For the past several years, the Red Shirt movement in Peshawar and other cities had been much in the news. To Ustad Mangu, this movement was all tied up with the ‘king of Russia’ and, naturally, with the new constitution. Then there were the frequent reports of bomb blasts in various Indian cities. Whenever Ustad Mangu heard that so many had been caught somewhere for possessing explosives or so many were going to be tried for treason, he interpreted it all to his great delight as preparation for the new constitution.
One day he had two barristers at the back of his tonga. They were vigorously criticizing the new constitution. He listened to them in silence. One of them was saying, ‘It is Section II of the Act that I still can’t make sense of. It relates to the federation of India. No such federation exists in the world. From a political angle too, such a federation would be utterly wrong. In fact, one can say that this is going to be no federation.’
Since most of this conversation was being carried on in English, Ustad Mangu had only been able to follow the last bit. He came to the conclusion that these two barristers were opposed to the new constitution and did not want their country to be free. ‘Toady wretches,’ he muttered with contempt. Whenever he called someone a ‘toady wretch’ under his breath, he felt elated that he had applied the words correctly and that he could tell a good man from a toady.
Three days after this incident, he picked up three students from Government College who wanted to be taken to Mozang. He listened to them carefully as they talked.
‘The new constitution has raised my hopes. If so and so becomes a member of the assembly, I will certainly be able to get a job in a government office.’
‘Oh! There are going to be many openings and, in that confusion, we will be able to lay our hands on something.’
‘Yes, yes, why not!’
‘And there’s bound to be a reduction in the number of all those unemployed graduates who have nowhere to go.’
This conversation was most thrilling as far as Ustad Mangu was concerned. The new constitution now appeared to him to be something bright and full of promise. The only thing he could compare the new constitution with was the splendid brass and gilt fittings he had purchased after careful examination a couple of years ago for his tonga from Choudhry Khuda Bux. When the fittings were new, the nickel-headed nails would shimmer and where brass had been worked into the fittings it shone like gold. It was essential that the new constitution should shine and glow.
By 1 April, Ustad Mangu had heard a great deal about the new constitution, both for and against. However, nothing could change the concept of the new constitution that he had formed in his mind. He was confident that come 1 April, everything would become clear. He was sure that what the new constitution would usher in would soothe his heart.
At last, the thirty-one days of March drew to a close. There were still a few silent night hours left before the dawn of 1 April and the weather was unusually cool, the breeze quite fresh. Ustad Mangu rose early, went to the stable, set up his tonga and took to the road. He was extraordinarily happy today because he was going to witness the coming in of the new constitution.
In the cold morning fog, he went round the broad and narrow streets of the city but everything looked old, like the sky. His eyes wanted to see things taking on a new colour but, except for the new plume made of colourful feathers that rested on his horse’s head, everything looked old. He had bought this new plume from Chaudhry Khuda Bux for fourteen annas and a half to celebrate the new constitution.
The road lay black under his horse’s hooves. The lampposts that stood on the sides at regular intervals looked the same. The shop signs had not changed. The way people moved about, the sound made by the tiny bells tied around his horse’s neck were not new either. Nothing was new, but Ustad Mangu was not disappointed.
Perhaps it was too early in the morning. All the shops were still closed. This he found consoling. It also occurred to him that the courts did not start work until nine, so how could the new constitution be at work just yet.
He was in front of Government College when the tower clock imperiously struck nine. The students walking out through the main entrance were smartly dressed, but somehow their clothes looked shabby to Ustad Mangu. He wanted to see something startling and dramatic.
He turned his tonga left towards Anarkali. Half the shops were already open. There were crowds of people at sweetmeat stalls, and general traders were busy with their customers, their wares displayed invitingly in their windows. Overhead, on the power lines perched several pigeons, quarrelling with each other. But none of this held any interest whatsoever for Ustad Mangu. He wanted to see the new constitution as clearly as he could see his horse.
Ustad Mangu was one of those people who cannot stand the suspense of waiting. When his first child was to be born he had spent the last four or five months in a state of great agitation. While he was sure that the child would come to be born one day, he found it hard to keep waiting. He wanted to take a look at his child, just once. It could then take its time getting born. It was because of this desire that he could not overcome that he had pressed his sick wife’s belly and put his ear to it in an attempt to find out something about the baby, but he had had no luck.
One day he had screamed at his wife in exasperation, ‘What’s the matter with you! All day long you lie in bed as if you were dead. Why don’t you get up and walk about to gain some strength? If you keep lying there like a flat piece of wood, do you think you will be able to give birth?’
Ustad Mangu was temperamentally impatient. He wanted to see every cause have an effect, and he was always curious about it. Once his wife, Gangawati, watching his impatient antics, had said to him, ‘You haven’t even begun digging the well and already you’re dying to have a drink.’
This morning he was not as impatient as he normally should have been. He had come out early to take a look at the new constitution with his own eyes, in the same way he used to wait for hours to catch a glimpse of Gandhiji and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru being taken out in a procession.
Great leaders, in Ustad Mangu’s view, were those who were profusely garlanded when taken out in public. Anyone bedecked in garlands of marigolds was a great man in Ustad Mangu’s book. And if because of the milling crowds a couple of near-clashes took place, the leader’s stature grew in Ustad Mangu’s eyes. He wanted to measure the new constitution by the same yardstick.
From Anarkali he turned towards the Mall, driving his tonga slowly on its shiny surface. In front of an auto showroom, he found a fare bound for the cantonment. They settled the price and were soon on their way. Ustad Mangu whipped his horse into action and said to himself, ‘This is just as well. One might find out something about the new constitution in the cantonment.’
He dropped his passenger at his destination, lit a cigarette, which he placed between the last two fingers of his left hand, and eased himself into a cushion in the rear of the tonga. When Ustad Mangu was not looking for a new fare, or when he wanted to think about some past incident, he would move into the rear seat of the tonga, with the reins of his horse wound around his left hand. On such occasions his horse, after neighing a little, would begin to move forward at a gentle pace, glad to be spared the daily grind of cantering ahead.
Ustad Mangu was trying to work out if the present system of allotting tonga number plates would change with the new law, when he felt someone calling out to him. When he turned to look, he found a gora standing under a lamppost at the far end of the road, beckoning to him.
As already noted, Ustad Mangu had intense hatred for the British. When he saw that his new customer was a gora, feelings of hatred rose in his heart. His first instinct was to pay no attention to him and just leave him where he was. But then he felt that it would be foolish to give the man’s money a miss. The fourteen annas and a half he had spent on the plume should be recovered from these people, he decided.
He neatly tu
rned around his tonga on the empty road, flicked his whip and was at the lamppost in no time. Without moving from his comfortable perch, he asked in a leisurely manner, ‘Sahib Bahadur, where do you want to be taken?’
He had spoken these words with undisguised irony. When he had called him ‘Sahib Bahadur’, his upper lip, covered by his moustache, had moved lower, while a thin line that ran from his nostril to his lower chin had trembled and deepened, as if someone had run a sharp knife across a brown slab of shisham wood. His entire face was laughing, but inside his chest roared a fire ready to consume the gora.
The gora, who was trying to draw on a cigarette by standing close to the lamppost to protect himself from the breeze, turned and moved towards the tonga. He was about to place his foot on the foothold when his eyes met Ustad Mangu’s and it seemed as if two loaded guns had fired at each other and their discharge had met in mid-air and risen towards the sky in a ball of fire.
Ustad Mangu freed his left hand of the reins that he had wrapped around it and glared at the gora standing in front of him, as if he would eat every bit of him alive. The gora, meanwhile, was busy dusting his blue trousers of something that couldn’t be seen, or perhaps he was trying to protect this part of his body from Ustad Mangu’s assault.
‘Do you want to go or are you again going to make trouble?’ the gora asked.
‘It is the same man,’ Ustad Mangu said to himself. He was quite sure it was the same fellow with whom he had clashed the year before. That uncalled for argument had happened because the gora was sozzled. Ustad Mangu had borne the insults hurled at him in silence. He could have smashed the man into little bits, but he had remained passive because he knew that in such quarrels it was tongawalas mostly who suffered the wrath of the law.
‘Where do you want to go?’ Ustad Mangu asked, thinking about the previous year’s argument and the new constitution of 1 April. His tone was sharp like the stroke of a whip.
‘Hira Mandi,’ the gora answered.
‘The fare would be five rupees,’ Ustad Mangu’s moustache trembled.
‘Five rupees! Five rupees! Are you…?’ the gora screamed in disbelief.
‘Yes, yes, five rupees,’ Ustad Mangu said, clenching his big right fist tightly. ‘Are you interested or will you keep making idle talk?’
The gora, remembering their last encounter, had decided not to be awed by the barrel-chested Ustad Mangu. He felt that the man’s skull was again itching for punishment. This encouraging thought made him advance towards the tonga. With his swagger stick, he motioned Ustad Mangu to get down. The polished cane touched Ustad Mangu’s thigh two or three times. Ustad Mangu, standing up, looked down at the short-statured gora as if the sheer weight of a single glance would grind him down. Then his fist rose like an arrow leaving a bow and landed heavily on the gora’s chin. He pushed the man aside, got down from his tonga and began to hit him all over his body.
The astonished gora made several efforts to save himself from the heavy blows raining down on him, but when he noticed that his assailant was in a rage bordering on madness and flames were shooting forth from his eyes, he began to scream. His screams only made Ustad Mangu work his arms faster. He was thrashing the gora to his heart’s content while shouting, ‘The same cockiness even on 1 April! Well, sonny boy, it is our Raj now.’
A crowd gathered. Two policemen appeared from somewhere and with great difficulty managed to rescue the Englishman. There stood Ustad Mangu, one policeman to his left and one to his right, his broad chest heaving because he was breathless. Foaming at the mouth, with his smiling eyes he was looking at the astonished crowd and saying in a breathless voice, ‘Those days are gone, friends, when they ruled the roost. There is a new constitution now, fellows, a new constitution.’
The poor gora with his disfigured face was looking foolishly, sometimes at Ustad Mangu, other times at the crowd.
Ustad Mangu was taken by police constables to the station. All along the way, and even inside the station, he kept screaming, ‘New constitution, new constitution!’ but nobody paid any attention to him.
‘New constitution, new constitution! What rubbish are you talking? It’s the same old constitution.’
And he was locked up.
Translated by Khalid Hasan
Khushia
KHUSHIA WAS THINKING.
He had just got himself a paan laced with black tobacco from the shop across the road. He was sitting in his usual place, the cemented plinth by the roadside that served as a showroom for tyres and motor spares during the day. Evenings, it was his. He was masticating his black-tobacco-laced paan slowly and he was thinking of what had happened just half an hour earlier.
He had gone to the fifth street in Khetwari because around the corner lived his new girl, Kanta, who had come from Mangalore. Someone had told him that she was planning to move and he had gone to check it out. He had knocked at her door and she had asked who it was. ‘It is I, Khushia,’ he had answered. She had opened the door and what he had seen had nearly thrown him. She was naked, or nearly naked because all she had covering her was a skimpy towel which was simply not adequate because whatever women keep covered normally was there in full view.
‘Khushia, what brings you here…I was about to take a bath…sit down…you should have ordered some tea from the shop across the road before you came in…that blasted boy Rama who used to work for me has run off.’ Khushia, who had never seen a woman naked or even half naked, was confused. He did not know how to react or what to say. His eyes wanted to be elsewhere rather than on Kanta’s body.
But all he could manage to mutter was, ‘Why don’t you go and take your bath?’ And then, ‘If you were not quite dressed, why did you answer the door? You could just have said you were not ready and I would have come another time…But go and take your bath.’
Kanta smiled, ‘When you said it was Khushia, I asked myself what harm there was in letting you in. After all, I thought, it is Khushia, our own Khushia…’
He sat there thinking of the smile on her face as she had spoken to him. The sensation was almost physical, electrifying his mind and body. He could see her standing in front of him naked like a wax figurine. Her body was beautiful. For the first time, Khushia had realized that women who rent out their bodies could be beautiful also. This was like a revelation. But what had thrown him was her standing in front of him without the least sense of shame or self-consciousness. Why?
But then had she not answered that question herself when she said that she had let him in because, after all, he was ‘Khushia, our own Khushia.’
Both Kanta and Khushia were in the same line of work, she being the goods that he hawked. In that sense, he was her ‘own’ but did that justify her standing in front of him without her clothes? Khushia could not figure it out.
He could still see her as she had stood there. Her skin was taut like skin over a drum and her body did not seem to be aware of itself. His probing eyes had gone over her rich brown figure several times, but there had been no reaction from her. She had just stood there like an emotionless statuette. She should have reacted to his gaze. After all, there was a man staring at her, and men’s eyes could penetrate through a woman’s clothes, but she had shown not the least nervousness. He also remembered that her eyes had a washed and laundered look. Whatever it was, he said to himself again, she should have felt some sense of selfconsciousness, given some sign that her modesty had been outraged. Her face should have turned red with embarrassment. It is true she was a prostitute but did prostitutes stand undressed in front of men as she had done?
He had been in this business for ten years and he knew all the secrets of this profession and the women who worked it. He knew, for instance, that at the end of the street the girl who lived with a man she said was her brother, and who used to play a song from the movie Achoot Kanya on her broken harmonium, was in love with the actor Ashok Kumar. Many boys had taken her to bed on
the promise that they would introduce her to Ashok. He also knew that the Punjabi girl who lived in Dadar wore a jacket and trousers because a customer had once told her about Marlene Dietrich, the star of the movie Morocco, who was said to wear trousers because her legs were so beautiful that they needed to be protected. They were said to be insured for a lot of money. She had seen that movie many times. The trousers sat tightly over her buttocks but it didn’t matter. Then there was the girl from Daccan who lived in Mizgaon and who ensnared handsome college students because she wanted to have a good-looking baby, though she knew it was unlikely to happen as she was infertile. There was also the dark one from Madras with diamond earrings who wasted most of what she earned on lotions and bleaching creams that promised to turn dark skin into fair, though in her heart of hearts she knew it would never happen and she was wasting her money.
All these women for whom he worked he knew inside out but what he did not know was that one day one of them, Kanta Kumari, a name he found difficult to remember, would stand in front of him naked, an experience he had never had before. Beads of perspiration appeared on his brow. His pride had been hurt. When he thought of Kanta’s bare body, he felt a deep sense of insult. He was speaking to himself. ‘It is an insult, is it not! Here is a girl who is practically naked and she stands bang in front of me and says, “Come in, after all, you are Khushia, our own Khushia.” As if I was not a man but that stupid cat which is always sprawled on her bed.’
As he sat there thinking, he became convinced that he had been insulted. He was a man and he expected women, whether housewives or the other kind, to treat him like a man, a male. He expected them to maintain the distance laid down by nature between man and woman. He had gone to Kanta’s house to find out if she was really moving and, if so, where. It was a business call. When he knocked at her door, he had had no idea what she might be doing. He had thought maybe she was lying in bed with a bandage around her head to fight a headache or de-licing her cat or removing the hair from her armpits with that foulsmelling powder he could not stand. She could even be playing a game of cards with herself.
The Dog of Tithwal Page 26
