Train to Pakistan (24 page)

Hukum Chand was also uneasy about his own role. Was it enough to get others to do the work for him? Magistrates were responsible for maintenance of law and order. But they maintained order with power behind them; not opposing them. Where was the power? What were the people in Delhi doing? Making fine speeches in the assembly! Loudspeakers magnifying their egos; lovely-looking foreign women in the visitors’ galleries in breathless admiration. ‘He is a great man, this Mr Nehru of yours. I do think he is the greatest man in the world today. And how handsome! Wasn’t that a wonderful thing to say? “Long ago we made a tryst with destiny and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure but very substantially.”’ Yes, Mr Prime Minister, you made your tryst. So did many others.

There was Hukum Chand’s colleague Prem Singh who went back to fetch his wife’s jewellery from Lahore. He made his tryst at Feletti’s Hotel where European sahibs used to flirt with each other’s wives. It is next door to the Punjab Assembly building where Pakistani parliamentarians talked democracy and made laws. Prem Singh whiled away time drinking beer and offering it to the Englishmen staying in the hotel. Over the privet hedge a dozen heads with fez caps and Pathan turbans waited for him. He drank more beer and forced it on his English friends and on the orchestra. His dates across the hedge waited patiently. The Englishmen drank a lot of beer and whisky and said Prem Singh was a grand chap. But it was late for dinner so they said, ‘Good night Mr … Did not catch your name. Yes, of course, Mr Singh. Thank you very much, Mr Singh. See you again.’ … ‘Nice old Wog. Can hold his drink too,’ they said in the dining room. Even the orchestra had more beer than ever
before. ‘What would you like us to play, sir?’ asked Mendoza the Goan bandleader. ‘It is rather late and we must close down now.’ Prem Singh did not know the name of any European piece of music. He thought hard. He remembered one of the Englishmen had asked for something which sounded like ‘bananas’. ‘Bananas,’ said Prem Singh. ‘“We’ll Have No Bananas Today.”’ ‘Yes, sir.’ Mendoza, McMello, DeSilva, DeSaram and Gomes strummed ‘Bananas’. Prem Singh walked across the lawn to the gate. His dates also moved along to the hedge gate. The band saw Prem Singh leave so they switched onto ‘God Save the King’.

There was Sundari, the daughter of Hukum Chand’s orderly. She had made her tryst with destiny on the road to Gujranwala. She had been married four days and both her arms were covered with red lacquer bangles and the henna on her palms was still a deep vermilion. She had not yet slept with Mansa Ram. Their relatives had not left them alone for a minute. She had hardly seen his face through her veil. Now he was taking her to Gujranwala where he worked as a peon and had a little room of his own in the Sessions Court compound. There would be no relatives and he would certainly try it. He did not seem particularly keen, sitting in the bus talking loudly to all the other passengers. Men often pretended indifference. No one would really believe that she wanted him either—what with the veil across her face and not a word! ‘Do not take any of the lacquer bangles off. It brings bad luck,’ her girl friends had said to her. ‘Let him break them when he makes love to you and mauls you.’ There were a dozen on each of her arms, covering them from the wrists to the elbows. She felt them with her fingers. They were hard and brittle. He would have to do a lot of hugging and savaging to break them. She stopped daydreaming as the bus pulled up. There were large stones on the road. Then hundreds of people surrounded them. Everyone
was ordered off the bus. Sikhs were just hacked to death. The clean-shaven were stripped. Those that were circumcised were forgiven. Those that were not, were circumcised. Not just the foreskin: the whole thing was cut off. She who had not really had a good look at Mansa Ram was shown her husband completely naked. They held him by the arms and legs and one man cut off his penis and gave it to her. The mob made love to her. She did not have to take off any of her bangles. They were all smashed as she lay in the road, being taken by one man and another and another. That should have brought her a lot of good luck!

Sunder Singh’s case was different. Hukum Chand had had him recruited for the army. He had done well. He was a big, brave Sikh with a row of medals won in battles in Burma, Eritrea and Italy. The government had given him land in Sindh. He came to his tryst by train, along with his wife and three children. There were over five hundred men and women in a compartment meant to carry ‘40 sitting, 12 sleeping’. There was just one little lavatory in the corner without any water in the cistern. It was 115° in the shade; but there was no shade—not a shrub within miles. Only the sun and the sand … and no water. At all stations there were people with spears along the railings. Then the train was held up at a station for four days. No one was allowed to get off. Sunder Singh’s children cried for water and food. So did everyone else. Sunder Singh gave them his urine to drink. Then that dried up too. So he pulled out his revolver and shot them all. Shangara Singh aged six with his long brown-blonde hair tied up in a topknot, Deepo aged four with curling eyelashes, and Amro, four months old, who tugged at her mother’s dry breasts with her gums and puckered up her face till it was full of wrinkles, crying frantically. Sunder Singh also shot his wife. Then he lost his nerve. He put the revolver to his temple but did not fire. There was no point
in killing himself. The train had begun to move. He heaved out the corpses of his wife and children and came along to India. He did not redeem the pledge. Only his family did.

Hukum Chand felt wretched. The night had fallen. Frogs called from the river. Fireflies twinkled about the jasmines near the veranda. The bearer had brought whisky and Hukum Chand had sent it away. The bearer had laid out the dinner but he had not touched the food. He had the lamp removed and sat alone in the dark, staring into space.

Why had he let the girl go back to Chundunnugger? Why? he asked himself, hitting his forehead with his fist. If only she were here in the rest house with him, he would not bother if the rest of the world went to hell. But she was not here; she was in the train. He could hear its rumble.

Hukum Chand slid off his chair, covered his face with his arms and started to cry. Then he raised his face to the sky and began to pray.

A little after eleven, the moon came up. It looked tired and dissipated. It flooded the plain with a weary pale light in which everything was a little blurred. Near the bridge there was very little moonlight. The high railway embankment cast a wall of dark shadow.

Sandbags, which had guarded the machine-gun nest near the signal, were littered about on either side of the railway tracks. The signal scaffolding stood like an enormous sentry watching over the scene. Two large oval eyes, one on top of the other, glowed red. The two hands of the signal stood stiffly parallel to each other. The bushes along the bank looked like a jungle. The river did not glisten; it was like a sheet of slate with just a suspicion of a ripple here and there.

A good distance from the embankment, behind a thick cluster of pampas, was a jeep with its engine purring gently. There was no one in it. The men had spread themselves on either
side of the railway line a few feet from each other. They sat on their haunches with their rifles and spears between their legs. On the first steel span of the bridge a thick rope was tied horizontally above the railway line. It was about twenty feet above the track.

It was too dark for the men to recognize each other. So they talked loudly. Then somebody called.

‘Silence! Listen!’

They listened. It was nothing. Only the wind in the reeds.

‘Silence anyhow,’ came the command of the leader. ‘If you talk like this, you will not hear the train in time.’

They began to talk in whispers.

There was a shimmy-shammy noise of trembling steel wires as one of the signals came down. Its oval eye changed from red to a bright green. The whispering stopped. The men got up and took their positions ten yards away from the track.

There was a steady rumbling sound punctuated by soft puff-puffs. A man ran up to the line and put his ear on the steel rail.

‘Come back, you fool,’ yelled the leader in a hoarse whisper.

‘It is the train,’ he announced triumphantly.

‘Get back!’ repeated the leader fiercely.

All eyes strained towards the grey space where the rumbling of the train came from. Then they shifted to the rope, stiff as a shaft of steel. If the train was fast it might cut many people in two like a knife slicing cucumbers. They shuddered.

A long way beyond the station, there was a dot of light. It went out and another came up nearer. Then another and another, getting nearer and nearer as the train came on. The men looked at the lights and listened to the sound of the train. No one looked at the bridge any more.

A man started climbing on the steel span. He was noticed only when he had got to the top where the rope was tied. They thought he was testing the knot. He was tugging it. It was well tied; even if the engine funnel hit it, the rope might snap but
the knot would not give. The man stretched himself on the rope. His feet were near the knot; his hands almost reached the centre of the rope. He was a big man.

The train got closer and closer. The demon form of the engine with sparks flying from its funnel came up along the track. Its puffing was drowned in the roar of the train itself. The whole train could be seen clearly against the wan moonlight. From the coal-tender to the tail end, there was a solid crust of human beings on the roof.

The man was still stretched on the rope.

The leader stood up and shouted hysterically: ‘Come off, you ass! You will be killed. Come off at once!’

The man turned round towards the voice. He whipped out a small kirpan from his waist and began to slash at the rope.

‘Who is this? What is he…?’

There was no time. They looked from the bridge to the train, from the train to the bridge. The man hacked the rope vigorously.

The leader raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired. He hit his mark and one of the man’s legs came off the rope and dangled in the air. The other was still twined round the rope. He slashed away in frantic haste. The engine was only a few yards off, throwing embers high up in the sky with each blast of the whistle. Somebody fired another shot. The man’s body slid off the rope, but he clung to it with his hands and chin. He pulled himself up, caught the rope under his left armpit, and again started hacking with his right hand. The rope had been cut in shreds. Only a thin tough strand remained. He went at it with the knife, and then with his teeth. The engine was almost on him. There was a volley of shots. The man shivered and collapsed. The rope snapped in the centre as he fell. The train went over him, and went on to Pakistan.

THE BEGINNING

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VIKING

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First published in 1956
Published by Ravi Dayal Publisher 1988
Published in Viking by Penguin Books India and Ravi Dayal Publisher 2007

Copyright © Ravi Dayal 1988, 2007

Cover photography by E. O. Hoppé/CORBIS
Cover design by Bhavi Mehta

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-143-06588-3

This digital edition published in 2013.
e-ISBN: 978-9-351-18352-5