Two Short Novels (8 page)

Nur didn’t know whether the Doctor had made his gesture to tell his father confidentially that it was the end or whether to make sure of his fee. From the way in which he extended his hand, it seemed he was just a little embarrassed at the heartlessness of his demand for his fee; but then, as he took the five rupee note, he whispered something to the Chaudhri.

‘Will you come in again this evening, Sarkar?’ asked the Chaudhri as the Doctor was adjusting his hat so as not to knock it against the narrow door of the stairs.

But Captain Pochanwala affected not to have heard and screwing up his nose, opening his eyes wide, had explored the comparative darkness.

‘What did the
Dagdar
say?’ Nur heard his grandmother ask from where she came scrambling down the stairs again.

‘Nothing very much,’ the Chaudhri replied casually unheeding. Then he turned to Nur and asked sneeringly: ‘What have you been doing to yourself,
ohe, Gentermana?
’

‘How much more alive his patients are to the case histories of their ailments,’ said Nur, as if he were talking aloud to himself, ‘than Captain Pochanwala. He thrives on the snobbery of his position as an ex-IMS Officer. But he only had a temporary commission during the war, and doesn’t know any other medicines except quinine and tincture of iodine.’

‘What have you done,’ the Chaudhri burst out, red with rage, ‘that you should be critical of your elders? You wasted hundreds of rupees of my hard-earned money, you son of a bitch, and you couldn’t even get a job to feed yourself and wife and child? Why don’t you die of shame, you lover of your mother, and rid me of the responsibility you have imposed on me so long? When will you die, you dog? How long will you go on prolonging the agony of your poor old grandmother? You have disgraced me and given a bad name to your family! Go to hell and die and be done with it, you wretch
. . .
’

‘My son, my son, what are you saying?’ the old woman appealed coming towards the Chaudhri with lifted, supplicating hands.

‘Go to hell and be done with it, die and rid us all of this responsibility,’ the Chaudhri shouted raising his voice, ‘Die and give me peace,’ and he stood swaying with anger as he warded off his mother with a flourish of his hand.

Nur just lay bewildered on the bed, dazed by his father’s outburst, incapable of realising the full force of the Chaudhri’s anger, as if all his nervous energy were exhausted and he were completely unaffected by, indifferent to, things, except that his legs were shaking.

‘Why don’t you speak?’ the Chaudhri, rushing to the bed of his son, said, now tenderly.

‘Oh! forgive me, father, forgive me,’ Nur hissed, sinking farther and farther away from the reach of his father’s hand trembling and shaking and with the light of an abject terror in his eyes. ‘Oh, forgive me, forgive me
. . .
’

‘Is this the fruit of all my labour for you?’ the Chaudhri said alternately glistening with rage and patting Nur’s forehead.

For the slightest moment, everything was still. Then the old woman began to soothe her son’s form with her wrinkled fingers, saying, ‘Calm, yourself, child, calm yourself, he is ill.’

‘What has he done for the money I spent on his education?’ the Chaudhri shouted, his face twisting with impatience. ‘What has he done, except spoil my
izzat
!
Is this the reward I get for bringing him into the world, for looking after him, educating him! Why can’t God give me death and rid me of the affliction?’

As he stood there, however, his eyes fell on his son’s frightened bent head, and he ground his teeth with a revulsion against himself, and wished he could take the boy in his arms, but he felt the slightest gesture on his part would send the boy away from him and he had been too hardened since the day when Nur was a child to bend his body and touch his son to communicate the remorse he now felt. ‘Give him some food, mother,’ he with a heavy heart and extricating himself from his mother’s grasp rushed down the stairs, saying, ‘Give him some essence of chicken
. . .
’

‘Wait my son, wait child,’ said the old woman hobbling after him. ‘Son, you haven’t eaten anything yourself.’

But the Chaudhri had gone stamping down the stairs and was out of reach of her entreaties and prayers.

‘And now, now,’ the old woman wailed. ‘He hasn’t even eaten a crust of bread, and he went to work at dawn on an empty stomach
. . . .
Hai
,
what shall I do?’ And she waited near the door of the stairs, torn between following him and coming to Nur. Then she returned towards Nur, who was slipping back into bed, pale and hushed, and stretching her arms said: ‘Don’t take any notice of what he says, my son; he is worried on account of you and overwrought, and he loses his temper. I am sure he is sorry at heart, and he loves you. And now he will be hungry. But never mind, I shall get you your soup and take his meal to the shop for him.’

She shambled and shuffled and hurried upstairs.

Nur lay still, petrified, and looking on through misty eyes at the broad naked heat of the sun. His mind seemed to be closed. Only, there was a dry taste at the base of his tongue, a parched feeling in his throat, mixed with a vague sense of betrayal. His face which had changed colour so often since the visit of the Doctor was set in a livid mould as if it were plastered with a mud mask. His brain wheeled dizzily, and he moved his head this side and that, as if he wanted to stir it into thought. But his eyes just stared hard into the air and he could not notice a thing in the crowded room.

Then, after a moment, he felt a weight rise from his belly to his chest, and stand there pressing down on his ribs. He breathed hard and turned on his side and, twisting his body, moaned as if to summon all the fragile cells of his body to come and look at the new wound that his father’s hard words had inflicted on him. But he felt an increasing weakness in his legs and thought he was fainting. His limbs seemed like loose streamers falling away from his leaden trunk. The drowsy shade of the room in which he lay seemed to exaggerate his contours, and he felt as if he were breaking. His will relaxed and weakened.

And yet the bitterness of his father’s cruelty lingered. This was the man
. . .
this was the man who was responsible for his very existence, this was the man who had loved him so when he was a little child in arms, with dark eyes and a fair complexion, when he was full of mischief and learning to toddle and speak. It seemed strange and unbearably tender; but his earliest memory, almost his first vivid recollection, was the Chaudhri laughing heartily as he flung him into the air playfully and kissed him at each fall, fairly smothering his face with kisses. After that, except now and then during the years, he had only worn a serious expression on his round, rugged face. But he had been proud even then of his father’s hefty, handsome form. Only afraid, so afraid, that he remembered only a very few occasions when he had lifted his eyes to face him. Although he must admit, he was also attracted by the magnetic presence of the man; in fact, the war between these two emotions in him had always led to awkward collisions, and he had faltered,
stumbled, stammered, perspired whenever he had to say anything to the Chaudhri. His father had towered over him, simple and stubbornly upright. Was it because of his mother’s death that this difference had arisen between them? Anyhow, it was unfair. Was it because I, an only son, had been the cause of anxiety to him . . .
I am a failure indeed. But why, oh why did he have to drag me into the dust by educating me? How could a parent expect to get a return for the money he had spent on his child? Why should he have expected anything? You produced me for your own pleasure
. . .
you produced me for your own pleasure, do you hear, and you didn’t consult me beforehand! Why didn’t you
. . .
if you had to hate me
. . .
and tell me afterwards? Why did you? I didn’t want to be born
. . .

He felt his soul rising in revolt and he rolled in a frenzy. His eyes saw the injustice of it all and welled with tears.

‘Oh God, why did he produce me if he had to be so hard to me? Oh, why did he have to educate me, why did he not let me sit at the shop and follow his own profession? Oh why did he, why did he, why did he
. . .
? Why did he insist on my passing my M.A. if he had to blame me for it afterwards
. . .
? Oh why did he drag me
. . .
?’

No one seemed to hear his cries and in order not to waste his suffering on the empty air, he stifled his moans and with averted eyes still filled with tears, thought of the injustice more coolly.

‘Whose fault is it? He gave me all this education to flatter his own vanity and not because he meant me to learn anything. And was it my fault that I couldn’t get into any of the Services? Was it not because I was his son, the confectioner’s son, who couldn’t get any recommendations? For had I not always worked hard and always been top of my class? Of course, he couldn’t understand what books or anything meant. But had I not always passed in the first division? Did he not hate me because, not having flourished himself, he could not see his own son fail to ascend the pinnacles of glory so that he could call the faithful to come and witness the success of his investment
. . .
and he hit me
. . .
’

His tears ran down his cheeks and he was convulsed with sobs
. . . .
‘He has worked so hard in the grime and the dirt of the shop, the wretch has become surly and bad tempered serving his impatient customers,’ he thought. ‘But it was swinish the way he treated me, keeping a strict watch on everything I did. I must return home at seven. I must not consort with this man and that man. I must be respectful to his friends, his trusted friends, the pious practitioners of five prayers a day, who were always trying to kiss me and asking me to come and sit on their laps. And I dared not complain because they threatened to tell him that I didn’t go to say prayers at the mosque regularly. What right had he to fill me with fear. It was fear that had kept me from telling him openly about things
. . .
fear and his ignorance, for how could I have explained to him that Darwin said there wasn’t a God, and Huxley was an agnostic. What was Darwin to him and who was Huxley
. . .
’

But he felt he was being naive, thinking like that. Only the blows rankled.

‘Oh! God, oh! My God. Oh! My mother, my mother, come and take me
. . .
I am burning, I am bursting, I am torn
. . . .
Oh come, they have crushed me, they have ruined me, they have broken me, they have made me ill, they have destroyed me, your son, and there is none in this hovel, there is none who loves me at all
. . . .
Oh, I was an orphan, my mother, I was an uncared for orphan when you died
. . . .
Why, oh why did you have to bring me into the world if you had to leave me
. . .
? Oh why did he have to have me if he had to loathe the very sight of me
. . .
? Why did he have to do that, why
. . . ?
’ But he couldn’t go on. His cries were becoming louder and the reiterated hiccups of his sobs were choking him so that he would have to shriek to be heard even by his own ears. And he didn’t want the women upstairs to come down, because he would be too ashamed to face anyone. And yet he could not control the passion that he had let loose in himself, the anger, the resentment, the grief and the longing that lay choking him now
. . .

He turned on his side and suddenly, his whole form was numbed, as if he had been struck in the heart.

For a moment he writhed in a paroxysm. The frenzied fire in his head drummed through his temples, the hot tears of remorse ran from his eyes, and his hard teeth ground a swooning sigh.

His throat suddenly brought up a profusion of saliva rich with blood and he lurched over to throw it into the spittoon.

He kept his head hanging over the streaks of dribbling blood and gaped weakly into the spittoon for a confirmation of his dread. The streaks of blood clotted the edge of the brass bowl. There was a coloured space before his eyes. He was sure now
. . .

‘O mother,’ he cried and clutched the sheet tight. His brain was faint, the light of his eyes dimming slowly like an invisible anguish and his mind blended in a soundless void. He opened his mouth to call his grandma. But he felt the nerves of his body relaxing, as if the pain were being pressed out by the inexorable advance of death. ‘Nur, my child, Nur, wake up and drink this essence,’ his grandmother said, coming towards the bed. ‘Nur
. . .
’

His face looked strange.

She stood fixed to the ground. Then she struggled on heavy feet to the bed and shook him with trembling fingers, calling the while, ‘Nur, Nur, Nur my son, awake
. . .
’

But his face turned
. . .
and hung limply aside.

‘
Hai, hai!
’
she lifted her voice and cried.
‘
Hai hai! Hai hai!
’
And she struck the palms of her hands on her breasts, on her forehead, on her face and moaned and howled and tore her hair as she fell across his neck.

The women on the top storey came screaming down, beating their breasts, their thighs, their foreheads, their cheeks and their breasts again and cried,
‘
Hai, hai! Hai hai! Hai hai!
’

The women of the neighbourhood rushed and, entering the room, began to beat their bodies deliberately crying and wailing,
‘
Hai hai! Hai hai!
’

The body of death lingered on the sick bed.

Death of a Hero
Epitaph for Maqbool Sherwani