The Weary Generations

by Abdullah Hussein

  ‘Well done, men. You have sided with the management and stayed beyond your duty time. For this you will be rewarded. We have one mission and one only, and that is to keep the kiln chimney smoking. With your help we shall show the traitors outside the gate how to run a factory with the help of a few faithful men. We will lock them out for ever. Just remember: Keep the chimney smoking. That alone will defeat the mischief of the slogan raisers.’

  By the time he finished, a few labourers had brought some tables and chairs and laid them out on the kiln platform. Then they went back to fetch the food. There were three different kinds of food and they were all meat dishes, even the rice fried and cooked as pulao with lamb. The assistant engineers and foremen, who were not properly ‘management’, sat beside the higher-ups with looks of gratitude on their faces. But the lower-grade workers, even after much persuasion, refused to occupy the chairs alongside their superiors, although they accepted the food and sat on the ground to eat it. They couldn’t believe what they were witnessing: these men, near-gods to them, whose place was way up there in the clouds, were sharing their food with the lowly, the ones who were as dirt and hardly deserved better; and sharing not only food but also talk, speaking to those sitting near their feet on the ground with pleasant, affectionate faces and cheery words. Like friends, the labourers thought; like friends. The meal over, the labourers took it back, the utensils, the spoons, the dishes, trays, tables and chairs. Ali joined them hauling the things back to the canteen. He hadn’t eaten much and was not feeling joyful like the others; during all the agitation, he thought of Aisha and remembered that he had missed giving her the second dose of her medicine. He hung around the canteen for an extra free cup of tea. As darkness fell, he wanted to go home. He found himself in the midst of pandemonium as he went back to where he had been directed: the kiln wasn’t turning. Ali sprinted the last hundred yards to the point where everyone, from the general manager to the labourer, was crowding. The electrical motor that turned the main shaft of the kiln had gone dead. It was a hot end-of-May evening that made it impossible to go near the motor, for this was a spot that made men’s faces burn even in the severest of winters. They all stood a few yards away from it, leaving the foreman and a ‘senior’ electrician, their heads and faces wrapped in their shirts and other dirty rags from the workshop, to work on it. The heat was so intense that the two men weren’t even sweating, their bare bodies dry and roasted red.

  ‘Where were you?’ the foreman shouted at Ali. Silently, Ali tore off his shirt, wound it round his head and face and jumped on to the concrete plinth of the motor. Not until then did he see and recognize a third man, masked like the other two, struggling with a large nut on the side of the motor. It was Salim. Ali tried to get the spanner out of his hand, but Salim wouldn’t yield. Nor would the nut. Under the eyes of not only the electrical foreman but all the owners of the whole factory as far as he knew, Salim was reluctant to give up the job for which he had volunteered. Straining his sinewy body, his chest lowered on the spanner handle and his fingers jammed on it, shoulder and arm muscles rippling like long thin fishes and his face contorted with effort, Salim was determined to move the nut that had seized as if this was a job for which he had been preparing himself for his entire life. Ali put his strength behind it as well by placing his hand on top of Salim’s and pushing. The nut proved unmovable. The firing of the kiln was stopped and the smoke coming from the chimney at the other end got progressively thinner.

  As the slogans of the strikers, still there outside the gate after five hours, got louder upon seeing the smoke disappear, so the faces of the officers grew more frantic. The chief engineer got so out of control that he started accusing the electrical engineer of being ‘the most useless man in the world’, disregarding the fact that the man might be good for some other things in his life. As the chief engineer’s angry voice rose, so also did Salim’s ceaseless efforts. Ignoring Ali’s advice to let the machine cool down a little before going any further, he continued to wrestle with the obstinate nut, as if his promotion to electrician’s mate would come there and then if only he could prise open the death-bite of the nut-and-bolt teeth with the last ounce of his strength. Suddenly, in the middle of a pull, Salim’s hand slipped off the long spanner handle and he fell over on top of the motor. He didn’t spring back up. For a few seconds they watched him silently as he lay with both arms spread wide on the hot casing of the motor. Then the realization came that Salim had simply keeled over.

  Three men lifted the boy’s collapsed body and laid it carefully, face up, on the ground. In Salim’s bloodless face his eyes were half-open, fixed in a terrible gaze which seemed to look at nothing beyond the eyelids. Someone ran to fetch the ‘doctor’ from the works dispensary. The young rotund, bespectacled owner’s son threw a glance up at the smoke stack whose emission of curling white cloud had turned to thin black strands, dispersing forlornly into the air. He turned his eyes away from it and had a word with the general manager, who in turn spoke to his assistant. The assistant manager, taking the chief accountant and an engineer with him, walked quietly away. The man from the dispensary arrived. He examined the unconscious Salim and shook his head in despair. The men put the body on a trolley and wheeled it towards the dispensary.

  Within an hour, the assistant general manager and his team of negotiators had reached an agreement with the leaders of the striking workers. The gates were opened and the mob of workers poured in, chanting the usual slogans. Not many of their demands had been met, yet they were carrying two members of the management team on their shoulders in victory. The negotiators had proved cleverer than their labour opponents, giving away little but playing upon the gratitude of the lowly for merely being treated as equals across the bargaining table. Ali had earlier wandered off towards the main gate after they had removed Salim’s body from near the kiln. He met the incoming crowd on the way. Few noticed him in their euphoria. He walked out of the gate into the night, thinking of Aisha without emotion.

  CHAPTER 28

  ANEES RAHMAN WAS Personal Assistant to a member of the Indian Legislative Assembly – MLA (Centre) for short. He was both a relative of one of the only two Muslim members of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, and a member of the ruling family of a small state in central India. Although he lived comfortably on a stipend from his ancestral state, he had no personal fortune by way of landholding or money. All he owned as property was two houses, one in Delhi and the other in a picturesque village situated on the banks of the river twenty miles from the capital. The only other thing of value he possessed was a fine education. Supported by his family, he had gone to England in the early thirties and qualified as Barrister at Law. He never practised the profession; he dabbled in politics but gave that up after a while. Helped by family contacts, he acquired his present non-governmental position and settled down in it. Although some years younger, he had been a friend of Roshan Agha and his family for many years. He had known Naim, but only slightly, barely a handshake or two and an Assalam-o-Alaikam. When Azra spoke to him, he agreed to take on Naim in a position in his office at the Assembly – rather less, it was understood, to get Naim to do any real work than to provide him with a place to go to each day and a routine to follow. Naim got an entry pass to the Assembly and a desk of his own in an office that he shared with three other staff. Once he got settled in, however, Naim found himself more and more involved in conversations initiated by Anees Rahman, and not always regarding work; Anees had found Naim an attractive listener to the outpourings of his active mind. Over a period of time the two men developed a personal friendship.

  Azra had finally agreed to take a suite of rooms – a drawing room and two bedrooms – on the ground floor. Naim had amassed a great collection of books on various subjects. From books of general interest in the first year of his confinement, he had gone on to specialized reading, picking up books on a single topic at a time until he exhausted it according to his liking and ability, before going on to the next: religion, histor
y, general science, ending with philosophy. This did not particularly clear his mind about anything; what he got out of it was a permanent habit of reading, no longer now for the sake of acquiring knowledge so much as to use it as a veil between himself and the world. Meticulously following doctor’s orders, Azra would be seen by the early risers in the neighbourhood of Roshan Mahal taking Naim for a walk, her hand on his left shoulder while he carried his old walking stick in his right hand. Naim had almost fully recovered, his limp nearly gone, but like his reading the stick in his hand and Azra by his shoulder had become a comforting habit, one that served to hide his embarrassment from onlookers. On their return, they had breakfast together, the only occasion after the walk in the morning when they sat face to face, although they exchanged no more than a few words. Naim habitually skipped the midday meal in order to control the weight he had put on during his confinement, causing him high blood pressure. Azra always took her evening meal with Roshan Agha who, suffering from chronic diabetes and heart problems, was almost permanently confined to his room. Naim had dinner in his room and afterwards read late into the night. They had separate bedrooms.

  The country was in turmoil. The Cripps Mission had failed and Stafford Cripps’s offer of freedom ‘after the war is over’ had been rejected by the Congress Party. At the same time the ‘Quit India’ Movement was launched, which engaged in sabotage. Hearing reports of the blowing up of railway lines and suchlike, Naim was reminded of a part of his distant past but felt no movement in his blood. He had even given up reading the newspaper. Only Azra felt momentarily excited by it, reading the papers out aloud to Naim at breakfast. Getting a feeble response from Naim, she gave up after a few days. The war was at its height and a famine was raging in Bengal.

  Anees Rahman, a short, stocky bull of a man, moved with the agility of an athlete, his energy never allowing him to stay in one position for long. In the middle of looking at some papers, he would jump up and go to the window to look outside, often talking quietly to himself while gesticulating busily with his hands. Back at his desk, he would no sooner settle down than leave his seat and go to the outer office to speak to one of his staff. He had also had Naim’s desk moved to his own private office, placing Naim’s seat opposite his own so that he could talk to him without having to get up.

  One day he invited Naim to his house in the village for a stay over the weekly holiday. He picked Naim up at the end of office hours on Saturday afternoon and took him straight to the village. The journey took less than an hour. The village, although situated only a short distance from the river, was built on high ground, so that it remained safe from flooding when the river burst its banks during the monsoons. Anees’s house was right at the top of the hill from where the eye could see mile after mile of the plains on both sides of the river. The whitewashed house was simple but solidly built, with large gardens and old trees, lush green lawns sloping away from the front veranda of the house. The two men sat in cane chairs under the shade of an amaltas tree. The air was very still. There was not a sound to be heard, not even the chirp of a bird in the garden, except for the hiss of water coming faintly over from the great river that somehow had the effect of increasing the silence. Naim thought it was the quietest place he had been to, and mentioned it to Anees.

  ‘Yes,’ Anees said. ‘I have a rather agitated nature. I come here to calm myself.’

  A servant laid out tea on the table. The sun was still up. After tea, Anees asked the servant to get his fishing tackle out. Within fifteen minutes they were sitting on two low wooden stools by the river bank with Anees’s line in the water, the sinker bobbing on the surface and a small pot of squirming earthworms, dug up by the servant, by their side. Naim noticed the change in Anees: he had become quiet. Sitting absolutely still, gazing at the slow movement of the broad plank of water sparkling in the late afternoon sun, he seemed to Naim, for the first time since he had known him, to be in a reflective mood. There was a large family of refugees from Bengal living in the open on the bank of the river. They had not erected a shelter, nor did they appear to be doing anything towards the provision of food for themselves and their several children. There were only some rumpled dirty sheets on the ground by way of bedding.

  Nodding his head in their direction, Naim asked, ‘Aren’t the village people doing something for them?’

  ‘They get cooked food from the village,’ Anees replied. ‘But they don’t want to stay. They are moving on to the city. At least that is what they keep saying. I think they have lost their sense of direction.’

  Naim laughed drily. ‘God help them.’

  ‘What has God to do with it?’ Anees said, unleashing another of his speeches on the unsuspecting Naim. ‘It’s a man-made disaster. And only man will suffer.’

  A bit surprised, Naim slowly nodded, ‘Yeees.’

  ‘You have only seen the living,’ Anees said, ‘I have seen the dead in Bengal. Piles and piles of them. If you can spare a day’s supply of rice, you sell it. If you haven’t, you beg. The difference between rich and poor is a handful of rice. No, not between rich and poor, actually between life and death. We live our lives according to simple rules. When we are young we read history and come to know of the disasters that befell our ancestors. From these lessons, we deduce some rules. Look before you leap, that sort of thing. My father gave me a book called Golden Rules. Did you read the book of golden rules when you were young?’

  ‘I was never young,’ Naim said, laughing.

  ‘When we grow up we see that there is no such thing as a regular shape of history. Come floods, come epidemics, come famine. But they are never the same. Like each life, each disaster is different. There is a fixed pattern, it’s called helter-skelter.’ He laughed ironically. ‘In order to form a reasonable pattern, we invent the idea of justice. When that doesn’t work, we go further into helter-skelter and invent God. I will tell you one thing: there are no golden rules.’

  This was yet another aspect of Anees that Naim witnessed: the man, no longer restless, sitting patiently like an old angler, giving quiet words to his desperation.

  Later, as their friendship grew, it became, at Anees’s insistence, a regular feature of Naim’s life to accompany Anees to his village house once every two or three weeks. Gradually, there came a point when, one day, Anees told Naim the story of his life. He was thought of as a minor aristocrat, Anees said, an idea carefully cultivated by himself and others. He was nothing of the sort. He had been disinherited because his mother had been insufficiently respectable to qualify as a proper wife to his father, so she stayed in the position of a concubine all her life. The old nawab only married her on his deathbed, a marriage that became the subject of a dispute in the courts of law, initiated by the legitimate heirs, on the basis that the dying man was in no fit state to have reached a rational decision. In order, eventually, to avoid publicity, said Anees, he renounced all his claims in return for the grant of two houses and a reasonable sum of money as a yearly stipend. He had never, he said, been back to the state, although his wife and two children were being kept and well looked after there by the present ruler.

  Naim, hesitant though he was in the beginning, now began to look forward to these trips to the house on the river bank in company with Anees, recognizing in him a companion soul in trouble. He also liked the place, as it reminded him of his own village. Being neither a believer – in anything! – nor the opposite but, as it were, shuffling somewhere in between, Naim took comfort from the silence of the vast plains and the memory of what had been left behind.

  He did go back to his village once, when he received the news that his mother was unwell.

  ‘Shall I come?’ Azra asked him.

  ‘No,’ he replied softly.

  ‘I would like to.’

  ‘I am certain she is only sick with something minor. Maybe she only wants to see me.’ He laughed. ‘Really no need for you to go. She’ll get well.’

  But that was not to be. By the time he arrived at the village, sh
e was dead. He was surprised at how little grief he felt at his mother’s death compared to the time that his father passed away. What he felt immensely was the absence of Ali, someone to whom he hadn’t given a thought for a long time. Naim’s eyes searched for him.

  ‘I have no enmity with him,’ Rawal said. ‘It was long time ago. I would like him to come back here. Only Aisha,’ he said, with a hint of remorse in his voice, ‘died.’

  Naim sent Rawal to look for Ali at the cloth mill. From the information Rawal got at the mill, he travelled to the cement factory. On the third day, Rawal returned empty-handed. Ali had moved away from there, he said, and nobody knew where he had gone. Naim stayed in the village for seven days. During that time he went one day to Aisha’s village to give his condolences to her family. The had no information about Ali’s whereabouts either. Naim went back to Delhi, to his routine at Roshan Mahal and his association with Anees.

  The war was over. A quarter of a million Indian troops had become casualties on the fields of Europe and elsewhere. Those who survived returned to a turbulent land. The struggle for independence had hotted up. Times had changed, and Naim saw Anees Rahman undergo a gradual transformation. Over the years he became mellower, then morose and finally bitter, although he never lost the attractive sides of his personality. He had started going back for short trips to his state to see his wife and two children, now grown up. He never stayed for long. ‘I feel out of place there,’ he would say as he rushed back to Delhi. ‘Always will.’ His physical energy had diminished. On one occasion he said to Naim, ‘Life wastes us with such savagery,’ and Naim felt that he was looking at a man who had died. He shivered at the thought of seeing his own image in the other man. But the two of them had by now become so firmly dependent on one another as friends, not least because they had none other, that they gravitated together, now more frequently, each Saturday to the riverside house which had become their place of sanctuary from the world. Once there, they would sit by the river bank or, if the weather did not allow it, on the veranda and talk, or not, descending into long silences. At times, when he became maudlin, Anees talked about death.