The Weary Generations (31 page)

He had been asked by his local command to assist in holding a public meeting in Jat Nagar, the largest village in the territory. He was to organize the gathering of people from twelve villages within reach of Jat Nagar. A couple of men were to come from Delhi to speak to the meeting. Naim sent his men out to inform everyone in all the surrounding villages about the day, the time and the place of the meeting, and waited for the day to arrive. As in the previous few lucky years, the monsoons did not fail to bring timely rain and it was not so heavy as to wash away the soil. The mood among the farmers as well as the muzaras and field labourers was good, for they were optimistic that the earth would give them grain that would see them and their animals through the year without hunger attacking their guts. They had time on their hands and the moment was judged suitable for meetings – jalsas – all over the country. Political meetings, although not covered by a blanket ban, were nevertheless actively discouraged by the government.

As the day came and Naim and his party of men arrived in the village, they did not see many police in the outskirts. Jat Nagar was a market town for grain and other agricultural produce, serving a hundred villages around. The market, a large compound made up of wholesalers' stores and shops with a clear area in the middle, was situated in the centre of the village. It was here that the meeting was to take place. Men in large numbers
had gathered outside the village, and the speakers from Delhi had arrived the previous night. When this crowd reached the market square, they saw that the only entrance to the central area had been blocked by planks of wood, supported by stacks of bricks on both sides and tied to each other with ropes. The job had been done expertly and only in the past hour so that the news hadn't reached the people who had waited at some distance outside the village at the gathering point. There were police everywhere. Only their three-stripe chief constable was armed with a rifle; the others carried lathis in their hands. There was nothing the people who had come to the jalsa could do other than to first stand around and then to sit down on the ground where they stood, filling up the narrow bazaars and streets around the square. The shops had quickly been shut and the shopkeepers joined the crowd. It was a day when the sun, after several days of overcast skies, had come out and was stinging the earth with its direct rays.

The wet earth on which the men sat was giving off steam, creating in the absence of wind a mugginess that made it difficult for them to breathe. With the sweat pouring from them like water and the sun baking their brains, with no one to listen to, they were getting restless. They started raising the usual slogans. The police were strutting around, striking their lathis on the ground, abusing the men, telling them to go home and sit in their mothers' laps. The crowd was becoming angry. They had walked miles and didn't want to go home.

Suddenly, three men got up and charged, with all their body weight, at a plank that seemed a bit rickety. The plank fell, with the men on top of it. They had gained entry. More men followed the first three, pushing over the other planks. Naim, who was sitting near the front, ran in and went straight to the other side of the compound where some covered bales of cotton had been stacked. He mounted them and stood there, looking at the men pouring in through the opening. A lathi charge was going on outside, the police beating the men with their batons. Some men were bleeding from the head and the face. But the purpose of the charge, which was to disperse the crowd, was defeated as the men were driven instead into the enclosure, now fast filling up. As the square filled, the last men in re-erected the planks, closing the gap. The police were pushing from outside and the men from the inside. Naim was not scheduled to make a speech at this meeting, but as he was standing on a raised platform on his own and could not spot the two speakers from Delhi, who were lost in the mêlée, he started to speak. He wasn't aware of what he was saying, except that he knew he had to keep speaking, if only to say over and over again, ‘Stay calm, stay calm, don't hit back …' The crowd, except for the few
who were holding the planks up, began actually to listen to him, to sit down one by one and become quiet.

Naim was babbling on when suddenly something happened to his perception: the crowd that he had been seeing as an amorphous body composed of irregular heads and bodies began to appear as a solid mass, joined up by unseen strings, expanding and shrinking like a lake of rubber, and the strings, he felt, were in his hands – both hands, he thought happily – and he could pull and push and tug, draw and withdraw and direct this concentrated centre of power whichever way he wished. He even waved his left hand to the right and left, and people would obey the command, draw in or out, sit down and listen to whatever he was saying. He talked on …

Eventually the police forced their way and stormed in, raining blows of their lathis on the sitting men and arresting them. The head constable with the rifle came straight for Naim, mounted the cotton bales and put him under arrest. There was no time to escape. When the policeman pulled up Naim's second hand for handcuffs, he was amazed.

Azra had been spending long periods at her father's house. She met her friends, read newspapers, books, anything she could lay her hands on. Occasionally, when she got bored with her life there and knew that Naim was in Roshan Pur, she returned to their house in the village for a few days. They talked, exchanged news and very occasionally made love. The garden, having taken root, was growing more or less on its own, although like the life in the house it suffered from a general lack of attention, with the result that part of it, especially the less hardy part, was drying out year by year.

In another part of the village, one hot day, Ali and his friends were playing with conkers when a dispute arose among the children. There were accusations of unfairness and deceit. Some pushing and shoving took place, and a punch was thrown. Two of them were wrestled to the ground and kicked. The game broke up and everyone went home, leaving only Ali and Aisha there. Aisha was Ali's cousin, thrice removed, whose mother had come to visit Ali's mother for a few days. Ali picked up his conkers from the dust on the ground, loosened during the skirmish, and the two of them started walking away. Aisha would take a shisham leaf from the handful she kept in her shirt pocket, fold it between her thumb and fingers and, holding it tightly stretched at both ends, blow on one end, producing a sharp whistling sound. She called them peepees. After a couple of times the leaf would crack and begin to leak wind. She would then fish out
another green leaf and start again.

‘I could cut Suleiman down with my left hand for playing foul,' Ali boasted.

Aisha kept blowing the peepees until they reached the cool shade of a large shisham tree. They sat down underneath it. Ali started rubbing his conkers on the tree trunk to put an extra shine on them.

‘Ali,' Aisha said, ‘can you climb the tree?'

‘I can climb any tree,' he answered.

‘My leaves are finished. Go up and get me some more.'

‘Why should I? You can go up yourself.'

‘I can't climb it, it's too big.'

‘Then get Rawal to do it for you.'

‘Why?'

‘You are always talking to him, aren't you? Why are you always talking to him?'

‘I don't talk to him,' Aisha said.

‘Don't lie. I saw you talking to him.'

‘He talked to me first, then I talked to him.'

‘See, you were lying. I saw him pinch you on the cheek. If you lie, I will pinch you too.'

‘No, please.'

Ali pinched her hard on the cheek. Aisha started crying. Ali panicked. ‘All right, all right, here, take my conkers, they are shiny, look, they have more shine than anyone else's. Take them all.'

Aisha's sobs slowed down but did not stop, still producing a low whining noise.

‘I will go up and get you some leaves,' Ali said.

Aisha quickly became quiet. ‘Go on then,' she said, wiping her tears with the back of her hand.

The tree trunk had few holes that could serve as footholds. After a struggle, Ali managed to climb up to the branches. ‘Can Rawal climb this big tree?' Ali asked from above.

‘Yes, he can.'

‘No, he can't.'

‘He is big,' Aisha said.

Ali did not answer. He started picking dry, yellowing leaves and throwing them down, ones that would crack when folded and be useless as peepees.

‘These are no good,' Aisha said from below. ‘Pick the green ones.'

‘I can't see any green leaves here,' Ali said.

‘I can. Lots of them.'

‘Then get Rawal to get you them. I bet he can't climb this tree, there are no footholds. Can he?'

After a minute's silence, Aisha said weakly, ‘No.'

‘No what?'

‘He can't climb the tree.'

‘See, I told you.'

Ali then picked handfuls of young green leaves and dropped them on Aisha. Aisha ran around collecting and stuffing them in her pocket. Ali slithered down from the tree and the two sat there quietly, Aisha making peepees of the succulent, elastic leaves that gave out a good sound for several blowings. It was noon, and the sun was emitting rays of fire that drove the men from their work to seek shelter in the shade of dense trees, quenching their thirst from pots of lassi and waiting for the sun to slip a little from overhead.

‘I am going home,' Ali said.

‘Why?'

‘I am hungry.'

The heat had sent everyone indoors in the village. As the two children approached their house, they saw Ali's old stepmother come out of the door and go into the next house. A tight white sheet of sun spread over the courtyard ground, making magic of the empty silence of a summer noon. Beside the old woman's room was a small hut-like cell of a room. There her milk was kept in an open earthenware pot on top of a bed of slow-burning dung cakes to prevent it from splitting in the heat. It warmed and gradually, over many hours, formed a thick layer of reddish brown fat on the top before the dung cakes beneath it quietly turned to ashes. Ali entered the little cell with a reed stalk in his hand that he had picked up before coming into the house, cleaning it on the way by blowing into it. He pierced the top layer of the milk on one side, taking care not to disturb it, and dipped one end of the reed pipe into the milk. From the other end he sucked the warm sweet milk from the pot. After swallowing several mouthfuls, he asked Aisha, ‘Are you hungry?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘I will drink from Auntie's milk,' pointing to a similar mud cupola by the door of Ali's mother's room.

‘No,' Ali said, ‘don't drink our milk. Here, take the reed, come, drink from here.'

Aisha sucked up the milk from the same pinprick of a hole, almost invisible, in the fat layer. As they came out the old woman entered the house and saw them. She ran after them.

‘Stop, thieves, I am going to deal with you. Thieving robbers, stop –'

They ran as fast as they could around the woman and jumped through the open door, not stopping until they reached the old pipal tree, and on its huge roots they fell, breathless, their eyes streaming.

‘Why are you crying?' Ali asked.

‘My feet are burning,' Aisha whimpered.

‘Hunh!' Ali said disdainfully. ‘Excuses.'

‘Why, you are crying too.'

‘It's only the dung smoke in my eyes,' Ali said manfully. ‘I never cry.'

‘Rawal never cries,' Aisha said. ‘He is a big man.'

‘You are small,' said Ali to her. ‘You should never speak to him. I am small, only one year bigger than you.'

They sat there talking until they knew that their mothers would be up from their afternoon sleep to protect them.

The next day, Aisha and her mother were leaving. Ali's mother had borrowed two mares from Naim's house to take her guests back to their village. As mother and daughter mounted the horses and said goodbye, two villagers passing on the other side of the pond called out.

‘Chaudri Naim's auntie, may God be with you.'

They knew that the woman was really Ali's aunt, but Naim's name was used as a matter of pride.

‘God be with you too,' Aisha's mother replied.

‘Used to be some woman when she was young,' said one villager to the other afterwards.

Aisha's mother was riding a few yards ahead of her daughter. Ali was walking alongside Aisha's mount. ‘I will go with you,' he said.

‘Why?' Aisha asked.

‘There are wolves on the way. They kill the horses and steal young girls.'

‘Nobody can catch up with this mare.'

‘Wolves run faster.'

‘Do they eat girls?'

‘No, they make them servants for their wives. I know, I once saved a young girl from the jaws of a wolf.'

‘You did?'

‘Yes.'

As the path levelled out, Aisha's mount quickened its step. Ali started running with it.

‘I can run,' he said.

‘Go back,' Aisha, a good rider, said to him. ‘It will soon be at a gallop.'

‘Never mind, I can run as fast as the horse.'

Soon, however, the mare, with Aisha digging her heels in, galloped ahead, disappearing in a cloud of dust. Ali went some way after it, then ran out of breath. He sat down on the low brick wall of a nullah bridge. It was then that he realized he had lost his shoes. He started walking back, his eyes to the ground. He found one on the way to the village but saw no sign of the other. His mother saw his fallen face as he stepped into the house and ran to clasp him to her breast.

‘What is it, my child? Tell me. Why don't you say something? Tell me, my love, what is it?'

‘I lost my shoe,' Ali said after a while.

‘Never mind, it was an old shoe anyway, torn in the front. I will ask your brother to buy you new shoes.'

‘I don't want shoes from him.'