‘It is a matter of shame for us,’ Arshad began again, ‘that today girls have had the nerve to throw a challenge to us.’
‘Hear, hear,’ the men clapped.
‘I said it is not a matter for applause but a disgrace.’
‘Hear, hear.’ More clapping from the men.
The girls had begun to organize themselves.
‘Four speeches each. Right?’
‘No, five,’ Pervez interjected.
‘We agreed on four.’
‘Nonsense. Five. We agreed on five.’
‘One, two, three, four … Where is Azra?’
‘She is probably in the kitchen.’
‘I have just come from the kitchen. She isn’t there.’
‘Might have guessed, you glutton.’
‘I only had a glass of water, I swear.’
‘Liar. You smell of kebabs.’
‘Let me be struck down if I lie. I didn’t touch the food.’
‘Oh God, where’s Azra? Azraaa –’
Azra heard it as though it was someone else’s name. She stood still, holding the empty bucket in her hand. Then she heard Sahibzada Waheed’s short, light footsteps approaching from around the hedge and over to her side and she wanted to be somewhere else.
‘Azra bibi, what are you doing here?’
For one moment she felt that her old friend was addressing not her but another person. She looked around, as if expecting to find a third standing there.
‘Oh, look,’ the sahibzada said, ‘you’ve drowned the poor flower. Now it will die.’
Staring at a perfect jewel-like drop of water resting on a petal, she felt that the flower was looking back at her through that sparkling eye. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It won’t die.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Look at that drop.’
‘Oh, how wonderful!’
‘How did you find me?’ she asked.
‘I have something of the bloodhound in me. I followed your smell.’
‘Foul, was it?’
‘No, no, the opposite. Most wonderful. You leave your perfume on the grass that you tread.’
She laughed. ‘Fantastic exaggeration, as ever.’
‘No, no, no.’
She wanted to run away.
‘The speeches are on,’ the sahibzada said.
‘Yes, I can hear them. Let’s go.’
‘No. Let’s stay.’
They walked up and down the narrow strip of grass. Azra didn’t understand what had happened – she never did, although she was never surprised at it. It always happened, and at the most unexpected of times. At times like these, her heart filled up at once with the weight of a vague, unremembered sorrow and the lightness of joy: she became still and yet felt like crying out in an unfamiliar, two-tone voice.
‘I don’t understand you,’ the sahibzada was saying. ‘I never know what you are going to do from one moment to the next.’
‘I know what I am going to do now,’ she said, laughing, and tossing her head in a familiar gesture, sweeping back a strand of hair on her brow with the back of her hand. ‘I’m going to join the speeches. I mean, we are, aren’t we?’
She ran over to the other side. Shirin was standing on a chair, orating in her shrill voice, and the crowd were laughing their heads off. Several people turned to look at Azra. Shirin stopped for a moment, then resumed where she had left off.
‘Well done,’ Azra shouted.
‘Where did you disappear to?’ Arshad said to her. ‘It’s your turn next.’
‘I am ready,’ Azra replied.
This was the young generation of the Indian upper classes that, for a few years of their youth, mixed with each other, went to the same schools and colleges, spent long summer holidays at the same hill stations and had endless parties in vast houses full of light and air and servants. On this day, after the speeches, the applause, the hotly disputed judgement, the chaos, the boycotts, the food, the songs, the stories and the jokes, night fell and the party ended. In her bedroom, Azra changed into night clothes, threw a gown over her shoulders and switched off the light. Instead of going to bed, she went and stood at the open window, looking out into the garden where most of the lights had been turned off, save one or two at strategic points near the gate and the big lawn. The house had three floors, and Azra’s rooms were at the top. Just outside her window was the top of the tallest eucalyptus tree in the garden. She could reach out and touch its leaves, as she had often done. But on this night she looked above the trees and the lights. The sky was becoming overcast with great puffy masses of cloud. She looked for the stars among the clouds and marked them – one, two, three … When all the stars disappeared one by one, she turned back into the room. A little diffused light from outside spread faintly through the room. She noticed that her collection of little bronze and china figurines on the mantelpiece was covered in a fine layer of dust. She calmly proceeded, without turning on the lamp, to clean each object in turn with her silk nightgown. After she had them clean and glistening dimly in the dark room, catching the light from the hidden source, she stood back and regarded them – those figures of metal and stone with which she had lived for years – as if they were living beings whose acquaintance she had made for the first time. The last thought she had before she went to bed was: Am I really strange? She did not need to ask herself. She knew that her strangeness had been part of her for as long as she could remember, and it was known and accepted by others. A hint of a troubled smile appeared on her lips, and she closed her eyes.
CHAPTER 15
IT WAS A bitterly cold late January dawn when Naim reached the eastern edge of Roshan Pur’s lands from where he could see the faint outlines of grey mud walls of the village in the distance through the fog that hung in the still air. Wheat and gram crops were already calf-high. There were patches of bare, tilled fields whose ruts were covered with hard frost. Naim had left the train and walked miles in the dark until daylight began to spread at his back and he had a view of the village for the first time in eighteen months. Wrapped up in his dirty long coat, woollen hat and heavy boots, all ex-army and long used, he stood under a shisham tree looking at his beloved home and felt the blood in his legs gradually run cold and the chill of the frozen earth rise through his feet, making him shiver. His tongue was dry from walking so far. He picked up a thin, sharp-edged piece of ice from the ground and put it in his mouth, letting it slowly dissolve into thick saliva. He pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth to hold back the tiny particles of dirt while attempting to suck in the clear liquid. It proved an unsuccessful effort. He had to spit most of it out, but his throat was no longer dry. He came out from under the ancient tree that he had known all his life and started walking. The lands he was stepping on did not belong to him or his fathers, yet they were Roshan Pur’s lands and they made him feel at home. He pulled his wool cap down on his brow and thrust his hands deep into the coat pockets, enjoying, as he stepped on it, the occasional crunch of frozen water that had begun to give off vapour with the gradual climbing of the sun, now just below the rim of the earth.
Men were already out, carrying ploughs on their shoulders and driving oxen ahead of them, going to the fields that were still untilled. Naim recognized them as they passed: Guru, Dina Nath, Karam Singh, Imam Din the wrestler. The men looked, with a peasant’s silent suspicion, at the stranger in the unfamiliar garb, his face completely hidden by his hat and the upturned collars of his coat, walking by at this unusual hour. Naim wanted to stop and speak to them, but he didn’t have the will. Only Imam Din stopped for a moment to look him up and down before walking on, mumbling to himself, ‘Don’t know, walks like Niaz Beg’s boy,’ then addressing his bullock, ‘Year fourteen last brought this kind of cold to the world.’ Naim saw his steaming white breath as he laughed quietly, striding towards the village. By the edge of the pond he picked up a flat stone and threw it over his arm. The stone skimmed the icy surface once and, with a single muffled bubbling sound, sank
a yard further, throwing up tiny drops that gleamed in the light from the sky. Naim looked at the house on the corner and remembered Mahinder Singh and then all the others that had died who had never left him since, and for a moment he had a sense of having no home anywhere.
But that was before he saw the Mughals’ house – his and his father’s home. He didn’t recognize it. As if in a trance, he walked up to the door and stared at it in disbelief. It was a big new door with scores of thick five-headed brass nails hammered into the solid black shisham wood all over it. Putting his hand out, he touched the glinting metal of the decorative nails. It was a rich man’s door. Seized by sudden apprehension, Naim didn’t have the nerve to knock at it. He stood there for minutes, until the sun came up behind him and from the neighbouring door emerged the figure of Ahmad Din, riding on the back of his bullock with hukka in hand and pipe between his lips. Naim pushed his wool cap up his forehead and said, ‘Assalamoalaikam, chacha.’
Ahmad Din jumped down from the bullock’s back like a young boy and ran up to peer at Naim.
‘Ah – ha ha – ha ha ha,’ he burst out, spreading his arms wide. ‘Niaz Beg’s boy? You, when did you come? What are you doing standing here?’ The old man started furiously thumping at the door, shouting with the full force of his lungs, ‘Hey, hey, you old lazy-limbs, look, your boy’s come, your son, from whose medal’s acres you got melons a maund in weight and by the income from that you have raised a palace and become a big chaudri. Why did you not send your new mare to fetch your son? The earth is hard with ice and you have made your son walk here, you rascal! Come on now, leave your women in peace and come out –’ Suddenly the old man stopped thumping the door and turned to Naim, twisting one of his coat buttons. ‘I asked after you many times. Your father said you were seeing friends in Dilli and Kalkatta. So many seasons with friends, I asked? He said you were a very important man and had friends high up. True, true. I asked after you regularly. Since my son died in the angrezi war everyone’s son is my son. Why don’t you speak? Is it because of the cold? Tsk tsk! Once I had to travel all night in the month of Poh and I couldn’t speak for three days because of a stiff tongue. It froze.’
The heavy door creaked and Naim saw his father’s face. Ignoring the stream of condemnation pouring once again from Ahmad Din’s lips, Niaz Beg kept staring at his son, and Naim saw that his father’s mouth was hanging loose and his lower jaw was shivering – not from the cold but trembling on nerves that couldn’t support it. He had grown very old. Presently, he stepped outside and started kissing his son on the face, the coat on his chest, his right hand and then the wood of his left, mumbling words that were only a sound with no shape or meaning. He pulled Naim inside the house and quickly shut the door on Ahmad Din. Ahmad Din stood there looking at the door, in his eyes the wilderness of his own loss, then shouting for the last time in a fast-fading voice, ‘I asked after you many times, as your father can confirm …’
Inside, Naim looked at the house in amazement. The courtyard had been laid with bricks, a new pukka brick room had been built on the roof of the house – ‘your room’, Niaz Beg told Naim later, ‘all yours’ – and all the doors had been replaced with polished shisham wood. The older woman, Naim’s mother, stood in the doorway of her room and was crying loudly, both hands half-raised to the sky. Niaz Beg found his tongue. He started shouting at her.
‘Get the fire going, stupid woman. Don’t you know that after the year fourteen this is the biggest cold that the sky has sent the earth? And stop hoo hooing – hoo hoo hoo hoo,’ he mimicked his wife, dragging Naim into the room.
Shortly after, Naim was sitting in front of red hot coals with a jug of hot buffalo milk and a day-old roti that had been fried in butter. Talking constantly, Niaz Beg was saying, ‘This is all from your income that came –’
‘My income?’ Naim asked, absentmindedly chewing the bread.
‘Yes, yes, from your ten acres, and some of mine. But mostly from your land. After all it’s the land that we won with our bravery, so why should it not give us good fruit? So much wheat that I sold to ten other lazy ones for seed and still the grain store is full. I laid the bricks out in the yard and built the room above for you and all the doors and everything with my own hands, these hands,’ he spread his hands in front of him, and through their dry, cracked skin knobs of bones showed, cruelly swollen.
Ali, now no longer a toddler, walked silently in from the other room and stood by Naim. ‘Have you brought something for me from the city?’ he asked.
Naim looked at the child and for the first time he emerged from the state of mindless, limb-stretching comfort into which he had lowered himself. Taken a little aback, he touched Ali on the cheek. ‘I didn’t go to the city,’ he said weakly.
Niaz Beg pushed the child away with his arm. ‘Go. Don’t bother him, he is tired. Let him rest.’
The old woman passed her hand over the nice spun-cotton sheet spread on the bed. ‘There are eleven more like this one.’
‘No need to shout about it,’ Niaz Beg admonished, ‘the whole village knows we have eleven more like this. In all a full dozen. No need to tell him. Let the boy rest.’ Instead, seeing that Naim had finished his food, Niaz Beg pulled him up by the shoulder and dragged him outside. ‘You see this mushki bullock? It is famous in all the villages here. Thieves came three times to steal it, but I was alert. They went away empty-handed. You’ve been walking all night. You need rest. Afterwards, I will show you the grain store.’ Without a pause, Niaz Beg took him to the storeroom. Entering the room, he stumbled on the threshold. Naim saw that the old man’s legs were thin as dry stalks and bent like bows.
‘Baba, you’ve grown old,’ he said, laughing.
Niaz Beg waved his arm all round the room, which was stacked with bags of wheat to the rafters. ‘Look, all this with my own hands.’ Then, remembering his son’s remark, ‘I am not old. I work. Men who work never become old. And I don’t cry like women. Now you must sleep. When you get up, I will take you out.’
The sun had already covered three-quarters of the sky on its downward journey before Naim awoke. Niaz Beg was ready and waiting. They stepped out of the house together.
‘This is where our acres start,’ Niaz Beg said, standing far out in the fields beyond Roshan Agha’s vast spread. ‘You can’t put a foot down without trampling on a root. I have looked after it bravely, seeing that we won it with bravery. Only two marlas of sugarcane were left, and I cut them while you slept. Finished. See those two girls peeling them now? Oh ho, they are three. Who is the third? Who are you?’
‘I am Rehmu’s daughter,’ the third girl replied. ‘Don’t you recognize me, chacha? Have you stopped wearing surma in your eyes?’ Sweating around the nose and breasts, which were visible through their loose shirts, wet from hours of labour cleaning sugarcane with small hand scythes in the sun, the girls laughed.
Niaz Beg shouted at them with embarrassment. ‘Keep your heads and hands on your work. Young girls shouldn’t let their tongues run free. Work, work, keep yourselves away from the devil!’
The girls looked at Naim and smiled shyly. Niaz Beg pulled his son away. ‘We need a woman in the house. A young strong girl can manage the house on her own and help out in the fields too. I have made a room above the house for you. Do you like it?’
‘Yes,’ replied Naim.
At night, in the animals’ yard just inside the main door of the house, the last of the gur was being made.
‘This crusher,’ Niaz Beg told Naim, ‘I bought with my money. You remember we used to hire it from others and paid for it with the gur that we had made with our own labour? Now it is all ours. After all, it from the medal’s land that –’
‘Don’t go on about it, Baba,’ Naim interrupted.
‘Why not? When I went with money in my pocket to buy the mushki bullock from the chaudris of Jat Nagar, people tried to stop me. They said nobody goes to the big chaudris to buy their cattle. But you know, when I went there they gave me a good seat to sit o
n, right next to themselves, and they mentioned your name with respect. After all, we won with bravery the medal from gora sarkar.’
‘Baba,’ Naim said severely, ‘if you mention it one more time I will throw it in the fire. Be quiet.’
A great fire, fed by the crushed peel of the sugarcanes and their long dry leaves, burned under a huge wide-mouthed iron pot containing the furiously boiling juice that poured out of the crusher, pulled by the mushki ox. The cane crusher was always the gathering point for the men of the village wherever it was working, as much for the warmth of the fire on cold nights as for a cup of juice, a mouthful of hot gur, a round of hukka and gossip. Volunteers presented themselves to drive the oxen, feed the sugarcane into the mouth of the crusher and put the crushed peel into the fire. They talked for half the night about things that concerned them: the young about girls they fancied, the old about the weather, the crops, the strength of each other’s tobacco, and later, when the sweet aroma of vapour arising from the ever-thickening juice in the pot had saturated the air and after it had been cleaned up with okra stalks and the dirt skimmed away from the surface and they had had a taste of the hot, yellowish pink gur and the night mellowed, they talked about their old loves, their faces showing the shy remembrance of their youth for ever gone.
The big door creaked and Hari Chand, the schoolmaster, entered. He quietly greeted the assembled people and went to sit by Naim who had earlier moved aside to sit on his own away from the crowd.
‘Good to see you back,’ Hari Chand said. ‘You were away a long time.’
‘Too long,’ Naim said with a smile.
‘I knew you were sent to other places, although not exactly where,’ Hari Chand said with a questioning look.
‘Oh, several places,’ Naim said to him.
‘I was told that our people lost track of you.’
‘No they didn’t, although I did go away on my own towards the end.’
The Weary Generations Page 19