Cracking India

by Bapsi Sidhwa

  There were no Sikhs about. The village was not under attack. Perhaps the army trucks were there to evacuate the villagers and take them to Pakistan.

  Ranna hurtled down the lanes, weaving through the burdened and distraught villagers and straying cattle, into his aunt’s hut. He saw her right away, heaping her pots and pans on a cot. A fat roll of winter bedding tied with a string lay to one side. He screamed: “Noni chachi! It’s me!”

  “For a minute I thought: Who is this filthy little beggar?” Noni chachi says, when she relates her part in the story. “I said: Ranna? Ranna? Is that you? What’re you doing here!”

  The moment he caught the light of recognition and concern in her eyes, the pain in his head exploded and he crumpled at her feet unconscious.

  “It is funny,” Ranna says. “As long as I had to look out for myself I was all right. As soon as I felt safe I fainted. ”

  Her hands trembling, his chachi washed the wound on his head with a wet rag. Clots of congealed blood came away and floated in the pan in which she rinsed the cloth. “I did not dare remove the thick scabs that had formed over the wound,” she says. “I thought I’d see his brain!” The slashing blade had scalped him from the rise in the back of his head to the top, exposing a wound the size of a large bald patch on a man. She wondered how he had lived; found his way to their village. She was sure he would die in a few moments. Ranna’s chacha Iqbal, and other members of the house gathered about him. An old woman, the village dai, checked his pulse and his breath and, covering him with a white cloth, said: “Let him die in peace!”

  A terrifying roar, like the warning of an alarm, throbs in his ears. He sits up on the charpoy, taking in the disorder in the hastily abandoned room. The other cot, heaped with his aunt’s belongings, lies where it was. He can see the bedding roll abandoned in the courtyard. Clay dishes, mugs, chipped crockery, and hand fans lie on the floor with scattered bits of clothing. Where are his aunt and uncle? Why is he alone? And in the fearsome noise drawing nearer, he recognizes the rhythm of the Sikh and Hindu chants.

  Ranna leapt from the cot and ran through the lanes of the deserted village. Except for the animals lowing and bleating and wandering ownerless on the slushy paths there was no one about. Why hadn’t they taken him with them?

  His heart thumping, Ranna climbed to the top of the mosque minaret. He saw the mob of Sikhs and Hindus in the fields scuttling forward from the horizon like giant ants. Roaring, waving swords, partly obscured by the veil of dust raised by their trampling feet, they approached the village.

  Ranna flew down the steep steps. He ran in and out of the empty houses looking for a place to hide. The mob sounded close. He could hear the thud of their feet, make out the words of their chants. Ranna slipped through the door into a barn. It was almost entirely filled with straw. He dived into it.

  He heard the Sikhs’ triumphant war cries as they swarmed into the village. He heard the savage banging and kicking open of doors: and the quick confused exchange of shouts as the men realized that the village was empty. They searched all the houses, moving systematically, looting whatever they could lay their hands on.

  Ranna held his breath as the door to the barn opened.

  “Oye! D’you think the Musslas are hiding here?” a coarse voice asked.

  “We’ll find out,” another voice said.

  Ranna crouched in the hay. The men were climbing all over the straw, slashing it with long sweeps of their swords and piercing it with their spears.

  Ranna almost cried out when he felt the first sharp prick. He felt steel tear into his flesh. As if recalling a dream, he heard an old woman say: He’s lost too much blood. Let him die in peace.

  Ranna did not lose consciousness again until the last man left the barn.

  And while the old city in Lahore, crammed behind its dilapidated Mogul gates, burned, thirty miles away Amritsar also burned. No one noticed Ranna as he wandered in the burning city. No one cared. There were too many ugly and abandoned children like him scavenging in the looted houses and the rubble of burnt-out buildings.

  His rags clinging to his wounds, straw sticking in his scalped skull, Ranna wandered through the lanes stealing chapatties and grain from houses strewn with dead bodies, rifling the corpses for anything he could use. He ate anything. Raw potatoes, uncooked grains, wheat flour, rotting peels and vegetables.

  No one minded the semi-naked specter as he looked in doors with his knowing, wide-set peasant eyes as men copulated with wailing children—old and young women. He saw a naked woman, her light Kashmiri skin bruised with purple splotches and cuts, hanging head down from a ceiling fan. And looked on with a child’s boundless acceptance and curiosity as jeering men set her long hair on fire. He saw babies, snatched from their mothers, smashed against walls and their howling mothers brutally raped and killed.

  Carefully steering away from the murderous Sikh mobs he arrived at the station on the outskirts of the city. It was cordoned off by barbed wire, and beyond the wire he recognized a huddle of Muslim refugees surrounded by Sikh and Hindu police. He stood before the barbed wire screaming, “Amma! Amma! Noni chachi! Noni chachi!”

  A Sikh sepoy, his hair tied neatly in a khaki turban, ambled up to the other side of the wire. “Oye! What’re you making such a racket for? Scram!” he said, raising his hand in a threatening gesture.

  Ranna stayed his ground. He could not bear to look at the Sikh. His stomach muscles felt like choked drains. But he stayed his ground: “I was trembling from head to toe,” he says.

  “O me-kiya! I say!” the sepoy shouted to his cronies standing by an opening in the wire. “This little motherfucker thinks his mother and aunt are in that group of Musslas.”

  “Send him here,” someone shouted.

  Ranna ran up to the men.

  “Don’t you know? Your mother married me yesterday,” said a fat-faced, fat-bellied Hindu, his hairy legs bulging beneath the shorts of his uniform. “And your chachi married Makhan Singh,” he said, indicating a tall young sepoy with a shake of his head.

  “Let the poor bastard be,” Makhan Singh said. “Go on: run along.” Taking Ranna by his shoulder he gave him a shove.

  The refugees in front watched the small figure hurtle towards them across the gravelly clearing. A middle-aged woman without a veil, her hair disheveled, moved forward holding out her arms.

  The moment Ranna was close enough to see the compassion in her stranger’s eyes, he fainted.

  With the other Muslim refugees from Amritsar, Ranna was herded into a refugee camp at Badami Baug. He stayed in the camp, which is quite close to our Fire Temple, for two months, queuing for the doled-out chapatties, befriended by improvident refugees, until chance—if the random queries of five million refugees seeking their kin in the chaos of mammoth camps all over West Punjab can be called anything but chance—reunited him with his Noni chachi and Iqbal chacha.

  Chapter 26

  Cousin’s cook drops hints. He tells Cousin he suspects where Ayah is. Yes, he thinks she’s in Lahore.

  Then he clams up. And no matter how much Cousin threatens or cajoles him, doesn’t add one illuminating word. I dare not question the cook. In front of me he clams up. And in private threatens Cousin he won’t tell him anything if he blabs to me.

  I roam the bazaars holding Himat Ali’s wizened finger, Hamida’s glutinous hand. I visit fairs and melas riding on Yousaf’s shoulders, looking here and there. And when I ride on the handlebar of his bicycle, peering into tongas, buses, bullock-carts and trucks, I sometimes think I spot Ayah and exclaim! But it always turns out to be someone who only resembles Ayah.

  Godmother is influential. Even Colonel Bharucha visits her. Neighbors of all faiths drop in to talk and to pay their respects. But Godmother seldom ventures out. She only visits if someone is very sick or in extreme need of her.

  Or if she feels the call to donate blood.

  The call nags her this stifling July morning. Godmother tucks a cologne-watered handkerchief into a little p
ocket in her sari-blouse, puts on her maroon velvet going-out slippers, pins her going-out beige silk sari to her hair and armed with a black umbrella sets off in a tonga to bequeath blood. I accompany her. Schools and tuitions are suspended for summer vacations and I am spending the week with her. Hamida and Adi spend most evenings with us. Mother visits occasionally and I feel distanced from her—as with a guest.

  Godmother lies down on a hard hospital bench covered only with a white sheet. A nurse bends her arm back and forth and rubs the crease in her arm with cotton wool that smells just like the muzzle did when Colonel Bharucha operated on my leg. The lady doctor approaches with a hideous injection syringe and, sick to my stomach, I turn my face away and squeeze Godmother’s hand. Her answering grip remains steady.

  When I look at her again, the blood-sucking needle withdrawn, she appears to have grown longer—as if the noble deed has added stature to her horizontal form. I am certain her blood will save many wounded lives.

  Perspiring and half-dead from the heat, we return from the hospital. Mini Aunty hands Godmother a precious half-glass of iced water from a thermos and says she would also like to donate blood.

  Godmother is firm with her middle-aged kid sister. “No,” she says, “you may kindly not donate your blood! I can’t afford to have you go all faint and limp on me.”

  Slavesister looks unutterably deprived. “All right,” she says, sagging against the kitchen door jamb. “Go to heaven all by yourself, then. Deny me even good deeds!”

  Godmother is truly astonished.

  “Is that what you believe?” she asks, staring at Slavesister slack-jawed and openmouthed; for once at a complete loss.

  At last, shaking her head, Godmother rotates her thumb against her temple: “A screw loose somewhere,” she says, looking dazed. “What’s to become of her, I don’t know... In heaven or in hell!”

  Over the years Godmother has established a network of espionage with a reach of which even she is not aware. It is in her nature to know things: to be aware of what’s going on around her. The day-to-day commonplaces of our lives unravel to her undercurrents that are lost to less perceptive humans. No baby—not even a kitten—is delivered within the sphere of her influence without her becoming instantly aware of its existence.

  And this is the source of her immense power, this reservoir of random knowledge, and her knowledge of ancient lore and wisdom and herbal remedy. You cannot be near her without feeling her uncanny strength. People bring to her their joys and woes. Show her their sores and swollen joints. Distilling the right herbs, adroitly in-stilling the right word in the right ear, she secures wishes, smooths relationships, cures illnesses, battles wrongs, solaces grief and prevents mistakes. She has access to many ears. No one knows how many. And, when talking incessantly about my resurrected friend I relate to her the rigors of Ranna’s experience, she achieves for him a minor miracle! Ranna is suddenly siphoned into the Convent of Jesus and Mary as a boarder.

  It surprises me how easily Ranna has accepted his loss; and adjusted to his new environment. So... one gets used to anything ... If one must. The small bitternesses and grudges I tend to nurse make me feel ashamed of myself. Ranna’s ready ability to forgive a past none of us could control keeps him whole.

  The Convent is on the outskirts of Shahdara, about halfway between Imam Din’s village and Lahore. Barricaded by tall brick walls the girls’ school accepts boys up to a certain age. Getting a poor refugee child admitted to a Convent school is as difficult as transposing him to a prosperous continent, and as beneficial. Not only for him, it is said, but for seven succeeding generations of the Ranna progeny. Ranna visits us on the weekends he can get a cycle ride into Lahore.

  Godmother can move mountains from the paths of those she befriends and erect mountainous barriers where she deems it necessary.

  She is on to something. I can tell. When I catch her goos-goosing with Slavesister and they stop whispering abruptly, I know they are talking of Ayah. Slavesister behaves as if they are not hiding anything from me. But Godmother, to her credit, looks guilty as hell.

  She has never let me down yet. I have more faith in her investigative capacities than I have in Mother’s and Electric-aunt’s sorties.

  The mystery of the women in the courtyard deepens. At night we hear them wailing, their cries verging on the inhuman. Sometimes I can’t tell where the cries are coming from. From the women—or from the house next door infiltrated by our invisible neighbors.

  There is a great deal of activity by day: of trucks going to and from the tin gates sealing the courtyard; of women shouting; but no hint of the turmoil and suffering that erupts at night.

  And closer, and as upsetting, the caged voices of our parents fighting in their bedroom. Mother crying, wheedling. Father’s terse, brash, indecipherable sentences. Terrifying thumps. I know they quarrel mostly about money. But there are other things they fight about that are not clear to me. Sometimes I hear Mother say, “No, Jana; I won’t let you go! I won’t let you go to her!” Sounds of a scuffle. Father goes anyway. Where does he go in the middle of the night? To whom? Why... when Mother loves him so? Although Father has never raised his hands to us, one day I surprise Mother at her bath and see the bruises on her body.

  And at dawn the insistent roar of the zoo lion tracking me to whatever point of the world I cannot hide from him in my nightmares.

  It gets so that I cannot sleep. Adi is asleep within moments, but I lie with my eyes open, staring at the shadows that have begun to haunt my room. The twenty-foot-high ceiling recedes and the pale light that blurs the ventilators creeps in, assuming the angry shapes of swirling phantom babies, of gaping wounds forming deformed crescents—and of Masseur’s slender, skillful fingers searching the nightroom for Ayah.

  And when I do fall asleep the slogans of the mobs reverberate in my dreams, pierced by women’s wails and shrieks—and I awaken screaming for Ayah.

  Mother rushes to my side and bends over me. In the faint glow from the night-light I see her hand sweep my body as she symbolically catches mischievous spirits and banishes them with a loud snap of her fingers. At the same time she blows on me, making a frightening noise like moaning winds: Whooooo! whoooooo! The sound is eerie enough to banish any presence: natural or supernatural. She places a six-inch iron nail, blessed by the Parsee mystic Mobed Ibera, the disciple of Dastur Kookadaru, under my mattress to ward off fear.

  Sometimes Mother lies beside me, her touch as fresh and soothing as daylight, and tells me the old story of the little mouse with seven tails. Mother has wisely changed the ending. “And then there was only one tail left,” she says, “and the little mousey came home laughing: ‘Ha, ha, ha, ha!’ ” Mother’s artificial laugh bounces off the walls so heartily that it dispels fear and I, too, laugh. “And the little mousey said,” says my mother, “ ‘Mummy, mummy, no one teased me. They said, ”Little mousey with one tail. Nicey mousey with one tail!” ’ ”

  I have outgrown the story—but the intimacy it recalls lulls the doubts and fears in my growing mind.

  Mother asks Hamida to sleep on a mat in our room. Hamida squats by my bed and we talk in whispers till I fall asleep.

  One cold night I am awakened by a hideous wail. My teeth chattering, I sit up. I must have just dozed off, because Hamida is still sitting by my bed.

  “Shush,” she says. “Go to sleep... It’s just some woman.”

  I lie down and Hamida patiently strokes my arm.

  “Why do they wail and scream at night?” I ask.

  It is not a subject I have broached till now, mindful of Hamida’s sensibilities.

  “Poor fate-smitten woman,” says Hamida, sighing. “What can a sorrowing woman do but wail?”

  “Who are those women?” I ask.

  “God knows,” says Hamida. “Go to sleep... there is nothing we can do... She’ll be all right in the morning.”

  My heart is wrung with pity and horror. I want to leap out of my bed and soothe the wailing woman and slay her tormen
tors. I’ve seen Ayah carried away—and it had less to do with fate than with the will of men.

  “Did you cry?” I ask Hamida.

  “Who doesn’t? We’re all fate-smitten ... ”

  “I mean, when you were there?”

  Her hand on my leg goes still.

  “I saw you before you came to us, you know. I saw you in the jail next door.” I speak as gently as I know how.

  “What nonsense you talk... ”

  “I looked down at you from a hole in the roof. You couldn’t see me—but! I saw you. I recognized you straightaway when you were talking to Mother about the job... But I didn’t tell her!”

  After a pause, breathing heavily in the dark, Hamida says, “Your mother knows I was there.”

  The woman in the jail has stopped wailing. It is so quiet—as it must be at the beginning of time.

  “Why were you in jail?” I ask at last.

  “It isn’t a jail, Lenny baby... It’s a camp for fallen women.”

  “What are fallen women?”

  “Hai! The questions you ask! Your mother won’t like such talk... Now keep quiet... ”

  “Are you a fallen woman?”

  “Hai, my fate!” moans Hamida, suddenly slapping her forehead. She rocks on her heels and makes a crazy keening noise, sucking and expelling the air between her teeth.

  “What’s the matter? Don’t do that... please don’t do that,” I whisper, leaning over to touch her.

  “If your mother finds out this is how you talk, she’ll throw me out! Hai, my fate!”

  Again she slaps her forehead and makes that strangling nasal noise.

  “I won’t tell her... I promise! Stop it. Please don’t do that!”

  I get out of bed and press her face into my chest. I rock her, and Hamida’s tears soak right through my flannel nightgown.