The Weary Generations (12 page)

‘What kept you?' she asked her daughter-in-law.

‘Why don't you give your sons a little less to eat so they stop bothering me like dogs all the time,' she said and went straight to her cot.

H
ARVESTING HAD BEGUN.
Every man, woman and animal in Roshan Pur was busy. Even the birds, seeing an abundance of grain on the ground, hovered in swarms, uttering shrill cries of hungry delight. Under the May sun, the bare bodies of men had been burnt black. In the women's jars at home, ghee was being finished fast as each cutter consumed a quarter seer of the stuff a day. The storerooms were emptying of straw and chaff, and the cattle were showing their ribs like curved swords under the loose, dull skin on their flanks. Dry white spots had appeared on the faces of the women, who gave everything they had – food, the warmth of their bodies at night – to the aching limbs of the labouring men in the hope of a year's subsistence. Yet the villagers, working in a hundred and twenty degrees of shadeless heat, with their deep-creased faces, sunken eyes and cheeks, were happy, for before them was the heavy, ripened wheat ready to be cut down, the fruit of their long, hard labour. Swinging their sickles in short fierce strokes against dry stalks, talking and laughing, mocking and swearing, they were leaving heap after heap of the felled crop behind them as they moved, squatting like two-legged tortoises, along the ground, clearing swathes of field in their wake.

By the end of the week most of the fields had been cleared. They lay flat, looking naked and white in the sun, lifeless without the standing crop that had swayed in the wind for months and was now gone, marked only by great mounds of cut crop scattered all over them. The women of the village, anticipating for the first time in a long while the end of their toil, had come out in a blaze of colour, the red and orange, yellow and green of cotton and cheap silk kurtas and shalwars or simple sheets wound round the hips and air-light dopattas of dyed muslin covering their jet black, oiled hair. Even the cattle, eating armfuls of straw given them as starters until the wheat grain was beaten out of the ears and the proper chaff and stalk tied up and
hauled away to the storerooms, raised their heads and mooed, brayed and roared, the females among them getting restless and hot of blood and juices, ready to mate even before their ribs disappeared under layers of winter fat. It was a celebration.

Niaz Beg pulled up in his bullock cart by the Sikhs' field. Mahinder Singh came out to greet him.

‘Your eye is red,' Niaz Beg said to him.

‘Motherfucking sweat got in,' Mahinder Singh replied. ‘Flows like lassi these days, you know.'

‘True. Very true.'

Mahinder Singh glanced up. A grey haze hung in the still atmosphere, threatening a storm. Wide-winged kites wheeled high and low, crying with their tongues out as if warning of the coming wind through the lull. ‘Signs are bad,' he said.

‘They are,' Niaz Beg said. ‘I came with a purpose.'

‘Is your cutting done?'

‘Done. We cut a good crop.'

‘And you are complaining?' laughed Mahinder Singh.

‘Not complaining. But our store is full and still a little bit is left out. You have a big store, will you take my surplus?'

‘With the grace of guru, we have a heavy crop this year as well, chaudri.'

‘My boy is a friend of yours, that is why I came to ask.'

‘He is my friend all right. Yes, yes, I will talk to Juginder.'

‘We will eat from it first, finish it in a month.'

‘All right.'

‘When I was taken away, you know, I gave a bullock to your father for safekeeping. Don't know what happened to it, I was away a long time. Maybe it died, like your father. There is no accounting for such things. But he was my friend, your father was.'

‘Right, right. Don't worry, chaudri.'

Niaz Beg gave rope to the bullock, then flipped it hard on its back. The bullock didn't budge.

‘It won't go, chaudri,' Mahinder Singh laughed. ‘Feed it a cup of my daroo, then see how it goes.'

Niaz Beg began to beat the animal furiously. In the fields that were still being cut, they were beating the drums, the cutters swinging their sickles in time with the beat – dhum dhum dhum – dhumadhum dhumadhum – dhum dhum dhum – kept up by two professional drummers, their eyes closed and sweat pouring from every limb, completely lost in the rhythm of their hands and the sound they created. Equally lost in the drumbeat were
the peasants, the farmers, the cutters, holding bunches of stalks in one hand and running the cutting edge of the sickle over them with the other, doing it for an hour or so without stopping, dropping their sweat on earth that had been wet and black, firmly holding the green shoots only six months before and was now grey and dry and weak, giving up its fruit to men as they desired. ‘Halalala – dopey swine, come on – lazy-hand pig, faster, faster, halala …' Mock-swearing, they cheered and challenged each other to keep up the dance of the sickles on the roots of their food. As the sun reached its zenith, trying to break through the haze of dust, the women arrived. In their colourful dresses they poured out of their homes, balancing cane trays of thick butter-drenched millet-flour rotis and large round earthen pots of lassi which they held in the crook of the arm against the arc of their waist, eyes greedy and voluptuous for the almost bare fields and for their men. Once they were near the harvest they scattered in the fields, putting down food beside their men, and started gathering up little bundles of the cut crop that had been left behind by the cutters, laying one on top of the other to form high mounds from field to field. The drums stopped. The harvesters got up on tired knees and sunken bellies and leaped, hungry-jawed, upon the food.

The sun was setting when the wind rose, bucking the great grey sheet that had floated around all day, rumpling it up into huge balls of dust and flinging them to the earth. The dust-storm had arrived. The harvesters ran to their houses to fetch sewn-up gunny bags and whatever tarpaulin covers they could lay their hand on, even old quilts and heavy blankets, to cover up the little hills of crop and place stones on them all round to prevent them from flying away in the gusty wind. Those who couldn't find enough material for covers hauled the remaining crops on to their bullock carts and took off for home.

Fakir Din was trying to get his bullocks going.

‘They are for the butcher, Fakiroo,' Mahinder Singh called out to him. ‘They have had their day.'

Gravely offended, Fakir Din pulled at the rope-reins with such force that the bullocks' eyes bulged out. He eased a little, then pulled at them once again. The bullocks' nostrils flared, ears fluttered, muscles strained, and they started running.

‘Butcher, eh?' Fakir Din shouted. ‘Come on, let's see who's for the butcher. Here is the mile and there is the field. Halala …' and off he went, with Mahinder Singh coming up fast in answer to the challenge. The race was on, the two carts flying side by side, their wheels running astride the narrow path and into the fields on either side, as the bullocks were
viciously beaten by their masters with rope-reins and lashes of long thin twigs cut from shisham trees, accompanied and followed by the cheering, challenging cries of supporters who had cleared the path and taken sides without malice, athletic youngsters running alongside the carts and some of them leaping on to them and throwing their arms up in the air, shouting ‘Halalalala …' By the time they reached the edge of the pond, Mahinder Singh's cart was yards ahead. He pulled up. Jumping down from the cart, he slid out of the dhoti that covered his lower half. Standing naked, he started thrusting and gyrating his hips, making his genitals flip and flop in front of the oncoming Fakir Din, who, red-faced with anger and shame, swore loudly and turned his cart to head for home, while all around them swirled a fierce storm, blasting particles of hot dust into their bodies and faces, blinding and choking them.

They wrapped up their faces in sheets of cloth, leaving only slits for the eyes, and returned to the serious business of hovering in the fields around their heaped and covered crops, guarding them for half the night as they had done all their lives against the cruelties of the elements. When half the night had passed, the storm abruptly stopped. The men then returned to their homes, grateful that the storm did not bring in its wake the rain which could rob them of all they had toiled for.

By morning the dust had settled, the air was clear as glass and the sun, once again out of the shadow of dust, entered the streets of the village, quietly lighting up the chimneys and the edges of roofs. The men emerged, laughing and talking, driving their cattle ahead of them, the animals' neck-bells sedately tinkling as if both animal and man had found new energy and peace at the beginning of this day, ready for the threshing of the crop to separate the grain from the chaff. Little did they know at the time that another, deadlier storm awaited them that same morning. They had hardly been in the fields for an hour before everything came to a stop.

Niaz Beg ran out of his field and entered the house. He went straight to his storeroom. ‘Shut the doors,' he shouted to his wives. ‘Lock it. The lock's on the ledge up there. Don't tell anyone, you hear? Don't say a word –' Naim saw his father hiding in the storeroom and left the house. He saw a dozen policemen, rifles in hand, rounding up the peasants from all the fields. There were several horses and a military vehicle lined up along the widest path leading into the village. An Anglo-Indian sergeant and a thin-faced British officer, both in military uniform, stood by the vehicle. When all the men had been gathered in a cleared field where their cattle were tethered, the sergeant began, in a loud, harsh voice and broken vernacular, to address them.

‘War is threatening to devastate our country. It is the duty of each one of us to protect the country and the government.'

There was complete silence among the villagers, broken only by the tinkling of a bullock's neck-bell as it shook its head to drive off the flies.

‘We can only protect ourselves if we win the war. We have lakhs of men in our country,' the sergeant swept his arm across the breadth of the crowd. ‘We can win with the help of fighting men. Now, everyone who joins up will be given Royal silver coins in wages and free food and clothing on top. When the war ends, men will come home and get a pension for life.'

‘Have they stopped killing them in the wars now?' old Rehmat said with a little sarcastic laugh.

The sergeant's lips twitched. ‘We don't want old men,' he said. ‘Only young men may give their names.'

A buzz rose from the crowd. Two young boys started talking.

‘Where is the war going on?'

‘Don't know.'

‘Yes, where is it happening?' Mahinder Singh asked the sergeant.

‘Silence,' the sergeant ordered. ‘War is threatening England and the British government,
your
government. We need you to fight for your King and country. Come on, come forward and give your names.'

‘We are harvesting,' a man said. ‘Our cut crop is still out.'

‘We have no time,' the sergeant said severely. ‘We have to cover the whole district. Step forward.'

The crowd stirred. Men's voices arose here and there. ‘Who will thresh our wheat? The jackals?' ‘What will we eat?' ‘Have we laboured for a whole year for the pigs to eat our grain?'

‘Look at my hands.' An old peasant extended his arms in front of him. Everyone standing beside him looked intently at his callused, dry-skinned hands as if they were seeing them for the first time. The sergeant was looking back at the thin-faced officer.

The officer quickly turned and went to his vehicle. He put his hand into the cab and brought out a sheaf of papers loosely held in a file-cover. After leafing through them for a minute, he handed them to one of the only three men who were in civilian clothes. They turned out to be a doctor and his two assistants. The officer then unfixed a bayonet from the rifle carried by a policeman standing next to him. He held up the weapon in front of the men. The sun caught the steel and exploded in the eyes of the bullocks, who jerked their heads in sudden fright. The officer paused for a moment, then spoke in perfect vernacular.

‘You will now cut your crops with this,' he waved the bayonet, ‘and do it on the field of battle.' With that he expertly flung the bayonet down so that it stood on end with its point sunk into the earth. ‘Tell the soldiers to present the men,' he ordered the sergeant.

The constables, poking them with their rifle butts, began to separate the younger men and drive them to the front at bayonet-point. The men resisted, clinging to their animals. The bullocks rubbed back, mooing softly, not with hunger or lust but with the warmth of intimacy as if they understood the danger ahead for their masters. Naim calmly walked up to the sergeant.

‘Put my name down,' he said in English.

The sergeant looked up, surprised. ‘Are you educated?'

‘I have passed senior Cambridge from Calcutta,' Naim replied.

‘We want fighting men, farmers and peasants, not educated people.' The sergeant paused, then added, ‘Er – not yet.'

The officer walked over and addressed Naim. ‘Why don't you join the Education Department? It is equally useful, all round.'

‘I am a farmer. I can ride, shoot and fight,' Naim answered.

The officer looked at him with interest from head to foot. ‘Wait,' he said.

Naim stood there looking at the uncut wheat crop whose grain-heavy ears swayed drunkenly in the light wind. In the cleared fields, heaps of gathered crop lay motionless like huge tortoises sunning themselves. Wide-winged kites wheeled overhead, crying thirstily, as the hot wind of a summer noon swirled around the pushing, shoving, swearing and sweating men of the village. After two hours of effort, coaxing and bullying, the sergeant and his soldiers had only managed to extract names and particulars from two young men. The officer was in an obvious temper. He turned to Naim.