The Weary Generations

by Abdullah Hussein

‘You don’t even read the papers any more, Naim. What’s happened to you?’

  ‘You know I’ve been so busy.’

  ‘You are just not interested any longer, that’s all, isn’t it?’

  ‘I am. I know what’s happening.’

  ‘Do you? Then why are you not concerned? You worked for the Congress for a time after you came back from the war, didn’t you?’

  ‘It wasn’t the Congress. Not exactly. Anyway, that was then.’

  ‘Why? Has India become free?’

  ‘No,’ Naim said. ‘But there are people working for it. Proper people.’

  Azra looked at him quietly for a long moment. Suddenly she said, ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To Amritsar. Find out what happened.’

  ‘I don’t want to go anywhere. I mean I can’t,’ Naim said, looking away.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘For one thing, the harvest is starting in a few days.’

  ‘We can’t go now anyway. There’s Martial Law in the whole of Punjab. Have to wait, until a way can be found.’

  There was a silence, full of unease and the sounds made by thirsty crickets hiding under the hot, cracked surface of the earth.

  ‘What is the point?’ Naim said.

  ‘Point! You ask me what is the point? All right, I’ll go if you don’t want to.’

  ‘What, on your own?’ Flabbergasted, Naim said gently, ‘Azra, aren’t you happy – I mean, living here?’

  Azra gave no reply but looked around without seeing anything. Naim suddenly became aware of a terrible fact: her life in the village had ceased to interest her. His heart panicked. He saw clearly that there was nothing there – not even the longing for a child – that involved her: she was utterly bored.

  Roshan Agha, who could never say ‘no’ to his daughter anyway, was persuaded to go along with her proposal and proceeded to use his contacts among the people who mattered. As a result, Naim and Azra were included, although only as observers, in the inquiry committee that the Indian National Congress formed and delegated to produce a report about the events in Amritsar. As soon as martial law was lifted, the committee made its way to the Punjabi town.

  CHAPTER 18

  ‘THIS,’ SAID THE little hunchbacked old man, flourishing an expansive arm, ‘is the place.’

  The place, called Jalianwala Bagh, was no baghor garden in fact but a large yard, hedged in by a brick wall on three sides with a single exit on the fourth, which could well be taken for one of those places customarily used for tying up cattle or horses away from built-up areas in most cities. It was not, however, used as such but as a gathering place on any occasion for which people got together in numbers. The ground was corrugated baked earth with not a green shoot in sight – a place both close and desolate. Not so the ancient-looking man. He had skin like crumpled paper, and it was impossible to guess his real age or to decide whether the hump on his back was due to age or was merely the gift of his birth. With all that, he was quick as a rabbit, and very talkative. The inquiry committee had been talking to prominent social and political leaders, academics and lawyers in the city over the last few days and taking down their accounts. On their last day, when their work had finished, even their stock of pen and paper had run out and they were on the point of departure, they had come across this creature close to the spot. One of them had asked him an innocent question and that proved quite enough to get him going. He was a fisherman, now retired, he said, and he virtually dragged them back the short distance to the actual site, visited more than once by committee members who were now tired out and wanted nothing more than to leave the city. They were struck, however, by this man who had buttonholed them – by his appearance, for he resembled a four-legged primate with a withered face, his long arms starting from the curvature of his back and almost touching his ankles, and by his demeanour which matched his appearance, the sure-footed agility of an animal bestowed with several times more energy than size. With a single easy leap, he mounted the double-brick wall, sitting there now at eye-level to his audience.

  ‘I saw what happened. Everything.’

  ‘Tell us.’

  ‘I am a fisherman,’ the man began. ‘So was my father before me. So you can say that I was born a fisherman, only three years old when I started going with my father in his boat to catch fish. My father caught fish and walked miles on his round selling it fresh from the bucket on his head, and those he couldn’t sell he brought home, where my mother rubbed salt in them and hung them up to dry. Most times we lived well and in peace. But in the summer the river swelled up and the fish disappeared, swept away to God knows where in the muddy floods. Besides, the waters became too dangerous to row a boat in. Then my father grew bad-tempered for lack of a catch and he beat my mother and my mother beat me. Rain and the melting snow up in the mountains brought bad times for us. We became poor. That is when I got into the habit of eating raw fish.’

  Horrified, Azra asked, ‘Raw fish?’

  ‘It is not bad. After getting a beating from my father my mother would be waiting for me at home to deliver me a return beating on any old excuse, like laziness, although I was not lazy. So I stayed out all day, hanging about the little ponds in the village catching small fish in shallow water with my hands, washing and chewing them to stave off hunger. I always kept a rock of salt in my pocket. I couldn’t swallow the fish on its own in the beginning, but later I got a taste for it. When I returned home in the evening my mother would still beat me for loitering about. You could say that I had a bellyful of fish and beating. The summer brought trouble for us. War came to our home then. As the weather changed, life became good again. We had plenty of fish. My father would still beat my mother, but not for lack of fish.

  ‘My mother was a wonderful woman. When she died I was eleven years old. Neither my father nor I knew how to cook anything, so we just boiled dry fish and ate it. That is when my father lost all interest in catching fish. He would catch only enough for us to eat and hang them up to dry for the next day. One day I saw what he was doing. He picked up a lovely fish from the net and gazed at it for a time. The fish had round black spots on its yellow skin. It was a leopard fish. After a minute, my father let it slip slowly out of his fingers into the water. I went up behind my father and heard him mumble, “You are beautiful, my hut is ugly, go back to your beautiful home.” I stood there looking open-mouthed at him throwing fish after lovely fresh fish back into the river, saying to them, “You are so good-looking, we need only a few ugly old fish to eat. Go, go home.”

  ‘Then I knew he had gone away from the world. I waited patiently, and when we got to the shore I spoke to him. “That is it,” I said. “You are not going to catch fish any more.”

  ‘“Who will bring in our food?” he asked.

  ‘“I will,” I said. “You are old and you are going mad.”

  ‘He raised his oar above his head to strike me, but I was faster on my feet and ran out of reach. “You are a little worm,” he shouted, “worse than that, a dwarf.”

  ‘“I am a man,” I shouted back. “I will show you. Look, can you eat a raw fish?” I grabbed a wriggling live fish, small mind you, and chewed it up in front of him.

  ‘When he saw me swallow it he was tongue-tied with wonderment. He slapped his forehead and wailed, “My dear God, children of snakes and crocodiles are being born of humankind. What is the world coming to?”

  ‘But after that he let me alone. I was twelve years old then and I started going out on the boat by myself and my father sat at the roadside selling fish from a bucket. Then he began telling everybody who passed not to beat their wife or she would die and they would be reduced to eating boiled fish and have dwarf crocodiles for children. People laughed at him. He wasn’t paying attention to selling fish anyhow, so I took that job off his hands as well. Now I was doing both jobs at once. After some time he died of doing nothing and talking out of his head. For a time I looked around for a woman. But the women I approached were big a
nd tall. I am small, you see. They made fun of me. Others were bad-tempered and told me to run off. After some time I gave up. I have seen everything.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ Azra said.

  But the sun was going down and the others were getting restless, already regretting having been tricked into stopping by this babbling old idiot.

  ‘Tell us what happened here,’ one of them said to the man.

  ‘Yes, yes, do not be impatient, my children. We can stop here until the end of the day. After that,’ he gestured towards two white soldiers, rifles slung round their shoulders, standing by the yard’s exit, ‘there will be curfew. It is many days since I talked to someone alive like you people. Everybody in this city is going around like they were dead. I remember everything, even the time there was uprising by the Hindustani spahis, a proper ghadar, in the year ’57, although that was during the last hundred years when I was a young boy. Also the red fever that spread when the old hundred years ended and the new hundred years began and many died. When I tell people about all those things they say to me, “You have lived a long life. What do you eat, old man?” I tell them, “Raw fish and boiled corn all my life.” Then they say, “That is why you have a good brain.”’

  At this he bared the three teeth left in his mouth, and his listeners knew that he was happy, laughing soundlessly.

  ‘Tell us what you saw here,’ Naim asked him solemnly. ‘We have to go soon.’

  ‘Yes. I remember everything. Nobody talks to me here, these men and women you see on the streets, they have legs only for walking and hands only for buying food. They have lost their tongues. I can tell you everything.’

  ‘Then tell,’ someone said sternly.

  ‘I am coming to that right now. Thank you for asking me, my children, my tongue was becoming a dry fish from keeping quiet in this dumb people’s city. Well, did they not kill nine white men on the ninth day of the fourth month?’

  ‘Did they? Who did?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir, I saw every one of them. First the two, with whom I came to do direct business. No, they did not buy fish from me, although it is true that in my life I have definitely sold fish to three white people, two men and a woman. Or actually only two, counting the memsahib as half and the Anglo-Indian as also half to make one full. But never mind. These two, they only wanted to take my picture with a camera. After they had taken a picture of me sitting by my bucket of fish at the roadside, they laughed and threw a silver coin to me. I caught it in the air, and when I got a proper look at it I became dumb with happiness for some time, because it was a rupee, a whole rupee with the king’s head on it, enough for me to buy things for many months. But I do not need things, so I saved it. Before I could say thank you to them they were on their way. They did not get far. Two men appeared from a street with naked swords in their hands. They thrust the shining weapons into the bodies of the two white men. One went straight through the first victim’s belly, the other got stuck in the ribs of the second. The white men fell, bleeding and dying. Nobody came to tend to them. I was about to run, leaving even my bucket behind for fear that I would perhaps be also attacked for receiving a rupee from the white men, but the attackers disappeared back into the street from where they had come. Run away I did then, but not before picking up my bucket. Everyone around was running and vanishing away. Two streets further along I saw three white men badly wounded, all stabbed with sharp weapons through the chest or the side of the body, lying in the middle of the road. They had no cameras in their hands or anything. One of them was a beautiful young boy. He was either dead or he had lost consciousness, but there was no trouble on his face. I have seen much, in the time of the red fever I saw three dead bodies coming out of one house and have seen thousands of dead men and animals and fishes in the time of floods, but the picture of the young boy’s body lying on the road with his hair mixing with blood and dust and no trouble on his face stayed with me for many days. Next I passed the Darbar Sahib and in front of it was another white man slumped on the ground. I kept my distance and had no wish to see how he died. One picture in my mind was enough. Running by the District Courts I came across yet another one spread on the pavement. I only glanced at it but could easily make out that it was a white man and dead.

  ‘Nine men were killed that day, although I only saw seven with my own eyes. All the shops were shut quickly and not a single person was seen on the streets. Only ghosts lived in the town. But the ghosts were there all right, in the mohallas and dead-end streets, coming out of their houses and standing in little groups. It was like a net for fishes that is snipped with scissors at one end and gathers up in bunches in many places. There was no talk, only whispers, like the wind. But it was a bad wind. I was afraid. In my hut that night I could not sleep. The weather was not cold but I started shivering. I made a wood fire and lay down beside it. Still the sleep was absent from my body. I did not do much business that day either, and the fishes in the bucket gave off a stench because they were rotting in the heat of the fire. Thinking that this might be the reason for my lack of sleep, I decided to do something about it. As I cannot bear to see cats and dogs dragging around the fishes that I have caught with my own hands, I preferred to throw the older ones into the fire. Now, children, if you have spent your life with fishes as I have, you would know that the smell of fish roasting in the fire is the biggest cause of hunger in the world. Great hunger was born in my belly, but from what I had seen during the day my throat had closed up. So I sat there looking at my fish slowly burning, making a crackling noise with their eyes open and mouths still smiling. I could not watch those eyes and mouths go lifeless so I turned away and lay on the floor in my usual place away from the fire. After some time –’

  ‘Please, please,’ several voices, somewhat annoyed, arose from the listeners, ‘enough about the fish. Tell us what happened after the killings. Please, it is getting dark.’

  ‘I am coming to that right now. The next day, I saw the white woman and what happened to her. One,’ the old man raised a finger, crooked with work and age, ‘no white woman ever came out to the bazaar without a servant, usually a spahi with a rifle. Two, they are never on foot, always in a buggee, a tonga, a rickshaw or something. But this woman was not usual. She was walking and was all alone. In the middle of the bazaar she found people advancing towards her, groups of men with ugliness in their eyes, not only from in front but from behind her also. She looked this way and that, and sensing danger she stopped. The men on both sides halted a few yards from her and kept staring directly at her. The woman’s colour was pale on pink like turmeric, and she was turning on her feet like a spinning top but only slowly, looking in all four directions. Then one man stepped forward and grabbed her dress by the neck. He jerked it down with force so that the dress tore right down to the hem. No, I forget, it didn’t tear, there were buttons which broke, flying all over the place. At that moment all the men pounced on her. They knocked her down and fell on her, tearing all the other clothes off her body. There were fifteen or twenty men piled on top of her. They were beating her with their fists. It went on for only a very short time but seemed to me a very long time. At the end of it the men stopped all at once. One by one they stood up. They looked at the naked woman lying on the ground and ran away from view into the side streets. I wanted to run away too for I did not wish to be caught as a witness to this occasion. But then I saw a strange sight. The woman, whom I thought was maybe dead by now, sprang right up like a rubber doll and started running at full speed down the bazaar. She was barefoot and there was nothing on her body except two small pieces of cloth, one round her chest which she was holding with both hands and the other covering her hips. The sight of that woman running with her legs flying in all directions and the white flesh of her thighs and buttocks pumping and making little jumps in the sunshine is still in my eyes.

  ‘This scene was such that although for the next two days the city was like a graveyard, yet I could not stay indoors. And because all the food shops were shut I was able t
o sell most of my fish, even those that were half rotten which I had placed on top of the pile in the bucket. I made some money which I saved on top of the rupee I got from the man before he was dead. Now I was left with only a few fishes which I was bent upon selling as well. What I did not know was that the third day was to be the day when life in this city ended. I had not even reached my spot in the bazaar when I saw large groups of people moving in silence from one place to the other. Later I realized they were not going to different places but procession after procession of them was heading towards this place where we are now. I joined one group and went along. I also attempted to hawk fish by calling out loudly with my usual words once or twice but was silenced by the ugly looks I got from fellows around me.

  ‘When we got here the bagh was already nearly full of people, yet they kept coming. They were pouring in from every side. At one time it seemed that not another soul could squeeze into this place but men of all ages from young boys to old men kept coming. I was pushed along by the crowd towards the middle of the bagh, where I held my ground with the full strength of my legs. I also kept a hold on my bucket although it was becoming hard in the crush. I saw a man standing on a raised surface like an empty crate or something by the opposite wall. He had a long black beard and a green turban like a maulvi or a Sikh sardar, I could not make out which because I am small, you see, and could only see through holes in other people. He was shouting at the people while making wide gestures with his arms like a very angry holy man in the usual way. Nothing could be heard clearly from where I stood. Some time passed.

  ‘When I had entered the bagh I did not see any goras, only our people from the city. But then a gora officer appeared. He pushed the shouting man down from the crate and mounted it himself so that he could be seen clearly. He started saying something that also could not be heard. But slowly the sight of a gora officer in uniform made the people fall silent. The gora spoke in Urdu. “Go away,” he was saying, “get out, out, out,” he shouted, “now!” There was complete silence for a moment. Then a shoe was thrown from the crowd. It fell well short of the gora. There then followed a hail of shoes coming from everywhere, not one reaching the gora officer but falling on the people in front. Sometimes when my boat strayed into the wild ducks’ feeding ground they would take off in hundreds, forming a cloud that would make the sky dark. It was the same with the flying shoes above our heads. When the shoes finished and everyone was barefoot they started throwing their clothes. Shirts and vests and everything, making balls of them and pitching them forward, but being lighter than shoes they flew only a few yards and fell while men at the very front stood motionless, not daring to throw anything straight at the gora within sight of him. The silence was also broken. People were now shouting and chanting slogans, of a political kind at first and then, as always, the religious ones, with Hindu, Muslim and Sikh calling upon their own gods to do nothing special but only to rouse pious emotions which as I have seen always turn angry and more angry for God knows what reason. Looking at the men pushing and shoving with their naked bodies dripping with sweat, the white officer was getting more and more nervous until the moment of misfortune arrived.’ The old man stopped speaking for a long minute.