* * *
—
The dog wagged his tail and moved down the winding hilly track that led into the valley dividing the two hills. Subedar Himmat Khan picked up his rifle and fired in the air.
The Indians were a bit puzzled, as it was somewhat early in the day for that sort of thing. Jamadar Harnam Singh, who in any case was feeling bored, shouted, ‘Let’s give it to them.’
The two sides exchanged fire for half an hour, which of course was a complete waste of time. Finally, Jamadar Harnam Singh ordered that enough was enough. He combed his long hair, looked at himself in the mirror and asked Banta Singh, ‘Where has that dog Jhun Jhun gone?’
‘Dogs can never digest butter, goes the famous saying,’ Banta Singh observed philosophically.
Suddenly the soldier on lookout duty shouted, ‘There he comes.’
‘Who?’ Jamadar Harnam Singh asked.
‘What was his name? Jhun Jhun,’ the soldier answered.
‘What is he doing?’ Harnam Singh asked.
‘Just coming our way,’ the soldier replied, peering through his binoculars.
Subedar Harnam Singh snatched them from him. ‘That’s him all right and there’s something around his neck. But, wait, that’s the Pakistani hill he’s coming from, the motherfucker.’
He picked up his rifle, aimed and fired. The bullet hit some rocks close to where the dog was. He stopped.
Subedar Himmat Khan heard the report and looked through his binoculars. The dog had turned round and was running back. ‘The brave never run away from battle. Go forward and complete your mission,’ he shouted at the dog. To scare him, he fired at the same time. The bullet passed within inches of the dog, who leapt in the air, flapping his ears. Subedar Himmat Khan fired again, hitting some stones.
It soon became a game between the two soldiers, with the dog running round in circles in a state of great terror. Both Himmat Khan and Harnam Singh were laughing boisterously. The dog began to run towards Harnam Singh, who abused him loudly and fired. The bullet caught him in the leg. He yelped, turned around and began to run towards Himmat Khan, only to meet more fire, which was only meant to scare him. ‘Be a brave boy. If you are injured, don’t let that stand between you and your duty. Go, go, go,’ the Pakistani shouted.
The dog turned. One of his legs was now quite useless. He began to drag himself towards Harnam Singh, who picked up his rifle, aimed carefully and shot him dead.
Subedar Himmat Khan sighed, ‘The poor bugger has been martyred.’
Jamadar Harnam Singh ran his hand over the still-hot barrel of his rifle and muttered, ‘He died a dog’s death.’
Translated by Khalid Hasan
The Mice of Shah Daulah
SALIMA WAS TWENTY-ONE when she was married. And though five years had passed, she had not had a child. Her mother and mother-in-law were very worried. Her mother, more so, for fear that her husband, Najib, would marry again. Many doctors were consulted, but none were of any help.
Salima was anxious too. Few girls do not desire a child after marriage. She consulted her mother and acted on her instructions, but to no avail.
One day a friend of hers came to see her. The friend had been declared barren and so Salima was surprised to see that she held in her arms a gem of a boy. ‘Fatima,’ she asked indelicately, ‘how did you produce this child?’
Fatima was five years older than Salima. She smiled and said, ‘This is the benevolence of Shah Daulah. A woman told me that if I wanted children, I should go to the shrine of Shah Daulah in Gujarat and make my entreaty. Say, “Hazur, the first child born to me, I will offer up in your service.” ’ This child would be born with a very small head, she told Salima. Salima didn’t like this. And when Fatima insisted that this firstborn child had to be left in the service of the shrine, she was sadder still. She thought, what mother would deprive herself of her child forever? Only a monster could abandon its child, whether his head be small, his nose flat or his eyes crossed. But Salima wanted a child so badly that she heeded her older friend’s advice.
She was, in any case, native to Gujarat where Shah Daulah’s shrine was. So she said to her husband, ‘Fatima’s insisting I go with her. Would you give me permission?’ What objection could her husband have? He said, ‘Go, but come back quickly.’ Salima went off with Fatima.
Shah Daulah’s shrine was not, as she had thought, some old, decrepit building. It was a decent place which she liked well enough. But when in one chamber she saw Shah Daulah’s ‘mice,’ with their running noses and their feeble minds, she began to tremble. There was a young girl, in the prime of her youth, whose antics were such that she could reduce the most serious of serious people to fits of laughter. Watching her, Salima laughed to herself for an instant. Then immediately her eyes filled with tears. What will become of this girl, she thought. The shrine’s caretakers will sell her to somebody who’ll take her from town to town like a performing monkey; the poor wretch, she’ll become somebody’s source of income. Her head was very small. But Salima thought, even if her head is small, her heart can’t be similarly small; that remains the same, even in madmen.
Shah Daulah’s mouse had a beautiful body, rounded and proportionate in every way. But her antics were those of someone whose faculties had been decimated. Seeing her wander about, laughing like a wind-up doll, Salima felt as if she’d been made for this purpose.
And yet, despite her misgivings, Salima followed her friend Fatima’s advice and prayed at Shah Daulah’s shrine, swearing that if she had a child, she would hand him over.
Salima continued her medical treatment as well. After two months, she showed signs of pregnancy. She was thrilled. A boy was soon born to her, a beautiful boy. There had been a lunar eclipse during her pregnancy, and he was born with a small, not unattractive, mark on his right cheek.
When Fatima visited Salima, she said that the boy should be handed over at once to Shah Daulah saab. Salima herself had accepted this, but she had been delaying it for many days; the mother in her wouldn’t allow her to go through with it; she felt as though a part of her heart was being cut out.
She had been told that the firstborn of those who asked a child of Shah Daulah would have a small head. But her son’s head was quite big. Fatima said, ‘This is not something you can use as an excuse. This child of yours is Shah Daulah’s property. You have no right over him. If you stray from your promise, remember that a scourge will befall you, the likes of which you won’t forget for a lifetime.’
So, with her heart breaking, Salima went back to Gujarat, to the shrine of Shah Daulah, and handed to its caretakers her beloved flower of a son, with the black mark on his right cheek.
She wept. Her grief was so great she became sick. For a year, she hovered between life and death. She couldn’t forget her boy nor the pleasing mark on his right cheek, which she had so often kissed.
She had strange dreams. Shah Daulah, in her distressed imagination, became a large mouse gnawing, with its razor-edged teeth, at her flesh. She would shriek and implore her husband to help her. ‘Look, he’s eating my flesh!’ she would cry.
Sometimes her fevered mind would see her son entering a mouse hole. She would be holding onto his tail, but the bigger mice had him by the snout and she couldn’t pull him out.
Sometimes the very young girl, whom she’d seen in a chamber of Shah Daulah’s shrine, would appear before her, and Salima would let out a laugh. Then a moment later, she would begin to cry. She would cry so much that her husband wouldn’t know how to quell her tears.
Salima saw mice everywhere, in bed, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, on the sofa, in her heart. Sometimes she felt she herself was a mouse: her nose was running, she was in a chamber of Shah Daulah’s shrine, carrying her tiny head on her weak shoulders, and her antics made onlookers fall over themselves with laughter. Her condition was pitiable.
Her world had been scarred li
ke the cratered face of a dead planet.
The fever subsided, and Salima’s condition stabilized. Najib was relieved. He knew the cause of his wife’s illness, but he was in the grip of superstition himself and hardly conscious that he had offered up his firstborn as a sacrifice. Whatever had been done seemed right to him; in fact, he felt that the son that had been born to him was not even his, but Shah Daulah saab’s. When Salima’s fever, along with the storm in her mind and soul, cooled, Najib said to her, ‘My darling, you must forget your son. He was meant for sacrifice.’
Salima replied in a wounded voice, ‘I don’t believe in any of it. All my life I will curse myself for committing a great wrong by handing over a piece of my heart to those caretakers. They cannot be his mother.’
One day, Salima disappeared to Gujarat and spent eight or nine days there, making inquiries about her son, but learned nothing of his where-abouts. She returned, depressed, and said to her husband, ‘Now I won’t pine for him any longer.’
Pine for him she did, but inwardly.
Remember him, she did, but deep within herself. The mark on her son’s right cheek had been branded on her heart.
A year later Salima had a daughter. Her face bore a great resemblance to her firstborn’s although she didn’t have a mark on her right cheek. Salima called her Mujiba because she had intended to name her son Mujib.
When she was two months old, Salima sat her in her lap, and taking a little kohl, made a large beauty spot on her right cheek. Then she thought of Mujib and wept. When her tears fell on her daughter’s cheeks, she wiped them with her dupatta and laughed. She wanted to try and forget her grief.
Salima had two sons thereafter. Her husband was now very pleased. Finding herself in Gujarat for a friend’s wedding, she returned again to the shrine and made inquiries about her Mujib, but to no avail. She thought that perhaps he had died. And so, one Thursday, she organized a memorial for him.
The women of the neighbourhood wondered for whose death these rites were being so carefully observed. Some even questioned Salima, but she gave no reply.
In the evening she took her ten-year-old Mujiba by the hand and led her inside. She made a spot on her right cheek with kohl and kissed it profusely. She had always imagined her to be her lost Mujib, but now she gave up thinking about him. After the ceremony, the weight in Salima’s heart lightened. She had made a grave for him in her imagination, on which she would place flowers.
Salima’s three children were now in school. Every morning she dressed them, made them breakfast, got them ready and sent them off. When they’d gone she’d think for a moment of Mujib, and the ceremony she had performed for him. Her heart was lighter and yet she felt sometimes that the mark on Mujib’s right cheek was still branded on it.
One day her three children came running in, saying, ‘Ammi, we want to see the show.’
‘What show?’ she asked lovingly.
Her eldest daughter replied, ‘Ammi, there’s a man who does the show.’
Salima said, ‘Go and call him, but not in the house. He should do the show outside.’
The children ran off, came back with the man and watched the show.
When it was over, Mujiba went to her mother to ask for money. Her mother took out a quarter rupee from her purse and went out onto the veranda. She had reached the door when she saw one of Shah Daulah’s mice moving his head in a crazed fashion. Salima began to laugh.
There were ten or twelve children around him, laughing uncontrollably. The noise was so great that no one could hear a word.
Salima advanced with the quarter rupee in her hand, but just as she was about to give it to Shah Daulah’s mouse, her hand was flung back as though struck by an electric current.
This mouse had a mark on its right cheek. Salima looked closely at him. His nose was running. Mujiba, who was standing near him, said to her mother, ‘This, this mouse, Ammi, why does he look so much like me? Am I a mouse too?’
Salima took Shah Daulah’s mouse by the hand and went inside. She closed the door and kissed him and said prayers for him. He was her Mujib. But his antics were so moronic that Salima couldn’t help but laugh even though her heart was filled with grief.
She said to Mujib, ‘My son, I am your mother.’
At this, the mouse laughed uproariously, and wiping his runny nose on his sleeve, stood with his hands open before his mother and said, ‘One paisa!’
His mother opened her purse, but by then her eyes had begun to overflow with tears. She took out a hundred rupees from her purse and went out to give it to the man who had made a spectacle of Mujib. He refused, saying that he couldn’t part with his means of income for such a small amount. In the end Salima got him to settle on five hundred rupees. But when she came back inside, Mujib was gone. Mujiba told her that he had run out the back door.
Salima’s womb cried out for him to come back, but he’d gone, never to return.
Translated by Aatish Taseer
Ten Rupees
SHE WAS PLAYING with the little girls at the far end of the alley. Inside the chawl, her mother hunted for her everywhere. Kishori sat waiting in their room; someone had been told to bring him tea. Sarita’s mother now began searching for her on all three floors of the chawl. Who knew which hole Sarita had gone and died in? She even went into the bathrooms, yelling, ‘Sarita…Sarita!’ But Sarita, as her mother was beginning to realize, was not in the chawl. She was outside on the corner of the alley, near a heap of garbage, playing with the little girls, utterly carefree.
Her mother was in a panic.
Kishori sat waiting in the room; the men he’d brought – as promised, two rich men, with a motor car – waited in the main market, but where had her daughter vanished to? She couldn’t even use the excuse of dysentery any more; she was well now. And rich men with motor cars didn’t come every day. It was Kishori’s benevolence that once or twice a month, he managed to bring clients with motor cars. Normally he was nervous of neighbourhoods like this, with their compound stench of paan and stale bidis. How could he bring rich men here? But because he was smart, Kishori never brought the men to the chawl. Instead, he brought Sarita, bathed and clothed, to them, explaining ‘these are uncertain times; the place is crawling with police spies; they’ve taken away nearly a hundred working girls; there’s even a case against me in the courts so one has to tread very carefully.’
Sarita’s mother had by now become very angry. When she came down, Ramdi was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, cutting leaves for the bidis as usual. ‘Have you seen Sarita anywhere?’ Sarita’s mother demanded, ‘God knows which hole she’s gone and died in. And today of all days! Wait till I find her! I’ll give her a thrashing she’ll remember in every joint of her body. She’s a full-grown woman, you know, and all she ever does is waste the day fooling around with kids.’
Ramdi said nothing and continued to cut the bidi leaves. But Sarita’s mother wasn’t really speaking to her, she was just ranting as usual as she walked past. Every few days, she would go off in search of Sarin, and repeat the same words to Ramdi.
Sarita’s mother would also tell the chawl’s women that she wanted Sarita to marry a clerk some day. This was why she had always impressed upon Sarita the importance of education. The municipality had opened a school nearby and Sarita’s mother wondered if she should admit her daughter there. ‘Sister, you know, her father had such a desire that his daughter should be educated!’ At this point she would sigh, and repeat the story of her dead husband, which every woman in the chawl knew by heart. If you were to say to Ramdi, ‘All right, when Sarita’s father worked in the railways and the big sahib insulted him, what happened?’ she would immediately reply, ‘Sarita’s father foamed at the mouth and said to the sahib, “I’m not your servant; I’m the government’s servant. You have no right to throw your weight round here. And careful – if you insult me again, I’ll rip your jaws out and shove them
down your throat.” Then, what? What was bound to happen happened! The sahib was livid and insulted Sarita’s father again. Sarita’s father came forward and delivered such a powerful blow to the sahib’s neck that his hat flew off his head and landed ten paces away and he saw stars in the daytime! But the sahib was not a small man either. He retaliated by kicking Sarita’s father on the back with his army boot, and with such force that his spleen burst, and there and then, by the railway lines, he fell to the floor and breathed his last. The government ran a court case against the sahib and extracted a full five hundred rupees in compensation from him for Sarita’s mother. But her luck was bad. She developed a taste for the lottery, and within five months, she had squandered the money.’
This story was always ready on Sarita’s mother’s lips, but nobody was sure whether or not it was true. In any case, it didn’t evoke any compassion for her in the chawl, perhaps because everyone there was also deserving of compassion. And no one was anyone’s friend. The men, by and large, slept during the day and were awake at night as many worked the night shift at the nearby mill. They lived together, but they showed no interest in each other’s lives.
In the chawl, virtually everyone knew that Sarita’s mother had sent her young daughter into prostitution. But since these were people who treated each other neither well nor badly, they felt no need to expose her when she’d say, ‘My daughter’s an innocent, she knows nothing of this world.’
One morning, when Tukaram made an advance on Sarita, her mother began to screech and yell, ‘For God’s sake, why doesn’t anyone control this wretched baldy? May the Lord make him blind in both the eyes with which he ogles my virgin daughter! I swear, one day, there’ll be such a brawl that I’ll take this darling of yours and beat his head to a pulp with the heel of my shoe. Outside, he can do whatever he wants, but in here he’d better learn to behave like a decent human being, do you hear?’
The Dog of Tithwal Page 5
