by Bapsi Sidhwa
Edging sideways, drawn by the momentum of his new interest, the stranger sidled towards Afshan. Qasim’s fear exploded into loathing at the stranger’s lewd glance. Picking up a large rock he flung it at him straight, and then another. The man bent over and squatted in pain. His teeth glistened ferociously between cracked lips. But before he could get back his wind, Qasim, holding Afshan’s arm, was skittering away through the winding gullies.
After this, their relations changed. Qasim still teased Afshan, but with an awkward gentleness. She in turn seemed unduly severe and shy.
At sixteen Qasim became a father.
By cultivating the steppes, granting clearance to occasional smugglers from Afghanistan, and rearing a meager string of cattle, Qasim and his family managed to survive. Survival being the sole aim of life in those uncompromising mountains, they asked for no more.
By the time he was thirty-four, Qasim and Afshan had lost three children, two to typhoid and one in a fall off a ledge. It did not matter really, because two sons and a daughter survived—a fair enough average. Then a fugitive from Soviet Kirgiz visited. He left the next day, and within a month they heard that he had died of smallpox.
A few days later Qasim returned to find Afshan weeping by their hut.
“What is it?”
She forced herself to be calm, lest “Mata” the dreaded Goddess, so easily enraged, do even more harm.
“Zaitoon is not eating, ‘Mata’ has honored her with a visit.” Qasim’s throat contracted. He loved his daughter, a child with wide, tawny eyes, and limbs of quicksilver.
Brushing away tears with the edge of her tattered shawl, Afshan led him into a darkened corner of the room. Listlessly, the small five-year-old Zaitoon lay on the floor on a straw mattress. Her bright-eyed face and her small naked body were disfigured by a scabby eruption of pus-filled sores.
They did everything within their power. The dank, dung-plastered cubicle was darkened further, for the “Mata” could not stand light. Herbs and leaves, procured with great difficulty, and reputed to have a cooling effect, were strewn near the girl’s burning body. Zaitoon’s needs were ministered to with great obedience, for the Spirit in her body was ruthlessly demanding.
The disease spread to her mouth and throat and to her intestines. The child thrashed about in agonized frenzy.
Neighbors slipped like shadows across the door, leaving behind some small gift of food or apparel in token of their awe. A holy man of their tribe hurried from afar at the summons of the “Mata.” He placed amulets by the child and sprinkled her with holy water. But the girl, her eyes blinded by sores, grew worse. Finally, mercifully, she died.
The two boys were stricken also, and then Afshan, worn to a splinter, contracted the illness.
Within a month, Qasim, who had survived an attack of smallpox as a child, was the only one left of his family.
He was inconsolable. His face swollen with tears, and his throat hoarse with wailing, he flailed his chest with his huge fists, but death, swift, premature and grotesquely unfair, had to be accepted.
A year later a clansman who worked in the plains persuaded Qasim to travel down to Jullundur. He secured him a position as watchman at an English bank.
Chapter 2
Three years passed, and in the chaotic summer of 1947 there was serious political unrest in the North Indian plains. Savage rioting erupted and many minority groups felt insecure. One by one the hill-country tribesmen fled Jullundur. For a time Qasim, loath to return to his life in the mountains where he would be under pressure to remarry, stayed on. He did not want to expose himself again to the bonds of love.
Hysteria mounted when the fertile, hot lands of the Punjab were suddenly ripped into two territories—Hindu and Muslim, India and Pakistan. Until the last moment no one was sure how the land would be divided. Lahore, which everyone expected to go to India because so many wealthy Hindus lived in it, went instead to Pakistan. Jullundur, a Sikh stronghold, was allocated to India. Now that it was decided they would leave, the British were in a hurry to wind up. Furniture, artifacts, and merchandise had to be shipped, antiques, curios, and jewelry acquired and transported. Preoccupied with misgiving and the arrangements attendant on relocating themselves in their native land, by the agony of separation from regiments, Imperial trappings and servants, the rulers of the Empire were entirely too busy to bother overmuch with how India was divided. It was only one of the thousand and one chores they faced.
The earth is not easy to carve up. India required a deft and sensitive surgeon, but the British, steeped in domestic preoccupation, hastily and carelessly butchered it. They were not deliberately mischievous—only cruelly negligent! A million Indians died. The earth sealed its clumsy new boundaries in blood as town by town, farm by farm, the border was defined. Trains carrying refugees sped through the darkness of night—Hindus going one way and Muslims the other. They left at odd hours to try to dodge mobs bent on their destruction. Yet trains were ambushed and looted and their fleeing occupants slaughtered.
Near Lahore, men—mostly Sikhs—squat on either side of the rail-tracks, waiting. Their white singlets reflect the moon palely. These Sikhs are lean and towering, with muscles like flat mango seeds and heads topped by scraggy buns of hair, loose tendrils mingling with their coarse beards. They are silent, listening, glancing at the luminous dials of wristwatches.
They have raised a barricade of logs across the tracks, and the steel rails swerve slightly where the lines disappear in blackness. On either side, ploughed stretches of earth spread black wings to the horizon.
At first the men, bunched in loose groups, welcome the diversion when a voice rises:
“I saw them myself—huge cauldrons of boiling oil and babies tossed into them!”
Then losing interest in what they have heard so often, their faces turn away. By now these tales arouse only an embarrassed resentment. They are meant to stir their nobler passions, but the thought of loot undermines that resolve.
An old Sikh stands up. He wears a loose white muslin shirt, which makes him look bigger in the moonlight. They know him to be the sole survivor of a large family in the Montgomery district. They whisper, “It is Moola Singh, cousin of Bishan Singh.”
Seething with hatred, his hurt still raw, Moola Singh resents their apathy. From the depths of his anguish, his voice betraying tears, he shrieks: “Vengeance, my brothers, vengeance!” He swallows hard. “I thought we would stay by our land, by our stock, by our Mussalman neighbors. No one can touch us, I thought. The riots will pass us by. But a mob attacked our village—Oh, the screams of the women, I can hear them still . . . I had a twenty-year-old brother, tall and strong as a mountain, a match for any five of them. This is what they did: they tied one of his legs to one jeep, the other to another jeep—and then they drove the jeeps apart . . .”
Moola Singh stands quite still. The men look away despite the dark. Their indignation flares into rage.
“God give our arms strength,” one of them shouts, and in a sudden movement, knives glimmer. Their cry, “Bole so Nihal, Sat siri Akal,” swells into the ferocious chant: “Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!” The old Sikh sinks to his knees.
Chapter 3
Sikander cut his way frantically through the ripe wheat as he ran towards the mud walls of his hut. His wife Zohra, standing in the courtyard, watched him. In the heat-hazed dawn neat squares of rippling wheat stretched towards the horizon and—riding on sudden swells of the breeze—came the distant chants of “Hari Hari Mahadev!” “Bole so Nihal. Sat siri Akal!” and an occasional, piercing, “Ya Alieeee!” An ugly bloated ebb and flow of noise engulfed everything. The corn, the earth, the air, and the sky seemed full of threat.
The child saw her father’s brown legs flash towards them through the green stalks. Something in his movement checked Munni’s usual delighted greeting. She clung to her mother’s sari.
Sikander, panting, reached the open yard. He shouted, “A train is leaving at four o’clock from Ludhiana. We m
ust make it.”
Zohra turned her face away, sick with fright and the realization of loss. The moment she had vaguely dreaded hit her like a physical blow.
The angry chants, fragmented by the distance, urged them into action.
“Hurry, for God’s sake,” panted Sikander.
Zohra dragged out their tin trunks and bedrolls. Listlessly she wrapped odds and ends into clumsy cloth bundles. The calf and two goats were tethered, ready for departure.
Sikander ran round to the back and, trotting abreast of the horse, brought their two-wheeled rehra to the spread of luggage. “We can’t take all this!” he cried. “A trunk apiece, that’s all. Hide the jewelry somewhere on your body. Come on, hurry up.” He bustled Zohra out of her stunned apathy. Munni was lifted into the cart. Sikander hauled in the calf and goats while Zohra fetched the sleeping baby boy from inside. They drove through the fields on to a dirt road.
The train at Ludhiana station already swarmed with Muslims who had boarded it at earlier stops. Panic-stricken families were abandoning their animals and possessions in an attempt to get on. Zohra glanced back at their mound of luggage now scattered and indistinguishable among the mounting litter of tin trunks and bundles. Their goats had already run off. She pressed closer to Sikander, roughly yanking Munni by the hand. The baby, secure on her hip, looked about him with interest.
Carrying the calf, protecting it with his arms, Sikander forced a way for his family. Inches from the train they were suddenly pushed back by a swell in the crowd. Sikander dropped the calf. Lunging desperately, he at last got a grip on an open window. Quickly he clambered on to the roof of a compartment. Zohra held up the baby. Someone took him and passed him to his father. Lifting Munni, arms outstretched, Zohra too was hoisted up by friendly hands.
“Abba, the calf! There it is!” cried Munni, pointing it out. It tottered below them on spindly, unsteady legs, its face raised, mute and trusting.
“Get the calf, Abba. Don’t leave it, she’s a baby, she’ll die!”
“Shush,” her mother scolded. “We haven’t room for ourselves and you want to take that beast!”
“Abba, don’t leave the calf . . . I want my calf,” Munni wailed, and Zohra, overwrought and on the verge of tears herself, raged, “Shut up, or I’ll slap you.”
“Don’t be angry with the child,” said Sikander, holding his daughter close.
A few paces from them, jammed between two men, a boy sat cradling a newborn calf. Munni dug her face into her father’s shirt. She wept inconsolably.
The train sped through the throng awaiting it at Jullundur and stopped instead at a siding a few furlongs past the station. It was a prearranged halt and the small, clandestine group awaiting it squeezed in as best they could. Qasim, a roistered pistol slung across his chest, a rifle swinging down his back, walked rapidly towards the engine, scanning the compartments. He tried one, but was churned out by the pressure of brown bodies. Afraid that the train might leave without him, he began to run. Just as it pulled away, he hauled himself on to the roof of the carriage nearest the engine.
Sitting on the roof Qasim could see the refugees who had been bypassed at the station closing in like a tide. Men and women carrying children surged forward with their cattle. The train picked up speed. There was an angry roar from the scrambling mass, and some, leaving their families, rushed forward.
But the train, with an indifferent hiss, drew away into the growing darkness.
An old man with a wispy beard sits next to Qasim. Their legs dangle over the roof and from time to time the old man, afraid of losing his balance, grips Qasim’s thigh. He chirps like a bird, philosophizing, sermonizing, relating the histories of various members of his family in his impeccable Aligarh Urdu. Qasim, who has picked up only a broken, make-do Urdu in his three years in the plains, is at a loss before the onslaught of such poetic fluency. Yet he nods his head. He gathers that the old man is from Central India and is eager to settle in Pakistan with his wife, four sons, and their families, all of whom are scattered about the train.
Smoke from the engine spews into their faces, and except for their irritated red eyes, they are black with soot. Brushing away sparks and tears, patches of Qasim’s skin show unexpectedly white. Tall and bristling with weapons, he is unmistakably a mountain tribal. His narrow eyes, intent on the landscape, combine wariness with the determination of a bird of prey.
It is nearly four years since Qasim left his mountain village. From the remote Himalayan reaches of Kohistan, he had traveled straight to Jullundur where his cousin worked as a messenger in a British firm. His cousin found him a job as watchman in the National and Grindlays Bank. The work suited Qasim perfectly. He stood all day, resplendent in a khaki uniform and crisp turban, guarding the bank entrance. The double-barreled gun that he stood beside him and the bullet-crammed bandolier swathing his chest gladdened his heart and gratified his pride, for a gun is part of a tribal’s attire. It shows his readiness to face his enemy and protect his family’s honor.
Touchy and bewildered to begin with, Qasim nevertheless had been fascinated by Jullundur, a busy city in the North Indian plains. Each common object he saw was to him a miracle. Torches, safety pins, electric lights, cinemas, and cars whirled magically before his senses. The language posed a problem. Although he spoke Hindko, a distorted mixture of Punjabi and Pushto, Qasim was able to follow only very little of the zestful Punjabi spoken in Jullundur. Urdu and Hindustani were entirely beyond him.
In the evenings, with his Kohistani friends, Qasim perched atop the backrests of park benches, seeking with his mind’s eye the heights and valleys of the land he had left. Like prime-hooded hawks, the tribesmen squatted on the thin edges of roofs and walls, and their eyes sank into the women’s brisk buttocks and bare midriffs. Qasim developed a taste for spicy curries and vegetables, a far cry from his daily mountain diet of flat maize bread soaked in water.
The difference was greatest in the really basic values. The men of the plains appeared strangely effeminate. Women roamed the streets in brazen proximity. These people were soft, their lives easy. Where he came from, men—as in the Stone Age—walked thirty days over the lonely, almost trackless mountains to secure salt for their tribes.
The old man has not spoken for some time. Nervously he glances at Qasim’s pistol when the holster stirs between them. He is certain the jerks will trigger a shot and shatter his thigh. At last he pats Qasim gingerly on the back.
“Do you think you could move this thing to the other shoulder, Khan Sahib?”
Qasim obligingly shifts the holster strap.
The old man gives a thin smile. Holding on to the roof-edge with one hand, he combs his scant beard.
“Say, why do you carry this dangerous weapon?” he asks in fatherly tones.
“To kill my enemies.”
In the dark, Qasim feels the man’s shoulder twitch and move away. Enjoying the situation, he boasts: “I killed a baboo just before getting here.”
“Why . . . what had he done?”
“I settled a score with him before leaving.”
Qasim pats his gun.
“But why?” persists the old man.
“He was a bloody Hindu bastard!” says Qasim with a finality that checks the old man’s curiosity back into his throat.
It was a fact. Qasim had killed a man before leaving.
His enmity with Girdharilal, a puckish, supercilious little clerk, had started a few months after he became watchman at the bank. Besides his clerical work, Girdharilal was responsible for cleanliness in the bank building, right down to the toilets.
Qasim performed his ablutions before reporting for work, but sometimes he was compelled to use the public place reserved for lesser employees. It was of sophisticated Indian style: a clock-shaped china basin embedded in the floor to squat over, with a rusty chain dangling from the ceiling to manipulate the flush. A tap was at hand and a mug stood under it ready for use.
On his rare visits, Qasim left the contraption
clogged with stones and scraps of smooth-surfaced glass. Colleagues visiting the lavatory later would rush out in consternation. Girdharilal had the mess cleared out a couple of times and everyone wondered who had caused the mischief. Happily oblivious, Qasim understood none of their talk.
But Girdharilal had his suspicions. One day he followed Qasim and discovered him to be the culprit. He accosted him directly, asking, “Did you throw the stones in there?”
Qasim, who did not follow the quick-spoken, alien words, merely smiled. A bunch of peons and clerks gathered around them. They explained the charge to Qasim. Admitting the facts, still smiling, he looked from one astonished face to the next, wondering what really was the matter. But there was no mistaking Girdharila’s truculence. He spluttered and gesticulated insultingly. He poked him in the ribs, and the smile left Qasim’s face.
He realized he was being ridiculed. And then Girdharilal used a particularly vile obscenity. “You filthy son of a Muslim mountain hog!” he cried. Qasim’s face darkened. Lifting the slightly built man he pressed him against a wall, and with his hands around the clerk’s neck, he started to choke him. Death was the price for daring such an insult to his tribe, his blood, his religion.
Frantic cries rang out of “Murder! murder! The Pathan will kill him!” and the two were wrenched apart.
Girdharilal, faint with shock, trembled while Qasim hurled abuse and threats of vengeance at him in his hill dialect. Girdharilal did not catch a single word, but he could not miss the meaning.
A senior officer appeared. The situation was explained to him, and Qasim was ordered to apologize. He refused, and his clansman was sent for. After a roaring argument, the clansman finally persuaded Qasim to say the necessary words. He uttered them with the grace of a hungry tiger kept from his victim by chains. An uneasy peace ensued. Qasim learned from his cousin that killing, no matter what the provocation, was not acceptable by the laws of this land. He would be caught and hanged. These were the plains, with no friendly mountains to afford him sanctuary.
