He leaned over and, taking the baby’s pink toe between his teeth, bit it gently. The woman, who too was looking at this strange young man this closely for the first time, suddenly started crying. ‘For twelve years,’ she said, ‘we lived in peace. After my first husband died, my father gave me over in marriage to your father. I was his bride for twenty days before he was taken away by farangi soldiers. Your mother and I lived under the same roof and did not set eyes on another man’s thigh. Now she is my enemy.’
Tired senseless, Naim dozed off listening to the weeping woman. The sun overhead had begun to slip away to the west by the time Niaz Beg came out of the field holding an empty pouch.
‘Still nearly an acre left,’ he said to Naim. ‘We shall have to borrow seed. Tomorrow, you said. It has come true. You have a black tongue. Take the bullocks home.’
Roshan Agha’s munshi was a fat, red-faced man who wore spectacles – a distinction, unique in the village, that lent him an added air of authority. He lived in two rooms which formed part of the outhouse of the haveli owned by the landlord.
‘Come, chaudri, come,’ he greeted the father and son as they went to call on him in the evening. ‘How are you faring?’
‘Not well, not well without a loan of seed from you,’ Niaz Beg replied.
‘Ask for my life, chaudri, I will lay it at your feet,’ the munshi said, ‘but do not ask for seed. May God burn me in hell if I have a grain of it left in my store.’
‘Do not utter an oath too soon, you sinful man. It will be me who lays down my life for a finger-width of unsown land.’
A devious smile appeared on the munshi’s face. He delivered a forceful slap to Niaz Beg’s back. ‘Same old satan, you are.’
‘I want a half bag,’ Niaz Beg said. The two men started talking in whispers as if hatching a conspiracy. Then Niaz Beg suddenly cried, ‘One to ten, that’s it, settled. Do not say another word.’
‘One twelve, chaudri, one twelve.’
‘I will not leave a single hair on your already bald head, you devil. Remember that I am not one of your field muzaras. I am Mohammad Beg’s son, standing on my own two feet. One to ten, that’s all.’
‘One twelve.’
‘One ten.’
‘One twelve.’
They kept repeating their lines as if this were only a joke. Before they left, Niaz Beg and Naim loaded the half-full bag of wheat grain on to the mare, Niaz Beg swearing menacingly at the munshi.
‘Shall we have to pay back twelve times this quantity?’ Naim asked on their way back.
‘Who says twelve? Only ten. Five full bags and no more. If he demands more I will show him that I am a full owner of land in this village.’
‘What will you do?’
‘First of all, I will break those things he wears on his nose.’
‘You mean his glasses?’
‘Yes, yes. That will make him blind.’
‘We don’t need as much as this for the field that is left.’
‘I will keep some back for bread. I am starving for a wheat roti.’
‘Why don’t you keep back more from the crop?’ asked Naim.
‘We always have enough. But now there is one more mouth to feed.’
‘Who?’ Naim asked. Then, realizing that his father was talking about none other than himself, he said angrily, ‘If you think of me as a burden, I will go.’
Niaz Beg was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his rough voice was tinged with the quiver of a simple man’s emotion. ‘Since you are my flesh and blood, you can stay. But you will have to work.’
One cold winter evening a crowd of men gathered at Mahinder Singh’s house. They were all friends and relatives of the Sikh family. They sat in three separate groups in the large room, each group being looked after by one of the Sikh brothers who offered the men unboiled milk in wide-mouthed earthen cups. They had all come bathed and washed, dressed in their best clothes and shod in heavy, uncured leather footwear, their hair rubbed with linseed oil and nicely gathered under fresh turbans. The Sikhs’ house was by the side of the pond. It was a single-room house, and the room was used for all the functions of living – cooking, eating and sleeping – by the whole family. There was a small side room which served as a store for grain, straw, chaff and other things that needed to be put aside. The cooking things on this occasion had been shifted out to a corner of the courtyard that had the shelter of a simple tin roof standing on wooden legs and no walls, leaving the room free for the night’s gathering. In the room, everyone sat on the floor, the only light provided by a lantern hanging from the wall. Mahinder Singh’s elder brother was the groom of the party. Anxious to exhibit their clothes of raw cotton and homespun silk, the men had taken off the light blankets in which they had come wrapped from the cold outside and were sitting against the walls with their limbs spread out to show off their finery to good effect.
‘My wheat crop is already high above the knees, Mahindroo,’ Fakir Din, a favourite of the munshi’s, boasted.
‘And why not, Fakiroo. Hasn’t the munshi’s wife personally urinated on the root of each plant in your field! Soon even your fat bum will not be visible in the crop.’
Juginder Singh, busy with his duties as the main host, was running in and out of the room in shirtsleeves, feeling not a bit of the cold for the hard kikar liquor he had drunk. In the little storeroom a space had been cleared for a large earthen vat full of the stuff, and around it sat a few serious drinkers, dipping their cups in the vat and sipping from them.
‘My Blue can keep going with the plough for six hours at a stretch even when he is not in full health,’ announced Karam Singh, the middle brother.
‘And easily tills the ground about two hands wide,’ quipped an old fellow reclining against a heap of wheat straw stored for animal feed.
‘Oh, hunchback, I will push you back up your mother’s legs if you don’t shut up,’ said Karam Singh, emptying his cup of liquor on the old man’s head.
Three other men sitting around started laughing, tilting their faces to the ceiling and clapping merrily with their hard, yellow-palmed, callused hands, drops of liquor and saliva trembling on their beards. Juginder Singh ducked into the room. ‘This,’ he pointed to the vat, ‘I buried in the ground all of six months ago and got it out only tonight. It’s older than your grandfathers, you old fools, drink it with care, a little is enough to make you crazy.’
The three men began to drink and laugh hysterically. Kuldip Kaur, a hefty young girl who was Juginder Singh’s wife, passed by the door and screamed. Lal Din had earlier been blowing on the dying embers of his hukka to keep it going and a spark had fallen on the straw. The dry stalks had caught fire and were smouldering, producing smoke which the intoxicated men in the room had hardly noticed. Mahinder Singh and another man doused the fire by throwing a bucket of water over it.
‘Who brought this enemy of guru into the house?’ asked Mahinder Singh. ‘Get it out of here.’
‘Oi, Mahindroo,’ Juginder Singh said to his younger brother, ‘enemy of guru or not, Lal Din is my friend. Hukka stays where it is.’
Mahinder Singh looked at his brother’s drunken face and turned away. Kuldip Kaur, who had the body of a workhorse and the face of a child, was intoxicated merely by being the centre of so many men’s greedy eyes. She was rushing, hips swaying and breasts thrust out, in and out of the room at the slightest excuse.
‘Feed the wet straw to the animals first,’ she said to her husband, ‘or all of it will rot.’
‘Son of a bitch,’ muttered Mahinder Singh, ‘spoiled the whole mood.’ He went out of the house.
Mahinder Singh was a loner, the only one he could call his friend being Naim. He met Naim out by the edge of the pond.
‘What’s happening?’ Naim asked him.
‘Juginder’s getting his turban tonight. I told you three days ago, remember, I asked you to come?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Naim said. ‘I forgot.’
The two of them entered the big room. E
veryone in there was the landlord’s servant, while Naim was the son of a landowner in his own right. The men in the room greeted him warmly.
‘The way you beat Mahindroo in the horse race yesterday showed the quality of your blood,’ a middle-aged man sitting next to Naim said to him appreciatively.
‘His father was a brave man too, but the son, if you ask me, is one notch up,’ another said.
‘Who did you cross your mare with, chaudri Neem?’
‘With the munshi’s horse,’ Fakir Din offered before Naim could reply, pushing his hukka at Naim. ‘Have a pull.’
Naim declined the offer, saying he did not smoke.
‘That is a useless animal,’ said a weak-voiced peasant sitting in the back. ‘He’s dopey.’
‘Who, the mushki?’ Fakir Din asked loudly, aggravated.
‘Oh, the mushki, no, no.’ The peasant drew back. ‘I was talking of the one he had before.’
In the glow of victory, Fakir Din began pulling furiously on the hukka pipe.
‘Want a drink?’ Mahinder asked.
‘No,’ Naim said.
‘It’s number one stuff.’
‘No. Thank you.’
The heavy drinkers all had by now moved to the big room. A couple of them stood in the middle with their arms up in the air attempting a travesty of a dance. Seeing them make ungainly movements, some young boys among the guests who could dance got up. Fakir Din put his hand to his ear and began to sing a long-drawn-out village song out of time and step with the wild, limb-stretching, powerful dance of the boys.
‘What’s getting a turban mean?’ Naim asked.
‘Bhaya broke into a cattle yard.’
‘What?’
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Mahinder Singh said proudly. ‘This is the world of tigers.’
‘You are drunk.’
‘I am not drunk, chaudri saab. Until one of us lifts another man’s property and brings it home he cannot wear a turban.’
‘Don’t you all wear turbans anyway?’
‘These are guru’s turbans. I am talking of a man’s turban.’
The ceremony of succession that Naim had seen at Roshan Mahal in Delhi passed before his eyes. ‘What did Juginder do?’ he asked.
‘Went to Ali Pur last night. The bastards woke up, though.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Juginder cut two of them with his kirpan and lifted a buffalo.’
‘He is getting his turban as a reward for theft?’
‘Cowards give their own names to things,’ Mahinder Singh said, laughing. Then suddenly he became serious. ‘Remember, one word out of you about this and you are finished.’
The dance and Fakir Din’s interminable song came to a halt as the food was brought in. It was wheat-flour halwa, hot from the pan, cooked with raw sugar and fried in cardamom-seared ghee. All the men ate, balancing dollops of halwa dripping with ghee on their fingers before putting them in their mouths, where the soft and slippery substance slid down their throats with the greatest of ease, filling the room with hushed sounds of the gentle working of jawbones and the faint gurgle of swallowing interrupted only by Kuldip Kaur’s footsteps as she came and went, fetching yet more cups of lukewarm milk straight from the udders of the Sikhs’ buffaloes. A momentary thought passed through Naim’s mind that mixed in these cups might also be milk from the buffalo that Juginder had thieved from the next village the night before. He saw a drop of sweat on Kuldip Kaur’s cheek and he felt warm in the cold night. After the meal was over, an elderly Sikh wound a large turban of blood-red silk around Juginder Singh’s head and each of the guests got up to shake hands with him and utter the words ‘Greetings, Sardar Juginder Singh Ji’. The ceremony over and the meagre stock of simple farmers’ chat and gossip quickly exhausted, they began to leave one by one, to go home and sleep.
The next day the police came to the village. They called up the team of elders, led by the munshi. They arrested Juginder Singh, Karam Singh and Arjun Singh, laid them down on their stomachs and beat them blue with a foot-wide leather strap on their bare backs. But nobody said a word, and no witnesses came forward to tell of the crime.
In Niaz Beg’s house the two women were working in the courtyard, the elder spinning cotton on the wheel and the younger sewing a quilt spread in front of her on the ground. The young boy was giving the buffalo a bath by throwing water at it from a bucket. As he completed his chore and came back to sit by his aunt, shivering with cold, the elder woman said to him, ‘Give the small buffalo a bath as well. It is your aunt’s too.’ The boy went off to fill the bucket from the water pump. The second buffalo was bigger but was called ‘small’ because it belonged to the younger woman. As the boy started doing his job, the younger woman threw an oddly loving glance at her rival for this act of kindness. It was the coldest season of the year and all of them, men, women, children and birds, had come out to sit in the late morning sun. The atmosphere was chirpy, light and cheerful. At that moment Niaz Beg entered the house in a state of agitation. His cheeks had turned blue and there was terror in his eyes. He made straight for the storeroom at the far end of the yard.
‘Don’t tell anyone, don’t say a word,’ he said, and locked himself in.
The two women got up in panic, stood a cot in front of the storeroom door and spread a quilt over it, concealing the entrance to the room. Then they sat in the yard, waiting. The boy ran out of the house, returning a few minutes later.
‘The police have come,’ he announced. The women made a sign to him to be quiet. The three of them sat there, looking out the door of the house. Chickens picked at the grain on the ground and at the insects in the air, making small contented noises.
Out in a field, Naim spotted Mahinder Singh engaged in what looked like a wrestling match with a buffalo. He went and stood looking at them. Mahinder Singh had a large black piece of clinker in his hand that he must have picked up from the brick kiln. He was making repeated attempts to get a hold on the buffalo’s head. Each time, the huge animal jerked him away with such force that he fell back on his haunches on the ground. From there, Mahinder Singh jumped right back up to continue the fight. ‘Have you not found a woman today?’ Naim said, laughing.
Mahinder Singh gave no answer.
‘You won’t kill it with a brick,’ Naim said to him.
‘Shut up,’ Mahinder said between gritted teeth, rejoining his battle with the buffalo.
Both creatures, man and beast, had the same animal wildness on their faces, the same desperation in their respective struggles. The buffalo, which at first had been trying to run away, now stood her ground, determined to fight as Mahinder Singh became more reckless with the passing of each second. Naim stood transfixed by the two warring beasts. Eventually, as the voices of some men, coming from the other side of the field, seemed to be approaching them, fear appeared in Mahinder Singh’s eyes. With an enormous heave and a hoick that seemed to come from the very depths of his being, Mahinder Singh lifted the buffalo’s head, parted its lips and with a savage blow of the iron-hard clinker, broke one of the buffalo’s upper teeth clean in half. He threw the rock away in the standing crop and fell on his back, exhausted.
A constable and a villager appeared around the corner of the field. The constable untethered the buffalo and took the two boys with him back to the village, delivering a blow of his lathi to each of them as they went.
All the Sikhs’ cattle had been herded outside their house and the three brothers were lying face down, bare to the hips, being beaten with a leather strap by two constables. Long, raw marks of the lash had come up on the skin of their backs and buttocks from which blood seemed about to ooze. As the small group of four men and a buffalo appeared from the fields, a farmer sitting near the police party jumped up and ran to them.
‘Here it is,’ he cried, ‘my buffalo, this is it, they stole it, wounded my servants, murderers, thieves, dirty Sikhs.’
Mahinder Singh put his hand on the animal. ‘Shut your filthy mouth, you
liar, I will pull your tongue out. Look,’ he said, lifting the buffalo’s upper lip, ‘I bought this mother of yours with a broken tooth from the market three months ago. Did your buffalo have a broken tooth?’
‘Thieves, robbers,’ the man wailed, spreading his hands before the head constable, ‘let it loose and it will go straight to my home, its own home, it was born there, I swear, it is mine.’
Ignoring the man, Mahinder Singh was running around, identifying each of the cattle. ‘This is my half-tail bull, tail cut off when it was a baby, and this – this my one-eyed cow, eye lost in fight with another cow, and this my horse with a cracked hoof…’
As he passed the head constable, the policeman felled him with a blow of his lathi. The constables forced him face down to the ground and started giving him the lash. Unlike his brothers who had borne the pain in silence, Mahinder Singh began to make a racket. Every few minutes the head constable would give a sign to the beaters to stop and ask the boy to tell the truth. Each time he would be answered with oaths of the most foul kind from the mouth of Mahinder Singh.
‘Give him the smoke,’ the head constable ordered finally.
They tied up Mahinder Singh’s feet with a rope and strung him upside down by a thick branch of the shisham tree under which they were sitting. Then they burned red chillies under his nose. The evil smoke getting up his nostrils, Mahinder Singh cried out, ‘All right, I will tell, in guru’s name stop.’
The burning chillies were removed. Mahinder Singh sneezed non-stop for several minutes, at the end of which he let out a string of even viler curses at the police. The operation was repeated over and over, Mahinder Singh saying, between tears and sneezes, ‘I don’t know who lifted your fucking mother,’ until he passed out. He was then let down and kicked ferociously while he lay unconscious. Not a word that would incriminate them could be got out of any of the brothers. The police, however, returned the buffalo to the rightful owner and went away without charging anyone for lack of witnesses.
The buffalo was of no value to the Sikh family; the point had been made and Juginder Singh had won his coming-of-age ‘pug’. In the evening, relatives and friends came to congratulate the brothers, bearing gifts of home-made sweetmeats as gestures of support and jubilation for the victorious events of the day and night.
The Weary Generations Page 8