The Weary Generations (45 page)

The constable hit him on the left arm with his lathi, and then pulled back sharply.

‘What is in your hand?'

‘Nothing.'

The constable shone his torch again and Naim rolled up his sleeve to show him in the light. The constable struck his lathi lightly twice on the hand and looked up in suspicious wonder.

‘What is your name?'

‘Naim Ahmad Khan.'

The constable looked at his companion and said, ‘A Musla.' Then he turned round and, pointing to the wall, ordered, ‘Go and sit there, and wait.'

Naim went and sat on an upturned crate lying outside a shop. The two constables hurried down the other street and disappeared. Naim sat on the crate and waited. A half-hour passed. Nobody came, other than a dirty stray pup out of an open drain who looked up at the man sitting outside the shop. Naim raised his stick to it but the pup wouldn't move. It was now that he realized he had picked up his uncle's walking stick instead of his regular one without noticing. Tired of waiting, Naim got up and walked away.

Quite without knowing it, he was walking towards Anees's house. It took him the better part of an hour to get there. A weak electric bulb burned outside the door. After hesitating for a few minutes, he rang the doorbell. Nobody answered. He rang again, and again, until the spring-action bell exhausted its coil. He started knocking on the door with his stick. In the end, a sleepy servant opened the door. Naim had never seen him before, but he received Naim as if he knew him.

‘Come, come welcome, nawab sahib ji,' the servant bowed low in greeting. ‘Are you all right, sir, everything all right at this time? Everything all right here, only sarkar is sleeping. I will go wake him, he will be happy.'

Anees looked anything but happy as he appeared a few minutes later, trying to rub sleep out of his eyes and looking at his wristwatch. Wordlessly, he regarded Naim from head to foot for a whole minute, then put his arm round him and led him to the drawing room.

‘Sit down,' he said and went to a wooden cabinet. He poured himself a whisky. ‘You want some?' he asked, raising the bottle.

Naim waved his hand.

‘I know you don't drink. You should, you know,' Anees said, coming to sit in a sofa beside Naim. ‘Are you all right?'

‘Yes,' Naim said with a small laugh. Strangely, he was feeling lightly cheerful.

‘Good God, Naim,' said Anees, still not over his astonishment. He kept raising his wristwatch and glancing at it. ‘What is the matter?'

‘Nothing,' Naim said. ‘I came out for a walk. It was hot indoors.'

‘It was too. But at this time?'

‘I walked around.'

‘Long walk, wasn't it?'

‘Yes,' Naim said, slowly nodding his head.

‘The city is becoming dangerous, do you know that?'

‘Yes,' Naim said, ‘I think I saw them.'

‘Who?'

‘Dangerous people.'

‘You did? Who were they?'

‘Police constables,' Naim said, laughing briefly again.

His light mood failed to communicate itself to Anees. His face solemn, Anees was becoming increasingly worried. He leaned forward.

‘Naim, are you feeling well?'

‘Very well. Why do you ask?'

‘Oh, nothing,' Anees said. ‘You want tea, breakfast, coffee?'

‘No, no, thank you.'

Anees sat quietly looking at Naim for a few minutes. Naim looked back and saw Anees as though from a long way away, almost disappearing in the distance.

Anees looked at his wristwatch again, finished the whisky in his glass and got up. ‘Come on, I will drive you home.'

It was in the early hours of the morning when Naim entered his bedroom. No one except the chowkidar at the main gate knew he had been absent. He lay in bed, still trying unsuccessfully to sleep. He gave up as daylight came up in the window. He took a leisurely bath, got dressed and sat in his favourite armchair, an unread book in his lap, until it was time for breakfast and then off to the office.

Naim didn't find Anees at the office. He sat at his desk for a few minutes and came out of the office. Walking along long covered verandas, he emerged on the second-storey balcony that went all the way round the great building. Many a time he had stood there with Anees, looking out over the large square a couple of hundred yards from the Assembly. It had always been bustling with people going about their business in this the capital city of India. On this day, he looked out and saw a different scene. There was a crowd all right, but it wasn't of people moving in any kind of
controlled motion. Pushing and shoving each other, they weren't going anywhere. Naim was reminded of Anees's phrase ‘helter-skelter'. He smiled to himself. In the square, some arms were raised along with muffled slogans that reached Naim's ears. Presently, a contingent of police arrived. They formed a circle three-quarters of the way round the crowd, leaving the fourth side free for the people to move away from the Assembly building. For a few minutes the police attempted to scare-drive the men, and some women, away with raised lathis, then they stopped, rearranging themselves on the orders of someone Naim couldn't see. Moments later, the lathi charge began. The people started running, not just to the open side but whichever way they were facing, their arms flailing and cries rising from their throats in place of shouted slogans. Some who broke through the lines and rushed towards the Assembly were pursued by the police. A constable's lathi fell on the head of an emaciated man with coal-black skin who had come within fifty yards of the building. The man fell to the ground. Surprisingly, his cry of pain, heard by Naim on the balcony, was mixed with his last slogan: ‘Jai Hind'.

Then a shiver ran through Naim. For a few moments he stood absolutely still, his body tense and his eyes fixed on a figure in the fleeing crowd. It is him, he said to himself. It's him! The figure of a man, the one who had turned this anonymous crowd into a familiar body, was appearing and disappearing between frantic bodies. Frantically too, Naim raised his cane in the air and waved it as if giving a signal, before he realized the futility of it; they were too far and going away. The crowd had drawn back and scattered. The man went behind a tree once and did not appear again, neither to one side nor the other. Naim walked several steps along the balcony to the right, then the left, craning his neck to spot him. The man had vanished with the crowd. Naim stood there looking at the tree, and in the branches of that tree he thought he saw something. It wasn't the man he had seen, it was a young girl in a mauve silk shalwar-kameez who was climbing up with her dress swept by a cross-wind against her round hips and thighs, their firm flesh trembling. In a second she was gone. Naim rubbed his eyes. The tree, although present in its bare ordinariness, seemed to be sliding back, as if the earth beneath it was slipping. Naim looked down at the floor under his feet; it wasn't an earthquake. He felt that he was himself slipping back. Suddenly he was seized by the feeling that not just the tree and the crowd and the man in it but everything – everything he had known – was receding, becoming too far and going away. Some words echoed in his head. Sitting by the shifting waters of the Jamna, Anees had once said to him, ‘For every man there comes a time
when he knows he has lost it,' and Naim had thought this another of Anees's little homilies at the time.

Naim came out of the Assembly building. The place was now almost deserted. Passing by the tree, he looked up into its dense branches and dusty leaves but as if he were little concerned. He kept walking away.

I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images and cling;

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;

The worlds revolve like ancient women

Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

– ‘Preludes',
T. S. Eliot

T
HEY WERE DRIVING
their mules and donkeys ahead of them and riding their bullock-carts, women and children and old men sitting beside their meagre household goods loaded on to the carts and younger men walking alongside with their hands on the side planks of the carts for support. They were a group of no more than fifty when they set off from somewhere outside Delhi. But within days this foot caravan increased in numbers to a thousand human souls plus their animals and in volume to a shapeless mass stretching back over a mile in length. Viewed from high up in the air, it would look like an enormous python, escaped from an ancient jungle, that had grown lumps and bumps down its stem and a thousand little toes, winding its way along the Grand Trunk Road. Despite the addition of innumerable others, the original fifty had stayed close together. They shared between them the intimacy of seniority and considered themselves in the position of informal leaders of the pack, although no one was leading and none were led. The assumptions of the first fifty were nevertheless strengthened to some extent by an important factor: a few police constables, who had been posted to act as minders by the authorities at the outset, gave up minding when they saw the crowd swelling out of all proportions and instead stayed with the fifty, talking mostly to them on account of longer acquaintance, somewhere about the middle of the long line, thus forming a kind of nucleus to which the others – newcomers, hence considered outside the circle – looked for safety.

The column was formed in such a hasty and haphazard way that no concept such as ‘safety in numbers' ever developed among them. Among the original fifty, however, had grown a feeling which was rather like the one between members of, say, a tourist party arriving in a city and finding themselves in the middle of a rebellion; they stuck together. The whole column was rife with rumour. Nobody talked about everyday matters, for
there were none; there was only an ‘each day', which was fed and gone through with ‘news', passing from one end to the other yet quickly overtaken by another, thereby reducing the one passed earlier to nil. It was not as though there was a family of rumour-mongers that invented and propagated false news. The news was not false, and the rumours were not a figment of the imagination but of desire: they were always of good things awaiting them at the next stop. Based on intense hope, rumour was more real than the event, the latest being that at the Ambala railway station a whole train had been reserved to take them on board and that to this train was attached a contingent of armed police to guard them in addition to a full kitchen stocked with ample food.

Among the distinguished fifty was also Naim. After days of walking, his clothes had become ragged and dirty. He had not spoken to anyone in all this time. People had made attempts to talk to him in the first day or two but, getting no response, had given up, dismissing him as a half-wit, while some women, considering him a man of God, deferred to him. The women gave him a little bit to eat from their own share, which he took without a word of thanks in return, thus enhancing his image as a holy man in the minds of the women, who looked after him in small ways. There were a few carts on wheels in their group, drawn by bullocks, mules or donkeys. Naim, having lost his cane somewhere along the way, put his hand on the side plank of one or the other. The women owner-passengers of these craft vied with each other to have Naim's hand on their cart, believing that it would bless the cart and save them from evil.

A mile short of Ambala the monsoons overtook them. They ran under a pouring sky and reached the railway station drenched to the skin. The cart people picked up their belongings, men, women and children carrying on their heads the stuff, wrapped and tied up with string, to the station platform. There was no train reserved and waiting for them; there was no other train for hours either. The rumour went round that all trains were running late because of the rains and floods. They sat down on the platform and waited for their train. After three hours, a train came. Picking up their bundles, they all ran to the edge of the platform. It was not just the compartments that were full, with people pressed against each other back to front like too many cattle in a small pound, but as many people again were riding on top of the train, men, women and children clinging to each other to avoid falling off the wet, slippery roof, and on the wooden steps of each compartment more than a dozen of them hung on to the metal handles of the doors. Some of the bolder ones among those waiting on the platform attempted to put a foot on the steps and were ferociously kicked
away by those already there. The engine whistled twice and pulled the train away. They all drew back. Some who were quicker occupied others' places under shelters by the walls of the station building. There were arguments and scuffles. In the skirmishes Naim's memory began to stir from slumber. He rushed through a small crowd in front of him and stopped facing his brother.

‘Ali,' he said. This was the first word he had spoken in over a week.

Ali looked at Naim without speaking for several moments, then said, ‘What's happened to you?'

‘Nothing,' Naim said, smiling.

‘This,' Ali said, moving his hand in the air along the length of Naim's body, ‘is nothing? I didn't recognize you.'

‘I recognized you. I saw you before.'

‘Where?'

‘In Delhi.'

‘When?'

‘Ten, fifteen days back.'

‘That is impossible,' Ali said. ‘I left Delhi two months ago.'

Naim looked blankly at Ali.

‘You are wet,' Ali said. ‘Wait here.' Ali went to the two bundles of his belongings stacked against the wall. An old man was sitting on top of them. Ali slipped his hands in the old man's armpits and lifted him to his feet. ‘Don't sit on my things,' he said harshly to the man. Untying one of the bundles, he pulled out a thin khes and brought it back to a shivering Naim. ‘Wrap it round you.' He took Naim by the hand and led him to the bundles of his stuff. The old man had replaced himself on top of them. ‘Get off,' Ali shouted at him. The man calmly got up and sat down on the floor. Ali kept glowering at him while settling Naim on the bundles. ‘Stay here, don't wander about. What's happened to you?'