Cracking India

by Bapsi Sidhwa

  “What do you know?” Muccho screams. “She’s no innocent! She’s a curse-of-a-daughter... Disobedient, bone lazy, loose charactered... she’ll shame us. She’ll be the death of me, the whore!”

  “How can she be your death? You’ve already killed her!” says Imam Din.

  Imam Din rarely shows anger and his harshness intimidates Muccho. Afraid she might have gone too far, she shakes Papoo’s shoulder roughly, as if to awaken her from sleep. “She’ll be all right: don’t carry on so,” she tells Imam Din.

  “Oye, Papoooo ... Oye, doll,” she says with affected affection. “Come on, get up.”

  She lays Papoo’s head on her thigh and pinching her cheeks forces her mouth open. Papoo shows the whites of her eyes as Muccho pours water between her teeth from the mug Ayah brought.

  Suddenly Muccho curses—and shies as if blinded. Papoo is spitting a fine spray of water straight into her face. As Muccho raises her hand to lash out Papoo leaps up, miraculously whole. Skipping nimbly from her mother’s lunges, Papoo jerks her boyish hips and makes dark, grinning faces and rude and mocking sounds and gestures. All at once she pretends to go limp and, again rolling her eyes up to show their whites, crumples defenseless to the ground; and then spinning like a bundle of rags in a gale, flinging her limbs about, twists away from Muccho’s eager clutches; dodging, jeering, now tantalizingly close, now just out of reach. Papoo is not like any girl I know. Certainly not like the other servants’ children, who are browbeaten into early submission. She is strong and high-spirited, and it’s not easy to break her body... But there are subtler ways of breaking people.

  “Wait till I fix you, you shaitan! You choorail!” Muccho screams vindictively. “You’ve got a jinn in you ... but I’ll knock it out or I’m not your mother! Just you see what I have in store for you ... It’ll put you right! You’ll scream to the dead... May you die!”

  We laugh at Papoo’s feigning—and her funny faces and her mother’s ranting. The men start to drift away and Papoo, followed by a cursing, shrieking Muccho aiming stones at her, imitates my limp—and lurching horribly, runs out on the road.

  Papoo, recognizing the manipulative power of my limp—and perhaps empathizing with my condition, sometimes affects it. She never does so out of any malice. Besides she knows it aggravates Muccho to no end.

  Chapter 7

  Ayah calls Imam Din the Catcher-in-the-kitchen. He sits in a corner on a wicker stool near the open pantry door and grabs anything soft that enters the kitchen. Sitting it, him, or her, on his lap he gently rocks. Ayah, I, Adi, Papoo, stray hens, pups, kittens and Rosy and Peter from next door have all had our turn. Rosy and I are bewildered by Imam Din’s behavior. Adi and Peter, belonging perhaps to the same species, are less confused and more aggressive.

  One day I come upon a dazed Rosy rocking dizzily on Imam Din’s lap and I pull her off. “Don’t do that, you damn fool!” I say, unleashing my bottled-up fury. “Why do you do that!”

  Imam Din gives a sheepish grin, genially pulls us both squirming on his lap, offers us puffs from his hookah and proceeds to tell us we should not mind. It is what he playfully calls only a little “masti”—a bit of naughtiness.

  And he tells me, “Lenny baby, don’t swear—swearwords don’t become you.”

  I know. Adi can swear and it’s a big joke. Rosy can curse and look cute. Papoo can let fly a string of invective, compared to which the tongawallah’s invective sounds like a lullaby, and manages to appear stunningly roguish. And I cannot even say a damned “damn fool” without being told it does not suit me!

  Imam Din possesses a sixth sense—a sensitive antenna that beams him a chart of our movements. And no matter how stealthily Ayah or I sneak into the kitchen, he is ready to pounce. He knows exactly who it is and he never pounces on Mother or Yousaf or Hari. Or us, if we are followed by any of them.

  Imam Din is tolerated because of the gray bristles in his closely cropped hair. They permit him to get away with liberties that in a younger man would provoke, if not the wrath of God, at least dire consequences from Ayah. As it is, God looks the other way and Ayah merely pulls away from him saying, “Have you no shame? Look at your gray hairs ... Fear God, at least!”

  Imam Din is tall, big-bellied, barrel-chested, robust: he bicycles twenty miles to and from his village once a month to impregnate his fourth wife. Happily he is three times widowed and four times wed. He is the most respected elder in his village; and his benign temperament and wisdom have earned him a position of respect in our house and among the other servants on Warris Road. He is sixty-five years old. Now you see why he is allowed a certain latitude ? Indulged even, you might say?

  Rocking apart, I like him and take my complaints to him. So does Ayah. He is a fair and imaginative arbitrator—and when Adi grows up a bit, and I grow, and Adi resolutely peeps through a crack in the bathroom door with a single-minded determination that is like an elemental force, Imam Din is the only one who can handle him.

  Twice Imam Din has taken me to his village. I have only a vague recollection of pleasurable sensations. I was too young then.

  It is not yet winter. I have been badgering Imam Din for the past week to take me on his next junket to his village home.

  “Lenny baby, I’m not going to my village,” he says, sighing heavily. “I need to go to my grandson, Dost Mohammad’s, village. It’s too far... Pir Pindo is way beyond Amritsar ... Forty miles from Lahore as the crow flies!”

  “It may be too far for a little crow; but it’s not too far for a strong old ox like you,” says Ayah. She is toasting phulkas (miniature chapatties) on the glowing coal fire and deftly flipping them with tongs. “Poor child,” she says. “She wants so much to go ... It won’t break your back to take her.”

  “Not only my back, my legs too!” says Imam Din. “I’m not so young anymore ... I’ll have a heart attack merely conveying myself there.”

  “Go on with you!” says Ayah. “You should talk of growing old! I’ll know that when I know that!”

  “I’ll never be too old to bother you,” murmurs Imam Din, sighing, pushing his hubble-bubble away and advancing from his corner on Ayah.

  Ayah whirls, tong-handed, glowing iron pointed at Imam Din.

  “Arrey baba...,” says Imam Din hunching his shoulders and holding his hands out defensively in front. “I still haven’t recovered from the last time you scarred me. Aren’t you ashamed... burning and maiming a harmless old man like me?”

  “I know who’s harmless and who isn’t! Go on, sit down!” she commands.

  Imam Din collapses meekly in his comer and drawing deeply on the hookah, causing the water in the smoke filter to gurgle, offers her a puff.

  But Ayah is in a determined mood. “Will you take her with you or not?” she demands, tongs in hand: and Imam Din capitulates.

  “Arrey baba, you’re a Hitler! I’ll take her. Even though my back snaps in two! Even though my legs fall off! I’ll take her.”

  “She weighs less than this phulka,” says Ayah turning her back on us and tossing a thin disk of wheat on the fire until it is swollen with trapped air.

  The next morning Ayah wakes me up when it is still night. She helps me to dress quietly: wrestling my arms into last year’s coat and my ears into a horrible pink peaked cap Electric-aunt knitted me two years ago. Imam Din and Ayah have a small altercation in the kitchen. Rather, Ayah scolds and Imam Din only protests and pacifies affably. I don’t know what the argument is about, but I can guess. Imam Din must have attempted with some part of his anatomy the seduction Ice-candy-man conducts with his toes—with less audacity perhaps, and perhaps with less ingenuity—but, at last, Ayah is appeased—and properly apologized to—and we cycle down our drive with the first faint smudge of dawn diluting the night.

  I sit on a small seat attached to the bar in front of Imam Din and his legs, like sturdy pistons, propel us at a staid and unaltering pace through the gullies and huddled bazaars behind Queens Road, then along the Mall past the stately pink spraw
l of the High Court, and the constricted alleys running on one side of Father’s shop. It is an illuminating experience—my first glimpse of the awakening metropolis of two million bestirring itself to face a new day.

  At the crack of dawn, Lahore, the city known as the garden of the Moguls, turns into a toilet. Creeping sleepily out of sagging tenements and hovels the populace squats along alleyways and unpaved street edges facing crumbling brick walls—and thin dark stains trickle between their feet halfway down the alleys.

  Cycle bell ringing, Imam Din and I perambulate through the profusion of bared Lahori bottoms. I hang on to the handlebars as we wobble imperturbably over potholes past a view of backsides the dark hue of Punjabi soil—and the smooth, plump spheres of young women who hide their faces in their veils and bare their bottoms. The early risers squat before their mugs, lost in the private contemplative world of their ablutions, and only the children face the street unabashed, turning their heads and bright eyes to look at us.

  Past Data Sahib’s shrine, past the enormous marble domes of the Badshahi mosque floating in a gray mist, and just before we cross the Ravi bridge we rattle through the small Pathan section of town. Now I see only fierce tribesmen from the northern frontiers around the Khyber and Babusar Passes who descend to the plains in search of work. They leave their families behind in flinty impoverished valleys concealed in the arid and massive tumult of the Karakorams, the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas. They can afford to visit them only every two or three years. The tribesmen’s broad, bared backsides are much paler, and splotched with red, and strong dark hair grows down their backs. In place of mugs there are small mounds of stone and scraps of newspaper and Imam Din sniffs: “What manner of people are these who don’t clean their arses with water?”

  A particularly pale bottom arrests Imam Din’s attention. The skin is pink, still fresh and tingling from cold mountain winds.

  “So. We have a new Pathan in town!” he muses aloud.

  At that moment the mountain man turns his head. He does not like the expression on our faces. Full of fury he snarls and spits at us.

  “Welcome to Lahore, brother,” Imam Din calls.

  Months later I recognize the face when I see Sharbat Khan, still touchy and bewildered, bent intently over his whirring machine as he sharpens knives in the Mozang Chawk bazaar.

  The sun is up, dispelling the mist. Filthy with dust, exhausted, we roll into Wagah, a village halfway to Amritsar. We have covered sixteen miles. I’ve stopped talking. Imam Din is breathing so hard I’m afraid he really will have a heart attack. He pedals slowly down the rutted bazaar lane and, letting the cycle tilt to one side, stops at a tea stall.

  After a breakfast of fried parathas and eggs we get a ride atop a stack of hay in a bullock-cart. Imam Din stretches an arm across his bicycle, and lulled by the creaking rhythm of wooden wheels, we fall asleep. Two miles short of Pir Pindo the cart driver prods us awake with his whip.

  We rattle along a path running between irrigation ditches and mustard fields. As we cut through a cornfield a small boy, followed by three barking dogs, hurtles out of the deepening light gathered in the stalks. He chases us, shouting, “Oye! Who are you? Oye! What’re you up to? Oye! Corn thief! Corn thief!”

  The cycle wobbles dangerously. Cursing, Imam Din kicks out. A ribby pup yelps and backs away. Imam Din roars: “Oye, turd of Dost Mohammad! Don’t you recognize your great-grandfather?”

  Ranna stops short, peering at us out of small, wide-set eyes. He bends to scrape some clay from the track and throws it at the dogs, shooing them away. He approaches us gingerly, awkwardly. He is a little taller than me. His skin is almost black in the dusk. He already has small muscles on his arms and shoulders. A well-proportioned body. But what attracts me most is his belly button. It protrudes an inch from his stomach, like a truncated and cheeky finger. (Later, when he sees me walk, I can tell he is equally taken by my limp.)

  As soon as Ranna is within range Imam Din ministers two quick spanks to his head; and, the punishment dispensed, introduces us. “Say salaam to your guest, oye, mannerless fellow!”

  Ranna stares at me, his mouth slack. His teeth are very white, and a little crowded in front.

  “Haven’t you seen a city girl before?” Imam Din raps Ranna’s head lightly. Ranna flinches. “Why aren’t you wearing a shirt, oye? Shameless bugger... Go tell your mother we are here. We want supper. Tell Dost Mohammad we’re here.” Both Dost Mohammad and Chidda are Imam Din’s grandchildren. Muslim communities like to keep their girls in the family; so marriages between first cousins are common.

  Ranna appears to fly in his skimpy drawers, the pale soles of his feet kicking up dust as he dissolves down the path.

  In Ranna’s village we dwell close to the earth. Sitting on the floor we eat off clay plates, with our fingers, and sleep on mats spread on the ground, breathing the earth’s odor.

  The next morning Ranna and I romp in the fields, and Ranna, fascinated, copies my limp. I know, then, that like Papoo, he really cares for me. I let him limp without comment. In return, he shows me how to mold a replica of his village with dung. And, looking generously and intently into my eyes, he permits me to feel his belly button. It even feels like a finger.

  His sisters, Khatija and Parveen, barely two or three years older than us, already wear the responsible expressions of much older women. Like the other girls in the village, they affect the mannerisms and tone of their mother and adults. They are pretty girls, with large, serene eyes and a skin inclined to flush. Painfully shy of me, they are distressed—and perplexed—by the display of my twig-like legs beneath my short dress. (I don’t wear my calipers as much now.) They don’t know what to make of my cropped hair either. Busy with chores, baskets of grain stuck to their tiny hips, they scuttle about importantly.

  Every short while Ranna suspends play to run to his mother. Chidda is cooking at the clay hearth in their courtyard; she feeds her son and me scraps of chapatti dipped in buttermilk.

  Later in the blue winter afternoon a bunch of bearded Sikh peasants, their long hair wrapped in loose turbans or informally displayed in topknots, visit Pir Pindo. They are from Derra Tek Singh, a neighboring village. The men of Pir Pindo—those who are not out working in the fields—come from their barns and courtyards and sit with the Sikhs in a thick circle beneath a huge sheesham in a patch of wild grass.

  The rough grass pricks my bottom and thighs. Ranna has sidled into his father’s lap. Prompted by Imam Din, he wears a buttonless shirt he has clearly outgrown. I sit between Dost Mohammad and Jagjeet Singh, a plump, smiling bowlegged Sikh priest, a granthi. Khatija and Parveen, looking like miniature women of eight and nine, their heads modestly covered, bring us piles of fragrant cornbread fried in butter and a steaming clay pot of spicy mustard-greens. I see the wisdom of their baggy shalwars and long kamizes as I fidget in the grass, tugging at my dress.

  The Sikh granthi, gray-bearded and benign, beckons the girls, and, sly eyes lowered, they come to him. He strokes their covered heads and says, in Punjabi, “May the True Guru bless you with long lives.” He draws them to him affectionately. “Every time I see you, you appear to have grown taller! We’ll have to think about arranging your marriages soon!” He leans across me and addresses Dost Mohammad. “Don’t you think it’s time their hands were painted yellow?”

  Jagjeet Singh has alluded to the henna-decorated hands of Muslim brides. The sisters duck their heads and hide their mouths in their veils. Ranna finds the suggestion outrageously funny. Slipping from his father’s lap, his belly button pointed at them like a jabbing finger. he jumps up and down. “Married women!” he chortles. “Ho! Ho! Married women!”

  Already practiced in the conduct they have absorbed from the village women, the girls try not to smile or giggle. They must have heard their mother and aunts (as I have), say: “Hasi to phasi! Laugh (and), get laid!” I’m not sure what it means—and I’m sure they don’t either but they know that smiling before men can lead to disgrace.

&
nbsp; We have eaten and belched. The hookah, stoked with fresh tobacco, is being passed among the Muslim villagers. (Sikhs don’t smoke.) In the sated lull the village mullah clears his throat. “My brothers,” he says. And as our eyes turn to him, running frail fingers through his silky white beard, he says, “I hear there is trouble in the cities ... Hindus are being murdered in Bengal... Muslims, in Bihar. It’s strange ... the English Sarkar can’t seem to do anything about it.”

  Now that he has started the ball rolling, the mullah raises his white eyebrows in a forehead that is almost translucent with age. He looks about him with anxious, questioning eyes.

  The village chaudhry—sitting by Imam Din and the mullah—says, “I don’t think it is because they can’t... I think it is because the Sarkar doesn’t want to!” He is a large man, as big-bellied and broad-beamed as Imam Din, but at least twenty years younger. He has large, clear black eyes and an imposing cleft in his chin. As he talks, he slowly strokes his thick, up-twirled moustache: without which no village headman can look like a chaudhry. “But all that is in the cities,” he continues, as if he has considered the issue for some time. “It won’t affect our lives.”

  “I’ve not come all this way without a reason,” says Imam Din. The villagers, who are wondering why he is visiting them, look at him attentively. He rubs his face with both hands; as if it pains him to state the reason. “I don’t think you know how serious things are getting in the towns. Sly killings; rioting and baton charges by the police ... long marches by mobs ... The Congresswallahs have started a new stunt... they sit down on the rail tracks—women and children, too. The police lift them off the tracks ... But one of these days the steam engines will run over them ... Once aroused, the English are savages...