roshan Pur?’
‘Perhaps,’ Naim replied.
‘You’ll go to see your parents.’
‘Maybe. Why do you ask?’
‘I just ask. What’s the harm in that?’
‘The harm is that you haven’t answered my question.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
Azra looked up, her eyes widening blankly. ‘Auntie told me you cannot join any government service.’
The fingers of Naim’s hands, white and fragile, paled suddenly and spread out on the grass as if pulled apart by strings. A servant appeared by Azra’s side, bearing a message from Roshan Agha that she was to come inside the house.
‘I’ll be a minute,’ she told the servant.
Naim lifted himself off the ground and started walking away.
‘Will you come tomorrow?’ Azra called after him.
He didn’t answer. Azra kept looking at his receding back until Naim walked out of the house. At the gate the chowkidar said something to him. A heavy, foul-smelling object had settled in his stomach like a clenched fist. Once on the road, a sudden anger rose up to his brain like a curled column of smoke. He leaped over the narrow moat that ran along the boundary wall of the house and thrust his face through the hedge.
‘Your aunt is a bad woman,’ he shouted.
There was no one to be seen on the great lawn. As he jumped back, the chowkidar came towards him.
‘Go,’ he roared at him.
Then he turned and started running down the road.
CHAPTER 5
NAIM’S TRAIN JOURNEY was marked by an incident which, although it did not directly concern him, occurred right before his eyes between the station of Ali Kot and the next train stop of Rani Pur, Naim’s destination. As the train started to leave Ali Kot, Naim, who had earlier left his seat to go and stand in the doorway to escape the stuffiness inside the compartment, saw an old peasant running along the platform in an attempt to board the train. His entire baggage, a small loosely tied-up bundle, was hooked to one end of a wooden staff that he carried on his shoulder, holding the other end tightly in his hand. It did not look like he was going to reach the third-class compartment he was chasing as it raced further and further away from him. In desperation, he clutched at a handle nearest to him and with a last, awkward leap climbed on to the footboard of a first-class compartment, still hanging precariously as the train gathered speed. He began to knock repeatedly at the closed door of the compartment with his staff. Eventually, the door was unlocked from inside and a bare-bodied white man appeared from behind it. The room was cool and dark inside. The white passenger, who appeared to have been woken from sleep, had a vile expression on his face. Seeing the sunburnt, withered face of the old peasant at his feet, he shouted in his mixed Hindustani-English, ‘Nikal jao. Get out. This dabba fust class, reserve for sahib loge, naeen for you, naeen hai. Go …’
‘Saab ji,’ the peasant begged, ‘my wife is on the train. In the name of God, pity me. I will go when the train stops.’
The peasant heaved himself on to the lip of the compartment. The first-class passenger, whom the old man’s action had caused to draw back a step, became furious. At first he tried pushing the intruder out by closing the door on him. But the peasant had gained a hold on a space as narrow as a two-inch ledge and clung to it for dear life. The earth a few feet beneath him was flying away backwards. On his creased-up face, terror began to appear.
‘I will not come inside, saab ji. Let me sit here on the floor …’
The white man, getting angrier, withdrew into the compartment for a minute. When he returned, he had heavy boots on his feet. He started kicking the old man in the back with all his force. ‘Soo’er, pig, smelly pig, nikal jao, jao, go, go …’
The peasant’s staff flew out of his hand, taking with it the bundle of dirty thick cloth tied to its end as the man held on to the two side handles of the carriage with both hands. The round bundle struck the earth and rolled along the sloping ground, the impact undoing
its loose knot and revealing a small quantity of gur and a few raw cobs of corn, before it was left behind by the train and disappeared from view. The old man saw his meagre stuff scattering away and a terrible moan emerged from his throat, ‘Haaa – my daughter – it was for my daughter …’
The first-class passenger kept kicking him, shouting, ‘Take a soo’er for your daughter, a pig, take a pig …’
Under the blows, some of them falling on his head, the peasant yielded his place on the edge of the carriage but kept a hold on the outside handles by passing his arms through them and knotting them together while balancing himself on the narrow footboard in the face of the rushing wind, which pressed him back. Gradually, the effort of clinging to the speeding train drew the life out of his spent body, although he still managed to tighten the vice-like knot of his arms around the handles. He hung on like a limp rag flapping in the wind, his eyes slowly shutting on him and blood, mixed with tears, trickling down his face, curling through the creases of his ancient skin to his chin, the drops flying in the wind, spattering the side of the carriage. There he stayed until the train arrived at Rani Pur. Two Anglo-Indian sergeants of the railway police came to force the peasant’s arms from the carriage handle and put him down on the station platform, where he lay in a lifeless heap, looking quite naked without his staff and his bundle of possessions. Within fifteen minutes Naim had seen a man deprived of his whole world. An old woman with an equally beaten-in face came and bent over the body, looking at it in disbelief. She poked at it a couple of times, saying, ‘Get up!’ quietly, then kneeled beside it as if in prayer and, gathering it in her arms, began to utter low, animal-like moans.
One of the two sergeants knocked at the door of the carriage. The white passenger lifted the two wood and glass panes of the window. The sergeants talked to the man. Naim, disembarking, went and stood by the policemen. Half a dozen other people gathered round the body. The man in the carriage looked at them angrily. The last words that Naim heard the sergeant say were, ‘You will have to answer some questions at the end of your journey, sir.’ The passenger dismissively waved him away and dropped the window.
The Weary Generations Page 5