The Weary Generations

by Abdullah Hussein

  There were rare stretches of ground that were comparatively tranquil. They would take refuge under a growth of dense old trees around a field or in a small forest and make forays into villages disguised as Hindus, or those who had beards would wrap sheets round their heads to look like Sikhs and pick up drinking water and other sustenance. They would come back and sell the food that was surplus to their own needs at a profit to those who had not had the heart to venture into dens of danger. All the wells had been contaminated by the rainwater overflowing into them from the ground, so clean water was only to be had from pumps dug in people’s houses, thus fetching the highest price, especially from those who were dying of thirst. As their destination came nearer, hopes of survival grew, and acquiring money finally took priority over everything else. Those, however, were the marginally happier days …

  Back in Delhi, Roshan Agha’s family were at the airport, waiting for their flight. They were sitting in the superior lounge of the air terminal with their hand luggage on the floor beside the sofa chairs; Naheed was gripping a large handbag containing her jewellery in her lap with both hands and a half-satisfied expression on her face, while Azra, sitting away from her, looked blank, her empty hands resting lightly on the arms of the chair. Roshan Agha was in a wheelchair between the two women. There was bewilderment on his sallow face. Pervez and Imran were away at the check-in counter in the departure hall, haggling about getting on board the aircraft nearly fifty locked containers as accompanied baggage. ‘I am Assistant Commissioner, Delhi,’ he was saying, ‘I have opted for Pakistan. We are all going. I want all this as accompanied baggage, none unaccompanied. I was given assurances by Mr Mehta, your General Manager. This is his card, you can speak to him …’ Their flight was delayed for two hours, then for several hours more for unknown reasons. They all waited in the comfortable lounge, sipping ice-cold water. Outside, in the arrival and departure halls, there was pandemonium approaching a riot. It was hot and humid. Sweat pouring from their bodies, drenching them and their clothes, a thousand people were pushing, shoving, swearing and screaming to get to their uncertain future.

  Naim was lucky in two respects: one, few were more worldly-wise than Ali, who was always the first to go into nearby villages at stop-overs posing as a Hindu traveller from the next village, speaking the local dialect and getting provisions; and, second, he had money in his pocket. He came back with water and food for the two of them and dry cut grass for the mule, all bought with cash. Every time he returned with his purchase, Naim asked him, ‘Has your money not run out yet?’

  ‘Why do you keep worrying about money?’ Ali would reply. ‘I have enough for us. I have worked all my life and earned it and kept it. I am not telling you how much I have.’

  ‘Where did you work?’ Naim once asked him when the column was on the move.

  ‘Everywhere. Kulkutta.’

  ‘You went to Calcutta?’

  ‘Yes. I wanted to join the army. Do not imagine I wanted to get rid of my hand or win a medal. I only wanted to go to Burma.’

  ‘Did you go then?’

  ‘They said we would go. But we did parades and nothing but parades. One day I said to the sergeant, “The day you were born your mother’s milk split in her teats and you became a coward.” They put me under guard for three weeks and then kicked me out.’

  ‘You were lucky,’ Naim said.

  ‘Why, because I did not lose my hand?’

  ‘You would have been taken prisoner by the Japanese and died there.’

  ‘I wouldn’t. If I were to die I would have died in the factories.’

  ‘But that was later when the war started,’ Naim said. ‘Where did you go before that?’

  ‘I came here to Punjab. I was in Lahore once before but only for two days, it was no good then. But I liked the city. After Aisha passed away I came back here and got jobs in electric shops for three years.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Where did you go after that?’

  ‘Dilli.’

  ‘You were in Delhi?’

  ‘Yes. I could get work anywhere.’

  ‘How long were you there?’

  ‘Many years.’

  ‘But I was there too. I went back to the village once and sent Rawal looking for you. He couldn’t find you.’

  ‘Just as well. I would have killed him. I hope he is already dead.’

  ‘Don’t say that. Not at a time like this.’

  ‘And his wife and child, I hope they are dead too. Hey,’ Ali turned to an old man walking alongside the cart, ‘take your hand off the wood, puts a drag on the animal.’

  ‘What did you do in Delhi?’ Naim asked him.

  ‘Have you become a fool? Worked in electric shops, what else? I saw you there once.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I was sent to do some work in your big house.’

  Naim sat up. ‘Where, when, what work?’

  ‘Mended a short-circuit in the kitchen.’

  ‘And you saw me?’

  ‘You came out of the house and got into a black car and went. I asked the maid and she said you were bibi’s husband and you went every day to work in the Viceroy’s office.’

  ‘And you didn’t stop me?’

  ‘How could I?’ Ali said.

  Naim was quiet for a long time.

  ‘This,’ said the old man, as if talking to himself, his hand still on the side plank of Ali’s cart for support, pointing with his other hand to the dead bodies that lay in the fields they were passing, ‘is history.’

  ‘Oi, you old beggar, stuff your history in your mother’s hind legs. Don’t you listen? I told you to take your hand off my cart, the poor animal is already dead finished. You want a blow of this before you will listen,’ Ali said, raising the cane in his hand that he used for beating the mule.

  ‘Let him,’ Naim said. ‘Leave him be.’

  ‘He’s putting a drag on it,’ Ali said sullenly.

  The man wasn’t very old, he only looked like it with his scraggly beard, dirty face and torn clothes. Naim liked his face; it had a rounded softness to it, although the cheeks had sunk.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Naim asked him after a while.

  ‘Jamaluddin.’

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘Aligarh.’

  ‘Nice town,’ Naim said.

  ‘Very nice. I was born in the city and stayed there all my life.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Taught history at the University.’

  ‘You were a professor?’

  ‘I was. Now I profess nothing. I taught old history, rajas and maharajas and the Mughals and English kings. Waste of time. This,’ he pointed again to the corpses in the field, ‘is history now. I shall be teaching this next to the boys and girls so they don’t forget. Only what you don’t forget is history.’

  ‘You’ll never get to your next history if you keep yapping like that,’ Ali taunted him again.

  ‘Hop on to the cart,’ Naim said to the man.

  The professor took an awkward leap. Ali looked angrily over his shoulder and started beating the mule, which broke into a gallop under the whip. The man hung half off the back of the cart. Naim pulled him in.

  That night, after safely bypassing the city of Amritsar, they heaved a sigh of relief. Jalandhar and Amritsar were the main danger points, teeming with Sikhs inflamed by the sight of Hindu and Sikh refugees fleeing in similar columns and trains from the opposite direction and arriving with nothing to show but tears. Past Amritsar, they knew they were now within striking distance of the border. They relaxed and set down for the night in a field sheltered by trees and with no village in sight.

  ‘We’ll be all right,’ Ali said, crawling under the cart for a few hours’ rest. ‘We will go to Lahore. I know every part of the city. I can get work there any time.’

  ‘No,’ Naim said to him, ‘we will go to the village.’

  ‘What village?’

 
‘Any village. We will get land there and work on it.’

  Ali gave Naim a look of suspicion in the dark. ‘How can we get land?’

  ‘We will put in a claim in return for the land we left behind.’

  ‘Have you got papers for the land in Roshan Pur?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how?’

  ‘We will do something,’ Naim said. ‘If nothing else, you have money, we will buy land.’

  ‘It’s not enough to buy land, only for a month’s food for us. I am not throwing my money away on some land when I can get paying work the very first day.’

  ‘No,’ Naim insisted. ‘It is good to work on the land. We will grow our own food, don’t have to rely on anyone else. Good open air as well, healthy life.’

  ‘You know how many other things we need to grow a crop?’

  ‘Yes, yes, we will do something,’ Naim said again.

  Ali kept looking at Naim as if he thought his brother had lost his mind. ‘My money is not for you and your foolish ideas,’ he said. ‘It is my own money.’ He turned away, putting an arm under his head on the ground.

  Just before dawn they were attacked, for the first and last time during their flight. A horde of Sikhs, armed with spears, swords, daggers and lathis, took them by surprise. A few of them were on horses, the rest on foot. The horsemen were looking only for women. They simply went round the column and grabbed young girls, flinging them sideways over the front of their horses and galloping away. The half-darkness of dawn came alive with the screams of girls as young as ten and eleven being snatched and taken away. Older men on foot lifted older women, at places two men subduing and carrying away a powerfully flailing woman. Most of the group, merely enraged with the passion for revenge, simply killed, sinking sharp weapons into the bellies of men, women and children. The smell of fresh-spilled blood filled the air. Many people in the column, even some who owned carts, got up and fled on foot, leaving everything behind, including the carts, which were seized by the attackers. Ali kept his head. He pushed Naim up on to the cart and drove the mule, beating it fiercely with his cane as well as the reins amid the yells and cries of the attackers and the attacked, not minding whether he ran over his own people as they fled on foot. He had only gone a short distance before a few of the invaders jumped at the mule, catching hold of its mouthpiece. The cart came to a halt. Other Sikhs pulled Naim off the back of the cart.

  Ali let go of the reins and turned round. ‘Don’t take him,’ he begged, ‘he is sick.’

  They beat Naim on the head with lathis.

  ‘No, no, in the name of Parmatma,’ Ali put his palms together in front of their faces, then bent down to touch their feet, ‘in the name of Guru Gurnanak, don’t beat him, he is not well, look, look here.’ With trembling hands he rolled up Naim’s sleeve and quickly unhinged the wooden limb, holding it up to them. ‘Here, see, he has only one –’

  A lathi fell on Ali’s hand, knocking the wooden arm to the ground, and another on his head.

  ‘Here,’ he wept, ‘wait, wait.’ He took out the money from the secret inner pocket of his shalwar. ‘Take this, take the lot, I have no more,’ he pulled the secret pocket inside out to show them, ‘nothing, take everything – just – leave him –’ They grabbed the money. Two lathis fell simultaneously on Ali and Naim. Naim fell in a motionless heap on the ground. A spear’s blade shone near Ali’s eyes. He glanced back for a way out and saw several men on top of his cart, holding the reins. He turned and ran. The Sikhs pursued him a little way, then, diverted by other prey nearer to them, gave up the chase.

  A half-mile down the road, Ali ran out of breath. The voices behind him had died down. He sat down in the dust on the ground, looking fixedly at an ant-heap while he tried to regain his breath. After a few minutes, he turned to take a look at the desolate landscape behind him, scanning the width of it with his eyes. Then he raised his face and both his arms to the sky and let out howl after dry, animal howl, the pain in his eyes not letting the tears come.

  CHAPTER 30

  ‘RAI MANZIL’ WAS a sprawling, solidly constructed double-storey house built in the 1870s by Rai Bahadur Kaidar Nath, a big local landlord, in the outskirts of Lahore. After his death, his two sons and their families lived in the house until July 1947. The Rais, Rajput Hindus traditionally close to the Muslim culture, were nevertheless swept up in the frenzy of Partition, worked up daily by columns and trainloads of refugees arriving from India with tales of atrocities visited upon them by the Hindus. Receiving information on the quiet from their friends, the two families left secretly for India under the protection of the army authorities. When a Muslim mob attacked the house a few days later, they found neither the residents nor any valuables in the place. In their anger, they put the building to the torch. The fire succeeded only in burning down the eastern half of the house before it was brought under control – mostly by the efforts of Muslim neighbours who feared the conflagration would spread to their own equally large houses.

  What was left of the Rai house, however, was more than sufficiently large to accommodate a family. Pervez’s friends in the Civil Service who had already taken up jobs in Pakistan soon showed him round a few grand houses, and from these he chose Rai Manzil, which was a roomy house with extensive wood panelling and masonry cornice-work on the ceilings and parapets along the roof and a large mature garden left untouched by the arsonists. With the four other members of his household, Pervez slipped into the house just as easily as he did into his job as Secretary, Education, in the new provincial government. His son, Imran, who had done his MA in economics in Delhi, took a teaching job at the Punjab University while preparing himself for the Civil Service competitive examination. Naheed and Azra took a few months to settle down, Naheed organizing the house and the servants and Azra looking after her sick father and the garden. The wing of the house that was still standing was in reasonable order, the only damage a slight blackening of the walls where the smoke from the other wing had touched them. Naheed had all the rooms whitewashed under her supervision while Azra hired a gardener and went round having the lanes and the lawns cleared of fallen leaves, dead birds andweeds and seeing that the fruit trees of citrus, guava, jaman and shahtoot were properly pruned.

  After the essentials had been dealt with, Pervez began gently to prompt Naheed and Azra to take up jobs in the Education Department where, he said, he could easily have decent posts created for them – ‘Just for the sake of helping the new generation in this country in which we have invested by choosing to live here.’ But, realist as he was, he could see that if things didn’t quite work out all the able-bodied members of the family would have to pull their weight merely in order to keep a large house and its staff going. Although they had quickly lodged a claim to ‘evacuee property’ in lieu of the estate they had left behind in India, it was being processed for proper allotment at a snail’s pace by the Rehabilitation Department while local people, non-refugees, were walking into evacuated houses and vast landholdings and taking possession by force of men and arms. Having no such resources at his command, Pervez, despite his senior position in the government, had to wait patiently amid the administrative confusion created by tens of thousands of claims, small and large, true, untrue and false, and not enough staff to deal with them. In the new country, since refugees held no papers of domicile and no proof of property ownership, their ‘claims’ were without substance and had to be recreated.

  The fortune of Pervez’s family (now no longer Roshan Agha’s) had meanwhile been considerably depleted on account of a wrong decision in Delhi: having been unable to get all their luggage on to the aircraft as accompanied baggage, and since they were not prepared to part with even a single piece of it for any length of time, they had decided, after prolonged and ill-tempered discussions, to take the train. The train was attacked at both Jalandhar and Amritsar stations by Hindus and Sikhs, who over-powered the police contingent accompanying the train and killed and robbed the passengers. The five members of the fam
ily were fortunate to have escaped death or injury, but they were deprived of most of their baggage, looted or lost. They were, however, able to hang on to their handbags which contained all their jewellery. They also escaped with some cash that had been sewn into the lining of their clothes. The cash quickly went within the first two months of their arrival, most of it on making the house habitable. Selling off the jewellery – the family heirlooms – was anathema to them. As a result, they began to live within much reduced means, which meant only Pervez’s salary. Azra never complained, but Naheed constantly did. She would not, she said, set foot in a tonga or any such thing; she had to have a car and chauffeur. So a proposal that she should out to work in a girls’ college came to nothing. The household subsided into a dreary routine, waiting for their claim to be settled. At one stage they were made the offer of an equally large tract of land in adjustment of their claim, but it was hundreds of miles away in the uncultivated wilderness of the province of Sind, and Pervez rejected it. The house, though, had been allotted to them in the name of Roshan Agha. Their days and evenings were spent making plans to rebuild the burnt-out part of the house as and when they got their hands on their claimed land or, preferably, compensation for it in cash.

  Roshan Agha meanwhile had risen above everything that went on around him: he was dying. Soon after they arrived in Pakistan his diabetes ceased responding to treatment, and the disease began to attack his vital organs. From the very first day, his main concern had been less with getting his estate back than with changing the name of the house. ‘RAI MANZIL’ was etched in big black letters into a white marble slab right up on the façade of the house. He couldn’t bear to look at it. It got so that eventually he stopped going out altogether to sit on the lawn on pleasant autumn evenings. The first thing he asked of his son on Pervez’s return from office each day was whether the ‘ordinance’ had been issued. Every day, he waited. The government had forbidden by law the altering of names and signs of businesses and buildings, including private homes, until it completed its inventory of ‘evacuee property’, after which a new ordinance was to be issued allowing changes of use and name. That it would take some time was known and accepted by all in the family, and anyway nobody was much bothered whether or not it was allowed. But for Roshan Agha it became a matter of life and death. In the end, it proved to be literally so.