The Eighteenth Parallel

by MITRAN, ASHOKA

  'Next batsman!'

  Chandru stood gazing at Narasimha Rao's face before him. It was a dark, handsome face with a broad jaw and a high forehead. A fine dignified specimen of a man from Andhra. But God help you if you happened to call him that. He belonged to Andhra all right. But he wished to be called a Telengana man, emphasising the region of Andhra to which he belonged. He came from a Telugu-speaking family that had been in Hyderabad for generations. But they spoke Urdu at home most of the time. He was near-Muslim himself. Yet here he was, accusing Chandru of hobnobbing with Muslims. But then the boy had no means of knowing what Nasir had said to Chandru at the end of the day's practice, 'Why, friend, anything the matter today?' That was all he had said.

  'Narasimha, let me go now,' Chandru said. 'I'll see you tomorrow. No lamp on my bicycle, you see.'

  Chandru bit his tongue for bringing up the subject of the bicycle lamp again. But Narasimha Rao did not detain him.

  Chandru rode through the labyrinth of narrow lanes that connected James Street and Kingsway. The streets were usually so congested that manoeuvering a bike through them called for considerable skill. But there were very few people on the streets now. Not that there had been any riots here. But several long-settled Muslim families had moved down from here to predominantly Muslim localities in Secunderabad. At the same time, several Hindu families had also sent their women and children out of the state. The place was now almost deserted so that Chandru was able to ride without ringing his bell. Those who had moved out of there had been simple folk, petty vendors of vegetables, betelnut or fruit, and hawkers who pushed their food-carts through the streets. They sold very tasty food like vadas and murukus which cost just a rupee a seer. An anna's worth could be quite filling. The same things sold for two annas in the restaurants. They had fled now, all those who made a living filling their hands and stomach for a single anna. The Muslim refugees had now taken over their street-food trade. Let a thousand more like them set up shop here, and the city would gobble it all up and ask for more. Thus it wasn't as if the earlier lot had left for fear of competition. It was something else that had driven them away. This Hindu-Muslim thing had been festering for nearly a year and had finally come to a head on Join Indian Union Day. That day there had been processions, police baton charges and arrests in Hyderabad city. In Secunderabad shops were closed and nobody attended school. Things would have passed off peacefully but for what happened in Regimental Bazaar.

  Chandru passed the Islamiah High School. A policeman was sure to be around. He must push the bicycle, not ride it. There was no other way.

  Then suddenly, two men sprang on Chandru. 'Who are you?' asked one. 'Bomman,' said the other, as if he were answering the man.

  'Kill him!'

  All Chandru felt were the first two blows.

  4

  Chandru fell. His bicycle fell on top of him, luckily as it turned out, for it took most of the beating.

  Some people ran across from another alley with shouts of "Kill!" Chandru's attackers saw them come and fled with the second group at their heels.

  Hardly fifty yards away, Secunderabad's Monda Market hummed with activity. Yet the lane Chandru was in was deserted. He pulled himself together and stood up.

  As he wheeled his bicycle and walked towards Monda he wondered how he had survived that furious swirl of sticks with minimal damage to himself. Perhaps his assailants had not intended to kill him, just to beat him up.

  The crowd at Monda seemed thinner than usual. Until a few months ago, every inch of space on the platform or on the floor was covered with vendors' wares. Now the shops had thinned out. The large and impressive platform was now occupied by vendors selling onions, aubergine, chilli, clusterbeans. Those who sat at the foot of the platform sold spinach and greens. A great variety of leaves glimmered in the light of the tin oil lamps with stout wicks which gave out as much smoke as light. The greens had helped them out in the World War years when rice was not to be had and one had to content oneself with maize rotis. Young people managed with any kind of diet but adults had a difficult time with a daily diet of greens. But spinach was practically the only thing available in the market those days. All other vegetables would be scooped away by military contractors. Their army trucks would line up from eleven in the morning, blocking the way to the market. They never stopped to bargain, just paid the asking price, loaded their trucks with large sacks of vegetables and cleared the stocks in no time. But even in those days when Nagpur aubergines, too large to be held in your palm, were in season, you got two seers for an anna. If you bought in bulk you got forty seers for a rupee, that is eighty pounds a rupee. Sacks full of aubergines would be brought home in large baskets by porters. Then the heap would be chopped and the pieces dried in the sun – the whole process would take weeks – then tightly packed in clay pots and stored. Those aubergines were not to be seen these days, thought Chandru. Few things came to Hyderabad from outside.

  It was a different sort of arrival these days. 'Refugees' for one. Must look up the spelling.

  Chandru walked in the direction of Monda. The place presented a curious spectacle at this hour when the day had ended and the night had begun. The day's crowds had gone, only a few people lingered about. The vegetable vendors and the women selling greens would also leave soon. They would leave a few things spread on the floor, onion, garlic, dried chilli and grain. In the naked flame of the smoking oil lamps, a few paise worth of goods would change hands. This petty trading would go on until half-past eight. Then they would wind up and go home.

  Home? What sort of a home? And where? At night the vendors collected their wares in baskets, covered them with empty baskets and sacking. Some of them went to sleep beside their bundles. It wasn't long before the whole platform at Monda was covered with them. A few had already begun to appear.

  As Chandru wheeled his bicycle along, his cricket boots beat sharply on paved floor. The strong granite and cement flooring had given way under the assault of the ceaseless trundling of barrows. Then Chandru's foot caught in a pothole and the boots came up coated with slush.

  Chandru was walking at a normal pace. Somehow that attack hadn't shaken him. He hadn't seen the faces of his assailants though they must have seen his. He was sure they were not refugees. If they were they would be huddled in those makeshift shelters on Station Road a furlong away. There were twice as many women among them as men, ranging from old women to little girls. And the children swarmed all over the place. There were too many squeezed into a tiny pocket of this small city. The places they had left behind may not have been much to boast of, but then they were places they had been born and grown up in. Even beggars would find an alien city forbidding. Yet this was the fate of not just a few but millions of Indians in the north, caught in the holocaust of the partition. Whole villages had been plundered; women in their hundreds raped and abducted; people hounded out of their homes and hacked down. Those who had fled their homes were not spared either. Refugee convoys, refugee trains, people clinging to the roofs and the carriage-couplings were all fair target for the butchers. Some refugees had walked mile after mile witnessing the slaughter, rape and abduction of their kith and kin. But all these horrendous happenings a thousand miles away had been mere news on the radio here so far, only a blurred image at the edge of one's consciousness. Even the knock Chandru had received was too slight to bring home the total horror of the situation.

  He knew that just as the Muslims in their hundreds sought refuge in Hyderabad, Hindu and Sikh refugees had descended on Delhi in their thousands, in their millions. Having lost all to the bestial lust of humans, they were beasts now themselves. But amidst this wilderness of churning, heaving, terror-struck humanity was a figure raising his lone voice in a hymn: 'Ishwara Allah tero naam'. Chandru had never seen him, though. Not yet. Not even once. But then Hyderabad never seemed to have a place in the great man's itinerary.

  Three cows accosted Chandru. Whose? Who knew? Scores of stray cattle, mostly cows and calves, had the f
reedom of Monda. Cattle from other localities were rounded up and impounded by the police. But the cattle of Monda were impervious to all such threats. They visited all the vendors, waited for the moment when their attention would stray, and treated themselves to huge mouthfuls of beans, potato, banana and gourd. Beating and shooing had little effect on them. While a shopkeeper was intent on haggling over a half-anna, he would lose a whole eight annas' worth to these marauders in no time at all. Apparently, the shopkeepers themselves had set aside a share of their merchandise for these cattle who fattened themselves at public expense but whose milk was for others.

  Chandru scratched the head of one of the cows before him while still holding on to the bicycle. The cow craned its neck forward to be rubbed. One by one, the other cows began to lean on his bicycle, awaiting their turn for a scratch. Chandru soon found his fingers aching and the nails began to burn. But the cows were in no mood to leave him. Chandru's mind went back to their buffalo at home and the thrashing he had given it earlier that evening. It made him sad to think of it. But then a buffalo could never nuzzle up to one as gracefully as these cows. Everything a buffalo did, from the flapping of its tail to the sudden scampering off at seeing you approach was awkward, ill-timed and ungainly. But the way these cows – never mind whose they were – offered their faces for a caress, one would think they had been snuggling up like that for years.

  Chandru pushed his bicycle forward, shouting at the cows: 'Out! Out of my way!' As they reluctantly made way for him, the handle-bar of his bicycle scraped against the stomach of a cow, causing it to shiver. There was an outer fringe of buildings that surrounded Monda like a fortress. It housed a number of wholesale grocery shops, most of them closed now. Many of them were not provided with a light at all, so sure were the merchants that their business would never outlast the sun's light. One shop was, however, still open. It stood apart from the rest, set a little away from the road, an oil store. In the backyard were the oil presses and the oil vendor's house. The shop sold oil wholesale as well as retail. You could buy barrels of oil or just a seer or two. A small boy looked after the till. Chandru asked him, 'Where's your mother?'

  'In the house.'

  'Could you call her?'

  The boy went in. After a while, a fat woman came out. She was from Rajasthan. The patches of oil on her clothes were visible even in the dim light.

  She said, 'Don't you see it's past the lighting hour. Why did you come so late?'

  'I haven't come for oil. Just to leave my boots here. May I? I'll come for them in the morning.' She didn't understand what Chandru said. So he kicked a booted foot at the ground to explain. Still not sure what was expected of her, she said, 'All right.' Chandru stood his bicycle on the street and climbed the four steep steps that lead to the shops and took off his boots.

  Now she asked, 'So the shoe pinches, does it?'

  'No, it's just that it's impossible to walk with these on.'

  'What brought you to Monda after dark?' she asked. 'Is your father with you?'

  'I was delayed at college,' I said.

  'You'd better hurry home now. There are plenty of thugs around.'

  With that, she suddenly became suspicious. 'Why, were you beaten up by any chance?'

  Chandru looked up at her, boots in hand. 'Yes.'

  She started to shout, and a young man appeared when he heard the noise. 'Calm down, Mother, calm down,' he said.

  The woman gripped Chandru and asked him, 'Where? Where did they hit you?'

  'On the back. Just a couple of times. By then some people ran by that way. The men saw them and bolted.'

  'But who were these people?'

  'Why, the Arya Samajis, of course.' It was the young man who had spoken.

  The woman now shifted her attention from Chandru to him, her older son. 'Go in. At once. Get in now.'

  'Stop it, Mother,' he said. Then he asked Chandru, 'Where did they attack you?'

  'Near the High School.'

  'Are they people you know?'

  'No.'

  The woman screamed at her son. 'Go in. Now go!' To Chandru she said, 'Please leave at once. Don't get us into trouble. Go, get away from here.' She began to haul the oil tins into the shop.

  Chandru tied his boots together and hung them on his biycle. This was the shop where his father always bought the cooking oil the family needed. Even in those days when the railways had taken it upon themselves to supply them with groundnut oil along with their rationed cereal, they had depended on this shop for their sesame oil. They never needed more than two seers of oil, but Father, fastidious as ever, always bought it from this Rajasthani shop, patiently waiting at the mill for the freshly crushed oil. Chandru and his younger brother who used to sit along with Father on these occasions, used to get a bit of jaggery to eat from this woman. Ever since her husband's death several years before this, she had run the oil mill herself. Her son had now grown old enough to join the Arya Samaj and was receiving training in weilding sticks. Certain people were sure to have their eye on this young man and his shop, though nothing untoward had happened yet.

  It was so much easier to walk barefoot. Chandru went on a circuitous route to avoid Station Road which was packed with refugees. The playground of the SPG school with St Thomas' Church at one end seemed to move along with him. He never could figure out how the school attached to this church got its name. Until a few years ago, people used to walk across its grounds, but now there were high walls on all sides and a locked gate.

  Manohar Talkies marked the westernmost point of the Regimental Bazaar. The cinema hall was on the first floor of the building. The ground floor was let for shops and houses. A lot of people lived there. A film was playing. Soon it would be the interval and half the audience would get 'out passes' and come out to have a cup of tea, or a betelnut bida or a glass of sweetened buttermilk from Govardhan's shop. The place hadn't changed much. Not yet. The shops wore a drowsy look all day but woke up to work in the evening. Even the whir of the tailors' sewing machines could be heard only during the evening and night. The area round the Manohar Talkies building was full of clumps of people talking. Harigopal was sure to be somewhere here with his friends even now. But then Harigopal's house was near, he could afford to stay out talking till eight-thirty at night. Not everyone was as lucky. Lancer Barracks was still at least a mile away. It wouldn't do to get spotted by Harigopal now.