‘You’re doing a good thing, beta,’ he told her one day. She was leaning against his arm, watching him pour the chai cleanly from the cup into the saucer. Like all things he did, the motion was parsimonious, without the slightest possibility of waste. His moustache, and the hair on his chin, was a silvery white, but his cheeks were covered with the softest black, and Prabhjot Kaur loved the way the white curved into the black. He drank, tilting the saucer and somehow not getting his moustache the slightest bit moist. He worked for a British company, and Prabhjot Kaur knew the English for what he did, ‘Assistant-Regional-Manager’ for a medical supply company, and that he had worked his way up from ‘Salesman’, but what ‘Manager’ really meant she had no idea. She knew that they also had dada-pardada land in the absolutely fast-asleep village of Khenchi, which despite its deliciously ridiculous name produced eleven quintals per acre of good wheat every year, and this grandfatherly bounty was a great help to them. She did know what a quintal looked like, because she had been to Khenchi once every winter ever since she could remember, to the broken-down yellow house squatting lonely in the middle of green fields. She knew that from the yellow house to this new one was progress, and that all of it had happened because of education, because Papa-ji had been the first boy in the village to pass his Inter and go to college.
‘In another six months I’ll have them all to class one level,’ she said. ‘In one year, to class two.’
He looked at her then, from under white eyebrows. ‘One year?’
‘Yes.’
He put the cup back into the saucer, even though it was still a third full, and handed it to her. She watched while he walked round and round the edges of their plot, brushing the wall with his sleeve. When Mata-ji called Prabhjot Kaur in, he was still out there, trudging in circles with his head low.
Why were old people sad? Mostly Prabhjot Kaur had no idea. Mata-ji had running feuds with aunts and cousins and neighbours, and sometimes she muttered about them and went on the whole day about some ancient betrayal or slight, but there were other days when, for no visible reason, she was just beset by sighs and a powdery sadness that paled her face. Even Navneet-bhenji had days when she seemed silenced by a shapeless melancholy, even after the engagement and the letters had made her languorous and lovely. So Prabhjot Kaur didn’t think much of Papa-ji’s mood. The next morning he seemed back to his normal sprightly self. There were workmen at the back of the house, and as she was leaving, Prabhjot Kaur gathered that they were to put grilles over the wooden shutters on the windows. What she found when she got home were more like bars, thick rectangular lengths of iron that sat squarely across the windows, and up and down. ‘They’ll be painted green when they finish,’ Papa-ji said. ‘Like the shutters.’ But now Prabhjot Kaur’s window didn’t even open all the way, so that Ram Pari’s family was hidden from her. She pointed this out to Papa-ji, this inefficiency in the construction, and incredibly enough all he said was, ‘There’s no time to fix it now, beta. And the window opens all the way, almost.’ This was the same man who had had four cartloads of bricks taken back to the supplier because they weren’t exactly what he had paid for. Prabhjot Kaur was going to talk about all this the next morning with Manjeet and Asha, but when she got into the tanga, she was amazed to find herself followed by Iqbal-veerji, who swung himself into the front seat and sat next to Daraq Ali, with his cricket bat between his knees and the handle held between two large-fisted hands. He didn’t say a word all the way to school. And the three girls sat with their heads half-turned, and nobody in the tanga spoke. Only after they were inside the school gates did Manjeet snap her head and signal a conclave, and they found a corner to stand in, with their shoulders hunched and foreheads almost leaning against each other, and she whispered, ‘In Minapur there were three murders last night. Three Hindus were killed.’ She was trembling, Prabhjot Kaur could feel Manjeet’s elbow twitching against her arm. ‘One was a girl.’
Prabhjot Kaur couldn’t learn even part of a lesson the whole day. She didn’t write a word in her notebooks, and during recess the girls in the whole school stood around in huddles, and not one game of kidi kada was started. When the final bell rang and they all came to the gate, Prabhjot Kaur saw Iqbal-veerji standing by the tanga and felt a relief so gigantic that she ran forward to him, and stood a step away from him almost in tears until he put a hand on her head and walked her back around to the seat. Now there was that silence again, thick and uncomfortable as woollen blankets in the summer, and Daraq Ali didn’t say one word to Shagufta, which frightened Prabhjot Kaur more than anything else. The streets seemed less crowded than usual, and Prabhjot Kaur could see that people weren’t saying a thing to each other, nobody lingered on street corners or in front of shops to talk. When the tanga finally turned the corner, and she saw the familiar tall rectangle of the gate, Prabhjot Kaur exulted in a huge warm gush of safety which felt like a rising bath of honey, all cushiony and caressing against her skin. She ran inside, and hugged Navneet-bhenji, and sat close to her, and drank down an enormous tumbler of milk without even a squeak of ritual protest, gurgling it down in one long run of gulps. Only when the last drop was gone did she notice that Iqbal-veerji had gone on in the tanga, to escort Asha home. That night, she was glad of the bars, for the metal which at least held away dread, even though it couldn’t make the fear vanish. She felt lucky she didn’t have to sleep outside.
The light pressed on her face and she was awake. The courtyard was bright outside, and she knew it was late in the morning, very late. When she saw the time in the clock on the mantelpiece her heart thumped. The first assembly bell would ring in less than ten minutes. She threw herself out of bed and ran through the door. ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ she gasped at Mata-ji. ‘It’s so late.’
Mata-ji reached out a hand. ‘It’s all right, beta,’ she said, her voice soft. ‘There’s no school today. Or college. Everything is shut.’
‘Why?’
‘There’s some trouble in town. Go and wash your face and then eat.’ She reached out further and touched Prabhjot Kaur’s hand, held her by the wrist a little. ‘Go.’
It was the quietest holiday Prabhjot Kaur had ever had. She stayed inside her room, arranging her books and cleaning out her school-bag, but at eleven she couldn’t stand it any more and tiptoed through the house and slipped out of the front door. Standing by the gate, she could feel an absolute lack of motion in the streets, as if everyone had made an agreement and left town simultaneously. And yet she knew they were all there. She went back through the gate and walked around the house, and at the rear all of Ram Pari’s brood were huddled together, even Natwar, who was usually bouncing about the lanes on filthy bare feet, rapt in some mysterious secret life Prabhjot Kaur knew absolutely nothing about.
‘Go inside, Nikki,’ Ram Pari said. ‘You shouldn’t be out here. Stay inside the house.’
‘Why?’
‘Bad things are happening, Nikki.’ Ram Pari was looking straight at the rear garden wall, and Prabhjot Kaur saw that what had just been an untidy lane beyond, an insignificant ribbon of parched mud covered by a perpetual shifting mist of scraps of paper, was now even in bright daylight a darkness from which danger came. Prabhjot Kaur studied the top of the wall, and wondered if it was high enough. She wanted to go and stand at its foot, to measure its height and so its protection. But now the garden seemed a foreign wilderness, and she couldn’t make herself step off the brick on to the earth. She nodded and went back inside, and sat herself on her bed, cross-legged. She was waiting now, and didn’t know for what.
Lunch was also a hushed affair, with everyone speaking in low tones, and Navneet-bhenji not saying a word at all. Papa-ji and the two brothers sat in a tight little circle and spoke with their heads lowered. Afterwards, it was back to the bed for Prabhjot Kaur, and more sitting, and then lying down with her heels drumming against the bedcover. ‘Will you stop that?’ Mani burst out. ‘You’re driving me mad.’ Madness was what Prabhjot Kaur felt pooling behind her s
houlder-blades, in that afternoon that passed like a slow procession of ants crawling up her leg. So when the chain at the front gate rattled, the metal sound of it echoed through the house and into Prabhjot Kaur’s head and she felt a violent spasm of fear, but it was also a relief. Mani was twisted up on to her elbows, her mouth wide open and her neck a bunched bundle of thin ropes just under the skin. Prabhjot Kaur leapt from the bed and ran. She reached the door and swung out with a hand on a wall and saw Iqbal-veerji and Alok-veerji going through the gate and Papa-ji stepping out. She ran forward and saw Papa-ji standing at the other side of the lane, craning his neck, and there were running feet and the hubbub of voices. Now there was a quick panting next to her, and she saw that it was Natwar. They leaned together against the gate. He had eyes as bright as black agates. He slipped past her, and was out into the lane. Without a moment’s hesitation she went after him, and was instantly in the shelter of a group of running men. She kept her eye on Natwar, and followed his dodges through the crowd, his sudden swerves and cuts amongst the huffing bodies. Now they came to a gathering halt, in a dense crowd. Natwar reached, without looking back, and pulled her through, bumping her head on hips and buttocks. She fell out of the jostle, and forward, stubbing her nose on Natwar’s shoulder, and the way was clear before them. A tanga stood, tilted forward at an angle she had never seen. Tangled in the harness and traces lay a horse, its neck craning forward in a taut curve, as if it were trying desperately to inch along the ground, pull itself along. It was Shagufta. Prabhjot Kaur saw this straight away. Shagufta’s lips were curled back, exposing the huge teeth in a rictus of effort. The front legs were curled together. The back ones were splayed out open, and between them and over them spilled fat blue coils from her belly. Prabhjot Kaur could see straight into Shagufta, into the cavity which was the colour of a very ripe winter jamun. The stuff from inside had come out as if with force, and even though it was not moving, Prabhjot Kaur felt it was still forcing itself out from the body, boiling over in oily billows. The road under the tanga was black and wet. On the other side of the tanga, as far away from it as Prabhjot Kaur, was a heaving crowd of men, Muslim men all of them, she knew this somehow, it wasn’t the clothes alone, and at their front she could see Daraq Ali. He was shouting something and Prabhjot Kaur could see his teeth. All their mouths were open and she could see the white shine of teeth. That crowd was coming forward in small jerks and then going back. A shove in Prabhjot Kaur’s back moved her forward, and she saw that Shagufta’s eyes were wide open and moist. She thought now that Shagufta was still alive and was stepping up to her when she was lifted by her arm, twisted and lifted by it, and she cried out in pain. It was Papa-ji. He ran her back through the crowd, held against his side. He ran and ran. All through the lane she felt his fingers hard on her arm. Inside the gate, inside the courtyard, at home again, he took her by the shoulder and shook her, and his own head was moving back and forth and his face was sweaty, and pulled and pushed by his anger, Prabhjot Kaur saw only a blur. ‘Why did you go out?’ he said, and slapped her. ‘Why did you go out? Haan? Why?’ He slapped her again.
‘Let her be,’ Navneet-bhenji said, and took Prabhjot Kaur to her bed. She laid her down and then climbed on to the bed and held Prabhjot Kaur’s head in her lap. She was stroking Prabhjot Kaur’s face and shoulders, and Prabhjot Kaur could feel her fluttering heart. Mani was sitting on the floor, her knees up and her back against the wall. Mata-ji came in and shut the door quickly and put up the chain. She sat on the bed, her head covered with her dupatta. In the distance they could hear a confused and continuous shouting, like the steady crackle of a dim fire. ‘Vaheguru, vaheguru,’ Mata-ji said. They sat together until dark. And then it was quiet.
After that night none of the women went out. Prabhjot Kaur hardly even left her bed. She came out to eat and ran back to it, went out when called by Mata-ji, but then sidled away as soon as possible. Papa-ji came and sat cross-legged with a pillow over his lap and teased her and made her laugh and tickled the soles of her feet, and she understood that he was apologizing for his moment of panic, and she was able to go out into the courtyard with her hand in his, but despite herself she grew anxious out in the open, she got a feeling in the middle of her chest as if a hard bubble was expanding to the size of an onion, making it hard to breathe. She came back fast, into her room. The white walls made her feel better, and the bars. She looked out of the window sometimes, to find Ram Pari and Natwar and all the rest huddled below, but she avoided raising her eyes to the garden, and what lay beyond. When she turned around, and she was securely in the room, on her bed, she was all right.
Outside, men and women were killed every night, and every day. Prabhjot Kaur knew what this was called: khoon. Prabhhjot Kaur held the word on her tongue, and to her it felt like a square metal apparatus with a gaping hole in the centre. Dripping with viscous fluids and sharp edges glinting. Manjeet had shown her this thing in a senior class history book once, this engine of death, and now it came back to Prabhjot Kaur. Khoon. Papa-ji and the brothers came into the house laden with the names of those who were already gone. A sardar named Jasjit Singh Ahluwalia on the corner where Pakmara Street ran into Campbell Road, near Tarapore Bakery, slashed to hanging bits by men with swords. Ramesh Kripalani, aged sixteen, found with his throat expertly cut around, head hanging into the gutter so that Ali Jafar Road was not sullied by a drop of blood. ‘They say a butcher from Karsanganj did it,’ Alok-veerji said. ‘Caught him on the way home from his Chacha’s house.’ Khoon. There were more, many more. Mata-ji and her daughters listened to the lengthening list. On the day that final exams would have started, Ram Pari’s husband was killed. He was one of three looters shot by the police on Larkin Road at six a.m. – Prabhjot Kaur heard about this the next day, first as a rumour, then as a certainty. A wailing rose behind the house, a blurred chorus that rose and fell, and there was nowhere to escape it, and Prabhjot Kaur learnt for the first time his name, Kuldish. All through the day they mourned Kuldish, the bad man who had never come to threaten Ram Pari, and the wails slid under Prabhjot Kaur’s skin and made her shiver.
That evening Mata-ji told the brothers to stay at home, not to go out on to the street, and Iqbal-veerji laughed, and the sound fell into the room with a clank like iron. The brothers left anyway, and Alok-veerji glanced back as he shut the door, and Prabhjot-Kaur saw that he looked at her, all of them, his sisters and mother, with anger and something very much like contempt. Mata-ji began to curse Muslims. ‘No one can ever live with these people,’ she said. ‘They are incapable of living peacefully with anyone.’ Her face was suffused with blood, flushed and thickened by it. ‘Dirty lying people,’ she said. Prabhjot Kaur made lists in her mind, of the Muslims she knew. Daraq Ali, of course; Papa-ji’s friend Khudabaksh Shafi, who came to visit always with baskets of strawberries or apples or mangoes, and all his sons and daughters and grandchildren; Parveena and Shaukat Shah, who owned the Excellent Store, from which Prabhjot Kaur and all her brothers and sisters had bought school uniforms and shoes all their lives; all the Muslim girls at school, especially Nikhat Azmi, who was a round-faced girl that the Trio played with whenever they went to Manjeet’s house. The list went on and on, and once Prabhjot Kaur started, it seemed to her there was always one more person, one more face that she remembered late at night, before drifting into sleep. But Mata-ji cursed. And Pritam Singh Hansra wrote letters to Papa-ji. He had stopped writing to Navneet-bhenji, and instead wrote letters to Papa-ji begging him to come to Amritsar, to bring the family, all of it, but especially Navneet-bhenji. He had been in Amritsar for a month and a half already. ‘You know yourself what is happening,’ he wrote. ‘And things can only get worse.’
But Papa-ji was paralysed. He shook his head in the morning at the newspapers’ reports of flames and murder and ambushed trains full of refugees, and in the afternoon he was completely still. He sat cross-legged on an armchair in the courtyard, not even shifting in his seat, as if he were bound with tight chains that slowed ev
en his breathing. He stopped changing his clothes then, and sat through the whole day in a banian and pyjamas, his hair loose under a patka and bare feet resting on the brick. Prabhjot Kaur knew he was waiting for something, and saw that he had been emptied of vigour, suddenly drained of volition like an upended bucket. She remembered how he had bounded from one side of the excavation to the other when the foundation was being dug, how he had not minded that his arms were muddied from grasping at the earth, how he had held up handfuls of mud from the bottom of the pit for her to test for moistness, how he had dusted his hands with great slappings of them, with wide sweeps to the sides and sharp cracks that she had jumped at. There was no more motion in him, and even the blinks of his eyes were slow, mournful sweeps, which Prabhjot Kaur could follow down and up. One day, she thought, I’ll come out and even that will be stopped, finished, unmoving. She tried not to think this, but it came back as slyly as a persistent fly, this thought, and then its buzzing grew louder and louder until she hit at her forehead with the heels of her hands. I’ll go mad, she thought. I will.
Finally Mata-ji took charge. It was now past summer and everyone they knew had gone, Manjeet and Asha and their families also. One evening a Pathan policeman rattled the gate. When Iqbal-veerji cracked the door an inch, the chain still firmly in place, the policeman flicked in an envelope that landed at Alok-veerji’s feet. ‘I’ll be back in half an hour for an answer,’ the policeman whispered, and went down the lane. Inside the envelope was an unsigned letter.
Sacred Games Page 24
