This Is Not That Dawn: Jhootha Sach (29 page)

‘There’s no need to finish the translation now.’

‘Why? It’s such an interesting novel.’ Tara said in surprise.

‘Girdharilal talked as if he was having it translated only to help me out. I don’t need such patronage,’ Puri said in a sharp tone.

‘Who asked him for his patronage?’ Tara said, out of sympathy for her brother’s feelings. But anxiety swept over her mind. What excuse would she now have to go to Gwal Mandi?

Tara’s family had begun to get her trousseau together in earnest. Sheelo sometimes came and lent a hand. She brought her infant son along, so
that she would not have to hurry back home. She found Tara’s indifference towards her trousseau infuriating. Sheelo often talked about the approaching wedding, ‘Your in-laws are not such bad people…’

Irked by Tara’s apathy, Bhagwanti too sometimes mumbled irritably or aimed a jibe at her daughter. Tara did not want to start a quarrel, nor did she want to risk losing the opportunity of going out with her brother. Therefore, after being asked several times, she too would contribute something to the work of preparation. In her heart she would tell herself: ‘I know my family will say all kinds of horrid things when I’m gone.’ And she would answer herself: ‘They are the ones who forced me to elope. Let them say what they want.’

Puri was surprised at seeing Tara take part in the preparation of her trousseau. He did not say anything, but felt relieved of a burden. He had felt guilty at not fighting the injustice being forced on Tara; now she herself had freed him of that responsibility. He too asked a couple of times of his mother and Masterji, ‘Let me know if I can do anything to help.’

His mother said with relief, ‘It’s you who has to do everything. Who else can?’

But Tara had also heard him. Why had he said that? He’s had a change of heart? The ground beneath her feet had opened, she felt, and she was falling into a dark bottomless pit. She suppressed her sighs of desperation with clenched teeth, and told herself: There’s no hope or help for me from anyone now. I have to fend for myself.

To lighten her distress, Tara would say to herself: What’s the use of worrying like this? Why should I continue to torture myself? But whenever she tried to turn her back on her worry, it came back with greater intensity. Why did my brother say that? Only two days ago he was telling me not to worry. She reasoned with herself: I too am pretending to lend a hand to avoid unpleasantness. Probably he’s just doing the same. Doesn’t he know what’s going on? She thought she had found an answer.

Pandit Girdharilal had cunningly dealt a shrewd blow to Puri’s self-respect. Smarting from the insult, Puri did not want to go near Panditji. Still, it was not easy to avoid thinking about Kanak’s willingness to yield to him, and of her promises of love. He was quite sure that either Kanak or Kanchan had seen him sitting in Panditji’s office. He also found it difficult to believe that Kanak had known nothing of his visit. Why, then, had she
not asked him to come to the living room as before? Has she been affected so much, and so soon, by her father’s lectures? The old saying was right: It’s never wise to trust a woman!

Puri’s mind was seething like a vat of boiling oil. Was Kanak a part of the scheme to get me the translation work, so that I could be put down? Puri did not believe so, but still he thought: If she was, I’ll get my own back by jilting her. She’ll have to explain herself to me. Could it be that she now finds it embarrassing and bothersome to meet me? These women!

He knew he had to meet her and ask her for a satisfactory explanation. But he wanted to meet her outside her home. He also wanted her to make the first move to meet him. To give her that opportunity, Puri put aside work on the textbook and passed by her house at 9 o’clock in the morning, on his way to the office of his friend Chopra. In the depths of his heart he believed, perhaps wrongly, that Kanak would not be able to resist coming out and meeting him if she saw him passing by.

Chopra, a sub-editor at the
Tribune
, was an old acquaintance. Puri asked him if he could borrow a report from the newspaper’s library. He went back in the evening to collect the report. And again the next evening to return it. The third time he saw Kanchan on her way out of the house. She smiled and said namaste to him as if he was just another acquaintance, and kept on walking. Kanchan saw him at her doorstep and did not ask him to come in. What could be more humiliating for Puri?

Everyone in the family had ganged up to insult him, Puri told himself. He took Kanchan’s insolent behaviour to heart. He vowed that he’d avenge this insult dealt out to him, question Kanak harshly for an explanation, and make her shed tears of remorse in front of him.

Puri was working on the history textbook in the morning of the next day. It was close to 10 o’clock. Bhagwanti was finishing off kitchen chores so that she could do some sewing work on Tara’s wedding clothes. Tara sat looking at her textbooks on a chatai in the veranda, sunk in the depths of her worries. There was no sense in preparing herself for exams that were now only two weeks away. Her parents would certainly object, and she wouldn’t be allowed to sit for them. Then again, who knew where she’d be after 12 May, and whether she’d be in a position to present herself for the examination? How completely her family was destroying her life and her future!

‘Tara,’ she heard her brother call. ‘Bring me a glass of water.’ He had an
uncapped fountain pen in his hand. Tara had noticed an edge of nervousness and unease in him since the day of his meeting with Pandit Girdharilal.

She looked up at him from her book, and got up to get him the water.

‘You wanted to go to Surendra’s?’ he asked.

Tara nodded.

‘Achcha, we’ll go around four or five this afternoon. You also wanted to meet Kanak?’ He began to drink from the glass she had fetched.

Tara understood his motives; he wanted news of Kanak. But Surendra had asked her to come on the twelfth, and would have told Asad to be there on that day. Nobody would be there today. She said apprehensively, ‘Bhai, Surendra invited me for the twelfth, not today.’

Puri removed the half-empty glass from his lips, and said kindly, ‘I’ve to go in that direction today. You can meet Kanak today. We’ll go to Surendra’s again on the twelfth. Two visits in the same evening will stretch for too long.’

Tara was willing to help and assist her brother in any way, if it ensured her going to Surendra’s on the appointed day. Their motives might be similar, she knew, but there was a world of difference between them. He could ask for her help without hesitation, but she was compelled to adjust herself to suit his convenience. Women perhaps have to become deceitful for want of such simple freedoms, she thought.

Tara had been steadfast in her resolve to present herself for her exams, but she had another, secret plan in mind. She couldn’t keep up pretences any longer, sitting in front of an open textbook. The thoughts racing through her mind overwhelmed her with their intensity. To clear her head she would sit with her mother, Meladei and Pushpa, listening to their chatter, hemming her trousseau.

Puri had been working in the veranda in the afternoon, sitting on a chatai. Usha sat near him, bent over her homework on another chatai. Puri called, ‘Tara, it’s four-thirty. Get dressed if you want to go out. Give me my shirt and trousers that you’ve ironed.’

Tara put down the garment in her hand. She gave her brother the clothes she had ironed at Meladei’s. Her mother could hear that Puri had asked her to come along; Tara didn’t have to explain anything to her. She went to the kitchen, washed her face in a corner over the small drain, and began to comb her hair before changing her clothes.

Since the women were using the room, Puri had to change his clothes
on the veranda. He was tying his shoelaces when he said in a startled voice, ‘What’s that?’

‘
Agg da bamba,
the fire engine!’ Usha said, raising her head. The faint clanging of a bell that they had heard receded into the distance.

‘It’s somewhere far away,’ Meladei relayed her guess from the room. ‘You go ahead, wherever you have to get to.’

Usha could not restrain her curiosity. There was the thud of her feet on the steps going upstairs, and she called out, ‘Tara! Ma! Auntie! Come and look!’

The women dropped whatever they were doing and went up to the roof. Tara followed them, comb in hand. Puri too went up.

There was a pall of smoke over the eastern horizon. Several three-storey houses towards the east dwarfed Puri’s house. A huge spiralling column of dense black and brown smoke churned upwards from an unseen source somewhere behind the building right in front of Puri’s house and spread out across the sky. Clouds of denser smoke followed in its wake.

Usha yelled at Kartaro and Rampyari to come up to their roof and look at the spectacle.

The women were making guesses about the location of the fire. One thought it was the railway station, others guessed it was at Delhi Gate or Kashmiri Mohalla or Akbari Mandi. Puri agreed that Akbari Mandi was the most likely place, and said, ‘The fire seems to have spread. Must have been going on for some time.’

Usha said to Pushpa, ‘Let’s go to Dhanno’s roof, bahinji. We’ll have a better view from there.’ The rest followed them downstairs.

Puri said in a worried voice to Tara when they reached the room below, ‘Should we leave or not? It would be a different matter if the fire were an accident. Otherwise…’

Dewanchand called in a loud voice from the gali, ‘Shyam! Where are you?’ He warned the children playing in the gali in the same breath, ‘Careful, all of you. No one’s to go out of the gali. The curfew is on.’

Shyam’s mother called her husband from her window, ‘Go quickly and look for Shyam in the bazaar. He’s gone to buy mithai from Mukund Lal’s shop.’

Bhagwanti and Meladei called from their windows, ‘Bhai, what’s happened? And where was it?’

‘There were huge riots at Delhi Gate, and a big fire is burning in the
Akbari Mandi. The police are patrolling the bazaars. The curfew has been imposed.’ Dewanchand said hurriedly and ran off to look for his son.

Masterji had left only minutes before, for his tutoring job at Seth Gopal Shah. Govindram, Beeru Mal and Tikaram had not returned from their offices. Some announcement was being made over a loudspeaker. What was being said was unclear, since it was some distance away, but it was obviously about the curfew. For the past three weeks the curfew siren had not sounded.

The women assembled on the chabutaras in front of their houses. Puri said to his mother, ‘I’ll go and get father. It’s quite safe at the place where he is.’

Bhagwanti’s heart sank, but she could not refuse. She pleaded, ‘Kakaji, be very careful. Don’t go through Machchi Hatta. Take the Vachcho Wali and the Haricharan Steps route, and come back the same way.’

Meladei said, ‘Vijay has gone over to his uncle’s in Said Mittha. Hope he stays there. And you know about Ratan, how careless he is. I won’t rest until I see them both.’

Every mother thought that her own son was the most vulnerable, and every wife was afraid for her husband and her children. Their men straggled back home one by one. When the son or the husband of a woman arrived, she would quietly leave for her home to busy herself in her kitchen. Men now sat on the chabutaras, recounting what they had heard about the incident. Some women listened at their windows. Puri and Masterji too came back.

Birumal said, ‘Only the Mall Road is open to traffic. The curfew covers Nisbet Road, Gwal Mandi and Anarkali. There has never been a curfew as wide as this.’

Doctor Prabhu Dayal said, ‘I telephoned the hospital. Seventy injured have been admitted so far. Most are Hindus.’

Puri had been able to telephone to his sources for news from the mansion of Seth Gopal Shah. He said, ‘There was a huge explosion at the railway workshop at the time of the one o’clock break. Three were killed and twenty-two injured. The workshop has been closed. Wherever the workshop employees went, the disturbances spread to those areas. It would be difficult to avoid a large-scale riot now. The forty-five thousand members of the Railway Union have so far been opposed to the riots. That’s why there was peace in the city recently. Now these men are out of control. Shahji said that the damages amounted to over one-and-a-half crore at Akbari Mandi alone. The fire is still raging there.’

‘It’s the Hindus who must have suffered the damage,’ Ghasita Ram let out a long sigh.

‘The Muslims looted the grain stores before the fire started. Many of them carried away rations enough for two years,’ Masterji added what Puri had avoided mentioning.

‘They’re always looking for an excuse for looting,’ Dewanchand said.

‘Hindu or Muslim, whoever exploded the bomb, did a cruel thing,’ Masterji said.

‘God is one for all. You may call Him whatever you want,’ Govindram said. The mention of God’s name ended their discussion.

When Puri went upstairs to his house, he repeated to Tara his fear of the spreading riots, and said, ‘The party comrades used to hold a gate meeting at the workshop every day.’

Tara’s heart missed a beat as she remembered that Asad too used to go to the workshops. Puri continued, ‘But the meeting was at four o’clock. They wouldn’t have gone if the riots had broken out before that.’

Tara did not reply. Previously the curfew had sometimes lasted up to two days. She thought, ‘Wonder what’ll happen tomorrow? My bad luck!’ She had planned so much for the next day.

It was stifling and hot inside the house at night, but cool and pleasant on the roof. Masterji’s family had more space to sleep on the roof this year. Ratan had bought another electric table fan, and all of Babu Govindram’s family slept indoors. Now charpoys could be set up on the roof for everyone in Masterji’s house.

Whenever he could, Puri gave an hour to the history book at night, doing his work in the light of a table lamp in the fresh air. Working was the best cure for his troubled mind, and the hope of receiving 500 rupees from Ghaus Mohammad after finishing the work was an added attraction. The sky in the direction of Akbari Mandi still held a dirty glow. No smell of burning filled the air because the breeze was blowing towards the fire.