‘Two hundred and fifty rupees!’ The old woman’s pupils dilated and her eyeballs disappeared behind their sockets.
‘Your hair has grown grey with age,’ old Gaffar said, ’so tell me, woman, have you ever heard of such a canard? How glibly he talks of two hundred and fifty rupees. Why, it’s almost a fortune. Shamsul, as you know, demanded eighty rupees for Jahunna and eventually came down to sixty. Well, what’s wrong with his girl? She’s strong and healthy like a man. And think of that scoundrel, Hasba, demanding two hundred and fifty rupees for that wisp of a girl? You have seen so much in life, woman. Now tell me, does it matter if Jahunna is a shade darker than others? Dark or fair, a girl is a girl. Only six months ago I bought your son a gun for sixty rupees. I had to sell a camel to raise the money. Ask him, will he be able to earn two hundred and fifty rupees in all his life? And see what dreams he has as though he’s a king’s son. You have seen enough of the world, woman. Now tell me, have you ever heard of anyone demanding two hundred and fifty rupees for a bride? Why, for two hundred and fifty rupees one can buy the feringi’s big cannon!’
Jabbar heard all this, sighed and turned his face to the wall.
Gaffar and his wife could not bear the sight of their only son languishing away before their eyes.
The old man said, ‘I’m like a ripe fruit and may drop off any moment. Whatever I have, I have put by so that this boy may live in comfort. My two camels are the only means of our livelihood. If I sell the camels, he’ll go about like a homeless coolie, breaking stones of the feringi’s roads for a living. People will mock at him and say, “There goes Gaffar’s son – a petty labourer!” Well, if such is his fate, what can I do? I’ll not last for ever. I’ll not be there to hear their taunts.’
At last Gaffar had to sell his two camels in the bazaar of Bannu, and Shabbu came to live with Jabbar as his wife.
Shabbu thought no end of herself. She bragged all the time about how Jabbar’s father had paid two hundred and fifty rupees for her. When she went to the well, she returned with the pitcher only half filled, swaying her waist as she walked. Her neighbour, Meeran, warned her not to be so vain. ‘Men don’t want dressed-up dolls,’ she said. ‘They demand work from their women. One day your husband will give you such a beating that your waist will get twisted for ever.’
‘Ah! You are forgetting, my friend!’ Shabbu wiggled her thumb in the air and rolled her eyes so that they stretched up to her ears. ‘My father did not make these fellows count out twelve score and ten just to give them the pleasure of beating me!’
Shabbu was indeed vain, and fond of good clothes. She wore a black velvet waistcoat, three lines of mother-of-pearl buttons tacked along its seams. She washed her hair twice a month, rubbed butter into it and every time she went out of the house, she patted down her hair with moistened palms.
Jabbar’s mother helplessly watched the ways of her daughter-in-law. ‘What use is she to me?’ she would grumble to her neighbours, wrinkling up her nose. ‘A costly doll – that’s what she is. She has no time left from her fopperies.’
‘You are no more a child,’ the old man said to Jabbar. ‘If you don’t work, what will you live on? It doesn’t behove you to idle away your time at home. We had two camels, the only means of our livelihood, and they too are gone. Do you expect me, an old man, to go to distant lands and work as a coolie so that you may stay at home, doing nothing?’
It was a reluctant Jabbar that one day left for Bannu in search of work. His heart was still in the village. Hardly a week had passed when he was overwhelmed by the longing to be with Shabbu. Unable to bear the separation any longer, he set off for his village one night. After trudging sixteen miles, as he saw the hazy rooftops of the village arranged against the hill in the first glow of dawn, he suddenly stopped in his tracks. Won’t his neighbours sneer at him, for his impatience at meeting his wife so soon? The thought acted as shackles on his feet. Sitting down on a nearby cliff he wishfully gazed at the door of his house, hoping to catch a glimpse of Shabbu as she came out to fetch water from the spring. With luck, he may even manage to exchange a few words with her and then rush back to Bannu, unnoticed by others.
Yes, Shabbu came, but not alone; there were two girls with her. Hiding behind a boulder he looked at Shabbu with hungry eyes, his heart pounding with excitement. But he could not bring himself to speak to her. What would her companions say? Shabbu came laughing and joking and went away the same way, swaying her hips. Dejected, Jabbar trudged back to Bannu.
His mind was filled with jealousy. He was piqued at the thought that while he sweated his guts out working in an uncongenial town, she was having the time of her life in the village, as though he meant nothing to her. Perfidy, he realized, was another name for woman.
Hardly a week had passed and Jabbar was again driven by the same desire to see his wife and, if possible, to hug her and steal a kiss from her. He made the journey overnight and at dawn found himself hovering near the village spring. This time again Shabbu did not come alone. Bubbling with youthful exuberance she came accompanied by three women of the neighbourhood. Crouching behind a boulder Jabbar perked up his ears to hear their gossip.
‘How coquettish you are!’ Meeran, Shabbu’s neighbour, said, holding up Shabbu’s chin. ‘That’s why the village gallants are so gone on you.’
Shabbu’s face glowed with pride. She went away with the pitcher of water.
Jabbar’s heart went numb as though a heavy rock had crashed upon it. His thoughts took a new turn, filling his mind with dark suspicion.
There were many gay youths in the village whose sole occupation was to create mischief. For instance, Rahman and Abbas – the Devil’s own progeny; they could be up to anything. If there was nothing wrong, why did Meeran talk to Shabbu in such a bantering tone? And why did Shabbu flaunt such finery and go about so cockily? Could there be anything more outrageous? Well, here he was, toiling hard and hungering after her and she…why, she hadn’t even a thought to spare for him! Jabbar wallowed in his own misery.
He gloomily surveyed his prospects. A petty labourer’s job at eight annas a day, he realized, would lead him nowhere. The desire to return home quickly made him desperate. One night, taking a bold plunge, he broke into a house and got away with it. Within a month and a half he was back home for good with three hundred and fifty rupees in his pocket. His father felt reassured: his son could make his way in life, at long last.
Like an indigo spot on cloth which does not wash off easily, suspicion, once it takes root in the mind, keeps nagging with maddening persistence.
‘You had a gay time while I was in Bannu,’ Jabbar said to Shabbu.
Shabbu was cut to the quick. ‘What gay time?’ she demanded. ‘Gay time with whom?’
‘Why, there are many. Rahman and Abbas, for instance. Else why did you go to the spring decked like that? Don’t I know?’
‘May I die if I ever cast a glance at anybody,’ Shabbu hissed. ‘Or may the one who blames me.’
‘Didn’t you go to the spring just to show yourself off?’ Jabbar said, quivering with rage. ‘To attract people with your charms?’
‘So what?’ Shabbu said coolly. ‘If people stare at me, am I to blame for it?’
‘You try to show yourself off – that’s why they stare at you.’
Jabbar started keeping an eye on Shabbu. Even if he saw a man standing a hundred yards away from her he suspected the fellow had designs on her.
‘What made you smile?’ Jabbar asked Shabbu one night. ‘I saw you smiling while you were coming home.’
‘Who says I was smiling?’
‘Yes, you were. And what were those people doing, standing there? Weren’t they staring at you?’
‘How should I know?’ she said flushing with pride.
‘You are mighty proud of your looks. Mind, I’ll cut off your nose!’ Jabbar threatened.
‘My nose is worth twelve score and ten,’ she replied coolly.
That night Shabbu fell asleep immediately b
ut there was no sleep in Jabbar’s eyes.
‘Listen,’ he whispered.
There was no reply.
Jabbar seethed with rage. What an impudent woman. How peacefully she slept while he lay tossing in bed. Indeed, it was her looks that had made her so vain, making all the riffraff of the village crazy over her. Could a man whose wife was ogled at have any respect? It was others who had their fill looking at her while he chewed the cud of humiliation. What good was her beauty to him?
The thoughts that besiege the mind in the dark stillness of the night are loaded with passion, making the imagination run berserk. The daylight has many distractions to dilute their intensity, but the night has no such impediments to keep the thoughts on leash.
For Jabbar his misery had become unbearable because it seemed to have no end. It made him desperate. He brought out a knife from under his pillow. In the darkness his probing fingers searched for Shabbu’s nose. He caught it. With one stroke of the knife he slashed off her nose and threw it aside.
Shabbu shrieked. Jabbar’s mother came in running. The earthen lamp was lighted hurriedly. The neighbours, hearing Shabbu’s shrieks, rushed in to find out what had happened in the house. Old Gaffar fulminated at the carnage his son had committed while the neighbours plied the bewildered mother with suggestions as to how to treat the injury. ‘Ho, someone fetch a warm piece of mutton from a freshly butchered sheep or goat and press it on the wound,’ an old woman cried. ‘Delay will kill the girl,’ she warned.
‘Where’ll I get a sheep or a goat at this time? We have none of our own,’ Jabbar’s panic-stricken mother lamented.
‘Well, it’s up to you,’ the old woman shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’ve told you the remedy.’
Jabbar was looking on, stupefied. He had cut Shabbu’s nose to keep her only to himself. That his action could spell death for her – the very thought horrified him.
He could not let Shabbu die. He was now even more desperate than before. If her life depended on a freshly butchered warm piece of flesh something had to be done about it. He picked up the knife again, and before anyone knew what he was doing, he had cut a piece of flesh from his thigh and placed it on the hole where Shabbu’s nose had been. His parents stood aghast.
For days together Shabbu lay in the cot, groaning with pain, while Jabbar, his thigh bandaged with some rags, would sit on the edge of the cot, whisking away the flies from her face. Her face had swollen and she had great difficulty in even swallowing a drop of water. And then she got a raging fever. When her condition showed no signs of improvement, Jabbar decided to take her to the feringi’s hospital at Bannu. One night when his parents were sleeping, he lifted Shabbu on his shoulders and slipped out of the house. Leaning on his staff, and weighed down under his precious load, he hobbled towards Bannu. It took them three days to reach Bannu and another twenty days before Shabbu’s wound healed.
With her nose gone, Shabbu breathed wheezily through the hole above her mouth and her speech became a nasal twang. One day she whined in a thin, guttural voice: ‘The doctor’s memsahib says she can get me from vilayat a special kind of nose made of rubber to replace the lost one.’
Jabbar looked up at her, alarmed. ‘You look charming as you are,’ he said. ‘Anyway, what do you require another for? To show it to the village loafers?’
Shabbu wept and became morose. She refused to eat. Jabbar was in a quandary and cursed in his heart the British doctor’s wife who had put that nasty idea of getting another nose into Shabbu’s head. In what desperation he had got rid of his wife’s nose and there was this memsahib ready to get her another.
When Shabbu did not speak or eat for three days, Jabbar was disarmed. He reluctantly deposited fifty rupees with the hospital towards the cost of a rubber nose. But he made Shabbu take an oath by Allah: If she found anyone gazing at her, she would immediately remove the nose from her face and tuck it away into the pocket of her waistcoat!
(Translated from the Hindi by Jai Ratan)
KHUSHWANT SINGH
selects
Best Indian Short Stories
KHUSHWANT SINGH is the most widely read author in India today. His weekly columns are reproduced by over fifty journals in all the regional languages of the country. He has done different things at different times: practised law, diplomacy and politics; taught comparative religion at Princeton and Swarthmore; and edited The Illustrated Weekly of India and The Hindustan Times. He has written regularly for several European and American journals including The New York Times. He has also edited and translated a number of literary works.
Author of more than ninety books, Khushwant Singh is best known for his work of fiction, Train to Pakistan, and his two-volume History of the Sikhs, which is still considered the most authoritative writing on the subject. His acerbic pen, his wit and humour, and, most of all, his ability to laugh at himself have ensured him immense popularity over the years.
He was Member of Parliament from 1980 to 1986. Among other honours, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974 by the president of India (he returned the decoration in 1984 in protest against the Union government’s siege of the Golden Temple, Amritsar).
He lives in New Delhi.
HarperCollins Publishers India
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Published in India in 2003
by HarperCollins Publishers India
Seventh impression 2007
Copyright © Individual authors
ISBN 13: 978-81-7223-464-5
ISBN 10: 81-7223-464-3
Epub Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9789350292945
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While I have taken care to establish contact with each of the contributors for his/her permission to reproduce the story, this has not always been possible. I have taken the liberty to do so. I regret omission and would appreciate it being brought to my notice so that i can get in touch with the contributor. - K.S.
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Khushwant Singh Best Indian Short Stories Volume 2 Page 22