The Weary Generations (44 page)

‘Yes,' Anees said. ‘I have a rather agitated nature. I come here to calm myself.'

A servant laid out tea on the table. The sun was still up. After tea, Anees asked the servant to get his fishing tackle out. Within fifteen minutes they were sitting on two low wooden stools by the river bank with Anees's line in the water, the sinker bobbing on the surface and a small pot of squirming earthworms, dug up by the servant, by their side. Naim noticed the change in Anees: he had become quiet. Sitting absolutely still, gazing at the slow movement of the broad plank of water sparkling in the late afternoon sun, he seemed to Naim, for the first time since he had known him, to be in a reflective mood. There was a large family of refugees from Bengal living in the open on the bank of the river. They had not erected a shelter, nor did they appear to be doing anything towards the provision of food for themselves and their several children. There were only some rumpled dirty sheets on the ground by way of bedding.

Nodding his head in their direction, Naim asked, ‘Aren't the village people doing something for them?'

‘They get cooked food from the village,' Anees replied. ‘But they don't want to stay. They are moving on to the city. At least that is what they keep saying. I think they have lost their sense of direction.'

Naim laughed drily. ‘God help them.'

‘What has God to do with it?' Anees said, unleashing another of his speeches on the unsuspecting Naim. ‘It's a man-made disaster. And only man will suffer.'

A bit surprised, Naim slowly nodded, ‘Yeees.'

‘You have only seen the living,' Anees said, ‘I have seen the dead in Bengal. Piles and piles of them. If you can spare a day's supply of rice, you sell it. If you haven't, you beg. The difference between rich and poor is a handful of rice. No, not between rich and poor, actually between life and death. We live our lives according to simple rules. When we are young we read history and come to know of the disasters that befell our ancestors. From these lessons, we deduce some rules. Look before you leap, that sort of thing. My father gave me a book called
Golden Rules.
Did you read the book of golden rules when you were young?'

‘I was never young,' Naim said, laughing.

‘When we grow up we see that there is no such thing as a regular shape of history. Come floods, come epidemics, come famine. But they are never the same. Like each life, each disaster is different. There is a fixed pattern, it's called helter-skelter.' He laughed ironically. ‘In order to form a reasonable pattern, we invent the idea of justice. When that doesn't work, we go further into helter-skelter and invent God. I will tell you one thing: there are no golden rules.'

This was yet another aspect of Anees that Naim witnessed: the man, no longer restless, sitting patiently like an old angler, giving quiet words to his desperation.

Later, as their friendship grew, it became, at Anees's insistence, a regular feature of Naim's life to accompany Anees to his village house once every two or three weeks. Gradually, there came a point when, one day, Anees told Naim the story of his life. He was thought of as a minor aristocrat, Anees said, an idea carefully cultivated by himself and others. He was nothing of the sort. He had been disinherited because his mother had been insufficiently respectable to qualify as a proper wife to his father, so she stayed in the position of a concubine all her life. The old nawab only married her on his deathbed, a marriage that became the subject of a dispute in the courts of law, initiated by the legitimate heirs, on the basis that the dying man was in no fit state to have reached a rational decision. In order, eventually, to avoid publicity, said Anees, he renounced all his claims in return for the grant of two houses and a reasonable sum of money as a yearly stipend. He had never, he said, been back to the state, although his wife and two children were being kept and well looked after there by the present ruler.

Naim, hesitant though he was in the beginning, now began to look forward to these trips to the house on the river bank in company with Anees, recognizing in him a companion soul in trouble. He also liked the place, as it reminded him of his own village. Being neither a believer – in
anything! – nor the opposite but, as it were, shuffling somewhere in between, Naim took comfort from the silence of the vast plains and the memory of what had been left behind.

He did go back to his village once, when he received the news that his mother was unwell.

‘Shall I come?' Azra asked him.

‘No,' he replied softly.

‘I would like to.'

‘I am certain she is only sick with something minor. Maybe she only wants to see me.' He laughed. ‘Really no need for you to go. She'll get well.'

But that was not to be. By the time he arrived at the village, she was dead. He was surprised at how little grief he felt at his mother's death compared to the time that his father passed away. What he felt immensely was the absence of Ali, someone to whom he hadn't given a thought for a long time. Naim's eyes searched for him.

‘I have no enmity with him,' Rawal said. ‘It was long time ago. I would like him to come back here. Only Aisha,' he said, with a hint of remorse in his voice, ‘died.'

Naim sent Rawal to look for Ali at the cloth mill. From the information Rawal got at the mill, he travelled to the cement factory. On the third day, Rawal returned empty-handed. Ali had moved away from there, he said, and nobody knew where he had gone. Naim stayed in the village for seven days. During that time he went one day to Aisha's village to give his condolences to her family. The had no information about Ali's whereabouts either. Naim went back to Delhi, to his routine at Roshan Mahal and his association with Anees.

The war was over. A quarter of a million Indian troops had become casualties on the fields of Europe and elsewhere. Those who survived returned to a turbulent land. The struggle for independence had hotted up. Times had changed, and Naim saw Anees Rahman undergo a gradual transformation. Over the years he became mellower, then morose and finally bitter, although he never lost the attractive sides of his personality. He had started going back for short trips to his state to see his wife and two children, now grown up. He never stayed for long. ‘I feel out of place there,' he would say as he rushed back to Delhi. ‘Always will.' His physical energy had diminished. On one occasion he said to Naim, ‘Life wastes us with such savagery,' and Naim felt that he was looking at a man who had died. He shivered at the thought of seeing his own image in the other man. But
the two of them had by now become so firmly dependent on one another as friends, not least because they had none other, that they gravitated together, now more frequently, each Saturday to the riverside house which had become their place of sanctuary from the world. Once there, they would sit by the river bank or, if the weather did not allow it, on the veranda and talk, or not, descending into long silences. At times, when he became maudlin, Anees talked about death.

‘It is easy, if you prepare yourself for it,' he would say.

‘How do you prepare yourself for it?'

‘If you have kept your moments whole, the moments of your lifetime, if you have kept them whole, death will hold no terror for you. Just as a moment in its completion passes to give rise to another, so will you pass through the moment of death to another birth. Only a divided moment causes pain, leading to a divided death.'

‘So you think these, what you call moments of our time, can be made “whole” with the power of the mind?'

‘No,' Anees shook his head, ‘you design your time not with the amount of thought but with the volume of grief that you hold.'

Conversations such as these would at times go on at length before coming inevitably to their inconclusive end. They knew that their discourse, albeit largely one-sided in favour of Anees, was carried on not for the sake of imparting information, knowledge or wisdom but to provide a shade – of voice, or presence – as shelter for one another. During periods of silence, both felt like two separate mausoleums within which their spirits flew like imprisoned birds, striking their heads against the walls while outside the world rushed onwards on its inexorable path without catching their voices.

Despite their closeness, Anees never invited Naim to his house in the city where he mainly lived, although Naim knew where it was, having seen it from outside while driving past it as a passenger in Anees's car. Only on one occasion did Naim visit the house to call upon Anees unannounced, and that was towards the end of their time together as they knew it. It was a night when Naim couldn't sleep. He was feeling restless on account of something that had happened earlier in the evening. There had been a gathering of the family in Roshan Agha's bedroom. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss whether to move or to stay in the event that the partition of the country, which seemed increasingly likely, eventually became a reality. Roshan Agha was torn between two points of view. Having never worked on it, he had no attachment to the land itself; his loyalty lay with the ownership – of land and, by virtue of that, of
people. On the other side was his late conversion to the cause of the Muslim League and their demand for a separate homeland for the Muslims to be called Pakistan. But these were the passions of an old and weak man, unable to force through his opinions. The meeting was dominated by Pervez. His arguments were rational: Roshan Agha will be able to claim, to the fullest extent, the lands in the new country abandoned by Hindus and Sikhs who will inevitably move back from there to India; and so far as his own career in the civil service was concerned, there would be unlimited chances for promotion right to the top as there would certainly be a severe shortage of Muslim administrators in Pakistan, given that there weren't many in the whole of India as it was.

‘How do you know the Hindus will leave their lands and migrate to this side?' asked Azra.

‘Don't you see what is going on? Already Hindus and Sikhs are beginning to riot, demanding that if Muslims want a separate country let them all go there. Besides, we have had reports.'

‘Reports of what?'

‘Of retaliations taking place in the north of the country, in areas proposed to become Pakistan.'

‘I don't believe people will actually pull up their roots and go,' Azra said. ‘Even if that happens it's bound to be a temporary phase. You can't deny nationality to people who have always lived here. It is unimaginable.'

‘Well,' Pervez said, ‘in that case, where's the problem? We can all come back.'

There was a brief silence, broken by Roshan Agha. ‘What do you think, Naim?' he asked.

Everyone looked at Naim. Naim gazed absent-mindedly at Azra. ‘I don't know,' he mumbled.

‘A decision,' Pervez's wife spoke up, ‘has to be taken on the basis of common sense.'

‘Do you think you have a monopoly on common sense?' Azra said sharply.

Naheed shrugged in a couldn't-care-less way. ‘Let's face it, Naim is –'

She was cut short by her husband. ‘Naim has no great stake here anyway,' Pervez said, ‘no family of his own, no property to speak of.' He was immediately embarrassed at having said that. ‘I mean,' he stammered, ‘I mean he is not tied down here, that is what I mean. He can go on living with us wherever we go.'

During the tense silence that followed, Naim left his chair and the room. Back in his own room, he couldn't read. He could hear the voices of
the other four, who had resumed the discussion. Naim lay flat on his bed, with a book opened and turned face down on his chest, staring at the ceiling. He got up and paced the room, then came back to bed. In time, the meeting in Roshan Agha's room broke up. He heard Azra go to her room and settle in bed. Extra lights in the house were turned off as a routine by the servants, and in the bedrooms by the occupants. Night had fallen. There was complete quiet in the house. Still sleep was nowhere near Naim's head. He switched his bedside lamp off and switched it back on again several times. Finally, he thought a walk in the garden might do the trick. He slipped on his dressing gown, picked up the walking stick and went out, trying not to make a sound. He had regained full health but carrying the stick had become a firm habit. Walking on the grass wearing slippers, around which the dew drops touched his bare feet, he felt perked up. A cool night breeze blew after what had been a hot July day. There was more than usual lightness in his head – a thoughtless vacuum. Stepping easily on to the hard ground, he approached the main gate and walked out of the house without being fully conscious of it. He walked on.

It was midnight now and Naim was walking through a heavily built-up part of the city. He was looking closely, stopping and starting, at houses and shops. He was in an area he vaguely recognized. After a while he realized that his uncle's old house was in a mohalla just like this one. A momentary thought, that it was his house now and he had never looked after it, passed through his mind. He thought that if he tried he could probably find the house. After all he had stayed there many times. There was no street lighting and in the dark of the night he went on, peering at the shut doors of houses, until he found himself in an area that ceased to be familiar. He stopped for a moment and thought of retracing his steps. Suddenly a group of dark shadowy figures emerged from a street, running soundlessly on bare feet. They disappeared down another side street. A few minutes later two police constables, carrying lathis, appeared out of the first street. One of them shone his torch on Naim.

‘Oi, who are you?' he asked severely.

‘Me?'

‘Do you see anyone else here, you sisterfucker?'

‘No,' Naim answered.

‘What are you doing here?'

‘I am just walking.'

‘Just walking? At this time? Are you a thief?'

‘No, no. I am –'