The Weary Generations

by Abdullah Hussein

  After only a few minutes’ exchange of pleasantries, which Naim thought were a bit tense and unsmiling, two men appeared, leading a live, well-fed lamb whom they stood in the middle and, leaving it there, withdrew. Presently, the sheet covering the opening of the tent lifted and a girl, the bride, covered from head to foot in red silk, silver ornaments sparkling on her forehead, neck and forearms, with only half of her face showing above the bridge of her nose up to the hairline, walked out, advancing towards the lamb that stood docilely where it had been left. The bride, a plumpish girl with fair skin and large black eyes, stopped by the lamb. She didn’t look up or around her. Bending over, she tried to lift the lamb off its feet by putting her arms round the animal’s legs and heaving it up. She could only move it a few inches off the ground. Then she tried lifting it with her arms slipped under its neck and stomach. She failed again; the lamb was too heavy. Finally, she knelt down, put her head under the lamb’s belly, spread her arms to hold either end of it and raised it up on her back, stumbling a little but steadying herself, using the strength of her entire body. She stood with the lamb gently wriggling across her shoulders, her legs trembling under the weight. Now she looked up, but at no one in particular.

  Wazir Khan, the groom, broke away from the crowd of his tribe, strode out to the middle and stopped some yards away from the girl bearing the lamb. Facing her, he swung his rifle from his side and lifted it to his shoulder. He took aim. Dumbfounded, Naim looked on. He knew nothing of what was going on nor what was going to happen. He had seen nothing like it in his life. There was complete silence among the nearly two hundred people sitting there as Wazir Khan stood with the sights of his rifle trained on the girl, who was now shaking under the load, swaying lightly to right and left. Almost imperceptibly, the barrel of Wazir Khan’s rifle swayed with her, his finger on the trigger. Naim felt as if every one of the men in that large crowd had stopped breathing, and yet the boy with the gun stood waiting, still not pulling the trigger. It must have been a minute but it seemed a long time. Naim saw the flash a split second before he heard the report of the gun. The girl staggered but kept to her feet. The lamb, bleeding from the head, was twisting and trembling on the girl’s back. She held fast until the lamb shivered a couple of times, hung its head to one side and became still. The girl let go of it. The lifeless body dropped with a thud to the ground behind her. Then she lifted her face and looked with a fearless gaze at her groom.

  A great roar arose from the throats of the men, and with it a hundred rifles were fired into the sky. For several minutes the noise of shooting and men shrieking with laughter buzzed in Naim’s ears. Leaving his crutches, Amir Khan had prostrated himself towards Makkah. After he had rubbed his forehead several times on the ground, he sat up and said to Naim, ‘Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah.’

  ‘Alhamdulillah,’ Naim repeated with him. ‘What happens now?’

  ‘The nikah,’ replied Amir Khan. ‘If the lamb didn’t get it in the head or the bullet hit the girl, my son would be killed. Alhamdulillah – honour is saved.’

  They, the bride and the groom, had to win each other, Amir Khan explained later. The girl did not falter in front of the gun, and the boy killed the lamb with a single shot. If any of this failed to happen, said Amir Khan, there would be no wedding but war between the tribes. ‘But do not worry,’ he said, laughing happily, ‘no one would shoot you. Everyone knows you are a guest.’

  Soon after the bride withdrew to the tent, the nikah ceremony was performed and presents were exchanged, including the bride-price of thirty-five silver coins offered in a pouch by Amir Khan to the girl’s father. All through this, except for a few minutes of the actual nikah when verses from the holy Quraan were recited by the maulvi, shots from rifles kept ringing out, echoing in distant hills until the food was brought out. Whole cooked lambs lay in round shallow trays, each one carried by two men. Amir Khan handed Naim a long knife for him to be the first to carve from the fattest lamb put before him. It was a mark of honour and Naim, with his good hand, put the knife to the lamb’s shoulder.

  ‘No, no,’ Amir Khan said, pointing to the stomach, ‘here, cut it here.’

  Naim saw that the stomach had been opened and then sewn up with strong thread that somehow had been saved from burning. As he passed the knife over the cut, it ripped open and mounds of rice, cooked inside the stomach’s lining of fat, poured out into the tray, fluffy and infused with cinnamon, cloves and cardamom. Nobody used knives to carve but sank their fingers into the tender meat and dug out handfuls of salted lamb to chew with the fragrant rice.

  It was after midnight when the wedding party returned with the bride. Amir Khan had had Naim’s bed laid out alongside his own in his room. Both tired out with the evening’s proceedings, Amir Khan talked to Naim for a few minutes, passing his hand appreciatively over the smooth surface of Naim’s left hand.

  ‘You got a medal?’ he asked.

  Naim shook his head.

  ‘I heard some talk about it later on.’

  ‘No,’ Naim said shortly.

  Amir Khan was called out. Naim was at the point of dozing off when Amir Khan returned.

  ‘Bad,’ he said, shaking his head.

  ‘What is it?’ Naim asked him.

  ‘Wazir Khan has five more days’ leave to go, but the army wants him to report back.’

  ‘Is he going straight back in the morning?’

  ‘No, straight back now. The man is waiting for him outside.’

  ‘Why so soon?’

  ‘God only knows. Maybe there is need. Poor boy has not seen his wife’s full face yet.’

  When Naim arrived back in Peshawar the next day, it was early afternoon and the following scene was already being played out in a bazaar in the city. A brown-haired man, clad in homespun rough cotton shalwar-kameez, stood on an empty wooden box. He had a strip of the same cloth in his hand, in one end of which was tied a fist-sized solid piece of something. The man had the free end of the strip in his grip and, rotating it in a centrifugal motion above his head, he was shouting repeatedly, ‘Salt, salt, salt …’ This mantra-like call was being picked up by a large crowd standing around him. They were taking turns: the man, continuously rotating the rock over his head, would shout the word ‘salt’ three times and stop, whereupon hundreds of people would repeat the same word the same number of times in an enormous roar and then fall silent, waiting for the cue from the man on the box – and the whole sequence would start all over again. As if it was a game, this went on for some time. Naim stood at the edge of the crowd, looking around. He was surprised to see the people, Pathans who considered a gun an ornament, indeed as much a part of their person as a shirt or a shoe, present in the gathering that day with no firearms on them. There was a heavy contingent of police surrounding them, although they were not doing anything to stop this law-breaking crowd. The voices of the people, answering the man on the box, were gradually rising, in volume and tempo, until they reached a screaming pitch and, in the heat of the emotion, a few rifles, hitherto unseen, were raised above heads. On seeing this, another man, a thick-set Pathan of middle years, mounted the box and raised his hand to silence the crowd.

  ‘No,’ he shouted in anger, ‘no firing. You were told not to bring your guns here today. If a single shot is fired, we will end this demonstration and leave. I appeal to the people who have guns to go and leave their weapons at home. Until you do that we will not go any further with the jalsa.’

  A handful of men, who seemed to be volunteers managing the meeting, went into the crowd, heading for men who had been seen raising rifles. They took these men gently out of the throng. The thick-set man jumped off the box, yielding to the man who had been orchestrating the meeting. This man now began undoing the knot at the end of the strip of cloth. Inside was not a hard rock but a misshapen piece of white matter, which he proceeded to place in the middle of his palm. He raised his hand and, closing the fingers around the substance, squeezed it. It disintegrated into small bits. The man let t
hem run slowly through his fingers and fall to the ground. Simultaneously from his audience rose an ecstatic howl, forming the words ‘Salt … salt’. He lifted his arms, bidding them to be quiet.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘we will hold protest demonstrations in front of the theatre. I want all of you to be there, every one of you.’

  He dismounted the box. As he stood among his companions, a number of policemen, led by an officer, waded into the mass of people and arrested him and a dozen others with him. They pushed the men off in front of them, reaching a covered police vehicle that was standing by and quickly bundled them into it. The vehicle sped away. For a moment the crowd, surprised into immobility, stood still. Then they started running after the police lorry. The vehicle, which had to go through bazaars and populated areas, could not throw off its pursuers despite the best efforts of the driver. When it reached its destination, the main police station in Qissa Khwani bazaar, the hundreds chasing it were only a few minutes behind. The police, however, had time to get their prisoners into the station’s remand gaol. The crowd of people outside came running up and stopped in front of the station. They were chanting slogans and shouting ‘Let them go … let them go … let them go.’

  All around them, in addition to the police, there was the presence of the army. Naim was still at the back of the gathering. As the slogans kept going, he thought there would be a lathi charge any time now. He had sensed wrong; there was no lathi charge. Instead, a British army officer, wearing an eye-patch, stepped forward and issued an order to the line of soldiers. The soldiers stirred. The officer shouted a second order.

  ‘Garhwali Rifles, Company One, Platoon One. Fire!’

  Not a single soldier in the front line lifted his rifle, took aim or fired. Astonished, the officer screamed his order a second time. Still there was no movement from the soldiers. A blue-eyed, fair-skinned Pathan soldier at the end of the line nearest to where Naim stood mumbled audibly, ‘They are unarmed.’

  The officer paused just for a second. Naim saw narrow red stripes, where the blood had gathered, appear across the paleness of his cheeks. Suppressing his anger, he spoke calmly.

  ‘Those who have disobeyed, step forward.’

  The front line of soldiers hesitated. As the order of their commander sank in under his angry glare, they took a step forward.

  ‘Garhwali Rifles, Platoon Two,’ the officer said, still in a calm voice. ‘Take their weapons.’

  Other soldiers from behind stepped forward and disarmed the front line. Then they took position.

  ‘Platoon Two,’ the officer – a Captain Wood, later infamously known as ‘the one-eyed butcher of Qissa Khwani’ – barked the order. ‘Fire!’

  The soldiers started shooting, firing their .303 rifles, the sound of smooth steel-on-steel sliding bolt for repeated reloading punctuating the terrifying crack of combined shot. The men in the crowd ran chaotically in whatever direction they faced, some straight into the bullets. Some of them got away, the rest either falling wounded or taking shelter in open drains and abandoned shops. The shooting went on for what felt like hours, concentrated into minutes.

  There was a loud bang to one side and an armour-plated car, a parked army vehicle, burst into flames, the soldiers inside it jumping out one after the other in panic. The shooting stopped. The officer and his company looked towards the vehicle on fire. Their disarmed colleagues still stood under guard.

  Slowly, a head began to emerge from under the burning vehicle. It was the head of a civilian, a Pathan. He was on his back, furiously crawling in that awkward position in an attempt to get away. Naim had sheltered himself behind a thick brick structure housing a water pump. His mind had completely emptied. Why, he wondered, looking at the man now moving his arms as if swimming in the air, does he not turn over and crawl out properly? Inch by inch, the man was sliding along the ground – head, shoulders, then chest. Below the chest, there was nothing, every shred of his body blown away. Unmindful of the soldiers, several men jumped out of the open drains and stood looking at the torso struggling like a healthy, strong person to escape the flames he may himself have helped ignite. Nobody went to his assistance. The ground in front of the police station was littered with bodies. When the shooting stopped, the police had pushed forward. Two constables came up and arrested Naim.

  I was not supposed to get myself arrested, thought Naim as he sat behind the barred door of the remand gaol. ‘I should have run,’ he said to himself firmly. In a moment of thought as clear as that sunny day, he knew that in the flow of the great river that his life had been, this was the one thing he could definitely have avoided. He was making mistakes. He was not thirty-four years old and already he felt things slipping through his fingers. With a throbbing pain in his head, his whole body was feeling increasingly lighter as if it was about to lift itself and float like a feather in the air. The strong sun hit his eyes in a solid sheet, making them ache. Random thoughts passed through his mind. Between his half-closed eyelids he saw other men sitting with him and he thought: Who will cut their crops? He didn’t even know if they had crops.

  CHAPTER 24

  ALI WAITED FOR Naim to return so he could go back to the village. A month passed and there was no news of his brother. He took his bride from her mother’s house and went back to the one-room brick hut that he had acquired as electrician’s mate in Shanti Nagar. There he waited and waited. Months grew into a year and then more, until slowly hope began to dry up in his heart. The mill was still being built, the machinery – looms and huge electric motors and a hundred other things – arriving from England and being erected, engineers, fitters, electricians and their helpers working twelve hours a day, later sixteen hours in two shifts.

  Shanti Nagar, the housing colony so named after the daughter of the industrialist owner, had been built to accommodate workers and their families. There were three parts of it. Spread over a few acres were one-and two-room brick ‘quarters’ for semi-skilled and unskilled workers, mostly labourers. These were built in straight lines with open drains running through the streets that crossed each other at right angles. There was no vegetation, no shade except for the shadows of brick walls that moved with the sun, providing no relief through the eight-month-long summer that turned the barracks-like structures into airless ovens. There was open ground between this and the second part of the colony which consisted of ‘houses’, each with three rooms and stamp-sized front and back lawns. The ‘officers’ who lived in them – young diploma holders from technical schools and semi-literate older men who had risen through years of experience above the rank of foreman – made an effort to cultivate their patches, although they grew vegetables instead of grass in their little squares, thus taking the first step towards colonizing the colony. The third part of Shanti Nagar was set back and apart from the first two, on land specially chosen for the mature tahli, pipal and bohr trees that had grown there for years. It was a row of seven large bungalows, enclosed by boundary walls with wooden gates and long grassy lawns in front and back of the houses bordered by new-grown trees and flowers beds tended by gardeners. Here lived the British engineers and administrators, their company cars and jeeps parked beside their gates, forever being polished by servants. A metalled road led from in front of the bungalows straight to the factory premises, bypassing the other two parts of the colony which had to make do with dirt paths. There were concrete tennis and badminton courts laid to the side of the bungalows, and next to these was the Rest House, and in an extension of it a small clubhouse, reserved for the residents of the bungalows and no one else, save their servants, to use for social gatherings. Only the owner, Mr Dalmia, on his occasional visits, stayed in the Rest House and was invited into the club for a cup of tea. On site, however, the white sahibs were the owners of the colony.

  The inhabitants of the three parts of the colony had no social contact one with the other, each group mixing only among themselves.

  (In years to come, after the white residents of the bungalows had left,
the middle order, those who lived in the ‘houses’ in the second part of the colony, took charge of different departments of the working mill and were upgraded to live in the bungalows. In addition to making use of all the facilities that went with the bungalows, to which they had long aspired, they took on the habits of their previous masters; socially they had little to do with the men working below them except when they came into contact with them inside the mill. The gulf between these two groups, one tiny and the other very large, remained in place until the end of time as if it were the natural order.)

  At noon, during his fifteen-minute rest period, Ali entered the empty hut earmarked for any extra storage that might be needed later on but which was used for the moment by men seeking shelter from the hot sun to ease their weary limbs. A labourer, another peasant, was sitting on the floor, eating a roti with tomato and green coriander chutney. Breathing in the cool, restful air of still-damp bricks and mortar, Ali went to stand by the lone window of the hut. Idly, he opened half of it; a view of the land entered the room. There was nobody in sight; everyone, high and low, was taking the few minutes of rest sanctioned by the owners and had found some shade or other. Ali saw only the heavy pieces of machinery lying around, waiting to be fixed in their proper place, and mounds of earth and stone, but no green, no sign of life on that scorched earth pressed down by the vast white sheet of a fierce sun.

  ‘Shut the window,’ the man on the floor said.

  Ali lingered by the window.

  ‘Here,’ the man said again, offering a piece of roti to Ali, ‘I’ve had enough.’