A friend was tending to Karam Singh’s wounds. The medication consisted of a folded muslin rag, dipped in hot linseed oil mixed with powdered cloves, which was put on his sore back and buttocks. He was crying with pain.
Juginder Singh, sitting by his wife’s side, mocked his younger brother. ‘What a woman! Did we not get the same lash? Hunh, crying like a woman dropping a baby!’
Karam Singh’s friend placed another piece of cloth dripping with boiling oil on his back. Uttering a cry of pain from the oil’s sting, Karam Singh reached behind him and flung the dressing away. ‘Stuff it up your mother’s arse,’ he said to his friend.
‘Hunh! A woman,’ Juginder Singh said contemptuously.
‘Pig,’ Karam Singh snarled at him. All the men laughed.
A short while later a stranger entered the house. He was a tall, black-bodied peasant, barefoot and dressed only in underpants. His legs were covered in mud, and he appeared to have travelled over rough ground.
‘Victory to wahguru,’ Juginder Singh said. ‘What brings you here this time of night, Ram Singh?’
The stranger, who had been leaning against the wall, slid down it to sit without answering the greetings. Juginder Singh got up, frowning, and went to sit by the man. They talked in whispers. A sudden change came over Juginder Singh. He clenched his fists.
‘When?’ he asked.
‘Last night,’ said Ram Singh.
Karam Singh and Mahinder Singh stood up. They went to join the two men. All four started talking in low, agitated tones. Their faces had turned pale and their eyes red. Juginder Singh got up.
‘All right, tonight,’ he said to the others, ‘this very night.’ Fixing his turban with lightly trembling fingers, he went out.
The visitors, sensing a crisis, got up and left. Sitting where he was, Naim asked Mahinder Singh, ‘What happened?’
‘Our cousin got murdered.’
‘What for?’
‘Over water turn.’ Mahinder Singh walked up to Naim. ‘We are going to finish them tonight. Are you coming? Our friends come with us for revenge.’
For a moment Naim didn’t know how to answer. Mahinder Singh was looming over him, swaying slightly. ‘Unless they are cowards,’ he said.
Naim looked at him angrily. ‘I will come,’ he said, and left their house.
Naim and Niaz Beg took turns sleeping out in the fields during this season to guard their young crop against marauding wild boar, foxes and suchlike. Naim had made himself a kind of machan up a shisham tree where he spent the night wrapped in quilt against the cold. Some time after midnight he dozed off for a few minutes. He was woken by the sharp point of a spear in his ribs.
‘Who is it?’ he asked.
‘We are off,’ Mahinder Singh answered from below. ‘Come.’
Their black bodies rubbed with oil from head to the bare feet and dressed only in brief underpants, all four brothers carried full-length spears in their hands, sharp dagger-like weapons tied firmly to their ends, and a bellyful of kikar liquor inside them, its strong smell floating on their breath, protecting them from the cold. They were accompanied by their mother and Kuldip Kaur, the women carrying large cane baskets on their heads.
‘Why are the women coming along to fight?’ Naim asked Mahinder Singh in a whisper.
Nobody answered. They moved, shadow-like, quick and silent, through fields green with crops, several of them being irrigated through outlets from the canal. The still, cold air of the night, rich with the mixed aroma of linseed, alcohol and wet earth, seemed to be travelling with them. The soft ears of the wheat were just growing heavy with the milk-filled seed that would harden within weeks and turn to edible golden grain. The men and women were approaching their dead cousin’s village along the canal bank in the pitch black night under an overcast sky. Mahinder Singh stopped at a certain spot.
‘Here,’ he said, pointing with his lance to the edge of a field that had been broken up; water from the canal had collected outside in a large puddle and had then been stopped at its source. ‘Was feeding his crop right here. The pig – died with just one blow of a spade.’
‘Shut your mouth,’ hissed Juginder Singh.
‘Pig.’ Mahinder Singh spat on the ground where their cousin had fallen.
Further down, they spotted three people sleeping under heavy quilts in a clearing between a field and the canal bank. Approaching on tiptoe, the four men approached them while the women hung back, crouching behind a tree. It was quick, the whole thing over within a few minutes. They flung the quilts off the sleeping men with their lances and sank the blades into their chests. Juginder Singh grabbed a sword and cut off their heads with a single lightning blow to each of them. They died without a sound. The women came up. Juginder Singh took an axe from a basket, chopped the bodies into small pieces and threw them in the canal. The women scraped off the bloodied earth, filling the baskets with it and emptying them in the canal. The men levelled the ground with a spade and spread the dead men’s quilts over it. Naim had gone off in the middle of all this to stand by the bank of the canal. A cold shiver had spread over his body.
‘Come on,’ Mahinder Singh said to him.
Naim followed them on unsteady legs. There was a taste of blood in his mouth. He felt as though he had swallowed a handful of pebbles, making his stomach heave. A few stars peeped through a break in the clouds, throwing the faintest of light upon dark earth. The seven shadowy figures sped through silky-green wheat crops standing in field after field. In a field of low green millet grown for fodder, Mahinder Singh stopped.
‘I am going to cut some for my one-eyed,’ he announced.
‘Have you no sense?’ Juginder Singh said to him. ‘You want to be seen and caught, fool?’
‘Go,’ Mahinder Singh said in a loud, threatening voice. ‘Go.’ Juginder Singh and the others, if only to keep him quiet, hastened away. Mahinder Singh put out the long shaft of his spear across Kuldip Kaur’s stomach as she passed him.
‘Stay,’ he ordered.
‘What for?’
‘Help me cut it,’ he said, looking fixedly and pushing her with the weapon’s handle towards the middle of the field. Juginder Singh stopped just for a moment to look at the two of them, then turned away, swearing as he went, the rest of the party following him. Pulling out a sickle tied up in his turban, Mahinder Singh started cutting the soft green plants, rapidly clearing an area. Kuldip Kaur followed him, bundling and tying up the crop with ‘ropes’ she made by twist-winding the stalks. The sound of the water in the canal reached them from afar. They heard someone approaching.
‘Lie down,’ Mahinder Singh whispered, ‘down.’
Kuldip Kaur lay down flat on the ground. The man was a farmer tending to the watering of his field. Carrying a spade in hand, he passed by.
‘I could see your chest above the crop,’ Mahinder Singh said. ‘What if that fucker saw it?’
‘So? There just would have to be another one,’ the woman said. ‘Your dagger’s still sharp, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t shoot off your mouth. Come here.’
She sat up. ‘Let’s go. It will be daylight soon.’
Mahinder Singh grabbed her breasts.
‘Animal,’ she hissed in the dark.
‘I am tired,’ he said. Spreading his arms, he rolled over, landing with his head in her lap.
‘I am cold,’ Kuldip Kaur said.
‘Come here.’
She lay down beside him. He put his arms around her. ‘Are you still cold?’
‘Your hair smells.’
‘Bitch,’ he said.
‘Don’t squeeze. I can’t breathe.’
He laughed. ‘I can squeeze the life out of you.’
‘Pig. You are not stronger than me.’
‘I am the strongest of all.’ He wrapped his legs around hers and did several rolls on the ground, taking her with him in his arms. ‘Son of a bloody cow,’ she cried. ‘Let go of me.’
‘I am the strongest,’ he said.
&
nbsp; ‘Juginder is stronger than you. He cut them all tonight.’
‘Bastard bitch.’
‘Did he not?’ she mocked.
He swore at her. ‘Were they your fuckers, that you mourn them?’
He released her. Picking himself and his spear off the ground, Mahinder Singh stabbed at the roll of green millet leaves that Kuldip Kaur had made. The blade of the lance went right through the bundle.
Kuldip Kaur got up, pulled down her shirt, pulled up the lance and handed it to Mahinder Singh. Then she carefully placed the bundle of fodder in the basket and lifted it on to her head. They started off. After a short while Mahinder Singh started singing.
‘Shut up,’ Kuldip Kaur said, ‘someone will hear us.’
He kept on singing. The morning star was shining brightly as they got home. Mahinder’s mother was on her way to milk the cow with the milk pail in her hand.
‘What kept you?’ she asked her daughter-in-law.
‘Why don’t you give your sons a little less to eat so they stop bothering me like dogs all the time,’ she said and went straight to her cot.
CHAPTER 7
HARVESTING HAD BEGUN. Every man, woman and animal in Roshan Pur was busy. Even the birds, seeing an abundance of grain on the ground, hovered in swarms, uttering shrill cries of hungry delight. Under the May sun, the bare bodies of men had been burnt black. In the women’s jars at home, ghee was being finished fast as each cutter consumed a quarter seer of the stuff a day. The storerooms were emptying of straw and chaff, and the cattle were showing their ribs like curved swords under the loose, dull skin on their flanks. Dry white spots had appeared on the faces of the women, who gave everything they had – food, the warmth of their bodies at night – to the aching limbs of the labouring men in the hope of a year’s subsistence. Yet the villagers, working in a hundred and twenty degrees of shadeless heat, with their deep-creased faces, sunken eyes and cheeks, were happy, for before them was the heavy, ripened wheat ready to be cut down, the fruit of their long, hard labour. Swinging their sickles in short fierce strokes against dry stalks, talking and laughing, mocking and swearing, they were leaving heap after heap of the felled crop behind them as they moved, squatting like two-legged tortoises, along the ground, clearing swathes of field in their wake.
By the end of the week most of the fields had been cleared. They lay flat, looking naked and white in the sun, lifeless without the standing crop that had swayed in the wind for months and was now gone, marked only by great mounds of cut crop scattered all over them. The women of the village, anticipating for the first time in a long while the end of their toil, had come out in a blaze of colour, the red and orange, yellow and green of cotton and cheap silk kurtas and shalwars or simple sheets wound round the hips and air-light dopattas of dyed muslin covering their jet black, oiled hair. Even the cattle, eating armfuls of straw given them as starters until the wheat grain was beaten out of the ears and the proper chaff and stalk tied up and hauled away to the storerooms, raised their heads and mooed, brayed and roared, the females among them getting restless and hot of blood and juices, ready to mate even before their ribs disappeared under layers of winter fat. It was a celebration.
Niaz Beg pulled up in his bullock cart by the Sikhs’ field. Mahinder Singh came out to greet him.
‘Your eye is red,’ Niaz Beg said to him.
‘Motherfucking sweat got in,’ Mahinder Singh replied. ‘Flows like lassi these days, you know.’
‘True. Very true.’
Mahinder Singh glanced up. A grey haze hung in the still atmosphere, threatening a storm. Wide-winged kites wheeled high and low, crying with their tongues out as if warning of the coming wind through the lull. ‘Signs are bad,’ he said.
‘They are,’ Niaz Beg said. ‘I came with a purpose.’
‘Is your cutting done?’
‘Done. We cut a good crop.’
‘And you are complaining?’ laughed Mahinder Singh.
‘Not complaining. But our store is full and still a little bit is left out. You have a big store, will you take my surplus?’
‘With the grace of guru, we have a heavy crop this year as well, chaudri.’
‘My boy is a friend of yours, that is why I came to ask.’
‘He is my friend all right. Yes, yes, I will talk to Juginder.’
‘We will eat from it first, finish it in a month.’
‘All right.’
‘When I was taken away, you know, I gave a bullock to your father for safekeeping. Don’t know what happened to it, I was away a long time. Maybe it died, like your father. There is no accounting for such things. But he was my friend, your father was.’
‘Right, right. Don’t worry, chaudri.’
Niaz Beg gave rope to the bullock, then flipped it hard on its back. The bullock didn’t budge.
‘It won’t go, chaudri,’ Mahinder Singh laughed. ‘Feed it a cup of my daroo, then see how it goes.’
Niaz Beg began to beat the animal furiously. In the fields that were still being cut, they were beating the drums, the cutters swinging their sickles in time with the beat – dhum dhum dhum – dhumadhum dhumadhum – dhum dhum dhum – kept up by two professional drummers, their eyes closed and sweat pouring from every limb, completely lost in the rhythm of their hands and the sound they created. Equally lost in the drumbeat were the peasants, the farmers, the cutters, holding bunches of stalks in one hand and running the cutting edge of the sickle over them with the other, doing it for an hour or so without stopping, dropping their sweat on earth that had been wet and black, firmly holding the green shoots only six months before and was now grey and dry and weak, giving up its fruit to men as they desired. ‘Halalala – dopey swine, come on – lazy-hand pig, faster, faster, halala …’ Mock-swearing, they cheered and challenged each other to keep up the dance of the sickles on the roots of their food. As the sun reached its zenith, trying to break through the haze of dust, the women arrived. In their colourful dresses they poured out of their homes, balancing cane trays of thick butter-drenched millet-flour rotis and large round earthen pots of lassi which they held in the crook of the arm against the arc of their waist, eyes greedy and voluptuous for the almost bare fields and for their men. Once they were near the harvest they scattered in the fields, putting down food beside their men, and started gathering up little bundles of the cut crop that had been left behind by the cutters, laying one on top of the other to form high mounds from field to field. The drums stopped. The harvesters got up on tired knees and sunken bellies and leaped, hungry-jawed, upon the food.
The sun was setting when the wind rose, bucking the great grey sheet that had floated around all day, rumpling it up into huge balls of dust and flinging them to the earth. The dust-storm had arrived. The harvesters ran to their houses to fetch sewn-up gunny bags and whatever tarpaulin covers they could lay their hand on, even old quilts and heavy blankets, to cover up the little hills of crop and place stones on them all round to prevent them from flying away in the gusty wind. Those who couldn’t find enough material for covers hauled the remaining crops on to their bullock carts and took off for home.
Fakir Din was trying to get his bullocks going.
‘They are for the butcher, Fakiroo,’ Mahinder Singh called out to him. ‘They have had their day.’
Gravely offended, Fakir Din pulled at the rope-reins with such force that the bullocks’ eyes bulged out. He eased a little, then pulled at them once again. The bullocks’ nostrils flared, ears fluttered, muscles strained, and they started running.
‘Butcher, eh?’ Fakir Din shouted. ‘Come on, let’s see who’s for the butcher. Here is the mile and there is the field. Halala …’ and off he went, with Mahinder Singh coming up fast in answer to the challenge. The race was on, the two carts flying side by side, their wheels running astride the narrow path and into the fields on either side, as the bullocks were viciously beaten by their masters with rope-reins and lashes of long thin twigs cut from shisham trees, accompanied and followed by the
cheering, challenging cries of supporters who had cleared the path and taken sides without malice, athletic youngsters running alongside the carts and some of them leaping on to them and throwing their arms up in the air, shouting ‘Halalalala …’ By the time they reached the edge of the pond, Mahinder Singh’s cart was yards ahead. He pulled up. Jumping down from the cart, he slid out of the dhoti that covered his lower half. Standing naked, he started thrusting and gyrating his hips, making his genitals flip and flop in front of the oncoming Fakir Din, who, red-faced with anger and shame, swore loudly and turned his cart to head for home, while all around them swirled a fierce storm, blasting particles of hot dust into their bodies and faces, blinding and choking them.
They wrapped up their faces in sheets of cloth, leaving only slits for the eyes, and returned to the serious business of hovering in the fields around their heaped and covered crops, guarding them for half the night as they had done all their lives against the cruelties of the elements. When half the night had passed, the storm abruptly stopped. The men then returned to their homes, grateful that the storm did not bring in its wake the rain which could rob them of all they had toiled for.
By morning the dust had settled, the air was clear as glass and the sun, once again out of the shadow of dust, entered the streets of the village, quietly lighting up the chimneys and the edges of roofs. The men emerged, laughing and talking, driving their cattle ahead of them, the animals’ neck-bells sedately tinkling as if both animal and man had found new energy and peace at the beginning of this day, ready for the threshing of the crop to separate the grain from the chaff. Little did they know at the time that another, deadlier storm awaited them that same morning. They had hardly been in the fields for an hour before everything came to a stop.
Niaz Beg ran out of his field and entered the house. He went straight to his storeroom. ‘Shut the doors,’ he shouted to his wives. ‘Lock it. The lock’s on the ledge up there. Don’t tell anyone, you hear? Don’t say a word –’ Naim saw his father hiding in the storeroom and left the house. He saw a dozen policemen, rifles in hand, rounding up the peasants from all the fields. There were several horses and a military vehicle lined up along the widest path leading into the village. An Anglo-Indian sergeant and a thin-faced British officer, both in military uniform, stood by the vehicle. When all the men had been gathered in a cleared field where their cattle were tethered, the sergeant began, in a loud, harsh voice and broken vernacular, to address them.
The Weary Generations Page 9