Khushwant Singh Best Indian Short Stories Volume 1

by Khushwant Singh

  Mirza was convinced that, chained down to wedlock, Lajo had become a genuine housewife. Had he not seen for himself, he would never have believed it. Seeing him on the doorstep so unexpectedly, she gave out a peal of laughter. She could not, even in her wildest dreams, imagine that Mirza would be so offended!

  But Mithwa knew. Clutching his dhoti firmly with one hand, he bolted and stopped for breath only after he had crossed three villages! Mirza flogged Lajo so much that, had she been made of softer stuff, she would have breathed her last.

  The news that Mirza had caught his wife with Mithwa spread throughout the village. People came in large numbers to watch the fun and were sorely disappointed to know that Mithwa, the hero, had fled and that the wife lay dismantled. Ramu’s grandmother arrived and gathered her away.

  One would think a flogging like that would turn Lajo against the very idea of Mirza. Far from it! Beating helped achieve what marriage could not. The bond was stronger. The minute she came to, Lajo enquired after Mirza. All her masters inevitably ended up as lovers. After giving her a sound thrashing, the question of pay was set aside. She slogged free and was beaten from time to time. But Mirza had always been good. Other masters had even loaned her to friends but Mirza regarded her as his own. Everyone advised her to run away and save her skin but she did not budge.

  How was Mirza to face the world? He saw no way but to kill her in order to save his honour. Miran Mian held him back. ‘Why must you stick your head in the noose for a bitch? Divorce the whore and forget her!’

  Mirza divorced Lajo then and there and sent thirty-two rupees of dower, meher, her clothes and other belongings over to Ramu’s grandmother.

  When Lajo heard of the divorce, she heaved a sigh of relief. Nikaah had proved unlucky. All mishaps had been due to that.

  ‘Is Mian still angry?’ she asked Ramu’s grandmother.

  ‘Shan’t set eyes on you. Wants you to get lost! Drop dead!’

  The news of Mirza’s divorce rocked the village. Lala sent out a feeler: ‘The bungalow is ready!’

  ‘Dump your mother in it!’ Lajo retorted.

  After a fortnight in bed, Lajo was up on her feet again. The beating seemed to have spring-cleaned her and left her more glowing than ever. When buying paan or kachori, she took the whole bazaar by storm.

  Mirza died a thousand deaths. Once he spotted her at the bania’s, arguing over something. The bania drooled. Mirza slunk away, avoiding notice.

  ‘You are crazy, Mian! Why care for what she does? You have divorced her, haven’t you?’ Miran Mian asked.

  ‘She has been my wife.’

  ‘If you want the truth, she was never your wife!’

  ‘What about the nikaah?’

  ‘Thoroughly illegal!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It was never valid. No one knows who begot her. And, I suppose, nikaah with a bastard is not valid,’ Miran Mian passed the verdict.

  ‘So the nikaah never came into effect?’ Mirza asked.

  ‘Never!’ confirmed Miran Mian.

  ‘And I never lost face either? My family’s reputation is intact!’

  Mirza felt immensely relieved. ‘But what about the divorce?’ he asked, worried.

  ‘My dear Mian, no nikaah, no divorce!’

  ‘So the thirty-two rupees were wasted!’ Mirza said sorrowfully.

  In no time, news went bouncing all over the neighbourhood that Mirza was never married to his ‘wife’, that the nikaah and divorce had both been unlawful.

  When Lajo heard the news she danced with joy. The nightmare that was her marriage and divorce was over. What made her happiest was the fact that Mian had not lost face, after all. She had been genuinely grieved that he had lost his honour because of her. ‘What a boon it is to be a bastard!’ she thought. God forbid, were she a legitimate child.... Even the idea of such a possibility made her shudder. Lajo was feeling suffocated at Ramu’s grandmother’s. Thoughts of the house kept her worried. Mian could not have had it swept and dusted for fear of theft. The place must be in a mess.

  One day Mirza was on his way to the shop when Lajo waylaid him.

  ‘Mian shall I resume duty from tomorrow?’

  ‘Damn!’ said Mirza and walked away briskly. ‘But I’ll need a maid sooner or later,’ he thought. ‘Maybe this wretch if none other.’

  Lajo did not wait for Mirza to make up his mind. She jumped into the house from the roof, tied up her lehenga and set to work.

  That evening, on his return Mirza held his breath. It was like the late Bi Amma come back! The house was sparkling clean. A faint smell of incense filled the air. The pitcher was filled with water and over that was placed a well-scrubbed bowl.

  Mirza’s heart went heavy with nostalgia. He ate the roast mutton and parathas in hushed silence. As usual Lajo sat on the doorstep, fanning the files away.

  At night, when she spread jute curtains on the kitchen floor and went to sleep Mirza once again had a severe bout of thirst. He tossed and turned, listening to the provocative tinkle of her anklets. Fear clutched at his heart, as also a feeling of guilt. He felt he had been very unfair to her and had grossly underestimated the poor creature. A deep sense of regret overtook him. He lay cursing himself.

  Then with a sudden ‘Damn it all!’ he got up, ran across and collected the Housewife from the mat.

  (Translated from the Urdu by Fatima Ahmed)

  T W E L V E

  A Home near the Sea

  KAMALA DAS

  Arumugham was not surprised when his wife hit him on the head during a quarrel, for she had been doing that for quite some time now, probably ever since he was dismissed from his job as a watchman for the sin of drunkenness a year ago. She had every right to express her dissatisfaction in such a rude way but the fact that she did it while the young man was watching them upset him. ‘I will kill her one of these days!’ Arumugham told himself, clenching his fist. But when she turned round to scan his face for an angry response in order to frustrate her, he grinned. It was a slow grin that wrinkled his dark face, even his smooth brow that separated his tiny eyes from the shaven head. He had not wanted to shave his head like a monk but she said that it was not possible to buy oil for the two of them for their weekly baths near the leaky faucet at the construction site. Oil had become very dear. Besides, he had lice in his hair. But lice she too had, juicy black ones as big as bugs creeping all over her scalp which he helped her kill, pressing them between the thumbnails in the long afternoons under the tree near the park and the sea.

  They had been homeless for nearly a year. He liked the languor of this life but feared the monsoons and the days when no edible food would be found in the garbage heap outside the Ritz Hotel. Hunger always picked up quarrels with him and abused him again and again for having got drunk enough to lose a fine lucrative job. True, he had been irresponsible. Why, on paydays he used to stop at Anna’s paan shop and drink five glasses of hooch which went down like a sword of fire and made him confident. To remove the smell from his mouth, he ate two paans filled with brown chunam and tobacco bits....

  ‘We would have been living in our kholi at Sewri,’ said the woman, pointing to him, ‘if you had not got drunk and insulted the supervisor of the factory. What a good-for-nothing dog I married! Who would believe now, looking at me, that the son of the inspector, Chinna Thampy, asked for my hand once upon a time? I have lost both my youth and my beauty.’

  ‘I will believe it, Amma,’ said the young man who wore a red cloth tied round his head and was dressed like one of the many beggars who walked the city. ‘You are still comely. When I first saw you making chapatis under that tree with a real sigree and coal, I thought you were a well-to-do lady. You looked like a grihalakshmi. Now you are homeless but why should you think that you will always be so? One of you may get a good job soon. If you were to get an ayah’s job with some rich family, your problems would be solved. You will have only to look after the children, take them to parks and undress them for the night. My mother was once an a
yah at a Parsi’s home. She used to get fifty rupees a month and three meals a day. And four saris a year.’

  ‘Three full meals per day!’ exclaimed the husband. ‘Why, I would myself work as an ayah if I got that! The Parsis are non-vegetarians. I will grow fat and handsome, eating good food.’

  The wife and the other man laughed uproariously.

  ‘Why, you cannot be an ayah in a hundred years,’ said the young man. ‘Only women can become ayahs. Your wife can become one. But these days people are full of suspicion. Nobody offers a job to you unless you take some certificates with you. One day I went to a house at Colaba and asked for a bearer’s job but the lady of the house wanted my fingerprints to be taken. Like a criminal’s. I left immediately. I do not want to be insulted by the rich. I would rather die on the road than work for people like her.’

  ‘How do you live now?’ asked the woman. She had begun to like the man’s pride and also the fine lines of his face.

  ‘Sometimes I go to the seashore and help the smugglers lift their goods onto a lorry parked nearby. Just five minutes of work but it fetches me fifty rupees. If I get caught, I remain in jail for a year. Things are not bad in the jails. Lots of wholesome food and free medical treatment if you fall ill. I sometimes wish they would nab me again so that I can get some rest. The monsoons are coming. What are we, homeless people, to do? A jail will be an ideal place for the coming months. But the police are useless. All of them have been bribed. They will not catch any of us even if we dangle the goods before their eyes. What can be done?’

  The young man chuckled pleasantly.

  ‘You can remain with us,’ said the woman. ‘My man has spoken to some shopmen about letting us sleep under the awnings. We shall eat whatever we get and pull on. The Rasna Hotel often offers food to the hungry. My man goes to collect it. Sometimes we get chapatis and samosas with pickles. You shall not starve, my good man, if you stay with us.’

  ‘She is a good hostess, is she not?’ asked the husband, scratching his shaven head. ‘She talks as if she owns a house and a larder full of food.’

  ‘Whose fault is it that I do not own a house?’ continued the wife shrilly. ‘You sold my ornaments. You lost your job. And we were pushed out of our hut. Who was at fault? You or I? Was I not always a dutiful wife to you? I have not slept around with other men like other women of the slum who waited for their husbands to leave for work to begin waving out to passengers on the slow train. I did not want to earn that kind of money. This good-for-nothing man of mine brought me nothing. Not even on Diwali day did he get me a new sari! I suffered in silence. But now I have turned bitter. I talk back to him. I even hit him when he irritates me.’

  ‘One day I shall give you the thrashing of your life,’ mumbled Arumugham. He did not want the visitor to consider him henpecked.

  ‘You will thrash me, will you?’ asked the woman. ‘Do it now, you dirty dog. I shall strangle you with my bare hands and go to the police station to announce the murder. I am not afraid of anybody. The jail will be a better place than this pavement.’

  ‘This is the best place in the world, Amma,’ said the young man sweetly. ‘You see the flowers of the park and the blue sea. And at night you lie watching the sky with all its stars. This is an ideal life in my eyes. I know a few songs about the sea. I used to sing in the electric train when I was a child and pick up some coins. Now they do not allow me on the train – I am too old for singing in the train....’

  ‘You are a singer?’ asked the woman, regaining her composure. ‘Will you sing a few songs to me? When I was a child in Tanjore, I lived close to a bhagavatar’s house. Every morning I woke up hearing his songs. He was very good. That was long ago. He must be dead by now.’

  ‘You have the soul of an artist, Amma,’ said the young man. ‘I knew it the moment I set eyes on you. You should be living in a wealthy house. You should be playing a veena with your long fingers, wearing white jasmine in your hair and gold ornaments on your person. You resemble the Goddess Lakshmi.’

  ‘When you talk like this, I feel sad,’ said the woman. She felt tears filling her eyes and flowing over her cheeks. She tidied her hair and hid her face in her hands. Her sobbing disturbed the husband, who looked up puzzled. What was happening? What was making his wife weep helplessly as she used to do once, years ago, when she had not lost her beauty?

  ‘What did you say now to make her weep?’ asked Arumugham.

  ‘I only spoke of music,’ said the young man.

  ‘You have upset my wife,’ countered the husband. ‘You had no business coming here to cause her unhappiness. Go away from here.’

  ‘I am sorry, Amma,’ said the young man.

  ‘You have misunderstood me. I was only praising your wife. I was telling her of her resemblance to the Goddess Lakshmi.’

  ‘We do not want you here,’ said the husband. ‘Take your bundle and go away.’

  The young man rose to take leave. ‘I am going away, Amma,’ he said. ‘May the God Murugan protect you all your life.’

  The woman suddenly stirred herself and stopped crying. ‘Wait,’ she cried, ‘take this with you. You can wrap yourself in it when the chilly weather arrives.’

  She handed him a blanket, taking it out of her bundle carefully. It was frayed at the edges but good and warm. The young man took it and brushed his eyes with it to express his gratitude.

  ‘You are the Goddess Lakshmi,’ he said. ‘I shall always remember you with love.’

  After he had walked away with the blanket slung over his strong shoulder, the woman’s husband turned on her in fury. ‘Why did you have to give the only good thing we had to a stranger? How are we going to put up with the rainy weather and the colder winter? Why did you give it to him? Tell me, woman, what is he to you?’

  ‘He is nobody,’ said the woman, laying out a piece of cloth on the ground and stretching herself to lie down, ‘but he spoke of music to me....’

  ‘You behaved like a person who has lost her senses. He cast a spell over you with his talk of the sea and the stars.’

  She smiled and was silent.

  T H I R T E E N

  The Crocodile’s Lady

  MANOJ DAS

  Miles and miles of marshland and sandy tracks; but nothing could disturb the curiosity of Dr Batstone, the distinguished sociologist from the West. After fifty miles the jeep had to be abandoned in favour of a bullock cart and when the cart got stuck in a stretch of mud, we had to plod on to reach our village.

  Dr Batstone, who had lived in a city of skyscrapers all his life, had expressed a desire to experience a real Indian village.

  This was before the Indian villages were reduced to caricatures of bazaars with huge red triangles glorifying family planning, politicians preaching patriotism, billboards going on about the virtues of small savings and cigarettes, and loudspeakers blaring from the community centres.

  Dr Batstone relaxed in an armchair on our spacious verandah and muttered to himself, once every five minutes, ‘Wonderful, fantastic!’

  There was no need to ask him what was wonderful or fantastic. That one could drive for eighty miles without meeting a single automobile was wonderful. That a hundred cattle could march through fenceless paddy fields with absolute abstinence, obeying a tiny tot’s hooting, was as fantastic as the Pied Piper’s magic. Wonderful was the huge rainbow, fantastic the revelation that ninety-seven per cent of our villagers lived quite contented without having seen a locomotive or a cinema.

  But his most wonderful experience had been an interview with the head pandit of the ‘Model’ Lower Primary School of our village, Shri Maku Mishra, who, Dr Batstone found out, had taught for forty years without having heard of Hegel or Marx or Freud or Einstein or even Bernard Shaw and Charlie Chaplin.

  Nobody had ever dreamed that a day could dawn when a real sahib would set foot on the soil of our insignificant village. The Malika, an ancient folk epic of prophecies and prognostications, which had foretold the great cyclone of half a century ago, t
he collapse of a local temple two decades thereafter and even the emergence of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, had failed to make a mention of such a possibility. No wonder that the two dozen daring, affluent and scholarly males of the village sat in front of Dr Batstone throughout the afternoon doing nothing but gaping at him and smiling respectfully.

  Dr Batstone realized how amused the people had been. He told me several times, ‘Well, Baboo, I did not really know that I could mean so much! What a pity that I can do so little to please them. I would have loved to perform acrobatics or even a dance, had I known the art, for the sake of your wonderful people.’

  Suddenly the professor asked, ‘Tell me, Baboo, do all these people believe in ghosts?’

  No sooner had I interpreted the sahib’s question to our people than they began shaking their heads. The professor leaned forward with a jerk. Now it was his turn to gape at the audience. ‘Believe me, Baboo,’ he confessed, ‘your people are much more progressive than my countrymen. At least fifty per cent of my countrymen believe in ghosts whether they admit it or not. Now, please find out for me, Baboo, do all these people believe in God?’

  I translated the question. The villagers exchanged glances, but kept quiet, looking intrigued. But the professor had his own interpretation of their silence.

  ‘Obviously, they are sceptical,’ he observed.

  But soon, after some collective coughing, my villagers, one by one, began to explain their reactions to the question.

  ‘Take it from us, Sahib, it is quite inadvisable to believe in ghosts. How much conscience do they possess? I tell you, absolutely nil!’ assured Maku Mishra.

  ‘Will you believe, Sahib, that he was my cousin, my very own father’s own maternal uncle’s own son-in-law’s own nephew? And hadn’t I done everything for him, from sharing my own pillow with him to doing half the shopping for his marriage? Yet who in this wide world does not know that this treacherous brother-in-law of mine, I mean his ghost, chose to harass me out of all the millions and billions of people in my village within a week of his death?’