‘War is threatening to devastate our country. It is the duty of each one of us to protect the country and the government.’
There was complete silence among the villagers, broken only by the tinkling of a bullock’s neck-bell as it shook its head to drive off the flies.
‘We can only protect ourselves if we win the war. We have lakhs of men in our country,’ the sergeant swept his arm across the breadth of the crowd. ‘We can win with the help of fighting men. Now, everyone who joins up will be given Royal silver coins in wages and free food and clothing on top. When the war ends, men will come home and get a pension for life.’
‘Have they stopped killing them in the wars now?’ old Rehmat said with a little sarcastic laugh.
The sergeant’s lips twitched. ‘We don’t want old men,’ he said. ‘Only young men may give their names.’
A buzz rose from the crowd. Two young boys started talking.
‘Where is the war going on?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Yes, where is it happening?’ Mahinder Singh asked the sergeant.
‘Silence,’ the sergeant ordered. ‘War is threatening England and the British government, your government. We need you to fight for your King and country. Come on, come forward and give your names.’
‘We are harvesting,’ a man said. ‘Our cut crop is still out.’
‘We have no time,’ the sergeant said severely. ‘We have to cover the whole district. Step forward.’
The crowd stirred. Men’s voices arose here and there. ‘Who will thresh our wheat? The jackals?’ ‘What will we eat?’ ‘Have we laboured for a whole year for the pigs to eat our grain?’
‘Look at my hands.’ An old peasant extended his arms in front of him. Everyone standing beside him looked intently at his callused, dry-skinned hands as if they were seeing them for the first time. The sergeant was looking back at the thin-faced officer.
The officer quickly turned and went to his vehicle. He put his hand into the cab and brought out a sheaf of papers loosely held in a file-cover. After leafing through them for a minute, he handed them to one of the only three men who were in civilian clothes. They turned out to be a doctor and his two assistants. The officer then unfixed a bayonet from the rifle carried by a policeman standing next to him. He held up the weapon in front of the men. The sun caught the steel and exploded in the eyes of the bullocks, who jerked their heads in sudden fright. The officer paused for a moment, then spoke in perfect vernacular.
‘You will now cut your crops with this,’ he waved the bayonet, ‘and do it on the field of battle.’ With that he expertly flung the bayonet down so that it stood on end with its point sunk into the earth. ‘Tell the soldiers to present the men,’ he ordered the sergeant.
The constables, poking them with their rifle butts, began to separate the younger men and drive them to the front at bayonet-point. The men resisted, clinging to their animals. The bullocks rubbed back, mooing softly, not with hunger or lust but with the warmth of intimacy as if they understood the danger ahead for their masters. Naim calmly walked up to the sergeant.
‘Put my name down,’ he said in English.
The sergeant looked up, surprised. ‘Are you educated?’
‘I have passed senior Cambridge from Calcutta,’ Naim replied.
‘We want fighting men, farmers and peasants, not educated people.’ The sergeant paused, then added, ‘Er – not yet.’
The officer walked over and addressed Naim. ‘Why don’t you join the Education Department? It is equally useful, all round.’
‘I am a farmer. I can ride, shoot and fight,’ Naim answered.
The officer looked at him with interest from head to foot. ‘Wait,’ he said.
Naim stood there looking at the uncut wheat crop whose grain-heavy ears swayed drunkenly in the light wind. In the cleared fields, heaps of gathered crop lay motionless like huge tortoises sunning themselves. Wide-winged kites wheeled overhead, crying thirstily, as the hot wind of a summer noon swirled around the pushing, shoving, swearing and sweating men of the village. After two hours of effort, coaxing and bullying, the sergeant and his soldiers had only managed to extract names and particulars from two young men. The officer was in an obvious temper. He turned to Naim.
‘So you want to enlist?’
‘Yes,’ answered Naim.
The officer nodded to the sergeant, who proceeded to take down the necessary details: name, domicile, father’s name, occupation. Naim’s tongue quivered as the name of his father was called for. But there was no reaction from either the sergeant or the officer. After he had been put through a cursory medical examination and enlisted, Naim felt as if he had already won his first battle.
The recruiting party did not leave; they set up camp in a field and demanded food for the night. Only the officer got into his vehicle and left, the wheels raising clouds of hot dust from the baking path in their wake. He returned the next morning, accompanied by Roshan Agha. All the men of the village – and some women, mostly old, who kept their distance – came out to greet him. They were joyous to see their supreme master, since he came to their humble abode so rarely that some young lads had never set eyes on him. They jostled to get near him, grateful as supplicants who wanted nothing more than to be in the presence of this near-deity they called ‘mai-baap’ – ‘mother-father’. Without wasting any time, Roshan Agha got up on a chair and addressed the peasants while the officer and his men stood to the side, arms folded, as though they had nothing directly to do with all this.
‘The English sarkar is fighting a war with our enemy. I want all young men to come forward and fight to save our country. As the gora sahib has already told you, coins of Royal silver shall be given to you every month, plus as much as you can eat of food, and uniforms with strong boots, guns in your hands for tha tha tha, free tickets for the railway trains for you to go where you want, and much more. But that is not all. On top of it, here is my word to you: everyone who goes to fight, his family will get double share of the crop they grow.’
Roshan Agha’s word was law. Inside of two hours, sixteen young men were enlisted. The visitors, including Roshan Agha, left the village with eighteen fresh soldiers. Women wept, old men’s chests fell in several layers, young girls lost all sense of tomorrow.
Niaz Beg kept himself locked in the storeroom for a day and a night. When he emerged the next afternoon, the terror of the previous day had given way to a vacancy in his eyes that had spread out to cover his whole face, like the vista of an empty, barren field.
‘Naim gone?’ he asked.
The old woman, sitting by the hearth, looked back at him with vast, desert-like eyes without answering. Niaz Beg cautiously approached the wall of the adjoining house and called out, ‘Hussain gone?’
‘Gone,’ his neighbour replied from the other side of the wall.
‘Who else?’
No reply came from across the wall.
Niaz Beg waited for a moment, then asked, ‘Are you going out to the fields?’
Still no answer. Giving up, Niaz Beg picked up his hukka from the courtyard and went to the hearth. It was cold.
‘No fire?’ he asked.
His wife, silently waiting for his anger to rise, shook her head. Niaz Beg put the hukka down. He went off to a corner of the courtyard to pick up the sickle and a length of rope that lay on the ground. He stood there trying to fix the hand-scythe inside the folds of his turban. Looking at him working blindly on his turban with trembling fingers and failing, the woman’s eyes filled with grief and pity, although they were still dry as parched earth. Eventually Niaz Beg picked up an identical implement lying near by that had belonged to his absent son. He threw it to the young boy.
‘Let’s go get some millet for the animals,’ he said to his wife’s nephew.
The twelve-year-old caught the scythe in the air and chirped, ‘Yes, baba, I can cut. Yesterday I cleared half marla of greens with Neem before he left …’
On his way out, Niaz
Beg was brought to a halt by the sight of the buffalo’s teats swollen like inflated rubber tubes.
‘Nobody milked the buffalo today?’ he asked, addressing his wives although not looking back at them. He spread a hand under the distended udder. A few drops of milk fell on his palm.
This was a crime in his house. In the past, he would have jumped up and down with rage and shouted, ‘You do this to a tongueless animal? Your own milk will dry in your breasts and your children will perish, bitches …’ But on this day he dried his palm by wiping it on his beard and said weakly, ‘The buffalo is throwing milk,’ and went out.
The older woman made as if to get up to go to the buffalo, then fell back where she had been sitting on the ground. Covering her eyes with a hand, she began to weep.
Outside, all was calm. Some old men wandered about in the fields among heaps of the cut crop without touching any of it. The sun shone cruelly on a patient earth; the storm had passed through and taken away the heart of the village.
CHAPTER 8
129th Baloch, Duke of Connaught’s Own, Ferozpur Brigade, Lahore Division
FOR TWO MONTHS the regiment stayed at headquarters, during which time they were given training – brief and brutal – in how to do battle, consisting chiefly in the use of .303 rifles, fixed bayonets for hand-to-hand fighting and grenade attacks. Apart from that, there were parades, never-ending parades; marches, quick marches and ‘double-ups’ carrying twenty seers of kit, left-turn here and right-turn there, stop here and about-turn. The peasants, village dwellers who could stop and start and execute a turn at will like birds upon the wind, took the discipline heavily to heart and broke under the shouted orders and having to learn how to walk in long trousers and strange boots.
It was the beginning of August and black monsoon clouds thundered overhead, making it the darkest of nights. Ali Pur’s Abdullah, Naim’s only friend in the platoon, was trying to mend a tear in his uniform. Four West Punjabi soldiers, carefully turned away from each other, were busy changing into their night shirts.
‘Where did you disappear from the firing range?’ Naim asked.
‘I don’t loiter,’ Abdullah replied. ‘I come straight home.’
‘Home?’ asked Naim with an ironic smile. He pushed his bedding roll against the wall with his boot and sat down on it. ‘You were firing like a madman today. I was afraid you’d kill someone.’
Abdullah stayed silently bent over his needle and thread.
‘If you do it again, you’ll be shot,’ Naim said.
Feeling tired after the day’s training and weary of Abdullah’s silence, Naim rested his head against the wall and shut his eyes. Outside it had started raining. A man sitting on the far side of the barracks began singing a song of barsaat that spoke of the onset of rains cooling the sunburnt earth and of women in pale dresses rising and falling on swings tied to ancient trees.
‘Exactly a year ago,’ Abdullah said suddenly, ‘I caught a lovely fish.’
Naim opened his eyes. ‘Did you eat it?’
‘No.’
‘What happened to it?’
‘It was the most beautiful little fish I ever caught. How could I eat it? On its body, only as big as my hand, were thousands of spots of all colours, red and orange and blue. I can never forget it. Today I saw a stone in front of me as we were crawling on the range. This stone also had many, many coloured spots on it and was of the same size and shape as the fish. Suddenly, I felt like running off to catch a fish. This is the season for it. When the rains came, we went fishing in the ponds. That is why I fired on the stone.’
Wide-eyed, Naim looked at him. ‘You wanted to kill the stone?’
‘No.’ Abdullah paused. ‘You are a book-reader. You will not understand.’
‘I will tell the sergeant,’ said Naim, laughing.
‘I will break the motherfucker’s head.’
‘You have a bullock’s brain inside your head.’
‘I don’t know,’ Abdullah said thoughtfully. ‘But I have a bullock’s heart.’
‘Bullocks don’t have a heart, they are rough and insensitive. Now horses, I know about horses, they have a heart.’
‘Bullocks too. You know, when my brother died our Blue didn’t eat for two days. My brother had brought him up from when he was little. I went out and he followed me. I took him to the millet field and he didn’t once put mouth to it. I sat down under a tree. I bit into a mango and gave half of it to the bullock. That was the only thing he ate in two days. Afterwards he put his head on my shoulder and cried.’
‘Cried!’
‘He had tears in his eyes.’
‘Good bullock,’ Naim laughed. ‘What happened to the fish?’
‘Huh? Oh, the fish. Don’t know, I brought it home and put it in a dish full of water. From there it disappeared.’
‘Disappeared where?’
‘Don’t know. We all think the buffalo ate it.’
‘You definitely have a buffalo’s brain, if not a bullock’s.’
The West Punjabis had taken off their night shirts and were bathing in the rain outside and laughing. Half of the recruits from across the barracks were out in the rain. Others stood on the veranda smoking and watching the bathers lit by flashes of lightning. Naim started humming a tune he had once heard in Roshan Mahal coming from what seemed a long time ago.
‘Neem,’ Abdullah raised his head again from his needle, ‘when will the war start?’
‘It has started.’
‘When?’
‘A few days back.’
‘Have you read it in a book?’
‘They are called newspapers. Why, are you in a hurry to die?’
‘To fight. Even to die will be better than this. We have sisterfucking rifles and bullets but no one to kill. As soon as I hold a rifle I want to kill. You think a stone has blood under its skin? I shot it because I am fed up with the parade. Nothing but parade and more motherfucking parade.’
‘Don’t worry, you will soon get a chance,’ Naim said.
Five days later the order came for the Brigade to move. There was commotion in all the barracks. They polished their boots to a high shine, oiled their rifles until even the shoulder-pieces sparkled, rubbed soda on their uniform buttons and finally massaged mustard oil into their washed hair and combed it. As a last touch they passed eye-pencils of kohl across their eyelashes to darken them further as if they were getting ready for a wedding. There were sounds of the opening and shutting of trunks, yet in the very centre of this noise there was silence among the men which seemed as though it would be broken with a bang at any moment: each of them felt as if the others would suddenly burst out laughing or else assault the men nearest to them for no reason at all. The order to move had triggered a force that rippled out through every muscle in their body; it was the expectation of freedom that they would have in the field of battle. After a while, the letter-writing began. The educated ones among them wrote their letters first and then wrote for the others. Naim had to write the most.
‘Aren’t you going to send a letter home?’ he asked Abdullah.
‘What is the point? If I am killed my wife will be looking for another husband even if she has three hundred of my letters.’
‘If a woman does that in Punjab,’ one of the Punjabis said, ‘she is killed.’
‘Punjab is full of junglees,’ Abdullah said as he slid the bolt of his rifle in and out of its empty casing, making a sharp metallic sound familiar to them all. ‘What were you saying?’
‘Letters,’ said Naim.
‘Yes. Letters.’
‘That is a silly thing to say.’
‘What is?’
‘That letters don’t mean anything.’
‘It’s true. Once read, they are like dead people. Reading old letters and weeping over the dead is no use. It is like seeing yourself dying beforehand. Anyway, nobody in our whole family can read. They will have to go to other people to have it read to them. That is no use too.’
‘Why not?�
��
‘Don’t want to tell the whole world what I am doing.’
‘They already know you have been recruited into the army.’
‘That is enough for them.’
There was a peculiarly secretive side to Abdullah that interested Naim. Naim was, however, the only one among them whose life had changed for the better. His time in the village had devastated not just his mind but also his body. The discipline of the past two months, which had given the peasants for the first time in their lives the feeling of boredom and listlessness, instead offered Naim a system of routines with which he had been familiar for most of his early life: he was again living as a regular, cheerful man.
Some time before midnight they embarked on a goods train. A layer of wheat straw mixed with leaves of corn and millet was laid on the floor of carriages for the soldiers to sit and lie upon. They put down their rolls of string-tied bedding along the corrugated iron walls of the carriages and sat on them. Sleep had vanished from their heads; their eyes glittered in the semi-darkness along with their cigarette ends, the only light in the carriage being provided by a low-flamed hurricane lantern hung high up in a corner. One soldier in Naim’s carriage had a stomach-ache and was the only one lying down, uttering occasional cries with his head tossing on a thin bed of corn leaves. The train carried no goods other than the conscripts and didn’t stop at normal stations, running at its regular half-speed pace for long periods of time. When it stopped it was only to let another train pass or to get water from a station pump. When the train stopped the carriages became stuffy and humid and the men gathered round the open door to breathe, attracting the attention of the people down at the station.
The Weary Generations Page 10