The Weary Generations (25 page)

‘Baba, you've grown old,' he said, laughing.

Niaz Beg waved his arm all round the room, which was stacked with bags of wheat to the rafters. ‘Look, all this with my own hands.' Then, remembering his son's remark, ‘I am not old. I work. Men who work never become old. And I don't cry like women. Now you must sleep. When you get up, I will take you out.'

The sun had already covered three-quarters of the sky on its downward journey before Naim awoke. Niaz Beg was ready and waiting. They stepped out of the house together.

‘This is where our acres start,' Niaz Beg said, standing far out in the fields beyond Roshan Agha's vast spread. ‘You can't put a foot down without trampling on a root. I have looked after it bravely, seeing that we won it with bravery. Only two marlas of sugarcane were left, and I cut them while you slept. Finished. See those two girls peeling them now? Oh ho, they are three. Who is the third? Who are you?'

‘I am Rehmu's daughter,' the third girl replied. ‘Don't you recognize me, chacha? Have you stopped wearing surma in your eyes?' Sweating around the nose and breasts, which were visible through their loose shirts, wet from hours of labour cleaning sugarcane with small hand scythes in the sun, the girls laughed.

Niaz Beg shouted at them with embarrassment. ‘Keep your heads and hands on your work. Young girls shouldn't let their tongues run free. Work,
work, keep yourselves away from the devil!'

The girls looked at Naim and smiled shyly. Niaz Beg pulled his son away. ‘We need a woman in the house. A young strong girl can manage the house on her own and help out in the fields too. I have made a room above the house for you. Do you like it?'

‘Yes,' replied Naim.

At night, in the animals' yard just inside the main door of the house, the last of the gur was being made.

‘This crusher,' Niaz Beg told Naim, ‘I bought with my money. You remember we used to hire it from others and paid for it with the gur that we had made with our own labour? Now it is all ours. After all, it from the medal's land that –'

‘Don't go on about it, Baba,' Naim interrupted.

‘Why not? When I went with money in my pocket to buy the mushki bullock from the chaudris of Jat Nagar, people tried to stop me. They said nobody goes to the big chaudris to buy their cattle. But you know, when I went there they gave me a good seat to sit on, right next to themselves, and they mentioned your name with respect. After all, we won with bravery the medal from gora sarkar.'

‘Baba,' Naim said severely, ‘if you mention it one more time I will throw it in the fire. Be quiet.'

A great fire, fed by the crushed peel of the sugarcanes and their long dry leaves, burned under a huge wide-mouthed iron pot containing the furiously boiling juice that poured out of the crusher, pulled by the mushki ox. The cane crusher was always the gathering point for the men of the village wherever it was working, as much for the warmth of the fire on cold nights as for a cup of juice, a mouthful of hot gur, a round of hukka and gossip. Volunteers presented themselves to drive the oxen, feed the sugarcane into the mouth of the crusher and put the crushed peel into the fire. They talked for half the night about things that concerned them: the young about girls they fancied, the old about the weather, the crops, the strength of each other's tobacco, and later, when the sweet aroma of vapour arising from the ever-thickening juice in the pot had saturated the air and after it had been cleaned up with okra stalks and the dirt skimmed away from the surface and they had had a taste of the hot, yellowish pink gur and the night mellowed, they talked about their old loves, their faces showing the shy remembrance of their youth for ever gone.

The big door creaked and Hari Chand, the schoolmaster, entered. He quietly greeted the assembled people and went to sit by Naim who had earlier moved aside to sit on his own away from the crowd.

‘Good to see you back,' Hari Chand said. ‘You were away a long time.'

‘Too long,' Naim said with a smile.

‘I knew you were sent to other places, although not exactly where,' Hari Chand said with a questioning look.

‘Oh, several places,' Naim said to him.

‘I was told that our people lost track of you.'

‘No they didn't, although I did go away on my own towards the end.'

Hari Chand was quiet for a while. Then he said, ‘Were you happy?'

‘It was work.'

‘What are you going to do now?' Hari Chand asked.

‘Nothing. I am going to stay here. Have you seen my father's condition?'

‘Yes.'

‘How is it with you?'

‘Oh, much as before, much as before.'

Niaz Beg gave them a clay cup each full of hot gur with melted ghee swimming on top. ‘Eat it,' he said. ‘You give one of these to a horse and it will jump the wall. The cold – not since year fourteen …'

Naim ate it with relish. Hari Chand took only a couple of fingerfuls and put the cup aside.

‘What do you think about the situation now?' Hari Chand asked.

‘I don't think. I told you, I am doing nothing but staying here. I am tired.'

‘I understand,' Hari Chand said. ‘Everyone's work is cut out.'

Under a pale moon, they sat silently for a few minutes. Then Hari Chand got up, shook hands with Naim and left. Naim felt the other man's hand cold and heavy in his grip.

It was early when Naim awoke the next morning. His father was still asleep, gathered up under his quilt like a small bundle. This was one of those rare days when he didn't leave the house in the early hours to go out to the fields and stay there until sunrise. Naim went to the water pump in the courtyard and started pumping it. When all the cold water in the pipe had run out, he filled two buckets with the lukewarm water that fetched up from the bowels of the earth. With those he bathed, luxuriously pouring water over his head and feeling the grime of weeks wash away. Little Ali and Naim's cousin Rawal had walked out of their rooms and stood watching him. After Naim dried himself and put on his shirt and trousers, he grabbed Ali by the neck and tossed him in the air. The child landed smartly on his stepbrother's shoulders, gripping his head.

‘I can ride the mare,' Ali said, pointing to the splendid white animal of whose purchase and value Naim had heard from his father at length the previous day.

‘I can ride standing up,' Rawal boasted.

To keep up with them, Naim told a lie. ‘I used to ride lying on my back when I was your age.'

‘Really?' Rawal said, his eyes wide. ‘Are there horses in Kulkutta?'

‘Yes, they pull buggies.'

‘Bullock buggies?'

‘No, horse buggies.'

Niaz Beg had got out of bed. The old woman was getting on with preparing the food for her men. They sat on the floor around a very low table that Niaz Beg told his son he had made ‘with his own hands', proudly spreading his hands yet again in front of him. He ate last night's warmed-up gur with butter first of all, followed by buffalo milk and a paratha and finally a melon. Naim had always been surprised at the contrast between his father's shrunken body and the amount of food he consumed. At times he had mentioned it and got the old man's answer, ‘Horse and man, as long as they keep eating, they stay upright. They stop eating, they die.'

The old woman started weeping.

‘Why are you crying, mother?' Naim asked her.

His mother kept quietly shedding tears.

‘Tell me, what is it?'

‘He,' she said, wiping her tears, ‘slept here after two months. Two whole months, he ate my food and slept with that blood-sucker in the other room. Last night, only because of you … I pray you not to go away now.'

Naim blushed deeply. ‘I am not going anywhere,' he said.

‘Hold your tongue, you foolish woman,' Niaz Beg shouted. ‘Give me some achar, go on, get up.'

Niaz Beg ate a whole pickled green mango and offered another to Naim. ‘Eat it. When a buffalo's stomach gets heavy, a single achar mango does the job. Eat it. It will make your insides light, light as the wind.'

Naim laughed. ‘I don't want the wind inside me.'

‘Baba has much wind,' Rawal said, laughing.

Niaz Beg glowered at the boy. ‘Hold your tongue. It is growing wings. One day I will cut them.'

They heard a noise outside the house. They listened. The low humming noise continued. There was the sound of hurrying feet. Niaz Beg and Naim got up together and went to the door. A group of villagers appeared running down the street, disappearing round the other corner. Following them came some women, all of them Hindu and Sikh, walking with irregular steps. Terror peeped out of their eyes, but no tears; they were
mumbling words that sounded like low moans arising from a deep pain: ‘They finished him. The Muslas finished him.' One by one they vanished into their houses, shutting the doors on the outside world. Picking up the scent, Niaz Beg and Naim went to Hari Chand's hut, where the schoolmaster lay, half in and half out of the door, his arms gathered upon his chest and legs spread wide. His throat had been cut. Out of his pulled-down shalwar his bloody genitals were visible: he had been crudely circumcised.

‘They came in the night,' an old Sikh said to Niaz Beg, shaking his head.

‘Did you see them?'

‘No. They came from outside, not from here.'

Back in the house, Naim sat on the cot with his head in his hands. The silence in the village was so complete that the thought of a single living, breathing being seemed impossible. Everyone was waiting, waiting for something, or someone, other people, Roshan Agha, the police, God from heaven, anyone, to come and lift this pall of breathless quiet where not a sound arose from the hidden multitude. Naim sat still, with a voice saying over and over to him in his head, ‘This has nothing to do with you, nothing at all.' His mother started crying. It was the first voice he heard. Then the horse neighed and the buffalo uttered a low, regretful moan. Some small children laughed in the distance. Slowly, the village began to come to life. But for hours no one came out of their houses and the streets remained empty, until the police party came. In the evening the police took the dead body away with them. The story told by the police was that ‘the reality was different, it wasn't the Muslas, a cow was slaughtered and the militant Hindus flared up and killed Hari Chand when he went to try to calm them'. All this had happened in ‘some other village', whence the body was brought back and dumped on his doorstep. Why was he circumcised? Because he was considered a ‘sympathizer' of the Muslas.

The reality, however, as always in such cases, was never discovered. The dead man had no known relatives, no one to mourn him. The locked door of his hut, never lived in afterwards, for ever reminded Naim of death in the plural, as if it were not one man that had died there but all the dead he had known, depositing yet more on the heap of anonymous mourning within him.

Two months after Naim arrived back in the village, Niaz Beg met his end. Swift and sudden, it took barely twelve hours. The old man kept making plans for the next day right up to the last few moments, when he briefly wept. It was the second half of March; the mornings were still chilly. At dawn, Niaz Beg picked up his hukka and went out for the last watering of
his wheat crop. He cut into the water coming from the main canal outlet and made little channels with his spade at several places for it to flow into his fields, constantly talking to it. ‘First you took so long to come, and when you come, you devil, you are cold as ice, freezing the blood in my feet,' he said, standing ankle-deep in mud. ‘But never mind, this is the last time before the harvest and I am going to suck up every drop of you. You go two steps and sink into the earth, eh? You lazy layabout, come with me and I will show you how many roots you have to wet, no man in the whole village has as much standing wheat as I have, I will tire you out or you can change my name to whatever you want, you wayward son of the river. When I was young I could stand in you up to the waist all night in the month of Poh, and now I am old you freeze my blood, eh? Shame on you. You just wait, wait, I am not going to give up until I am finished with you …' Talking thus, louder and louder to keep out the cold, he managed to water most of his field of rapidly paling crops before a neighbouring farmer came to claim his share of water.

The sun was up to a two-spear height when Niaz Beg returned home. He ate gur mixed with nuts and a cup of hot milk, smoked hukka for a few minutes and went out again to prepare the soil for the sowing of vegetables. Carrying the plough on his back and repeatedly taking the pipe of the hukka out of his mouth to poke the bullock in the behind with it to drive it ahead of him, he freed one hand by balancing the plough on one shoulder and rubbed his chest, swearing at the pain that had been roaming around under his ribs since the morning. ‘If the boy had two hands,' he mumbled to himself, ‘he could have helped me.' Sorrowfully, he swore at his son's disability and started tilling the land. By the time the sun was overhead he had turned the soil in the whole field. Back home, his pain kept bothering him. He made no mention of it. According to Niaz Beg, the one cure for a hundred ailments was work and more work. ‘Every impurity of the body is washed away with sweat,' he always said. Rubbing his chest surreptitiously and grimacing, he still ate like a horse: two thick rotis of wheat flour kneaded in butter, with gram daal seared with fried onions, followed by a pot of lassi.

After another few pulls at the hukka, which had been refreshed on his orders by Rawal, he was up once again, shouting at Rawal to accompany him out to fetch fodder for the animals. Rawal picked up his tools – a length of rope and a hand scythe – and followed him out of the yard. ‘You have eaten four times and they,' he said, pointing to the cattle and poking the boy in the neck with the sharp end of the scythe, ‘have not eaten once. Have you no shame?'