The Weary Generations (2 page)

For it so happened that the young British officer was a member of the English aristocracy with ‘high connections'. His rescue thus earned the gratitude of the viceroy, who summoned Roshan Ali to present himself at the Delhi darbar and, in a befitting ceremony, bestowed upon him a khil'at that bore the title of ‘Roshan Agha', in addition to granting him the right to go and round up as much uncultivated land as he could manage inside of seventy-two hours anywhere in the country. To the question of why and how Roshan Agha came to pick this particular spot for his land, miles away from anywhere and many more from his native town, the teller of the tale had no definite answer. So he hummed and hawed and quickly went over to the more intriguing episode of how Roshan Ali, single-handed and without any material resources, went about setting bounds to the territory he claimed. According to Ahmed Din, he gave his full attention to the problem for many hours before settling on a plan. All he needed was a horse, a large metal jar with a pinhole in its bottom and the purest honey he could find to fill the jar. The problem of money arose. What with his trip to the darbar in Delhi and fancy clothes to be bought for the occasion, Roshan Ali was left with little money for the purpose of putting his plan
into action. He had to borrow the money from a colleague of his, a neighbour and good friend, for the horse, the utensil and the substance. Thus equipped, he started off. Holding the jar aloft, transferring it from hand to hand as the arms got tired, Roshan Ali rode for sixty hours, day and night, stopping off only three times during this period for a bite to eat from his bag and a few minutes' rest. That was all that the horse and the rider could do before the two of them got too exhausted to go on. But enough had been accomplished. The honey, leaking drop by drop through the tiny hole, had attracted ants and other insects of all kinds and sizes wherever it fell. Millions of these creatures not only outlined the surface of the earth, but most of them could not free themselves from the dense stickiness of honey and died there, forming fixed borders to Roshan Ali's land. Roshan Ali had become Nawab Roshan Agha not just in name but in substance as well.

Regardless of the implausibilities of the story, it was considered of no consequence to doubt the veracity of the story, for there was the solid evidence of a landmass of ten thousand acres, now irrigated by the cutting of a canal from the river and covered with living crops, sustaining some hundreds of human and animal lives for all to see. Roshan Agha built himself a brick house in the middle, leaving fifty yards of ground on each side where he planted a garden of mango and citrus trees and banks of scented flowers, in a perfect circle all the way round. It was to be called ‘Gol Bagh' – the round garden. Beyond the tall garden hedges grew the village on all sides, except for a path on one side that cut through the mud houses to the brick house. Some years later, when the income from the produce of the vast landholding began to materialize, Roshan Agha also built, over many years and at much expense, a grand house in the best part of Delhi and named it ‘Roshan Mahal', although he never lived there for any length of time, visiting it for increasingly brief periods before returning to his beloved garden.

Roshan Ali, being ‘Middle Pass', was an educated man in his time and much valued the acquisition of education. He sent his only son, a bright boy, to good schools with private tutors, also briefly to England, although the boy was never to acquire any higher qualifications there except for a facility in spoken English and polite manners. Upon his return, however, the son committed an act of impropriety so serious, that is, he independently married a woman of unsuitable character and class, that the displeased father banished him from his ancestral home in Roshan Pur. Thenceforth the son, Nawab Ghulam Mohyyeddin Khan, made Roshan
Mahal his permanent home in Delhi. Roshan Agha did not see his son until the very last few weeks of his life when he was persuaded to forgive his son and accompany him to Delhi for medical treatment. His son's unsuitable wife had died a few years after the marriage but not before giving birth to a son and a daughter. The arrival of grandchildren greatly pleased Roshan Agha and was said to be the reason for his forgiving his son at the end of his life. The dead wife's widowed sister was invited to Roshan Mahal to look after the two small children. As Nawab Ghulam Mohyyeddin never remarried, his sister-in-law eventually took permanent residence at Roshan Mahal.

The only other brick house in Roshan Pur was located at one corner of the village and belonged to the family of the Mughals. The story of the Mughals, again from Ahmed Din's mouth, went thus: Mirza Mohammad Beg was the man from whom Roshan Ali borrowed money to buy the horse he took to round up the land. As Roshan Ali's transformation into Roshan Agha, with all the attendant riches, took place, he did not forget his old friend and benefactor. Roshan Agha transferred five hundred acres out of his ownership to Mirza Mohammad Beg by legal deed, invited him to come and live in Roshan Pur, built him a pukka house, although smaller than his own, at his own expense and told him to get on with cultivating the land. Mirza Mohammad Beg came from a long line of Mughals whose ancestors came to India with the first Mughal warriors from the north ten generations back, and he had the noble features of pure northern blood about him. Rumour had it that Roshan Agha was greatly enamoured of the unmatched beauty of his friend's wife and that it was this that had impelled him to show such largesse to Mohammad Beg; and even that Mohammad Beg's eldest son was the product of this attraction that had translated itself into a liaison in due course of time. But the very nature of rumour is wild, stretching itself to say even that Roshan Agha's only child, Ghulam Mohyyeddin Khan, who had pale grey eyes and a fair complexion, had come to be as a result of a tryst between Roshan Agha's beautiful wife and the very same Captain Johnson, later Colonel, whose life was saved by Roshan Agha and who became firm friends with his benefactor, coming to visit and stay, from as far as England, in Roshan Pur, the two going together to hunt wild boar and stag, the white man returning on occasion at odd hours, at times alone to the house, etc. etc. In the absence of solid evidence, however, what price mere rumour! No one, in the event, gave much thought to such gossip, except, in the dark and desolate corners of privacy, to lend some colour to dreary lives.

Mirza Mohammad Beg was a hard-working man and had an interest in
metalwork. Besides agriculture, he also started a little workshop, where he was later to make all the tools used in working the land. He was not even forty years of age when bad luck befell him. After a brief illness, Mirza Mohammad Beg died, leaving behind wife and two sons. The eldest, Niaz Beg, grew to be a strong and handsome young man under the tutelage of Roshan Agha, living a comfortable life on the lands. He had inherited his father's love of working with metal objects and spent much time in the workshop Mohammad Beg had built. His mother married him off to a good-looking girl from a Mughal family she had known from her old town of Rohtak. There was no issue until, fifteen years after the marriage was consummated, a son was born. It was said that the old woman, Mohammad Beg's widow, was seized with such overwhelming joy at the birth of a grandson that she died on the spot. With the removal of his mother's iron hand, Niaz Beg felt free to take a second wife, a girl from a lower class and much younger than himself.

Mohammad Beg's second son, Ayaz Beg, had the love of books. He went to a madrissa in a neighbouring village for some time, but did not like it. He stopped going to the madrissa and began spending most of his days wandering around or helping his older brother make tools in the workshop. After a few years, Ayaz Beg got bored with village life and ran away from home. He joined up with a group of travelling people roaming the vast country and ended up way out in Calcutta. There he joined the East Bengal Railways as a labourer in the yards. After a time, a sudden change came over Ayaz Beg. He started reading pamphlets and magazines of a technical nature, chiefly to do with the railway systems. All the boredom of life went out of his bones and with years of hard work and application, teaching himself to read English, he rose to be a mechanic and kept rising through the ranks thereafter. He did not return home.

Then an incident occurred in the village which radically changed this family's fortunes. On the charge of having committed a grossly illegal act, Niaz Beg was arrested and sentenced to twelve years of rigorous imprisonment. The authorities did not stop at that; they also confiscated most of the lands belonging to the two brothers in their joint names, leaving only enough for the two wives of Niaz Beg to get by. Ayaz Beg then came to the village for the first time since he had left it and took his brother's young son with him to Calcutta, where he had by now risen, despite his lack of formal qualifications, to the very considerable position of engineer, educating himself besides in a wide range of general subjects, acquiring a rounded and sophisticated personality all the more remarkable for a man with his background. He never married. Now he had got something to do:
to educate his nephew. He sent the boy to good English schools, giving him the best education available at his level.

Roshan Pur has a central position in this story; for the first few days, however, our narrative takes us to Delhi, the capital city of the Indian Empire, where, the old Roshan Agha having died recently in his eighty-sixth year, the title was going to be transferred to his son, Nawab Ghulam Mohyyeddin Roshan Ali Khan, in an elaborate ceremony held at Roshan Mahal. These were also the days when the struggle for the political independence of India had begun to take shape.

T
HE LARGE HOUSE,
set back from the road, stood in vast grounds at the corner of Queen's and Curzon roads. The two men, one elderly, the other young, got down from the behli a short distance from the main gate. Approaching the house, they could see the bunting strung overhead, the breeze ruffling it gently, and little multicoloured lanterns twinkling in trees and bushes. The light of the day was dying. The surface of the long drive leading from the gate was covered with freshly crushed, bright red gravel, marked on both sides by neat chalk lines defining the borders of the banks of summer flowers going right up to the wide patio. On the veranda were placed two tables, one bearing white napkin cloths, the other bare. Around the bare table were gathered several young people of both sexes, busily making up loose-knotted napkins but in a way that seemed not a job but an entertaining game to pass the time. Chairs and tables were being laid on the lawn by servants. A girl stepped aggressively from the lawn on to the patio. Going up to the veranda, she spotted the two guests and stopped, looking up as if startled.

‘Hello, Uncle,' she said. ‘Adaab. Papa is in the drawing room. Please go in. We are,' she laughed, ‘making napkins.'

Taking a quick glance at her wrist watch, she went up the four steps and joined the others. The girl had hazel eyes.

‘Look, Azra,' a girl in red silk dress said, holding out a jumbled-up white cloth. The first girl took the cloth and, exhibiting the same aggression that was in her step, held it up.

‘Wrong. Absolutely wrong. Look, everybody. Pervez,' she cried, pointing to the tallest boy in the crowd, ‘makes it like this,' and rolled up the cloth into a misshapen ball.

Everyone laughed.

‘The maulana ties it like this round his head to lead the namaz,' a plump
boy said from the other side of the table.

With her head thrown back, the girl was laughing, causing the back of her neck to roll up in a tight little rope of young, wheaten flesh, her face, flushed with the rush of blood, stretched in mad hilarity, making her finely ribbed throat tremble ever so slightly, her eyes beginning to water thinly, mockingly fixed on her brother, Pervez, the tall boy.

‘I am not a girl,' the boy said, embarrassed. ‘It's a girl's job. Or a bearer's.'

In this unfamiliar milieu, Naim's heart began to beat rapidly. He wanted to go and join this crowd, yet he couldn't. He followed his uncle, Ayaz Beg, into the house.

Nawab Ghulam Mohyyeddin was sitting on a tall delicate stool in front of a roll-top bureau, writing in a heavy notebook. He had a fair complexion, gold-tinged hair, a high, straight nose and pale-grey eyes. He extended his hand to Ayaz Beg.

‘Come, come. When did you arrive?'

‘Only an hour back,' replied Ayaz Beg and shook hands, bowing low. Naim had never seen his uncle greet anyone with such deference. ‘I am sorry, couldn't attend Roshan Agha's funeral. Job held me down.'

‘Of course, of course, for a conscientious officer like you.' The nawab turned to Naim. ‘And the young man?'

‘Nephew,' Ayaz Beg replied.

‘Oh,' the nawab said. ‘I see.' He kept his gaze upon the boy for a few seconds. Naim thought that the older man's powerful face had imperceptibly tensed. ‘I see,' he repeated. ‘Resembles his father. You know, we grew up together.' He paused. ‘Is he back?'

‘Yes.'

‘How long was it?'

‘Twelve years.'

‘Oh!' The nawab got up from his seat and started pacing the room. Looking at Naim, he asked, ‘Is he at school?'

‘He has just done his senior Cambridge,' Ayaz Beg informed him.

‘Have you seen your brother?'

‘No.'

‘Will you be seeing him?'

‘No,' answered Ayaz Beg.

All three sat down on sofas. Ayaz Beg finally broke the brief silence that followed their last exchange. ‘I hope everything is in place for Tajposhi.'

‘Yes, yes. Insha'allah. Plenty of people. You will enjoy meeting them. Gokhle sahib is coming. So is Mrs Besant. I know you are a rank theosophist. Ha, ha!'

Ayaz Beg smiled.

‘You know,' the nawab continued, ‘I would have liked Niaz Beg to come for this …' his voice sloped off.