The Weary Generations

by Abdullah Hussein

  A mile short of Ambala the monsoons overtook them. They ran under a pouring sky and reached the railway station drenched to the skin. The cart people picked up their belongings, men, women and children carrying on their heads the stuff, wrapped and tied up with string, to the station platform. There was no train reserved and waiting for them; there was no other train for hours either. The rumour went round that all trains were running late because of the rains and floods. They sat down on the platform and waited for their train. After three hours, a train came. Picking up their bundles, they all ran to the edge of the platform. It was not just the compartments that were full, with people pressed against each other back to front like too many cattle in a small pound, but as many people again were riding on top of the train, men, women and children clinging to each other to avoid falling off the wet, slippery roof, and on the wooden steps of each compartment more than a dozen of them hung on to the metal handles of the doors. Some of the bolder ones among those waiting on the platform attempted to put a foot on the steps and were ferociously kicked away by those already there. The engine whistled twice and pulled the train away. They all drew back. Some who were quicker occupied others’ places under shelters by the walls of the station building. There were arguments and scuffles. In the skirmishes Naim’s memory began to stir from slumber. He rushed through a small crowd in front of him and stopped facing his brother.

  ‘Ali,’ he said. This was the first word he had spoken in over a week.

  Ali looked at Naim without speaking for several moments, then said, ‘What’s happened to you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Naim said, smiling.

  ‘This,’ Ali said, moving his hand in the air along the length of Naim’s body, ‘is nothing? I didn’t recognize you.’

  ‘I recognized you. I saw you before.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Delhi.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Ten, fifteen days back.’

  ‘That is impossible,’ Ali said. ‘I left Delhi two months ago.’

  Naim looked blankly at Ali.

  ‘You are wet,’ Ali said. ‘Wait here.’ Ali went to the two bundles of his belongings stacked against the wall. An old man was sitting on top of them. Ali slipped his hands in the old man’s armpits and lifted him to his feet. ‘Don’t sit on my things,’ he said harshly to the man. Untying one of the bundles, he pulled out a thin khes and brought it back to a shivering Naim. ‘Wrap it round you.’ He took Naim by the hand and led him to the bundles of his stuff. The old man had replaced himself on top of them. ‘Get off,’ Ali shouted at him. The man calmly got up and sat down on the floor. Ali kept glowering at him while settling Naim on the bundles. ‘Stay here, don’t wander about. What’s happened to you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Naim said again pleasantly.

  ‘Nothing!’ Ali said, imitating him. ‘You look a miserable wretch. Now don’t get lost. I am going to get something to eat.’

  Another train arrived on the second line away from their platform, going the other way. It looked exactly the same as the first train, compartments and footboards packed and more people on top of it than inside, except for one difference: these people were all Hindus and Sikhs, apparent from their clothes and headgear and from their demeanour. Naim’s memory was beginning to pick up. Looking at the people clinging to the roof of the train, he remembered the trains of his childhood when he would see a man walking on top of the stationary train taking in water for the engine from a station pump and think that it was a tightrope walker from a circus in a railway uniform. The train stopped for a few minutes and pulled out, leaving in Naim’s eyes the sight of a child screaming with its mouth wide open in a woman’s lap in the rain on the roof of the train. Ali returned with a watermelon in his hands. He broke it in two with a punch and offered the red juicy flesh to Naim, scooping it out with his fingers.

  ‘Eat it,’ he said. ‘I have a few more left.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Naim.

  ‘In the cart.’

  ‘You have a cart?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With a bullock?’

  ‘A mule.’

  ‘Good,’ Naim said, eating the melon. Both his tongue and his hunger had returned.

  ‘What do you mean, “good”?’ Ali said. ‘They are already standing around the carts outside, hunh,’ he uttered a dry laugh, ‘praying just like us for our train to arrive.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So that they can steal our carts after we board the train, that’s why. Sisterfucking bastards.’

  Now they were waiting not for the train but for the rain to stop. After another hour, it stopped. They all put their belongings of tied-up large and small bundles on their heads and cleared out of the platform. Reloading the stuff, the women and the weaker old men on the carts, on the donkeys, the bullocks and mules without carts and on a few buffaloes, they took to the road, realizing that safety, not to be found in numbers or in trains, now lay only in time; the quicker they measured the earth with their feet the safer they would be at the end of it.

  ‘Hop on to it, hop on, what’s the matter with you?’ Ali said, eventually grabbing Naim by the waist and heaving him up on to the cart. ‘Sit, sit now, go to sleep, you’re in a bad way.’

  A few miles out of the city, the rain caught up with them again. There was no fixed destination now other than the road, so nobody bothered to run.

  ‘Here,’ Ali handed an empty gunny bag to Naim. ‘Cover yourself, put it on your head.’

  Naim placed it flatly on his head.

  ‘Not like that, no, no,’ Ali said to him, showing Naim his own conical hat he had made from a bag by pushing one corner of it into itself and sticking it to the other corner, ‘like this. Have you forgotten?’

  Naim started struggling with it. Ali interrupted him again impatiently, ‘Give it to me. You will never get it right. Give, give me.’ Then he checked himself. ‘Oh, you only have one hand. I nearly forgot. You never told me what happened. I asked you many times to tell me the story of your hand, but you always said it was nothing. Do you lose a whole hand if nothing happens? And you don’t say what’s happened to you now. You don’t look like a poor beggar if nothing happens either. Here, it’s made.’ He slipped the bag, now properly converted into a hat covering the head and shoulders, on to Naim’s head.

  ‘You tell me,’ Naim said to him.

  ‘Hunh?’

  ‘Tell me what happened to you.’

  ‘Why do you want to know? There’s nothing to tell. You said I could not come back to the village and I left. And you gave my room to Rawal and his wife. I was born there. I had no father, no mother, no brother, how could I come back? I looked after Aisha. I loved her. But her heart had shrunk. There was no way out for her but away. And away she went. What do you know about having your first good meal of chicken and spinach in a long time and not given time to rest before being told straight away you cannot come back home? What do you know of not giving your head a good rest and losing your home and everything? You married the jagirdar’s daughter and went to live in the big house and wanted for nothing. What do you know about these things? When Father went to gaol you went to Kulkutta and to Angrezi schools. Then you went into the army and got land in return, a full ten acres of good land. I asked you what you did to get it and you said, “Oh, nothing.” You never told me anything, not about the hand, not about the land, not about anything, always nothing, nothing, except don’t do this, do that, don’t come back to the village. So why do you ask me now? I have nothing to tell, not to you anyway. Then you even lost the land because like a fool you went to gaol for nothing. That was nothing, if you ask me. But this time you told me all about it and wanted me to do as you did. I did not want to go to gaol so I stayed put in mills and factories. I learned a skill as you said but lost half my life, and the other half when Aisha went, you never knew that, did you? Skill! What is the profit in skill if I have no home and no electricity of my own? There were no trees.’

  ‘What trees?
’ Naim asked.

  ‘Trees. Trees. I told you once. You have forgotten everything. The cement factory was worse, only limestone hills and nothing else. The stone was exploded every day and there was the smell of dust and blasting powder, no smell of trees. I am talking of old trees, not new ones. Big old trees that you can climb and sit in the branches and play with the leaves. Aisha made peepees with tahli leaves.’ Ali stopped to swallow tears in his throat. ‘You never grew trees, only took them on in the house they built for you when you married the rich woman and became the owner of the village. Where are they now, I ask you, your rich relatives? All gone. I knew it was no good, if you asked me, it was no good from the start. You have lost everything. What kind of skill is that? Fool’s skill.’ He put his hand out to point to the moving column. ‘Everything!’ He turned to glower at Naim’s hat covering his head and face. ‘I know everything. You became ill. I stayed away, but I got all the news about you. I had a hope that you would change your mind. But first you got yourself into gaol all over again, then you became ill and went to live in their house in Dilli and were treated by a big doctor. Who was there to treat Aisha and me? Homelessness, huh? You say nothing to everything, but I say nothing as well, I have nothing to tell you. This motherfucking rain, when crops are dying it doesn’t come, now we have no crops so it comes and comes. If these fuckers stopped for a bit we could get under the cart and save ourselves from it. But they keep running, the fools don’t know that you can’t run away from rain but only get more wet. But can you tell them this? No, sir, they go on running as if they have to catch their mother’s wedding in time. There’s two rotis in the bundle next to you. You can have one. Eat it with melon when you feel the hunger. Or better let me know, I keep forgetting you can’t untie the knot on your own. You were lucky, with only one hand you had servants to do everything for you. Where are they now? Are you feeling hungry?’

  Naim’s head of hat shook. ‘No. Tell me more.’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘What happened to you.’

  ‘Nothing to tell. Why don’t you sleep, it will do you good, put some strength into you. Go to sleep.’

  Naim’s hat shook silently again.

  The column kept moving until the day ended and darkness fell. They could see the lights of a city in the distance. Fearful of going into or near it, they stopped in a large uncultivated field surrounded by trees. The rain had stopped. They opened up bundles of their belongings, collected fallen twigs or broke them off the trees to start small fires, kneaded the dough with water they carried with them in pitchers, cooked rotis and ate them with whatever they had, some achar or chutney or two-day-old cooked daal or with just salt and water. Those who didn’t have anything to cook bought a little from those who did, with money or else by bartering clothes, shoes, even weapons such as long knives that they had kept to defend themselves in the event of an attack. The animals ate from the plentiful grass and foliage that sprouted everywhere in the days of the monsoons. After feeding their bodies they sustained their minds in the dark of the night by passing rumours from mouth to mouth. There were special camps, it was said, set up by the government in big cities where they would be housed and fed and guarded by the army and provided with proper transport for their journey onwards, all this being based on their concern for safety, food and conveyance in that order. The night, however, they spent, as they had done several before, under an open sky and occasional showers, shivering in the wet wind. Ali bought some milk from the few buffalo-owners who milked them nightly and sold the milk. They ate a roti each with milk and went to sleep, covering themselves with sheets and gunny bags under Ali’s cart, only disturbed once during the night by the mule splashing its urine on them.

  At dawn word passed through the column from one end to the other. For once it wasn’t a rumour but the news of an actual event: the first death in the column. It was of a young man travelling on his own carrying no bundles of belongings but only the clothes on his back and no money or valuables on him, found dead where he lay in the night from exposure and possibly starvation, but most probably because his spirit had given up and let the body go. Nobody knew who the young man was. But because it was a death from natural causes, sent down by the will of God, it was holy and required to be treated as such. The maulvis took over the proceedings; all the rituals of the funeral had to be observed. An atmosphere of piety rippled through the whole column. It served to brighten up the mood of the men, women and especially children by restoring at least part of the old order of daily life. They rummaged through their bundles to pull out whatever fresh clothes they could find and changed into them. They lent a little bit of water from their pitchers to those who did not have it for wetting, if not thoroughly washing, their hands, feet and faces by way of ablution before they stood, thousands of them, in straight row after row, the children happily organizing themselves alongside their elders who admonished them to stay still in the presence of God and his angels. Massed thus, they stood solemnly in the field facing the body of the unknown man, laid on the ground wrapped in a white shroud that had been donated by the richest family in the column who owned a good cart, two horses and several metal trunks full of belongings. Before the namaz janaza, they listened to a speech delivered by the head maulvi:

  ‘Brothers, we have proved before our God that we value and respect our dead. Today, an unclaimed person, whose name even we did not know and called him simply “Man” for the purpose of the namaz, is being blessed with a janaza bigger than many famous men get when they pass away. Look around you, more than a thousand souls, just imagine – more than even two thousand –’

  After he finished the speech, the maulvi led the namaz, in which everyone except the women and the animals participated. A hole had already been dug in the ground. The corpse was lowered into the grave and each of the ‘mourners’ threw a handful of earth on it, including the women, in orderly fashion, until the hole not only filled up but a great mound of earth eventually formed on top of it. After the service was over, they hastily picked up their things and the column started moving. It was the largest grave anyone had ever seen, this mound that they had made for the unknown man, and they were justly proud of it, looking back at it for a long time until they came to a bend in the road and it disappeared from view. Never afterwards in the brief life of the column would death be accorded such honour. For they were soon to enter a province in the fields of which death stalked its prey in the shape of marauding Sikhs and Hindus on one side of the border and Muslims on the other – the province of the Punjab, across a map of which the good judge Cyril Radcliffe, after much concern and absent-minded deliberation, drew a line in red ink dividing it in two, each half going to a different country.

  Despite hopeful rumours of a ‘safe’ camp with free food established for them at each ‘next’ stop, the column had begun to distrust railway stations and even cities, bypassing them although staying close to the road. They stopped for provisions, chiefly water, near small villages and only towns where they saw the dome of a mosque or a green rag of a flag flying above some holy ‘mazar’ signifying Muslim habitation. In most such places they found none of their kind, and no longer were even the signs of Muslim living allowed to remain in the abodes of those who had fled. The sense of fear grew with every mile they covered, until it became a solid mass that travelled by day and night alongside them. After shedding the notions that there was safety in railway stations, camps and the passage of time, their number one priority now was speed and, although speed was but a dimension of time, for them it existed in its own right, measured in terms of the ‘quickness’ with which they could take the decision to switch to another route, change direction or leave a stop-over spot in order to evade attackers, real and imagined. They started getting rid of their old clothes by throwing them by the wayside to lighten the load on the carts and the gradually weakening animals so they could pull along more easily, and indeed at times they became more a stampeding herd than a moving column. Nobody wanted the
discarded clothes, but many old shoes, already worn and holed, were picked up and put on regardless of size by those who had totally ruined their own during the march. Those who owned milch cattle quadrupled the price of the milk they sold; those who had pitchers stopped giving water to others, and instead put a cash price on it. Starvation became a reality and at every stop-over they left behind many sick people, the disabled with swollen feet and not a few who had died quietly in the night, along with others who simply refused to get up and go any further, waiting among the familiar dead under a blistering sun for someone or something to arrive and help them reach their end one way or another. No one looked back for them.

  Luckily, the column suffered no real attack until they reached the outskirts of Amritsar; there were only intimations of the danger from the dead bodies strewn along the roadside, among the fields and around villages and cities. Successfully skirting these, they felt shielded from evil by a similar column of refugees going ahead of them that had borne the brunt of the attacks, thus easing the situation for them who followed. This view was confirmed by a quite extraordinary sight at one place. There was a horde of Sikhs and Hindus, sitting by the wayside, their spears, swords and long-handled cleavers, and also their clothes, covered in blood, as if they were waiting to kill the new arrivals. The refugees failed to see them until they turned a corner and found themselves on top of them. The people on foot started running while the cart-owners began furiously to beat their beasts. Hardly one of the attackers moved; they remained still, looking at the fleeing herd with nothing more than tired unconcern on their faces. After the column had cleared the danger spot, it dawned on them, from the scores of dead bodies over which they had stumbled, that the attackers had killed so many so recently, possibly only minutes before, that they could not be bothered to do any more of the same. The people in the column felt doubly beholden to the ones who had passed before them and fallen; they silently recited holy verses from the Quraan to bless their souls and to thank God for providing them with the shelter of the freshly dead so that they themselves would live.