The Weary Generations

by Abdullah Hussein

  Hari Chand was quiet for a while. Then he said, ‘Were you happy?’

  ‘It was work.’

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ Hari Chand asked.

  ‘Nothing. I am going to stay here. Have you seen my father’s condition?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How is it with you?’

  ‘Oh, much as before, much as before.’

  Niaz Beg gave them a clay cup each full of hot gur with melted ghee swimming on top. ‘Eat it,’ he said. ‘You give one of these to a horse and it will jump the wall. The cold – not since year fourteen …’

  Naim ate it with relish. Hari Chand took only a couple of fingerfuls and put the cup aside.

  ‘What do you think about the situation now?’ Hari Chand asked.

  ‘I don’t think. I told you, I am doing nothing but staying here. I am tired.’

  ‘I understand,’ Hari Chand said. ‘Everyone’s work is cut out.’

  Under a pale moon, they sat silently for a few minutes. Then Hari Chand got up, shook hands with Naim and left. Naim felt the other man’s hand cold and heavy in his grip.

  It was early when Naim awoke the next morning. His father was still asleep, gathered up under his quilt like a small bundle. This was one of those rare days when he didn’t leave the house in the early hours to go out to the fields and stay there until sunrise. Naim went to the water pump in the courtyard and started pumping it. When all the cold water in the pipe had run out, he filled two buckets with the lukewarm water that fetched up from the bowels of the earth. With those he bathed, luxuriously pouring water over his head and feeling the grime of weeks wash away. Little Ali and Naim’s cousin Rawal had walked out of their rooms and stood watching him. After Naim dried himself and put on his shirt and trousers, he grabbed Ali by the neck and tossed him in the air. The child landed smartly on his stepbrother’s shoulders, gripping his head.

  ‘I can ride the mare,’ Ali said, pointing to the splendid white animal of whose purchase and value Naim had heard from his father at length the previous day.

  ‘I can ride standing up,’ Rawal boasted.

  To keep up with them, Naim told a lie. ‘I used to ride lying on my back when I was your age.’

  ‘Really?’ Rawal said, his eyes wide. ‘Are there horses in Kulkutta?’

  ‘Yes, they pull buggies.’

  ‘Bullock buggies?’

  ‘No, horse buggies.’

  Niaz Beg had got out of bed. The old woman was getting on with preparing the food for her men. They sat on the floor around a very low table that Niaz Beg told his son he had made ‘with his own hands’, proudly spreading his hands yet again in front of him. He ate last night’s warmed-up gur with butter first of all, followed by buffalo milk and a paratha and finally a melon. Naim had always been surprised at the contrast between his father’s shrunken body and the amount of food he consumed. At times he had mentioned it and got the old man’s answer, ‘Horse and man, as long as they keep eating, they stay upright. They stop eating, they die.’

  The old woman started weeping.

  ‘Why are you crying, mother?’ Naim asked her.

  His mother kept quietly shedding tears.

  ‘Tell me, what is it?’

  ‘He,’ she said, wiping her tears, ‘slept here after two months. Two whole months, he ate my food and slept with that blood-sucker in the other room. Last night, only because of you … I pray you not to go away now.’

  Naim blushed deeply. ‘I am not going anywhere,’ he said.

  ‘Hold your tongue, you foolish woman,’ Niaz Beg shouted. ‘Give me some achar, go on, get up.’

  Niaz Beg ate a whole pickled green mango and offered another to Naim. ‘Eat it. When a buffalo’s stomach gets heavy, a single achar mango does the job. Eat it. It will make your insides light, light as the wind.’

  Naim laughed. ‘I don’t want the wind inside me.’

  ‘Baba has much wind,’ Rawal said, laughing.

  Niaz Beg glowered at the boy. ‘Hold your tongue. It is growing wings. One day I will cut them.’

  They heard a noise outside the house. They listened. The low humming noise continued. There was the sound of hurrying feet. Niaz Beg and Naim got up together and went to the door. A group of villagers appeared running down the street, disappearing round the other corner. Following them came some women, all of them Hindu and Sikh, walking with irregular steps. Terror peeped out of their eyes, but no tears; they were mumbling words that sounded like low moans arising from a deep pain: ‘They finished him. The Muslas finished him.’ One by one they vanished into their houses, shutting the doors on the outside world. Picking up the scent, Niaz Beg and Naim went to Hari Chand’s hut, where the schoolmaster lay, half in and half out of the door, his arms gathered upon his chest and legs spread wide. His throat had been cut. Out of his pulled-down shalwar his bloody genitals were visible: he had been crudely circumcised.

  ‘They came in the night,’ an old Sikh said to Niaz Beg, shaking his head.

  ‘Did you see them?’

  ‘No. They came from outside, not from here.’

  Back in the house, Naim sat on the cot with his head in his hands. The silence in the village was so complete that the thought of a single living, breathing being seemed impossible. Everyone was waiting, waiting for something, or someone, other people, Roshan Agha, the police, God from heaven, anyone, to come and lift this pall of breathless quiet where not a sound arose from the hidden multitude. Naim sat still, with a voice saying over and over to him in his head, ‘This has nothing to do with you, nothing at all.’ His mother started crying. It was the first voice he heard. Then the horse neighed and the buffalo uttered a low, regretful moan. Some small children laughed in the distance. Slowly, the village began to come to life. But for hours no one came out of their houses and the streets remained empty, until the police party came. In the evening the police took the dead body away with them. The story told by the police was that ‘the reality was different, it wasn’t the Muslas, a cow was slaughtered and the militant Hindus flared up and killed Hari Chand when he went to try to calm them’. All this had happened in ‘some other village’, whence the body was brought back and dumped on his doorstep. Why was he circumcised? Because he was considered a ‘sympathizer’ of the Muslas.

  The reality, however, as always in such cases, was never discovered. The dead man had no known relatives, no one to mourn him. The locked door of his hut, never lived in afterwards, for ever reminded Naim of death in the plural, as if it were not one man that had died there but all the dead he had known, depositing yet more on the heap of anonymous mourning within him.

  Two months after Naim arrived back in the village, Niaz Beg met his end. Swift and sudden, it took barely twelve hours. The old man kept making plans for the next day right up to the last few moments, when he briefly wept. It was the second half of March; the mornings were still chilly. At dawn, Niaz Beg picked up his hukka and went out for the last watering of his wheat crop. He cut into the water coming from the main canal outlet and made little channels with his spade at several places for it to flow into his fields, constantly talking to it. ‘First you took so long to come, and when you come, you devil, you are cold as ice, freezing the blood in my feet,’ he said, standing ankle-deep in mud. ‘But never mind, this is the last time before the harvest and I am going to suck up every drop of you. You go two steps and sink into the earth, eh? You lazy layabout, come with me and I will show you how many roots you have to wet, no man in the whole village has as much standing wheat as I have, I will tire you out or you can change my name to whatever you want, you wayward son of the river. When I was young I could stand in you up to the waist all night in the month of Poh, and now I am old you freeze my blood, eh? Shame on you. You just wait, wait, I am not going to give up until I am finished with you …’ Talking thus, louder and louder to keep out the cold, he managed to water most of his field of rapidly paling crops before a neighbouring farmer came to claim his share of water.

&nb
sp; The sun was up to a two-spear height when Niaz Beg returned home. He ate gur mixed with nuts and a cup of hot milk, smoked hukka for a few minutes and went out again to prepare the soil for the sowing of vegetables. Carrying the plough on his back and repeatedly taking the pipe of the hukka out of his mouth to poke the bullock in the behind with it to drive it ahead of him, he freed one hand by balancing the plough on one shoulder and rubbed his chest, swearing at the pain that had been roaming around under his ribs since the morning. ‘If the boy had two hands,’ he mumbled to himself, ‘he could have helped me.’ Sorrowfully, he swore at his son’s disability and started tilling the land. By the time the sun was overhead he had turned the soil in the whole field. Back home, his pain kept bothering him. He made no mention of it. According to Niaz Beg, the one cure for a hundred ailments was work and more work. ‘Every impurity of the body is washed away with sweat,’ he always said. Rubbing his chest surreptitiously and grimacing, he still ate like a horse: two thick rotis of wheat flour kneaded in butter, with gram daal seared with fried onions, followed by a pot of lassi.

  After another few pulls at the hukka, which had been refreshed on his orders by Rawal, he was up once again, shouting at Rawal to accompany him out to fetch fodder for the animals. Rawal picked up his tools – a length of rope and a hand scythe – and followed him out of the yard. ‘You have eaten four times and they,’ he said, pointing to the cattle and poking the boy in the neck with the sharp end of the scythe, ‘have not eaten once. Have you no shame?’

  ‘We are going, aren’t we?’ the boy said angrily.

  Niaz Beg talked to Rawal on the way out, admonishing him for one thing or the other. But by the time he came back he had stopped talking. Lugging a large bundle of green fodder on his back, he was boiling with fever. At home, he threw down the heavy fodder and didn’t have the energy to untie the bundle or serve it to the animals. He fell on his cot and lost consciousness. His two wives, panicking at the sight of him shivering like a twig in a storm, started massaging his chest with clove-seared ghee, until Naim told them to stop exposing him to the cold and cover him up with quilts. Niaz Beg did not regain consciousness until several hours later, when he briefly came to and called out for his son. He grabbed Naim’s arm, felt that it was wood, a mistake he had never made in his full faculties, and shifted his grip to the good arm, holding it tightly to him. He spoke haltingly.

  ‘I have turned up the earth for vegetables. Sow them inside four days or the soil will become hard. Take Rawal with you and get the seed from Ali’s mother. Have you seen the mustard flowers blazing like fire? Phagan is already nearly over; soon it will be cutting time. I have watered the wheat for the last time, no more water there. It’s going to be a heavy crop again this year, I can tell you. The gram crop will be ready in thirty days’ time, but you don’t have to worry about that, I will be up on my feet by that time. Nobody dies of working hard. I am going to go out to look for a woman for you as soon as I am up, don’t you worry about that either. A woman is useful for a farmer …’ He let go of Naim’s arm for a second, then grasped it again, ‘Ali is your brother, look after …’ He wanted to go on but couldn’t utter the words. He looked at his son with dumb eyes, and tears trickled down his temples. One of his hands shot out and grabbed at his younger wife’s crotch under her waist-sheet, holding it tight. Lying thus on his back, Niaz Beg died quickly. The poor woman, her face red as beetroot, struggled to free herself from her husband’s death-grip, finally succeeding after furiously pulling herself away, although she lost a small tuft of hair from her genital area that was wedged in the dead man’s fist. She uttered a cry, as much of grief as of physical pain, and joined the other woman in wailing over their widowhood.

  They kept the body at home during the night while the gravediggers got busy, not in the village graveyard but in a corner of the Mughal’s land, for the burial the next day. In the morning the villagers came, those that were neighbours and friends and also those who disliked the deceased for his ill temper, his bragging and his new-found wealth. They sat on durrees spread on the ground in a circle in the courtyard, offering condolences. ‘When my woman told me,’ said Ghulam Hussain, a man well-known for being Niaz Beg’s enemy, ‘that chaudri had – had …’ His face screwed up to indicate that he was overcome with grief, and just when Naim thought the man was going to break down and cry, he straightened up quickly, regaining his composure, and continued, ‘– had passed away, an arrow pierced my heart, here,’ he thumped his chest, ‘right here!’ Despite the state of shock that Naim was in, he couldn’t help imagining what his father would say at such deceit: ‘Shut your tongue, you old thief, and be off with you!’ Another man took up the wail, and then another, in the usual manner of peasants, whose cunning came not from malice but from the way they took life and death, grief and joy, the same as they did, in their proper time, the cycle of the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun each day, and thought little more of the passing of men than the unending change of colour of earth and crops.

  A tonga stopped outside and Ayaz Beg stepped down from it. Slowly, he walked towards the house. The mourners sitting in the courtyard looked at this man whom they had last seen when he was a young man and calmly greeted him as they would someone returning from a night away from the village. Not Naim. He saw his uncle enter the house, supporting himself with a cane and, although he had spent the time since the death dry-eyed and numbed, now he leaned on the older man’s shoulder and cried like a child.

  CHAPTER 16

  NAIM TOOK SOME while before he could settle down to a routine of living – for the first time – as an independent man in the village. Then came a shift in his circumstances so swift and sweeping that it altered the course of his life.

  He had consolidated his father’s, his own and almost ten acres of good fertile grace-and-favour land given by Roshan Agha to Ayaz Beg to mark his visit to the village after a long self-exile. Ayaz Beg, after burying his brother, never returned to the village again. Naim had twenty-six acres of land under him, two-thirds of which he gave to the muzaras on a half-share basis and the rest he kept for cultivation under his own supervision, providing the bullocks, the ploughs, the seed and anything else needed for the job, the tillers being his servants who took a share of the crop and whatever little money they needed according to custom. These sharecroppers and farm labourers in general had milch cattle, the produce of which they sold or bartered to supplement their income. Naim had built himself two brick rooms on his land outside the village and in these he now lived, looked after by a servant who fetched his meals, cooked by his mother three times a day. Sometimes he felt deeply his loneliness and the need for a friend, but he found that the ability to form friendships was lost to him, a wall-like curtain having dropped between him and the world. He still mixed with the villagers, often going to sit with them in the panchayat yard, a place for the common folk to come and go, using it for assemblies or just to exchange chat as they pleased. Being the owner of land and men in his own right and a hero on top, aside from having the advantage of an education, Naim was consulted by everyone about their problems, from small everyday matters to big affairs, and asked to give decisions that were accepted by all. He had attained a position in the village that was far higher than that of the munshi, the previous headman, who was only a servant and owned neither land nor men. Naim also went to his father’s house regularly twice a week to sit with his mother and stepmother, to listen, mostly in silence, to their needs for food and clothing and to their woes, happy in the knowledge that the two women had now learned to live peaceably together.

  Once a month, he went to visit his uncle Ayaz Beg, who had taken early retirement and lived in the old house in Delhi. It was on one of these occasions, as he sat at the table after the midday meal in his uncle’s house, that Ayaz Beg handed him a thick, richly embossed card. The card, an invitation to the walima party of Pervez’s marriage – the nikah ceremony of which was to have taken place two days previously at a family function – w
as addressed to ‘Naim Ahmad Khan’.

  ‘Will you come?’ Ayaz Beg asked.

  ‘Er – I don’t know,’ Naim answered.

  ‘I got the impression that they would be glad to see you.’

  ‘This is a busy time of the year in the village,’ Naim said.

  ‘I think it would be wise to go,’ Ayaz Beg said to him.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Ayaz Beg paused before answering. ‘There is a chance,’ he said, ‘that we will regain possession of the land.’

  ‘Which land?’

  ‘The acres that we lost following the –’ he stopped for a second, ‘the case.’

  ‘How is it possible after all these years?’

  ‘Since your father’s death there is a slight chance that we can have the decision reversed. After all, I was also one of the owners, and now you. And neither of us had anything to do with – with what happened.’

  Naim thought for a moment. ‘Do you really think it is feasible?’

  ‘To be frank, it was Roshan Agha who first suggested it to me. I have already sent a petition to the governor. A separate one should go from you. In view of your services to the government, there is a real chance.’

  A month later, Naim had his hair cut, put on a suit that he had had made soon after his return from the war but had not once worn, and went to Roshan Mahal with Ayaz Beg.

  The house stood just as he remembered it, with only the addition of a garden-house, which, his uncle informed him proudly, was built to Ayaz Beg’s own design. The paths and lawns of the house were a lot more crowded on this day than on the day Naim was last here to attend a party. Under the colourful bunting stretched across the garden, their strings tied to the rooftops, people stood, sat, sipped mango and orange juice, talked, made gentle gestures, moved leisurely about so that the entire assembly of men and women seemed, in a hum of voices, to be slowly floating and churning in space like currents and eddies in a great river. Among them, here and there, Naim could see the old familiar faces of people who had been young boys and girls when he had played with them on the very same ground.