‘I am not hungry,’ Ali replied.
The man threw the piece of roti to a pup that had walked in and was sitting by the man’s feet, its eyes mild and moist and its tongue hanging out like the outstretched hand of a beggar. Ali shut the window. The burning view disappeared. He sat down by the wall, shutting his eyes and resting his head against the wall, his face a mask of bones showing on his cheeks and forehead and his eyes deep beneath them.
‘Oh well,’ the labourer said, ‘a man has rights ahead of an animal. I come here every day and give a crumb to this rascal. When I go, what will it do? I don’t know.’
‘Where will you go?’ Ali asked.
‘Home, where else?’
Home, Ali thought, and shut his eyes again.
‘You are not well,’ the man said, looking closely at Ali. ‘A man who works the land should not get ill.’
‘I work on no land,’ Ali said quietly. ‘I am an electrician’s mate.’
‘Still, eat more. That is what you should do, eat more wheat.’ He got up, picking up his spade.
‘Where are you working?’ Ali asked him.
‘On the south side.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Digging ditches. For water pipes.’
The pup followed him out. A gust of hot wind had pushed the latchless window open. Ali got up to go. Through the window he could see the labourer, spade resting on his shoulder, walking away with a heavy, steady step, one, two, one, two, as if imitating some machine. The pup had stopped short and was looking at the man too, his ears up in ignorant expectation. The man’s uniform gait produced an added sense of weariness in Ali. He turned his eyes away and went out into the blinding heat of the day.
A little before his shift ended, Ali put down his pair of pliers and the screwdriver.
‘I am hungry,’ he said to his electrician.
‘The shift is not over yet,’ his superior said.
‘I want to go to the canteen.’
‘How many knots have you done on the armature?’
‘One hundred and sixty.’
‘Not enough, boy.’
Ali did not pick up his tools. The electrician looked back to the foreman. The foreman was looking away. The electrician leaned forward. ‘Are you well, Ali?’
‘I want to go and have something to eat.’
The electrician stared at him for a minute. ‘All right, go. Through that door, not this one, that door – don’t let the foreman see you.’
Ali hadn’t tasted tea until he started working in the mill. Now he had tea twice a day. In the canteen he sat on a bench and asked for a cup of tea, paying a paisa to the seller in advance. The middle-aged man poured tea into a clay mug from a large black kettle that he had simmering on hot coals with the same tea leaves in it that he had put in that morning.
‘When will it be built?’ he asked Ali by way of conversation.
‘It is being built,’ Ali answered.
‘That I can see. But it’s been years. When will it be finished?’
Ali drank his tea from the mug without answering.
‘Do you have children?’ the tea-seller pressed on.
‘No.’
‘Oho. How many years have you been married?’
Ali drank the last of the tea and glared at the man. ‘Don’t know,’ he said and walked out.
‘Don’t know – don’t know, ha ha,’ the tea-seller laughed, turning to the other man sitting on the bench. ‘These starving peasants come here looking for work, and as soon as they have one paisa in the pocket they don’t have a nice word to say to anyone. Don’t know, he says.’
Aisha lay sleeping in the cot, her mouth half-open and her fine muslin shirt, wet with sweat, clinging to her breasts. Ali stopped in the doorway looking distantly at her familiar form. The sound of his feet awoke Aisha. She left the cot and immediately started talking as if continuing a sentence that had been interrupted a second before.
‘Where were you? I asked Rahim and he said he saw you leave the mill. I waited for you. It’s so hot I fell asleep. The black tom stole the grey hen. I was cooking. The beast, why don’t you kill it? Remember we killed this great big wild cat in the cornfield in Roshan Pur that year when –’
‘Give me something to eat. I am hungry.’
‘You would be hungry. It is so hot. Want to drink some water before you eat? No, it will kill your appetite. Better have a bath first, you will get hot-cold if you bathe after eating –’
‘Give me food,’ Ali repeated tonelessly.
Talking non-stop, Aisha went into the shadeless three-foot courtyard where she cooked under the open sky and warmed up the food. She brought in hot salan in a clay plate and warm rotis wrapped in a piece of cloth and sat down opposite Ali, waving one end of her dopatta over the food. ‘Flies, so many flies, don’t know where they come from, they’re like locusts, swarms of them. You remember two years before we were married locusts came to the village? Like dark clouds over the sky. Us women caught them and roasted them over the fire to eat, they were delicious, and all the men went into the fields waving sheets of cloth to stop them landing on the crops. But they came down and did a lot of damage. Don’t you remember, you told me not to eat them because they were no good for women, only good for men? I was Rawal’s betrothed at the time. He saw us talking to one another and slapped me later. I think rain will come – the sky is shimmering with the heat and do you hear the kites screaming, asking for water? That’s a sign. Eat up. Why, is it no good today? I know, Rahim’s wife came and borrowed all my mint. You said yourself to give them whatever they want, didn’t you? I couldn’t say no. Some people came from the mosque asking for money. I shut the door on them. We never go to the mosque, why should we give them money? After a while they went away. I don’t think they collected much money from round here. I did chase after the black tom, but he got away. And the grey hen laid eggs too. If I ever catch it I will strangle it. How fast I used to run in the village, do you remember? Nobody could catch me. I think you had something to eat in the mill. Don’t blame me –’
‘Shut up, Aishoo,’ Ali said, pulling back his hand from the food.
‘Something happen to you at the mill today? I know something has, you have not even finished your food, and you said you were hungry. Don’t blame me –’
‘Take these away,’ Ali said, wiping his hands and lips with the cloth covering the rotis.
When Aisha returned Ali was lying on the cot. She talked on. The tall slim girl knew nothing other than to talk, bringing up over and over again their past in the village.
‘Shut up,’ Ali said to her again. ‘Come here.’
She came and lay down by Ali’s side, still talking. Ali put a hand over her mouth and rolled over. He lay on top of her for a long time before he found the stirrings in his loins. These two children of the earth of their homeland writhed under the dead weight of a foreign life cracking through their bones and making them weary.
HINDUSTAN II
As they are told not to spread dispute among the people, so they reply that they are but peacemakers.
– Al Quraan
CHAPTER 25
AZRA SAT ON a stool in the window of her darkened room, leaning forward, her elbows on the sill and face in the cup of her hands, looking out on the rain that had been falling all day. When the day ended and the lights came on in Roshan Mahal, she had left her room unlit. She did not leave home all day, not knowing what to do with herself in the emptied state of her mind. Random thoughts, bereft of occasion or logic, came and went. A thick, greyish strand of hair, matching her eyes, had fallen on her forehead. She had wanted to push it up for some time but could not bring herself to do it. This typical winter drizzle, falling on the eucalyptus tree outside her window, through the lights in the garden and over the roads, the houses and beyond on the vast fields of villages far and wide, had ensnared her in its never-ending sounds of drip, drip, drip, covering the world in a damp quilt. In this busy world populated by a million drops,
only her mind was empty – not just of objects of thought but of intention. Shall I push up this strand from my brow? she thought for the tenth time, but made no move to do so. The rain is still falling, she repeated to herself, still falling, over everything. Two servants passed across the veranda below her window. ‘Bibi is sleeping,’ one whispered to the other. ‘Yes,’ the other whispered back.
It took Azra an effort of the will to stir from her seat on the stool. She finally pushed up the strand of hair touching her eyebrow with the back of her hand. It clung precariously to the shock of unbrushed hair on one side of her head. She looked at her musical instruments lined up by the wall, unplayed for years. She walked up to them and lightly touched the cloth cover of one of them. A fine layer of dust covered the tip of her finger. They haven’t dusted them, she frowned, then remembered that most days she wouldn’t let the servants into her room. Stiffly, carefully, she removed the covers, dropping them on the floor: a sitar, a tanpura, a sarangi, a violin all stood straight up against the wall, their polished wood glistening darkly in the dimness of light refracted from the garden. She lifted a string of the sitar with a finger. Instead of letting go of it, she slowly lowered it in its place as though it were the hammer of a loaded gun that would make a bang if thrown. She came back to sit in the chair. In front of her were some blank sheets of paper. After a while she switched on the table lamp, picked up her pen and began to write.
‘Dearest, dearest Shirin, you write to me after nearly two years and want to know everything. Why don’t you come and see me? You are so, so far away and want to find out what is going on here. Is it fair? Well, it’s been raining all day and I am sitting in my room writing to you, and it is late. That is how I am. Nothing drastic. In the day they have been celebrating somebody’s birthday, couldn’t go out because of the rain so ran about on the veranda and in the corridors making a racket. Sorry, it was Pervez’s son Imran’s birthday, you probably got an invitation so why am I telling you this? Oh yes, he is seventeen, that is why. I mean, such a lot of time has gone by so quickly, don’t you think? How are your three? And Salim Bhai? You never write anything about them, or yourself. All you do is want to find out, find out after two years whether I am alive, and how. Just like you, good old Shirin, my dear, dear, I am. Alive, that is. Don’t you think you’d know if it was otherwise? Only joking. Anyway, I joined the festivities downstairs but only for a few minutes. You know that Pervez has been putting more and more distance between himself and me over the years, did I mention it to you before? And Naheed, never been thick with me or my friends or anyone really. But don’t need to tell you this, do I? Well, you wanted to know everything. I have a feeling that they have begun to look at me and everything about me as if I were no longer part of them. Khala too. Don’t know why. Oh, I KNOW. They disapprove of me, that’s it. At least with Pervez I can pinpoint the time when he began to cut me off. No, nothing to do with Naim. I think Pervez had accepted him. Not Khala, not Naheed, but Pervez, and Roshan Agha, they came to have a certain regard for him in the end. I don’t know about now, though. So much has changed.
‘What was I saying? Yes, it was the time when Pervez spotted me in the mob in Lucknow years ago. I am certain of that. But I am very fond of Imran, he is the sweetest boy in the world, the only one who comes and sits with me and talks about everything, as if to defy everybody. It was for him that I went downstairs for a few minutes. Roshan Agha is not keeping well, can’t get rid of his cough. I am worried about him. Don’t tell me off, please, but I feel responsible. Yes, guilty. Although he is the only one to whom I go without any qualms. When he clasps me in his arms and hugs me each time he sees me, something he has only begun or begun again to do after a gap of many years, all my bad sense about anything vanishes. I love him very much. Then a strange thing happens. As soon as I come away from him I start to feel guilty even more than before and the weight of it descends on me like a falling sky. And yet there is no wrongdoing, no fault, no error, no regret even. Just the way it happened. Can guilt exist without regret, or am I going mad? Naim’s absence does not make it any easier. This time as you know there was a trial of sorts and they were sentenced for an unspecified time, but what is the unspecified time? Also it all happened in the Frontier and none of us knew anyone in that region. It is so, so far away. Well, not so far away as other places in the south, but strange, I mean nobody goes there. Why did he do it? I went to visit him once and he forbade me to come again. He is in fairly good condition, unlike last time. It’s not that I miss him in myself – it’s been too long and it’s too late for that. Funny thing is that I can’t picture his face in his absence. Every time I try to imagine his features I see blank. Don’t you think that is very, very odd? I don’t pine for his touch, only his presence. I am surrounded by holes – everywhere I turn there is a hole which is shaped like him. I breathe through holes in the air and my chest aches. Do you understand that, my dear, dearest Shirin? I think not.’
She didn’t put her name at the bottom. She stared at the letter for just a moment and then slowly crumpled it in her hands into a ball, as if she had decided to destroy it even as she wrote the last word. After a few minutes, she yawned and got up from the chair. She was going to change into her night-dress and go to bed. Instead, she didn’t even hang the clothes that she was wearing on the clothes-stand, dropping them on the floor one by one until she was standing naked in front of the tall mirror. She looked at her image, the circles around the eyes getting blacker, a fattened chin and thin shoulders above breasts limp and shrunk, never sucked by a baby’s mouth, and the expanding hips, and she wanted to turn her face away from the woman in the mirror. But her gaze into herself had stilled her in a frozen posture with her eyes staring into the pain of battles she had fought, until a great fright gripped her and she began to shiver. She slipped under the quilt as she stood, and the rub of velvet on her bare, goose-pimpled skin made her aware that, despite the time gone by and the sorrow of it, the one thing she still wanted was Naim’s presence, to fill the gap that had opened up in her life and calm the shivering of her heart.
Naim had years to serve yet, and Ali to live in his life without shade, before things would change. One rainy season cholera spread in several districts and took many lives, Ali’s mother among the Roshan Pur dead. Aisha and Ali crept up to the village in the dark of the evening and were met by someone they dreaded: Rawal. He had stood in their path outside the village for hours, waiting for them. When he confronted them he had his foot-long knife in his hand which he waved before them.
‘Put the woman in the ground and go back,’ he snarled.
The couple caught the shine of the steel blade, too close to them, and knew they had no choice. They sneaked out of the village the next day as they had come, still waiting in vain for Naim.
Naim had been unwell in gaol off and on for some time. It was no commonplace complaint like a headache or indigestion or some such as could be diagnosed and treated, but every once in a while he felt dizzy. He had to lie down and would then be overtaken by a great weakness that seemed to penetrate to his guts so that he could move not one limb for hours, sometimes for days. His gaolers, not in the least concerned for the health of the inmates, considered him a malingerer, while Naim, wishing to dismiss it from his mind, put it down to the poor quality of life that he had been leading there over the years. One day, when he least expected it, he was told to go.
Naim took one look at the big house in Roshan Pur and came away. He went to stay in his mother’s house. He found Rawal living in Ali’s mother’s room. Naim occupied his old room that his father had built for him on top of the house which had been lying vacant ever since he went first to live in his two rooms in the fields and then moved into the new house with Azra. Ali came to see him as soon he heard of his brother’s arrival back in the village. This time he came without fear.
‘I want to come back,’ he said to Naim.
‘Are you not happy there?’ Naim asked him.
‘Are you joking
? I am fed up there.’
‘Why, have you not learned any skills?’
‘I have. I am a first-class electrician now.’
‘Are you? I thought you were a mechanic.’
‘I am an electrical mechanic. I can mend big motors.’
‘Are you getting more money now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then why do you want to leave?’
‘Have you not looked at me? You were in prison so that is why you look like a ghost. But why do I look like this?’
Naim gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘You have lost some weight, I see.’
‘Some weight! I have lost half my life. Aisha has too. We work with machines there and their noise makes me go crazy. It is a prison. There are no trees there.’
‘Have they not planted any new trees?’ Naim said, wishing to divert Ali. ‘Or flowers?’
‘They tried. But the earth is not good. Only bushes and hardy creepers grow. There are some old trees, but they are in the bungalows where gora sahibs live.’
‘You have not been coming to the village very often, I hear.’
‘Don’t you know why? Rawal threatened to kill me.’
Naim looked towards his mother, who looked away. ‘He has old enmity in his heart,’ she mumbled. ‘What can I do?’
‘But he has a wife and child now. Why is he Ali’s enemy?’ Naim said to her.
‘What can I do?’ his mother repeated. ‘You were not here. I am only an old woman.’ She started crying. ‘You have lost everything. Just like your father.’
The room was full of smoke rising from smouldering dung-cakes on which the old woman had cooked a meal of a young chicken for the two men with separate portions of spinach. Naim got up to push the half-closed door wide open to let the air in.
‘I will put the rascal right,’ he said, and called out, ‘Rawal!’
‘He is not here,’ Ali said to him. ‘He went out when he saw me coming.’
The Weary Generations Page 30