The Weary Generations

by Abdullah Hussein

  ‘Where is the paper?’ Naim asked.

  ‘Inside my blouse,’ replied Azra.

  At the far end of the long straight stretch of the bazaar the advance party, mostly security people on horseback, became visible. Naim turned and tried to pull up the signboard hanging below the eye-line of the soldiers. The string holding it turned out to be wound round a nail in the wall. Instead of trying to unwind the string, he gave it a couple of panicky tugs and managed to break it. As he returned to his place, he saw an open police lorry, in the back of which was sitting the man who had been telling people to go home, accompanied by two others dressed exactly as he was, all smiling. An armed soldier stood guard over them. The lorry thundered by.

  ‘Where is the paper?’ Naim asked.

  Azra gave no reply. She was looking intently towards the end of the road from where first signs of the approaching precession were beginning to appear. Soon after, the cavalcade came into view.

  ‘Where is it?’ Naim hissed.

  ‘What?’ asked Azra without taking her eyes from the road.

  ‘The paper,’ Naim said fiercely.

  ‘Oh, here.’ She fished out the folded paper from inside her blouse.

  Naim snatched it from her hand, jerked it open with his right hand and tacked it on to the wooden board that he had gripped under his left arm. He handed the board to Azra, for it was she who was to hold it up as the prince’s carriage passed, running a lesser risk, being a woman, of being arrested, as they had agreed. She took the board in one hand without looking and held it at knee level. Riders in ceremonial dress were now passing. There were about a hundred of them, riding four abreast, of all the religions and castes of India, wearing tasselled turbans and golden swords in their waistbands. Carrying shining spears in one hand while the other hand held the reins, they sat erect and solid on the backs of splendid beasts without a single inch of unbalanced movement this side or that as if they were mere extensions of their horses. The prince’s carriage was now in clear view only a hundred yards up the road. The air crackled with the sound of horses’ hoofs on tarmac and with the full-throated cries of sergeants, cautioning the soldiers standing on both sides of the road to be ready to present arms for a ‘salaami’. The noise of the schoolchildren filled the air. The whole world seemed to boom with the military band leading the procession.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Naim asked Azra.

  Azra did not answer, her eyes fixed on the prince’s magnificent buggee drawn by six white horses. Her face glowing and eyes shining with extra sparkle, she appeared to be mesmerized. Just then a sign, written in electric light, was projected on to a tall gate a few yards ahead of the prince’s carriage. It read, ‘Tell Your Mother We Are Unhappy’. The prince looked up, seemingly amused. The sign disappeared. The Governor of Bengal, sitting beside the prince, looked less amused. Facing the two men and with their backs to the front, sat two British women wearing large hats. They did not see the sign. A few yards along the route, the sign flashed again on top of the gate with the same words. Everyone, except the prince, looked back. The source of that light was not discovered – either then or ever. Immediately after this, out of a side street emerged a group of men, their faces blackened with coal dust, carrying long narrow tablets hung by a thread round their necks with writing on them in bright letters: ‘Tell Your Mother We Are Hungry’. The prince did not turn round to look, but there could be no doubt that he was aware of them. The men quickly drew back into the street. From the next street, as the carriage came level with it, a small herd of cows was driven out. Slung round the cows’ necks were also placards saying, ‘Tell Your Mother We Are Dry’. The royal carriage was now only a few yards from where Naim and Azra stood. ‘Hold it up,’ Naim whispered to Azra. ‘Hold it up, hold it up. Azra, are you listening? Come on, hold it right up. Oh, for God’s sake –’

  The procession had passed. Azra did not move a limb. She stood frozen in her posture, her eyes locked upon the prince and his companions, the buggee, the two giant, resplendent guards standing on the footboards of the carriage on either side of him, still as statues. The procession now consisted of carriages, drawn by horses and even elephants belonging to the rajas and nawabs of southern India, high and low, trying to outdo each other in the flaunting of their splendour, their jewel-studded carriages and silk-dressed servants, but taking their place in the procession according to status, following in the wake of their future king. After having looked several times at Azra and the procession in turn, Naim felt paralysed too. The long line of people and animals passed. The soldiers kept standing at attention but the schoolchildren and their chaperons were starting to leave. The wooden board had slipped from Azra’s hand and was lying on the footpath. She turned and looked up at Naim. Her eyes were dull and her shoulders, her back, the whole of her body had visibly sagged. She looked extremely tired and out of place. Naim put an arm round her and pulled her to himself. They started slowly walking back.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Naim said after a while.

  CHAPTER 20

  THROUGHOUT THE YEARS of his activism, Naim had been trying to instil in people a sense of their power to achieve things by a new kind of force – a force of resistance without violence. He hadn’t been entirely successful in this within the national movement. At times he grew disheartened and returned to Roshan Pur to spend long periods of inactivity. But he always went back. Finally, in the middle of the monsoon season in the year 1924, he had the following experience, which drew him into a different world.

  He had been asked by his local command to assist in holding a public meeting in Jat Nagar, the largest village in the territory. He was to organize the gathering of people from twelve villages within reach of Jat Nagar. A couple of men were to come from Delhi to speak to the meeting. Naim sent his men out to inform everyone in all the surrounding villages about the day, the time and the place of the meeting, and waited for the day to arrive. As in the previous few lucky years, the monsoons did not fail to bring timely rain and it was not so heavy as to wash away the soil. The mood among the farmers as well as the muzaras and field labourers was good, for they were optimistic that the earth would give them grain that would see them and their animals through the year without hunger attacking their guts. They had time on their hands and the moment was judged suitable for meetings – jalsas – all over the country. Political meetings, although not covered by a blanket ban, were nevertheless actively discouraged by the government.

  As the day came and Naim and his party of men arrived in the village, they did not see many police in the outskirts. Jat Nagar was a market town for grain and other agricultural produce, serving a hundred villages around. The market, a large compound made up of wholesalers’ stores and shops with a clear area in the middle, was situated in the centre of the village. It was here that the meeting was to take place. Men in large numbers had gathered outside the village, and the speakers from Delhi had arrived the previous night. When this crowd reached the market square, they saw that the only entrance to the central area had been blocked by planks of wood, supported by stacks of bricks on both sides and tied to each other with ropes. The job had been done expertly and only in the past hour so that the news hadn’t reached the people who had waited at some distance outside the village at the gathering point. There were police everywhere. Only their three-stripe chief constable was armed with a rifle; the others carried lathis in their hands. There was nothing the people who had come to the jalsa could do other than to first stand around and then to sit down on the ground where they stood, filling up the narrow bazaars and streets around the square. The shops had quickly been shut and the shopkeepers joined the crowd. It was a day when the sun, after several days of overcast skies, had come out and was stinging the earth with its direct rays.

  The wet earth on which the men sat was giving off steam, creating in the absence of wind a mugginess that made it difficult for them to breathe. With the sweat pouring from them like water and the sun baking their brains, with no one to li
sten to, they were getting restless. They started raising the usual slogans. The police were strutting around, striking their lathis on the ground, abusing the men, telling them to go home and sit in their mothers’ laps. The crowd was becoming angry. They had walked miles and didn’t want to go home.

  Suddenly, three men got up and charged, with all their body weight, at a plank that seemed a bit rickety. The plank fell, with the men on top of it. They had gained entry. More men followed the first three, pushing over the other planks. Naim, who was sitting near the front, ran in and went straight to the other side of the compound where some covered bales of cotton had been stacked. He mounted them and stood there, looking at the men pouring in through the opening. A lathi charge was going on outside, the police beating the men with their batons. Some men were bleeding from the head and the face. But the purpose of the charge, which was to disperse the crowd, was defeated as the men were driven instead into the enclosure, now fast filling up. As the square filled, the last men in re-erected the planks, closing the gap. The police were pushing from outside and the men from the inside. Naim was not scheduled to make a speech at this meeting, but as he was standing on a raised platform on his own and could not spot the two speakers from Delhi, who were lost in the mêlée, he started to speak. He wasn’t aware of what he was saying, except that he knew he had to keep speaking, if only to say over and over again, ‘Stay calm, stay calm, don’t hit back …’ The crowd, except for the few who were holding the planks up, began actually to listen to him, to sit down one by one and become quiet.

  Naim was babbling on when suddenly something happened to his perception: the crowd that he had been seeing as an amorphous body composed of irregular heads and bodies began to appear as a solid mass, joined up by unseen strings, expanding and shrinking like a lake of rubber, and the strings, he felt, were in his hands – both hands, he thought happily – and he could pull and push and tug, draw and withdraw and direct this concentrated centre of power whichever way he wished. He even waved his left hand to the right and left, and people would obey the command, draw in or out, sit down and listen to whatever he was saying. He talked on …

  Eventually the police forced their way and stormed in, raining blows of their lathis on the sitting men and arresting them. The head constable with the rifle came straight for Naim, mounted the cotton bales and put him under arrest. There was no time to escape. When the policeman pulled up Naim’s second hand for handcuffs, he was amazed.

  Azra had been spending long periods at her father’s house. She met her friends, read newspapers, books, anything she could lay her hands on. Occasionally, when she got bored with her life there and knew that Naim was in Roshan Pur, she returned to their house in the village for a few days. They talked, exchanged news and very occasionally made love. The garden, having taken root, was growing more or less on its own, although like the life in the house it suffered from a general lack of attention, with the result that part of it, especially the less hardy part, was drying out year by year.

  In another part of the village, one hot day, Ali and his friends were playing with conkers when a dispute arose among the children. There were accusations of unfairness and deceit. Some pushing and shoving took place, and a punch was thrown. Two of them were wrestled to the ground and kicked. The game broke up and everyone went home, leaving only Ali and Aisha there. Aisha was Ali’s cousin, thrice removed, whose mother had come to visit Ali’s mother for a few days. Ali picked up his conkers from the dust on the ground, loosened during the skirmish, and the two of them started walking away. Aisha would take a shisham leaf from the handful she kept in her shirt pocket, fold it between her thumb and fingers and, holding it tightly stretched at both ends, blow on one end, producing a sharp whistling sound. She called them peepees. After a couple of times the leaf would crack and begin to leak wind. She would then fish out another green leaf and start again.

  ‘I could cut Suleiman down with my left hand for playing foul,’ Ali boasted.

  Aisha kept blowing the peepees until they reached the cool shade of a large shisham tree. They sat down underneath it. Ali started rubbing his conkers on the tree trunk to put an extra shine on them.

  ‘Ali,’ Aisha said, ‘can you climb the tree?’

  ‘I can climb any tree,’ he answered.

  ‘My leaves are finished. Go up and get me some more.’

  ‘Why should I? You can go up yourself.’

  ‘I can’t climb it, it’s too big.’

  ‘Then get Rawal to do it for you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You are always talking to him, aren’t you? Why are you always talking to him?’

  ‘I don’t talk to him,’ Aisha said.

  ‘Don’t lie. I saw you talking to him.’

  ‘He talked to me first, then I talked to him.’

  ‘See, you were lying. I saw him pinch you on the cheek. If you lie, I will pinch you too.’

  ‘No, please.’

  Ali pinched her hard on the cheek. Aisha started crying. Ali panicked. ‘All right, all right, here, take my conkers, they are shiny, look, they have more shine than anyone else’s. Take them all.’

  Aisha’s sobs slowed down but did not stop, still producing a low whining noise.

  ‘I will go up and get you some leaves,’ Ali said.

  Aisha quickly became quiet. ‘Go on then,’ she said, wiping her tears with the back of her hand.

  The tree trunk had few holes that could serve as footholds. After a struggle, Ali managed to climb up to the branches. ‘Can Rawal climb this big tree?’ Ali asked from above.

  ‘Yes, he can.’

  ‘No, he can’t.’

  ‘He is big,’ Aisha said.

  Ali did not answer. He started picking dry, yellowing leaves and throwing them down, ones that would crack when folded and be useless as peepees.

  ‘These are no good,’ Aisha said from below. ‘Pick the green ones.’

  ‘I can’t see any green leaves here,’ Ali said.

  ‘I can. Lots of them.’

  ‘Then get Rawal to get you them. I bet he can’t climb this tree, there are no footholds. Can he?’

  After a minute’s silence, Aisha said weakly, ‘No.’

  ‘No what?’

  ‘He can’t climb the tree.’

  ‘See, I told you.’

  Ali then picked handfuls of young green leaves and dropped them on Aisha. Aisha ran around collecting and stuffing them in her pocket. Ali slithered down from the tree and the two sat there quietly, Aisha making peepees of the succulent, elastic leaves that gave out a good sound for several blowings. It was noon, and the sun was emitting rays of fire that drove the men from their work to seek shelter in the shade of dense trees, quenching their thirst from pots of lassi and waiting for the sun to slip a little from overhead.

  ‘I am going home,’ Ali said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I am hungry.’

  The heat had sent everyone indoors in the village. As the two children approached their house, they saw Ali’s old stepmother come out of the door and go into the next house. A tight white sheet of sun spread over the courtyard ground, making magic of the empty silence of a summer noon. Beside the old woman’s room was a small hut-like cell of a room. There her milk was kept in an open earthenware pot on top of a bed of slow-burning dung cakes to prevent it from splitting in the heat. It warmed and gradually, over many hours, formed a thick layer of reddish brown fat on the top before the dung cakes beneath it quietly turned to ashes. Ali entered the little cell with a reed stalk in his hand that he had picked up before coming into the house, cleaning it on the way by blowing into it. He pierced the top layer of the milk on one side, taking care not to disturb it, and dipped one end of the reed pipe into the milk. From the other end he sucked the warm sweet milk from the pot. After swallowing several mouthfuls, he asked Aisha, ‘Are you hungry?’