The Weary Generations (39 page)

She didn't put her name at the bottom. She stared at the letter for just a moment and then slowly crumpled it in her hands into a ball, as if she had decided to destroy it even as she wrote the last word. After a few minutes, she yawned and got up from the chair. She was going to change into her night-dress and go to bed. Instead, she didn't even hang the clothes that she was wearing on the clothes-stand, dropping them on the floor one by one until she was standing naked in front of the tall mirror. She looked at her image, the circles around the eyes getting blacker, a fattened chin and thin shoulders above breasts limp and shrunk, never sucked by a baby's mouth, and the expanding hips, and she wanted to turn her face away from the woman in the mirror. But her gaze into herself had stilled her in a frozen posture with her eyes staring into the pain of battles she had fought, until a great fright gripped her and she began to shiver. She slipped under the quilt as she stood, and the rub of velvet on her bare, goose-pimpled skin made her aware that, despite the time gone by and the sorrow of it, the one thing she still wanted was Naim's presence, to fill the gap that had opened up in her life and calm the shivering of her heart.

Naim had years to serve yet, and Ali to live in his life without shade, before things would change. One rainy season cholera spread in several districts
and took many lives, Ali's mother among the Roshan Pur dead. Aisha and Ali crept up to the village in the dark of the evening and were met by someone they dreaded: Rawal. He had stood in their path outside the village for hours, waiting for them. When he confronted them he had his foot-long knife in his hand which he waved before them.

‘Put the woman in the ground and go back,' he snarled.

The couple caught the shine of the steel blade, too close to them, and knew they had no choice. They sneaked out of the village the next day as they had come, still waiting in vain for Naim.

Naim had been unwell in gaol off and on for some time. It was no commonplace complaint like a headache or indigestion or some such as could be diagnosed and treated, but every once in a while he felt dizzy. He had to lie down and would then be overtaken by a great weakness that seemed to penetrate to his guts so that he could move not one limb for hours, sometimes for days. His gaolers, not in the least concerned for the health of the inmates, considered him a malingerer, while Naim, wishing to dismiss it from his mind, put it down to the poor quality of life that he had been leading there over the years. One day, when he least expected it, he was told to go.

Naim took one look at the big house in Roshan Pur and came away. He went to stay in his mother's house. He found Rawal living in Ali's mother's room. Naim occupied his old room that his father had built for him on top of the house which had been lying vacant ever since he went first to live in his two rooms in the fields and then moved into the new house with Azra. Ali came to see him as soon he heard of his brother's arrival back in the village. This time he came without fear.

‘I want to come back,' he said to Naim.

‘Are you not happy there?' Naim asked him.

‘Are you joking? I am fed up there.'

‘Why, have you not learned any skills?'

‘I have. I am a first-class electrician now.'

‘Are you? I thought you were a mechanic.'

‘I am an electrical mechanic. I can mend big motors.'

‘Are you getting more money now?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then why do you want to leave?'

‘Have you not looked at me? You were in prison so that is why you look like a ghost. But why do I look like this?'

Naim gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘You have lost some weight, I see.'

‘Some weight! I have lost half my life. Aisha has too. We work with machines there and their noise makes me go crazy. It is a prison. There are no trees there.'

‘Have they not planted any new trees?' Naim said, wishing to divert Ali. ‘Or flowers?'

‘They tried. But the earth is not good. Only bushes and hardy creepers grow. There are some old trees, but they are in the bungalows where gora sahibs live.'

‘You have not been coming to the village very often, I hear.'

‘Don't you know why? Rawal threatened to kill me.'

Naim looked towards his mother, who looked away. ‘He has old enmity in his heart,' she mumbled. ‘What can I do?'

‘But he has a wife and child now. Why is he Ali's enemy?' Naim said to her.

‘What can I do?' his mother repeated. ‘You were not here. I am only an old woman.' She started crying. ‘You have lost everything. Just like your father.'

The room was full of smoke rising from smouldering dung-cakes on which the old woman had cooked a meal of a young chicken for the two men with separate portions of spinach. Naim got up to push the half-closed door wide open to let the air in.

‘I will put the rascal right,' he said, and called out, ‘Rawal!'

‘He is not here,' Ali said to him. ‘He went out when he saw me coming.'

‘The rascal,' Naim said angrily, ‘I will put him right.'

His one hand gripping the other behind his back and looking at the ground in front of his feet, Naim started pacing the room, as if in thought, while Ali finished the last of his butter-spattered roti, wiping clean the plate that had contained spinach cooked with fenugreek and green chillies.

‘I had thought,' Naim said, still pacing the floor, ‘that you could help me.'

‘I will,' Ali said. ‘I haven't forgotten how to work the land.'

‘I don't mean that,' said Naim. ‘I thought different.'

‘What?'

‘Among the workers. I did some thinking while I was inside. The next stage now is to wake up the labourers, all labourers, railway coolies, grain carriers, everyone who works as a casual worker on daily wages. But we can start with industrial labour. There are many of them in one place and they can be easily organized.'

‘Organized for what?'

‘More money, overtime payments, paid holidays, those things.'

‘I can do that,' Ali said eagerly. ‘I have many friends. I can go every day and talk to them.'

‘That won't do,' Naim said. ‘You have to be inside with them to be effective.'

‘You mean,' Ali stood up, ‘that I cannot come back?'

Taken aback by Ali's agitated state, Naim said to him calmly, ‘Of course you can come back. I just thought that for the time being –'

‘The time being? I have waited for you for years. Aisha – she has become barren. Waiting for you. We couldn't come back here for fear –'

‘Don't worry about Rawal, he will do as I tell him. He is not bad, he has looked after the land and the house –'

‘And your mother,' Ali interrupted him. ‘You take his side because he is your mother's nephew.'

‘Look, all right, if you do want to come back, listen –'

But Ali wouldn't stop. It was as if the whole vaporous mass of years of misery and fear had solidified into a weight that suddenly dropped on his heart in the face of ruined hope. ‘He is your uncle's son. You have made him the owner of everything. I am nothing to you, not your mother's son.' He flung himself out through the door.

‘No, no, Ali,' Naim ran after him. But Ali was already across the courtyard. At the main door, Ali stopped and turned.

‘And he is living in my mother's room.
My
room!' he shouted.

‘I will get him out of there,' Naim called out. ‘Stop, Ali, I will get him out of the house. He is nothing –'

Ali had cleared the threshold and was gone before Naim could finish the sentence. Standing at the outside door, looking at the receding back of his brother running away, he said, almost to himself, ‘He is nothing to me …'

Tears streaming down his face, Ali ran on until he had no breath left in his chest. He sat down on a large stone by the roadside. He put his hands on the craggy surface of the stone to support himself. A mile outside the village, this piece of rock had always been there. Nobody knew where it came from; there was no sign of its origin, a hill or a valley, for as far as the eye could see in this soft-soil flat land; nor any clue how and by what means the heavy stone, weighing tons, had been brought there. Nobody thought about it either, for the stone had grown to be part of the earth with age and had become invisible. Everything in Ali's mind too had become invisible. The sudden rage having subsided just as quickly as it came, his head was empty of thought. Once his breath levelled out, he got up and started walking. After he had walked for a while, passing other villages on
the way, he found himself at the railway station. He sat by the railway line, full of a mass of figureless grief. A train came and he boarded a third-class compartment. He didn't know where it was going, nor did he think about it. There was no room on the wooden bench seats, so he sat on the floor of the compartment. He did not move for hours. At times he dozed off, only to be woken, in the middle of a dream he didn't remember, by the bustle of embarking and disembarking passengers, most of them peasants like him or small shopkeepers from villages and towns. It was a passenger train that stopped everywhere and took twenty-four hours to reach its destination. Ali had been lucky on two points: first, no ticket-checker came to look for ‘free' travellers to demand money or throw them out, or if he came it was at a time when Ali had slipped under the nearest seat to sleep in peace for an hour or so, hidden behind and beneath a mass of bodies and left unspotted; second, he had a little money in his pocket to last him a day or two. By the time he left the train at the large and crowded station of the great city of Lahore, he had partially regained his sense of time and place and the shadow on his heart had shrunk to a dense spot, but one that was to stay heavy on his chest for the rest of his life.

He hadn't eaten for nearly a day and a night. He went to a tea stall and asked for a cup of tea. The stallholder, recognizing the accent of Ali's speech, asked him, ‘Where do you come from?'

‘Roshan Pur. It is near Rani Pur station.'

The stallholder, a man of thirty, immediately extended a hand to Ali. ‘Shake hands then,' he said, smiling. ‘I come from Ludhiana. I have relatives living near Rani Pur.'

Ali shook his hand.

‘My name is Hasan,' the man said. ‘What is yours?'

‘Ali.'

‘Have you come looking for work?'

‘Yes,' Ali replied after a pause.

‘I came last year. I was lucky. After nine months labouring I got permission from the railways to sell tea from this pitch. I know this town well. There are plenty of labouring jobs here. Have you anywhere to stay? No? Any money? Don't worry, I have a hut of my own by the river. There is only me and my wife. You can stay with me until you make your own hut. You can pay me whatever you figure is proper when you have money. If you are a hard worker you can earn enough by labouring in the markets. You see that road, if you follow it for a mile you get to the fruit and vegetable market. Lots of work there, loading, unloading for wholesalers, carrying for shopkeepers and customers. You are a young man, you will be all right
here. Have another cup, no charge, save your money until you start earning.'

‘Thank you,' Ali said shyly.

‘It is not every day that one finds someone from home,' Hasan said. ‘So far away …'

This was the third stroke of luck for Ali. It was, though, not to be of much use to him as events turned out. After Hasan closed up the stall late at night, the two of them walked for miles on dark, abandoned roads and paths to reach the river Ravi. The hut was made of river reeds and cardboard, with irregular planks of wood, some driftwood, tied up cleverly in places to hold the structure together. Across the opening for the door hung a dirty piece of cloth serving as a curtain for privacy. Hasan and Ali ate a simple meal of roti and daal cooked by Hasan's wife. Ali found the husband and wife good-natured and cheerful. Afterwards, Hasan spread a thick sheet of cloth on the ground in one corner for Ali while the couple slept in the other corner by the hearth. So tired out was he that Ali felt as if he had only slept a wink before the sounds of the day awoke him. He accompanied Hasan to the railway station and from there, following his friend's directions, took to the road.

Still in a daze, Ali knew only where he was but not why, nor what he was going to do in that strange place and for how long. He was not going to go to the fruit and vegetable market and do a labouring job, for sure. He took some turnings, carefully making a note of them in his mind so he could remember his way back to the station. He also knew that he didn't have to spend his own money for a day or two, little that he had, for his food and lodging were already taken care of. His belly was full from what he had had, a big roti left over from the previous night, eaten with mango achar followed by a cup of tea at the hut, and another cup at the railway station before he started off. He liked the city. It was the first time he had been in a city as large, clean and well-built as this, and the look of it helped lift his spirits a little bit. The people, men as well as women, looked healthy and strong and they talked to each other loudly in a different Punjabi. Within an hour he found himself in a densely populated area, bazaars running into narrow streets and through to other bazaars. He wondered whether it was the centre of the city. There was an abundance of food shops where very fat men sat deep-frying pakoras of cauliflower, aubergine, onion, long green chillies and potato covered in gramflour batter, grilling fat morsels of lamb marinated in yogurt, mint and coriander and spiced beef mince kebabs on open coal fires; tandoor operators cooking hot naans one after the other with their quick-clapping hands; and sweetmeat makers with
huge open-mouthed pans full of jalebis floating in bubbling syrup. The look and smell of all this made Ali wish he had more money in his pocket to buy some of it. He had to console himself with the thought that it was unnecessary because he was full up. He was beginning to enjoy just walking through this big city that he had only heard of, like Dilli, Bombai and Kulkutta. He thought with some bitterness about his brother who had been to all these places and many more. But also, for the first time since he arrived here, he felt a sense of pride that he too had travelled far from home to the centre of a city.