The Weary Generations (7 page)

‘Have you ever seen a harbour?' he asked.

‘No,' she said.

‘It's wonderful. Thousands of lights swimming in water.'

‘I wish I could go and see them.'

‘I want to go and live on a ship,' Naim said.

‘How can you live on a ship?'

‘I can join a merchant ship. What I really want to do is join up with the Navy.'

‘Oh, but –' Azra checked herself.

‘Will you come with me?'

‘Where?'

‘When I join the Navy?'

‘Women can't go and live on a ship,' Azra said. She took out a pen and began to draw lines with its tip on her fingernails.

Roshan Agha appeared in the veranda from the left wing, glanced at the two of them and passed through another door a few paces down.

‘Roshan Agha is unhappy today,' Azra said.

‘What about?'

‘Pervez's marriage. Everybody wants him to marry Jamila. He says no.'

‘Why?'

‘He doesn't say. Except that he has known Jamila from childhood as a relative and not as a wife.' She uttered her short laugh and went back to the pen on her fingernails.

With the nightfall the delicate, slim-fingered leaves of the shreen tree had closed up around each other and hung limply like an empty glove, the heavy, damp fragrance of its flowers spreading the feel of summer in the dark. Out on the road, behind the tall hedge of the lawn, a bullock-cart was passing on its slow journey, the lazy-toned peasant voices of its passengers rising above the creaking of the cart's wheels. The wind passing gently over the wet grass was pleasantly warm. ‘Will you?' Naim asked.

‘Will I what?'

‘Come with me to the sea?'

Without looking up from her nails, Azra paused before speaking. ‘Will you go to Roshan Pur?'

‘Perhaps,' Naim replied.

‘You'll go to see your parents.'

‘Maybe. Why do you ask?'

‘I just ask. What's the harm in that?'

‘The harm is that you haven't answered my question.'

‘I can't.'

‘Why not?'

Azra looked up, her eyes widening blankly. ‘Auntie told me you cannot join any government service.'

The fingers of Naim's hands, white and fragile, paled suddenly and spread out on the grass as if pulled apart by strings. A servant appeared by Azra's side, bearing a message from Roshan Agha that she was to come inside the house.

‘I'll be a minute,' she told the servant.

Naim lifted himself off the ground and started walking away.

‘Will you come tomorrow?' Azra called after him.

He didn't answer. Azra kept looking at his receding back until Naim walked out of the house. At the gate the chowkidar said something to him. A heavy, foul-smelling object had settled in his stomach like a clenched fist. Once on the road, a sudden anger rose up to his brain like a curled column of smoke. He leaped over the narrow moat that ran along the boundary wall of the house and thrust his face through the hedge.

‘Your aunt is a bad woman,' he shouted.

There was no one to be seen on the great lawn. As he jumped back, the chowkidar came towards him.

‘Go,' he roared at him.

Then he turned and started running down the road.

N
AIM'S TRAIN JOURNEY
was marked by an incident which, although it did not directly concern him, occurred right before his eyes between the station of Ali Kot and the next train stop of Rani Pur, Naim's destination. As the train started to leave Ali Kot, Naim, who had earlier left his seat to go and stand in the doorway to escape the stuffiness inside the compartment, saw an old peasant running along the platform in an attempt to board the train. His entire baggage, a small loosely tied-up bundle, was hooked to one end of a wooden staff that he carried on his shoulder, holding the other end tightly in his hand. It did not look like he was going to reach the third-class compartment he was chasing as it raced further and further away from him. In desperation, he clutched at a handle nearest to him and with a last, awkward leap climbed on to the footboard of a first-class compartment, still hanging precariously as the train gathered speed. He began to knock repeatedly at the closed door of the compartment with his staff. Eventually, the door was unlocked from inside and a bare-bodied white man appeared from behind it. The room was cool and dark inside. The white passenger, who appeared to have been woken from sleep, had a vile expression on his face. Seeing the sunburnt, withered face of the old peasant at his feet, he shouted in his mixed Hindustani-English, ‘Nikal jao. Get out. This dabba fust class, reserve for sahib loge, naeen for you, naeen hai. Go …'

‘Saab ji,' the peasant begged, ‘my wife is on the train. In the name of God, pity me. I will go when the train stops.'

The peasant heaved himself on to the lip of the compartment. The first-class passenger, whom the old man's action had caused to draw back a step, became furious. At first he tried pushing the intruder out by closing the door on him. But the peasant had gained a hold on a space as narrow as a two-inch ledge and clung to it for dear life. The earth a few feet beneath
him was flying away backwards. On his creased-up face, terror began to appear.

‘I will not come inside, saab ji. Let me sit here on the floor …'

The white man, getting angrier, withdrew into the compartment for a minute. When he returned, he had heavy boots on his feet. He started kicking the old man in the back with all his force. ‘Soo'er, pig, smelly pig, nikal jao, jao, go, go …'

The peasant's staff flew out of his hand, taking with it the bundle of dirty thick cloth tied to its end as the man held on to the two side handles of the carriage with both hands. The round bundle struck the earth and rolled along the sloping ground, the impact undoing its loose knot and revealing a small quantity of gur and a few raw cobs of corn, before it was left behind by the train and disappeared from view. The old man saw his meagre stuff scattering away and a terrible moan emerged from his throat, ‘Haaa – my daughter – it was for my daughter …'

The first-class passenger kept kicking him, shouting, ‘Take a soo'er for your daughter, a pig, take a pig …'

Under the blows, some of them falling on his head, the peasant yielded his place on the edge of the carriage but kept a hold on the outside handles by passing his arms through them and knotting them together while balancing himself on the narrow footboard in the face of the rushing wind, which pressed him back. Gradually, the effort of clinging to the speeding train drew the life out of his spent body, although he still managed to tighten the vice-like knot of his arms around the handles. He hung on like a limp rag flapping in the wind, his eyes slowly shutting on him and blood, mixed with tears, trickling down his face, curling through the creases of his ancient skin to his chin, the drops flying in the wind, spattering the side of the carriage. There he stayed until the train arrived at Rani Pur. Two Anglo-Indian sergeants of the railway police came to force the peasant's arms from the carriage handle and put him down on the station platform, where he lay in a lifeless heap, looking quite naked without his staff and his bundle of possessions. Within fifteen minutes Naim had seen a man deprived of his whole world. An old woman with an equally beaten-in face came and bent over the body, looking at it in disbelief. She poked at it a couple of times, saying, ‘Get up!' quietly, then kneeled beside it as if in prayer and, gathering it in her arms, began to utter low, animal-like moans.

One of the two sergeants knocked at the door of the carriage. The white passenger lifted the two wood and glass panes of the window. The sergeants talked to the man. Naim, disembarking, went and stood by the policemen. Half a dozen other people gathered round the body. The man
in the carriage looked at them angrily. The last words that Naim heard the sergeant say were, ‘You will have to answer some questions at the end of your journey, sir.' The passenger dismissively waved him away and dropped the window.

‘He is going to be charged,' Naim said to the man standing next to him.

With great sarcasm, the man nodded his head repeatedly and said, ‘Yes, oh yes, yes indeed. Who will be the judge and who the jury? Not your uncle, young man, not your uncle.' The man hastened away.

Naim was met by a kammi of his father's who had brought a severely ill-nourished mare for Naim to ride. Naim rode the wretched animal for fourteen miles to the village while the kammi walked alongside, talking without pause.

‘… Chaudri Niaz Beg raised his wheat by his own hands this year. It was a heavy crop, everybody says there is God's will in his hands. Gave me three maunds, just to me, you see, full three maunds only to me. And he bought this fine animal.' He struck the horse with the flat of his hand, but it paid not the slightest attention. ‘She comes from a fine line, believe me, but she was with the weavers of Jat Nagar, and they brought her to this condition. The weavers, may God take them from this earth, keep ever a tight fist with their animals. To be cruel to a tongueless creature is a crime against man and God. In his absence, Niaz Beg's lands had gone to the devil. It is good now. Oi, you low-caste dogs, we are not going to stop in your godless village, go away. There were not enough rains and not enough water in the canal this year so the rice crop was light. But not to worry …'

Dusk was falling as the trees of Roshan Pur came into view. ‘Do not worry,' the talkative kammi went on, ‘these are our dogs. They bark from habit, but once they recognize us as one of their own they will stop. Ah, here comes Chaudri Niaz Beg …'

The dogs of Roshan Pur never recognized Naim and kept yapping at his heels. But Niaz Beg did. He jumped up from under a kikar tree, threw away a thin stick that he was carrying and, despite the dimness of light in his sight, had no difficulty in running straight to Naim, putting his arms round his son's body and kissing him, first on the chest, then on his face several times, mumbling unintelligibly as he did so. Naim felt his rough whiskers and the smell of sweat and fresh grass from his father's body. Above a hard, gaunt body the old man had a ruined face.

Niaz Beg immediately started admonishing the servant. ‘What kept you so long? I know, you jumped on the mare and made my son walk, didn't you? Don't I know the nature of you kammis?' He got hold of the horse's reins and started walking ahead as the servant, spreading his hands
before him, tried to explain that the railway train was late by many hours, which Naim knew wasn't true and that there had been no delay in their coming.

‘Lies, lies,' cried Niaz Beg. ‘Don't I know you, don't I? People like you have a dark heart and a lit-up tongue. Just you come begging for a share of wheat next time and I will give you the dung of an ant, just you wait and see …'

Outside the house, two women, one old and the other much younger, stood weeping loudly. Niaz Beg addressed them angrily. ‘Did I not say we should not send this talkative merasi for this important job? Now look, he has spent all day talking to himself. Did I not say I will go myself and get my son back before sundown?'

‘Not on the weavers' mare, chaudri …' the servant said.

With his wiry, light body, Niaz Beg executed an astonishing leap, landing clean on top of the horse. Digging his heels in the animal's flanks, he rode it round the two weeping women in a tight circle and jumped back down. He picked up a light little stick from the ground and started beating the horse with it. ‘Miserly weavers, gave you nothing to eat, took my money and sold me a dead donkey …'

The older of the two women threw her arms around Naim and held him tight for a long time. Then she began passing her hands all along his body, feeling his features with the tips of her fingers like a blind person trying to figure out through touch the appearance of her son. Two dogs started fighting near them. Niaz Beg ran after them with a raised stick in his hand, uttering terrible oaths. After driving the mongrels ‘to the ends of the earth' as he had promised, he returned on the trot. People were coming out of their houses with lanterns in their hands to look. Taking his hand, Niaz Beg pulled Naim towards the house.

‘Pay no attention,' he said, pointing to the two women with his stick, ‘they are silly, they know nothing.'

A young Sikh lad called out. ‘Chacha, has your son arrived?'

‘Yes, yes,' answered Niaz Beg shortly, then said to Naim, ‘Pay no attention. These are people with no education.'

In the courtyard of the house, two buffaloes sat chewing cud and two bullocks stood eating from fluffy heaps of cut grass with their mouths in the trough. ‘This one,' Niaz Beg said, patting one with his dry, calloused hand, ‘I bought for the price of four maunds of wheat two months back. It got a paper from the gora saab at the last cattle fair. Finest blood. Well, Dittay, true or not?'

Ditta merasi agreed. ‘Sixteen annas true, chaudri. No answer to it
within twenty miles. Famous bull of Jat Nagar's chaudris cannot finish an acre before it starts crying for its mother. This one tills an acre and a half again by the time the sun even begins to go down.'

‘True, true,' said Niaz Beg proudly. He turned to the two weeping women. ‘Stop doing hoo hoo hoo, you silly women. Have you laid out the rice? Come, Dittay,' he addressed the kammi, now patting him warmly on the back, ‘eat rice with us.'

A large rough cloth with printed flowers on it had already been spread out on the ground of the inner courtyard. The women brought out a round tray of fired clay heaped with white boiled rice which they set in the centre of the cloth. The women, a twelve-year-old boy and Ditta merasi sat down around the tray. Before Naim could sit with them, Niaz Beg ran inside and brought out a low wooden stool for his son.

‘Sit on it,' he said. ‘I have made it with my own hands. Go on, sit, sit.'

Naim sat on the stool, above the others on the ground. The younger woman sprinkled raw brown sugar on the steaming rice and then poured on melted butter which quickly got absorbed by the fluffed rice. The four men, including the young boy, started eating around the large tray, gathering up rice in their fingers. After a couple of mouthfuls, Naim got tired of having to bend down each time he wanted to scoop up the rice. He knocked away the stool and joined the others on the ground. Hungry after a full day's journey, he ate heartily the delicious sweet rice fragrant with flavours of white buffalo butter and reddish-yellow shakkar. He hadn't eaten these things for years, and before he knew it the top of the arch he made in front of him in the heap of rice was approaching the centre of the tray. Naim pulled himself up. His mother took his hand and carefully cleaned the grease off his fingers with the hem of her muslin kurta. Then she poked the young boy in the ribs with the wooden handle of her fan.