‘What, the firing?’ his listeners asked impatiently.
‘No, the fish.’
‘The fish? What fish?’
‘My fish. I was the unfortunate man. When there was nothing left to throw the man next to me started trying to snatch the bucket from me. I clung to it as long as I could but it was taken away and passed from hand to hand. Soon it disappeared from my sight. Then the fishes began to fly. They were good fresh fishes, too, which I had put right at the bottom to attract the last customers so they wouldn’t think it was left-over stuff. The men picked out the poor dead creatures from my bucket and threw them. They too landed on the men in front. Except one fish. The man on whom it landed picked it up and threw it. I can understand his action from another point of view. You see, some men cannot stand the sight or the smell of fish. I have known such men, and they do not come anywhere near me. So this must have been one of these strange men, because he handled my fish as if it was poison and threw it fiercely forward as far away from him as he could. That was it. The fish struck the officer squarely in the face. The force was such that it made him stagger backwards while slapping away the slippery animal. He regained his posture and raised his arm. That was the moment.
‘Nobody had so far looked around them along the walls. Suddenly the heads of soldiers appeared above the walls on all sides as if from nowhere. They started shooting. For a moment we did not know what was happening although we felt that something was definitely on because the noise of the people stopped. In the silence the rat-tat-tat of bullets was coming from all three sides. Within moments we became aware of people being hit and bleeding and falling, and then we were running. Except that there was nowhere to run. We were all packed against each other like fishes in the net as it is pulled up, and like fishes we were wriggling, but whichever way we turned we saw only other men. I imagine that is what fishes see as they wriggle in the hold of the net – other fishes. There was movement in the crowd, but it was going in circles like eddies in a river. It was a river of heads and bodies turning and doubling back on itself, and still the bullets kept coming.
‘As luck would have it, men after men started falling, making room for others to run over them, and some who were weak although not even hit by a bullet fell in the crush and died under the feet of running men. I am small, but I am quick. My smallness worked to my advantage so I could slip through other men’s holes without falling. Near the opening in the wall which is the only exit, as you see, there is a well. It is a dry well, but deep. I saw that people were so blinded by the bullets which chased them that they were running and falling into the well and others were falling on top of them. There were rumours afterwards that the well was half filled up by the men who could not get out of it. But who wanted to wait and confirm it at the time? I made good my escape. But no, sir, I tell you it was no escape.
‘We were all running until we came to the bazaar and there was another scene going on there. This was the spot where the gori woman had been attacked two days before. On that stretch of twenty yards there were soldiers with rifles taking straight aim and everyone who came there had to drop face down and crawl. Not on their elbows and knees either. No, sir. On their bellies like lizards. There I saw another river of men squirming and slithering like a herd of pythons with their heads buried in the earth and faces bleeding in attempts to crawl, for which they were not trained. But they were in fear of their lives because whenever a head was raised a bullet came a hand’s width above it. The crawlers had great difficulty. Not me, though. I was only three when my father threw me in the river and taught me how to lie on it face down without moving a limb or sinking. So I was familiar with the job and the fastest to get through the crawl. Only this little bit of difficulty on my back was higher than other backs, and bullets passed two fingers above it but did no harm to my progress. The crawling of men did not stop that day but went on for many days after until people stopped going that side and still the soldiers went to other bazaars and drove the people ahead of them with rifle butts to this place and forced then to crawl through it. Many days. Oh, children, what do you know about how this rebel city was punished.’
There was complete silence from the six members of the committee. They started to shuffle without moving away. Dusk was not far away.
‘You should go now,’ the old man said. ‘Soon there will be curfew.’
‘And you? Are you not going home?’ Mr Deshpanday asked him.
‘The soldiers know me and let me sit here until late. I will tell you how. They traced me to my hut from my bucket that they found in the bagh and arrested me. I expected the worst because it was my fish that started it all. They put me in a small room with many others and asked questions of each of us for seventeen days. Me too. They asked me who I knew in the city, who were the leaders, who the speechmakers, whether I was a Muslim or a Hindu or a Sikh or Christian. I said I don’t know, I am only a fisherman. They asked what my father was, Hindu or Muslim. I said he did not know, nor did he tell me. He was a fisherman. And my mother? She was a great cooker of fish, I said, who could cook fish many different ways and beyond that did not know much. On the seventeenth day they let me go. I don’t know about the others. They did not give me back my bucket, so from that day I stopped working altogether. That is how they know me and let me walk after the curfew. I am in no danger.’
In the failing light of the day they saw the last three teeth flashing in the old man’s mouth and knew that he was laughing soundlessly with his mouth wide open.
CHAPTER 19
ALTHOUGH INITIALLY URGED by Azra to give consent and later included, as a result of her efforts alone, in the inquiry committee, Naim had nevertheless returned from his trip to Amritsar a deeply affected man. Not so much by the hundreds that were killed, for life had always been cheap in India – claimed yearly by the elements as well as man-made starvation – as by the manner of their dying. A further jolt was provided by what followed. The government had set up a body, called the Hunter Committee, to conduct an inquiry into the incident. The unofficial report prepared by the Congress Party was submitted but never considered with any degree of seriousness. General Dwyer, known as the ‘butcher of Jalianwala Bagh’, was called up before the Hunter Committee. He had earlier boasted that he had ‘put a loop through the nose’ of the mutinous city and that in return his superiors in London were dragging him before a committee of ‘nincompoops’. The Hunter Committee, however, completely exonerated him, although as a token of conciliation he was transferred from his post.
The effect of these events on Azra, although equally deep in the beginning, proved, by the very nature of the way she perceived such things, to be transitory. She had had her name and a photograph of herself displayed prominently in the newspapers as being the only woman member of the Congress inquiry committee, and the excitement and ‘glamour’ of that provided the momentum which took her some way along this path. Too soon, it wore off and she began to stay back. Naim, on the other hand, was riding this path, the fire within him reignited, washing away the bitter memories, the resentment and the wounded pride of the past, along with the inertia that had afflicted him since his return to the village. His feelings turned gradually into a passion that was to take him in the following years from one end of this vast land to the other.
Delegating the village work to the munshi and the management of his own acres to Rawal, now grown up, he let the Congress Party know that he was available for any work they wished him to do. He went and lived with the tillers of the land, eating and sleeping with them for days. It was a hard job to do – not to live day and night in their dark huts and eat their rough food but to break through their resistance, their sullenness nurtured through generations, and finally to spark their deceptive quietude into anger. Matters took a turn between him and Azra when Naim’s groundwork progressed to an open defiance of what was known as the ‘Landlords’ Law’. It was triggered by an incident that occurred in a village not far from Roshan Pur. Naim had been staying with the
peasants in the village for a few days. He was sitting with a handful of them one evening in a hut belonging to one of them, partaking of a round of hukka and chatting, when a noise arose outside. It kept coming nearer. Leaving him in the hut, Naim’s companions went out to look. What happened next Naim saw from the doorway of the hut when the sounds outside, of men swearing and threatening, became louder. Three men, two of the landlord’s relatives and a munshi, were demanding the owner’s share of the crop, long overdue according to them, from the muzaras.
‘There was no crop, not a seed, you know that,’ the peasants said.
‘Then put your thumb imprint here.’ The munshi pushed forward a sheet of paper with an inkwell in the other hand.
‘What for?’
‘To show that you owe it from the next crop.’
‘There were no rains. You were here, don’t you know that? Then the floods took the earth away. How can we owe you anything?’
One of the munshi’s two companions, both of them on horseback and carrying thick batons, poked the man who spoke in the neck, ‘Come on, liar, your thumb.’
‘Look at this,’ the young peasant said, pushing his fingers into the deeply corrugated flank of his bullock. ‘All four fingers go in the ribs, look. And this,’ he lifted his shirt from the front, baring his sunken belly with the ribs showing starkly around his trunk.
One of the men on horseback jumped down and struck the young man on the knuckles of his hand with a baton. ‘Your thumb,’ he ordered.
The peasant hid both his hands behind his back like a little boy before a schoolmaster.
‘Search the houses,’ the horseman thundered.
The munshi went into an unlit house. A woman’s voice arose from within. ‘My man is not home, I am alone –’
‘Lying slut.’ The munshi dragged the screaming woman out to the door.
‘Your thumb,’ the second horseman was saying to an old peasant.
The old man was quiet for a second. Then he said, ‘I would sooner cut off my thumb with an axe than put it on paper.’
The horseman laughed. ‘Then you will not be able to cut the next crop, will you? You will starve.’
‘We are starving now, can’t you see?’
‘Cut off your thumb then, go on.’
‘I will,’ the peasant said. The woman’s screams shook the mud walls of the houses. ‘I will cut it here, in front of you,’ the old peasant repeated.
‘Don’t keep barking about it, do it,’ the man taunted him.
The old man started trembling with the dumb rage of the powerless. All of a sudden, he turned around. He picked up a cleaver from inside the door of his house, placed his hand on the door frame and, before anyone could stop him, raised the cleaver above his head and with one precise stroke separated his thumb from the hand at the knuckle. He raised his thumbless hand, which was emitting a small fountain of blood, to the man on the horse and attempted to say something, but the words failed to come out of his twisted face, which opened and shut several times as if gasping for air. The peasant’s old wife came flying out of the door, screaming, and fell on her husband. She gripped the little stump of the cut thumb and pulled it into her open mouth. Closing her mouth tightly around it, she began to suck it, vigorously swallowing the shooting blood. With a piercing cry from the depths of his chest, the old peasant finally spoke, addressing not the man on the horse but his three sons who stood supporting their father’s body.
‘Hear, my sons. Claim a thumb for a thumb, every one of you.’
The horseman who had jumped down remounted, dragging the munshi up behind him. Without another word, they galloped away.
The news that the peasants of a village had refused to pay the owner’s share and that his men were afraid to go back and demand it quickly spread, reaching Roshan Mahal. That Roshan Agha’s son-in-law, the virtual head of Roshan Pur, was backing the peasants made matters palpably worse. Roshan Agha, although he had close friends who were at the forefront of the independence movement, was of necessity loyal to the interests of his class. And to defy the Landlords’ Law was to strike a blow at its very heart. It was also on this occasion that Azra, who had been spending more and more time in Delhi in Naim’s absence from the village and was coming under increasing silent pressure from her disapproving family, had her first argument with Naim.
‘Why don’t you distribute your land before inciting others?’
‘It’s not mine,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The land that I was supposed to look after for a time is your father’s. This house is yours.’
‘You have your own land, haven’t you?’
‘Just enough for our family.’
Azra sulked for a few days. She still loved her husband, and whenever he returned to Roshan Pur she came back. Yet she kept continually arguing that the British government would crush any physical uprising as they had shown, but that they could be more effectively pressurized by events that got publicity in the world. To this Naim replied that for ‘publicity’ you need the participation of large numbers of people, and for that you need first of all to get them out. An occasion arose, however, that excited Azra’s interest. It was the visit of the Prince of Wales to India.
All India Congress, seizing an opportunity of international significance, declared a boycott of the visit. Leaflets were distributed all over the country, asking people not only to stay away from public greetings being organized by the administration and from all the official functions in connection with the visit, but actively to demonstrate against it. The government, losing its nerve, banned the Congress Party and carried out widespread arrests.
Inside the big house in Roshan Pur, Naim and Azra lay alongside one another after a passionate hour of love, Azra lost in satiated thought and Naim having an occasional cigarette.
‘Shall we go to Delhi?’ she asked.
‘It’s the main venue. There will be a general strike, the city will be shut down, no point going there.’
‘There will be demonstrations, though.’
‘People will simply offer themselves for arrest.’
‘Oh no, no arrests, please. How about Calcutta? We can go to your uncle’s.’
‘You know quite well he no longer lives there.’
‘Sorry. I forgot.’
‘Why do you want to go anyway?’ Naim asked.
‘I want to see the prince. He is such a beautiful man.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He looks so nice in photographs.’
‘You can get yourself invited through your father to an official function and have your photo taken with him,’ Naim said, with just a hint of sarcasm in his voice.
‘No,’ Azra said after a pause. ‘It wouldn’t be right. But you have contacts in Calcutta, I know.’
‘Yes, some.’
‘Let’s go to Calcutta at least, please. Please, Naim, can we?’
Half asleep, Naim nodded.
‘But promise me one thing,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘That you will not get yourself arrested.’
‘I will have no control over it if we go to a demonstration. Besides, it is party policy to fill the gaols.’
‘Of course you will have control if you are not at the place where they are making arrests. Please, Naim, promise me that.’
Naim smiled quietly. ‘All right. We’ll see how it goes.’
Calcutta’s Sadar Bazaar was gaily decorated with bunting and ceremonial arches as it was the main route through which the Prince of Wales’s procession was to pass. The day had been declared a holiday in all educational institutions and government offices and, while most office workers and adult students had stayed away, young children from schools, boys and girls as well as their teachers, dressed in colourful clothes and carrying little paper Union Jacks, lined the route as far as the eye could see. Among them, strictly paced and armed with bayoneted .303 rifles, stood at attention Indian, Anglo-Indian and British soldier
s. Police and army sergeants did their rounds up and down the road, keeping an eye on arrangements. On the footpaths behind these lines there were few onlookers. All the shops were shut and their signboards were turned over, showing blank metal and wooden sheets of all shapes and sizes. In this city of four million souls, all business had come to a stop.
Azra had written, in very large red letters ‘SWARAJ – FREEDOM’ on an equally large piece of paper and folded it. The plan was to stick it with the help of a metal tack on to a suitably sized signboard from a shop and hold it up for the prince’s party to see and then quickly withdraw into one of the side streets. They chose a spot by a shop with an easy-to-handle wooden signboard that hung, turned over, by a piece of string. Also, unknown to Naim, Azra had gone to a photographer’s shop the previous day and arranged, on paying the required fee in advance, for a man with a camera to meet them. Walking up the bazaar before they chose the spot to stop, she was constantly looking around, but the cameraman was nowhere to be seen. She and Naim stood behind rows of Bengali schoolchildren, interrupted at one place by white children massed together, all of whom were being instructed to practise waving their flags. Temporary gates, their bamboo stays completely wrapped in palm leaves and foliage, stood at regular intervals bearing big signs that read ‘WELCOME OUR BELOVED PRINCE OF WALES’ and ‘LONG LIVE THE RAJ’. Occasionally, small groups of curious citizens emerged from one street and after a few minutes went into the next. The word was that the prince’s procession was already on its way from Government House. As he stood there, Naim’s mind went back to the time when as a child he used to pass here on his way to school. He remembered the bunch of coloured pencils he used to have in his satchel, each one a different colour of the rainbow, and an empty glass inkwell in his pocket which he had filled with butterfly wings of a hundred different colours. He used to take it out of the pocket of his short pants at night and slip it under his pillow. The inkwell stayed with him for a whole year, until one day, playing on the beach, he lost it. For a long time afterwards he didn’t feel safe in his bed at night, as if he had lost a coat of armour. It surprised him to feel that after all these years the loss of the inkwell that sparkled in the sun with the colours of butterflies still grieved his heart like a lost love. He was brought back from his reverie by a voice near by. A man dressed in white, homespun-cotton kurta-pajama was loudly admonishing a few onlookers for breaking the boycott. His audience scurried back whence they came. The admonisher walked earnestly along the footpath, throwing a glance at Naim but stopping short of speaking to him upon seeing Azra with him. The movements of the police and military officers on the road quickened, indicating the imminent arrival of the prince’s procession. There were ripples among the schoolchildren and their teachers, furious flag-waving and loud ‘cautions’ from officers to the soldiers.
The Weary Generations Page 23