Cracking India (30 page)

Hamida keeps her bowed head covered and her eyes averted from Father. She shuffles and pivots awkwardly on her long legs, hunching her narrow shoulders meekly, careful not to offend anyone by her unusual height.

Hamida has to be trained from scratch. Yousaf teaches her how to make beds the way Mother likes. Mother shows her how to stack clothes in tidy piles in cupboards, how to wash woolens and
dry them on spread towels. Hamida has never used an iron. She never does. She is so terrified of electricity that she doesn't even switch on the lights—until Cousin shows her how to with a wooden clothes hanger, which, it is dinned into her head, makes her shockproof.

We tell her where our things go and Mother shows her how to bathe us and massage my legs.

I barely limp now.

Hamida has to be restrained from latching on to Mother and massaging and pummelling her limbs whenever she finds Mother sitting, sewing or reading in bed. Hamida doesn't know what to do with her hands in Mother's presence. And, when idle, in fluttering panic they reach out and massage whoever is at hand. Adi wiggles and slips away from her grasp. Or, if she is too insistent, kicks out. I let her hands have their will with me and tolerate her irksome caress. She is like a starved and grounded bird and I can't bear to hurt her.

Sometimes her eyes fill and the tears roll down her cheeks. Once, when I smoothed her hair back, she suddenly started to weep, and noticing my consternation explained, “When the eye is wounded, even a scented breeze hurts.”

Hamida comes to fetch me from Mrs. Pen's. When we are close to the house, she casually says: “Imam Din has guests ... Poor things: they have suffered a lot ... The Sikhs attacked their village.”

“Where are they from?” I ask, my pulse quickening.

“Pir Pindo ... or some such village.”

I leave her hand and as I run towards the house I hear her voice trying to restrain me. “Be careful, Lenny baby,” she cries. “Wait for me!” And she runs after me. My heart beating wildly, I run into the servants' courtyard.

A small boy, so painfully thin that his knees and elbows appear swollen, is squatting a few feet away concentrating on striking
a marble lying in a notch in the dust. He is wearing ragged, drawstring shorts of thin cotton and the dirty cord tying them in gathers round his waist trails in the mud. His aim scores, and he turns to look at me. His face is a patchwork of brown and black skin; a wizened blemish. He starts to get up, showing his teeth in a crooked smile; and with a shock I recognize Ranna. His limbs are black and brittle; the circular protrusion of his windpipe and ribs so skeletal that I can see the passage of air in his throat and lungs. He is covered with welts; as if his body has been chopped up, and then welded. He sees my horror and winces, turning away. “Ranna,” I say, moving quickly to touch him. “Ranna! What happened to you?” I can't help it; I look at the ugly scab where his belly button used to be. He stares at me, his face crumbling. And, wheeling abruptly, he runs into Imam Din's quarters, I see the improbable wound on the back of his shaved head. It is a grisly scar like a brutally gouged and premature bald spot. In time the wound acquired the shape of a four-day-old crescent moon.

 

I almost live in the quarters. Hamida sits with us for short periods, and when she pulls Ranna to her lap and he presses against her, her disorderly hands grow tranquil. I only go to the house to sleep. I eat my meals in Imam Din's quarters, relishing everything Ranna's Noni
chachi
cooks. That's when they talk—using plain Punjabi words and graphic peasant gestures—Ranna, bit by bit, describing the attack on Pir Pindo, Noni
chachi
recounting her part in the story, and Iqbal
chacha
intervening with clarification, conjecture and comment. It is hard to grasp that the events they describe took place only a couple of months ago... that, like Ranna, Pir Pindo is brutally altered... that his family, as I knew it, has ceased to exist ...

No one realized the speed at which the destruction and the rampage advanced. They didn't know the extent to which it surrounded them. Jagjeet Singh visited Pir Pindo under cover of darkness
with furtive groups of Sikhs. A few more families who had close kin near Multan and Lahore left, disguised as Sikhs or Hindus. But most of the villagers resisted the move. The uncertainty they faced made them discredit the danger. “We cannot leave,” they said, and, like a refrain, I can hear them say: “What face will we show our forefathers on the day of judgment if we abandon their graves? Allah will protect us!”

Jagjeet Singh sent word he was risking his life, and the lives of the other men in Dera Tek Singh, if he visited Pir Pindo again. The Akalis were aware of his sympathies for the Muslims. They had threatened him. They were in control of his village.

Jagjeet Singh advised them to leave as soon as they could, but it was already too late.

Late that afternoon the clamor of the monsoon downpour suddenly ceased. Chidda raised her hands from the dough she was kneading and, squatting before the brass tray, turned to her mother-in-law. Sitting by his grandmother, Ranna sensed their tension as the old woman stopped chaffing the wheat. She slowly pushed back her age-brittle hair and, holding her knobby fingers immobile, grew absolutely still.

Chidda stood in their narrow doorway, her eyes nervously scouring the courtyard. Ranna clung to her shalwar, peering out. His cousins, almost naked in their soaking rags, were shouting and splashing in the slush in their courtyard. “Shut up. Oye!” Chidda shouted in a voice that rushed so violently from her strong chest that the children quieted at once and leaned and slid uneasily against the warm black hides of the buffaloes tethered to the rough stumps. The clouds had broken and the sun shot beams that lit up the freshly bathed courtyard.

The other members of the household, Ranna's older brothers, his uncles, aunts and cousins, were quietly filing into the courtyard. When she saw Khatija and Parveen, Chidda strode to her daughters and pressed them fiercely to her body. The village was so quiet it could be the middle of the night, and from the distance, buffeting
the heavy, moisture-laden air, came the wails and the hoarse voices of men shouting.

Already their neighbors' turbans skimmed the tall mud ramparts of their courtyard, their bare feet squelching on the path the rain had turned into a muddy channel.

 

I can imagine the old mullah, combing his faded beard with trembling fingers as he watches the villagers converge on the mosque with its uneven green dome. It is perched on an incline; and seen from there the fields, flooded with rain, are the same muddy color as the huts. The mullah drags his cot forward as the villagers, touching their foreheads and greeting him somberly, fill the prayer ground. The
chaudhry
joins the mullah on his charpoy. The villagers sit on their haunches in uneven rows lifting their confused and frightened faces. There is a murmur of voices. Conjectures. First the name of one village and then of another. The Sikhs have attacked Kot-Rahim. No, it sounds closer... It must be Makipura.

The
chaudhry
raises his heavy voice slightly: “Dost Mohammad and his party will be here soon ... We'll know soon enough what's going on.”

At his reassuring presence the murmuring subsides and the villagers nervously settle down to wait. Some women draw their veils across their faces and, shading their bosoms, impatiently shove their nipples into the mouths of whimpering babies. Grandmothers, mothers and aunts rock restive children on their laps and thump their foreheads to put them to sleep. The children, conditioned to the numbing jolts, grow groggy and their eyes become unfocused. They fall asleep almost at once.

Half an hour later the scouting party, drenched and muddy, the lower halves of their faces wrapped in the ends of their turbans, pick their way through the squatting villagers to the
chaudhry.

Removing his wet puggaree and wiping his head with a cloth the mullah hands him, Dost Mohammad turns on his haunches to face the villagers. His skin is gray, as if the rain has bleached the color. Casting a shade across his eyes with a hand that trembles
slightly, speaking in a matter-of-fact voice that disguises his ache and fear, he tells the villagers that the Sikhs have attacked at least five villages around Dehra Misri, to their east. Their numbers have swollen enormously. They are like swarms of locusts, moving in marauding bands of thirty and forty thousand. They are killing all Muslims. Setting fires, looting, parading the Muslim women naked through the streets—raping and mutilating them in the center of villages and in mosques. The Bias, flooded by melting snow and the monsoon, is carrying hundreds of corpses. There is an intolerable stench where the bodies, caught in the bends, have piled up.

“What are the police doing?” a man shouts. He is Dost Mohammad's cousin. One way or another the villagers are related.

“The Muslims in the force have been disarmed at the orders of a Hindu Sub-Inspector; the dog's penis!” says Dost Mohammad, speaking in the same flat monotone. “The Sikh and Hindu police have joined the mobs.”

The villagers appear visibly to shrink—as if the loss of hope is a physical thing. A woman with a child on her lap slaps her forehead and begins to wail:
“Hai! Hai!”
The other women join her:
“Hai! Hai!”
Older women, beating their breasts like hollow drums, cry, “Never mind us ... save the young girls! The children!
Hai! Hai!”

Ranna's two-toothed old grandmother, her frail voice quavering bitterly, shrieks: “We should have gone to Pakistan!”

It was hard to believe that the decision to stay was taken only a month ago. Embedded in the heart of the Punjab, they had felt secure, inviolate. And to uproot themselves from the soil of their ancestors had seemed to them akin to tearing themselves, like ancient trees, from the earth.

And the messages filtering from the outside had been reassuring. Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Tara Singh were telling the peasants to remain where they were. The minorities would be a sacred trust... The communal trouble was being caused by a few mischief-makers and would soon subside—and then there were their brothers, the Sikhs of Dera Tek Singh, who would protect them.

But how many Muslims can the Sikh villagers befriend? The mobs, determined to drive the Muslims out, are prepared for the carnage. Their ranks swollen by thousands of refugees recounting fresh tales of horror they roll towards Pir Pindo like the heedless swells of an ocean.

The
chaudhry
raises his voice: “How many guns do we have now?”

The women grow quiet.

“Seven or eight,” a man replies from the front.

There is a disappointed silence. They had expected to procure more guns, but every village is holding on to its meager stock of weapons.

“We have our axes, knives, scythes and staves!” a man calls from the back. “Let those bastards come. We're ready!”

“Yes ... we're as ready as we'll ever be,” the
chaudhry
says, stroking his thick moustache. “You all know what to do... ”

They have been over the plan often enough recently. The women and girls will gather at the
chaudhry's.
Rather than face the brutality of the mob they will pour kerosene around the house and burn themselves. The canisters of kerosene are already stored in the barn at the rear of the
chaudhry's
sprawling mud house. The young men will engage the Sikhs at the mosque, and at other strategic locations, for as long as they can and give the women a chance to start the fire.

A few men from each family were to shepherd the younger boys and lock themselves into secluded back rooms, hoping to escape detection. They were peaceable peasants, not skilled in such matters, and their plans were sketchy and optimistic. Comforted by each other's presence, reluctant to disperse, the villagers remained in the prayer yard as dusk gathered about them. The distant wailing and shouting had ceased. Later that night it rained again, and comforted by its seasonal splatter the tired villagers curled up on their mats and slept.