The Weary Generations (48 page)

What was left of the Rai house, however, was more than sufficiently large to accommodate a family. Pervez's friends in the Civil Service who had already taken up jobs in Pakistan soon showed him round a few grand houses, and from these he chose Rai Manzil, which was a roomy house with extensive wood panelling and masonry cornice-work on the ceilings and parapets along the roof and a large mature garden left untouched by the arsonists. With the four other members of his household, Pervez slipped into the house just as easily as he did into his job as Secretary, Education, in the new provincial government. His son, Imran, who had done his MA in economics in Delhi, took a teaching job at the Punjab University while preparing himself for the Civil Service competitive examination. Naheed and Azra took a few months to settle down, Naheed organizing the house and the servants and Azra looking after her sick
father and the garden. The wing of the house that was still standing was in reasonable order, the only damage a slight blackening of the walls where the smoke from the other wing had touched them. Naheed had all the rooms whitewashed under her supervision while Azra hired a gardener and went round having the lanes and the lawns cleared of fallen leaves, dead birds andweeds and seeing that the fruit trees of citrus, guava, jaman and shahtoot were properly pruned.

After the essentials had been dealt with, Pervez began gently to prompt Naheed and Azra to take up jobs in the Education Department where, he said, he could easily have decent posts created for them – ‘Just for the sake of helping the new generation in this country in which we have invested by choosing to live here.' But, realist as he was, he could see that if things didn't quite work out all the able-bodied members of the family would have to pull their weight merely in order to keep a large house and its staff going. Although they had quickly lodged a claim to ‘evacuee property' in lieu of the estate they had left behind in India, it was being processed for proper allotment at a snail's pace by the Rehabilitation Department while local people, non-refugees, were walking into evacuated houses and vast landholdings and taking possession by force of men and arms. Having no such resources at his command, Pervez, despite his senior position in the government, had to wait patiently amid the administrative confusion created by tens of thousands of claims, small and large, true, untrue and false, and not enough staff to deal with them. In the new country, since refugees held no papers of domicile and no proof of property ownership, their ‘claims' were without substance and had to be recreated.

The fortune of Pervez's family (now no longer Roshan Agha's) had meanwhile been considerably depleted on account of a wrong decision in Delhi: having been unable to get all their luggage on to the aircraft as accompanied baggage, and since they were not prepared to part with even a single piece of it for any length of time, they had decided, after prolonged and ill-tempered discussions, to take the train. The train was attacked at both Jalandhar and Amritsar stations by Hindus and Sikhs, who over-powered the police contingent accompanying the train and killed and robbed the passengers. The five members of the family were fortunate to have escaped death or injury, but they were deprived of most of their baggage, looted or lost. They were, however, able to hang on to their handbags which contained all their jewellery. They also escaped with some cash that had been sewn into the lining of their clothes. The cash quickly went within the first two months of their arrival, most of it on making the house habitable. Selling off the jewellery – the family heirlooms – was anathema
to them. As a result, they began to live within much reduced means, which meant only Pervez's salary. Azra never complained, but Naheed constantly did. She would not, she said, set foot in a tonga or any such thing; she had to have a car and chauffeur. So a proposal that she should out to work in a girls' college came to nothing. The household subsided into a dreary routine, waiting for their claim to be settled. At one stage they were made the offer of an equally large tract of land in adjustment of their claim, but it was hundreds of miles away in the uncultivated wilderness of the province of Sind, and Pervez rejected it. The house, though, had been allotted to them in the name of Roshan Agha. Their days and evenings were spent making plans to rebuild the burnt-out part of the house as and when they got their hands on their claimed land or, preferably, compensation for it in cash.

Roshan Agha meanwhile had risen above everything that went on around him: he was dying. Soon after they arrived in Pakistan his diabetes ceased responding to treatment, and the disease began to attack his vital organs. From the very first day, his main concern had been less with getting his estate back than with changing the name of the house. ‘RAI MANZIL' was etched in big black letters into a white marble slab right up on the façade of the house. He couldn't bear to look at it. It got so that eventually he stopped going out altogether to sit on the lawn on pleasant autumn evenings. The first thing he asked of his son on Pervez's return from office each day was whether the ‘ordinance' had been issued. Every day, he waited. The government had forbidden by law the altering of names and signs of businesses and buildings, including private homes, until it completed its inventory of ‘evacuee property', after which a new ordinance was to be issued allowing changes of use and name. That it would take some time was known and accepted by all in the family, and anyway nobody was much bothered whether or not it was allowed. But for Roshan Agha it became a matter of life and death. In the end, it proved to be literally so.

He had asked Azra to find a stonemason. Azra got one through the gardener. Roshan Agha interviewed him and, having satisfied himself about the workman's skill, engaged him. He was asked to bring back two things the following day: a large marble slab and a wooden board of equal size. The man returned the next day with a donkey cart on which were loaded the two required items. Roshan Agha ordered the marble to be stood against the wall in a corner of his room, and the wooden plank to be brought to him where he lay in bed. After receiving detailed instructions from the sick man, the stonemason sat on the floor and wrote the words ‘ROSHAN MAHAL' on the wood. It didn't come out at all right, so he was
asked to change the script. He changed it. Roshan Agha was not satisfied. The workman altered the script yet again. Roshan Agha shook his head and told him to go away and return the next morning. This went on for almost two weeks. The stonemason would continuously change the shape of the words and his master would reject it on one account or another. Despite the fact that the man, hardly educated enough in the first place to write more than a few words, ran out of scripts that he knew and then some more, he persevered because Roshan Agha had about forty old silver rupees in the pocket of his gown of which one, a fortune to the poor man, he tossed to the mason every third day. Several times, after examining the writing on the wooden board, Azra had said, ‘That's it, Papa, exactly as it was on Roshan Mahal.' Each time Roshan Agha would shake his head. The curvature of one letter, the line of another, the look of the whole word or the balance of the two wasn't quite right; it wouldn't do. The daily toil of the stonemason would go on. After a fortnight of this activity, still reluctantly, tilting his head this way and that to view the script from many angles, the old man brought himself to approve the final lettering and gave the mason the go-ahead to etch it into the marble in indelible colours. Another week, and the marble slab was ready. It stood against the wall in Roshan Agha's room, the stonemason on orders to be ready to report at short notice, while the Agha waited for the ordinance to be issued. All five members of the family were thus in a state of continuous alert, so to speak: Pervez for his promotion to the Federal Secretariat, Naheed for the claim on the estate to come through, Imran for the date of the competitive examination to be announced, and Azra for an imaginary face to appear out of the air and restore her memory in all its detail.

Roshan Agha ran out of time; his kidneys began to give out. Fighting for his life, he still asked Pervez every single day about the ordinance.

‘There is a way,' Azra said to Pervez one day.

‘What is it?'

‘Tell Papa that the ordinance has been issued.'

‘What, just like that? What if he insists on putting up the bloody sign straight away?'

‘Put it up so that he can see it once. He hardly ever goes out.'

‘Don't bet on it, he might sit there every day looking at it.'

‘Look, Pervez, it will ease his days. We ask the mason to stick it up temporarily. By the time someone from the government comes round, we can take it down. Who cares about these things anyway?'

‘It is a question of my job, Azra,' Pervez said doubtfully.

In the event, things were made easy all round. A few hours after Roshan
Agha heard the news from a reluctant Pervez and gave the order for the slab to be put up first thing in the morning, he sank into a coma. He was moved to a hospital, where he died three days later without regaining consciousness. His other wish was to be buried within the perimeter of the house; this was granted to him. Instead of the common graveyard, he was interred in the grounds of ‘Rai Manzil'. There were no postal or telephone contacts with India, so Pervez telephoned a few families he knew of who had migrated to Pakistan. Their letters of condolence, along with their regrets at not being able to participate in the funeral, arrived a few days later. The mourners included the remaining four members of the family plus three of Pervez's colleagues. Three house servants made up the rear of the namaz janaza.

Having no one to look after any more and nothing to take with him, not even the mule and the cart, Ali ran on through fields and forests, making it to the Wagah border. From there he headed for the Lahore railway station. Both times that he had been in the city, once for two days and the second time for nearly three years, he had found his friend Hasan at the tea stall. This time Hasan was nowhere to be seen. Lost in a crowd of thousands of refugees fighting to get into or on top of the trains leaving for India and others arriving in trains from the other side, Ali's legs gave way beneath him. He slumped against the green-painted iron railings of the station platform and closed his eyes. He had no desire in his heart – not even for a morsel of food if he could get it down to his appetite-dead stomach – stronger than the desire to sleep. Here, finally, there was no one after him to take his life or his possessions; his life, good enough only to take revenge on across the border, was worth even less on this side either to him or to other Muslims, and he had on him no more than a shirt, torn in many places, and an equally ragged shalwar. He had lost his shoes. In these unusual times, what had been a fatal threat to him on the other side proved to be his greatest asset on this: his name, and his genitals. Some time after he collapsed into sleep, he was woken by a kick on his shins. He opened his eyes to see a group of men and boys, some as young as ten, armed with swords and long knives.

‘Who are you?' one asked him.

‘Refugee.'

‘From where?'

‘Hindustan.'

‘What is your name?'

‘Ali.'

One of them cut the string of his shalwar with a knife. Lowering the garment, they saw that he was circumcised.

‘Musalman,' they said, a hint of disappointment in their voices.

They turned their attention to a newly arrived train from the north full of refugees going to India. A mob attacked the train. Ali saw a boy, hardly sixteen, shoot a crude home-made pistol into the face of a child who was looking out of the carriage window. The split-second-disfigured face of the child disappeared back into the compartment without a sound. A very fat woman came running awkwardly up the platform and suddenly came to a halt, face to face with the group of men that had questioned Ali. They raised their swords. The woman lifted the front of her muslin kurta, baring two enormous breasts that hung down to her navel. She put her hands underneath them and lifted them up, pushing the swollen, fleshy teats into the men's faces.

‘Look, look at them,' she wept. ‘I am your mother, don't kill me –' Feeling his empty guts rising to his throat, Ali turned his face to the railing with a groan, soon sinking into a deep sleep once again. When he next awoke somebody had his shoulders in their hands and was shaking them. It was a woman.

‘You have been lying here for two days,' she was saying to him. ‘You want to be dead?'

Ali had barely enough energy to open his eyes. He couldn't move.

‘Come on,' the woman said, ‘can you stand up? You can't even speak, you wretched man, you are half dead already. Who told you to sleep here? Come, put your arms round my shoulders, come, oh, you dead body, make an effort. Yeees – like this, stand, stand up, up –'

The woman walked him out of the station. Ali slumped again. The woman took nearly half an hour to drag-walk him to her hut at the edge of a sprawling refugee camp two hundred yards from the station. Inside the hut, she dropped him to the floor, herself out of breath. She warmed up some milk in a dented pan, black with soot on the outside, and put the milk to Ali's mouth in a cup.

‘Open your mouth,' she said to him, ‘it's only milk, not poison, it'll put some life into you. Sit up. Ohhh –' She put the cup of milk on the floor and dragged Ali up by the armpits to sit him against the wall. ‘Now, open your mouth, here, that's it, drink it up, swallow it …'

Ali tried to swallow the mouthful of milk and immediately threw up. The woman cleaned up the front of his shirt with a corner of her dopatta and put the cup to his lips again.

‘Don't worry, just get it down – swallow.' She put her hand under Ali's
shirt and passed it gently over his stomach. ‘Your belly is sticking to your back, I can feel your spine from the front, no wonder you can't swallow anything. Drink, don't worry about throwing up, drink.'