Above the roar of the water they heard their father call out in a new, strange voice. They stopped and looked at each other—they couldn’t immediately decide whether they should go inside or keep at their work (without understanding the danger they were in, they could tell that the work they were doing was a matter of pride). Before they could make up their minds they heard a splash as if something had fallen into the water. They saw some uprooted irises and a breach in the wall through which flooded out dirty, thirsty waters . . .
They made up their minds. The two of them ran to the house together. They hadn’t reached the door when the roar of the water became unbearable and they saw that they were running through knee-high waters.
And then—the door! Father was standing there. They looked at his face once and went inside. There was something on his face that no one saw twice—and one hopes no one ever does.
After a moment, everyone gathered upstairs. After a few minutes, water began flooding into the rooms downstairs. The water had risen twenty-five feet above its natural level . . .
That’s how high it was now. But afterwards, Shekhar kept thinking about that moment when his eyes met Saraswati’s after hearing their father shout out to them, when the wall was breached, when they ran together towards the door in some mute understanding—because in reality it was only one moment, an indivisible portion of the flow of time, a gust of felling, a single pulse of the heart—and it seemed to him as if Saraswati communicated something to him, taught him something—but what?
He remembers that much. Afterwards she wasn’t Saraswati any more; she became his sister. He doesn’t remember when he started calling her ‘Saras’ with love, in his own mind.
A boat was slowly moving across the still, tranquil lake. The lake was so quiet that it seemed as if the boat was also standing still; no evidence of its movement was discernible. Shekhar and his brothers were going to explore the island of ‘dreams’.
When they got there, his brothers proposed they swim, which was immediately passed, since Shekhar didn’t have voting privileges. They took off their clothes and got in the water.
Ishwar and Prabhudutt began swimming. Shekhar didn’t know how to swim, so he watched his brothers with wonder. How gently his brothers’ movements sliced through the water! How unbearably irresistible was their progress like a quivering arrow! Shekhar’s fascination had just reached that stage where the prohibitions stopped governing his actions, where his heart had become so entranced that imitation became a reflexive action . . . He jumped farther into the water and began moving his hands just as he had seen his brothers’ hands move . . .
But it only took a moment for him to sink. He came up for air with great difficulty, but before he could take a breath, sank again. His hands were still moving with the same amazed imitation . . .
He saw a beautiful dream of immense darkness, and then it seemed to him that he was so thirsty. Then he was gasping for breath, and then nothing . . .
When he regained consciousness, he was lying flat on his stomach and his brother was pressing down on his back. The boatman who had pulled him up from the water was standing nearby.
When they reached home, before he could even draw a breath, his brothers had told the story in their own manner. Father scolded him, ‘What got into your head? If you didn’t know how to swim why did you try to show off? You could have listened to your brothers’ warning!’
His brothers told the story, so ‘the brothers’ warning’ had been added by them. Shekhar didn’t say anything. He quietly looked at his father. Father spoke again, ‘What are you looking at? You should be ashamed of yourself. What if you had drowned?’
Shekhar didn’t think that being saved from drowning should be a cause for embarrassment, nor did he think that drowning was such a terrible thing.
In reality, fearing death is something that only adults do.
A few days later, when all three brothers were playing with some boys from the neighbourhood, Shekhar could tell that they were all impressed when they heard about his close call. It gave him a little touch of arrogance. Because he was younger than all of them he was usually overlooked, but now that he had the opportunity to impress them he wasn’t going to let it go. He said, ‘So it wasn’t such a terrible thing. I’m going to do it again some day. See what it’s like to drown, what it means to die. I most certainly will die like that one of these days.’
The boys all looked at him in shock. Then they left without saying anything.
The feeling that his father’s words were unable to produce in him, this did. Shekhar became grave and thought, ‘Is death really something to be afraid of?’
One day, overcome by the invisible shadow that this thought had cast over him, he asked his mother, ‘Mother, when will you die?’
Mother was coming down the stairs with a bottle in her hands when she heard the question. The bottle slipped from her hands and fell, and she asked, flabbergasted, ‘What?’
When he heard the sound of the bottle crashing, Father came. When he heard what had happened, he was stunned for a moment. Then he added one after the other three or four slaps to Shekhar’s collection. Then he took Mother and went upstairs.
After a little while Shekhar peeped in through the window and saw the two of them sitting quietly, seriously, and not looking at anything, not even at each other, even though their eyes were trained . . .
And then quite seriously, quite uncertainly, he asked, ‘Is death that terrifying?’
One day, Shekhar went to the market with his father and saw that the grocer was wrapping his merchandise in paper that had pictures on it. They were colourful images—blue, green and brown. And the pictures were of soldiers, ships, planes, cannons and smoke. You could say they were topsy-turvy, and these days he had a special proclivity for topsy-turvy matters. He tugged at his father’s shirt and said, ‘Get that for me.’
‘What?’
‘Those papers.’
Father laughed and said, ‘All right.’ Then he said to the shopkeeper, ‘Brother, can you give him a few of your old newspapers?’
Shekhar added, ‘Only the good ones. I don’t want the torn or messed-up ones.’ When he noticed that the shopkeeper wasn’t giving his request any special attention, he went and picked out eight to ten of them himself.
When he got home, he got his brothers and sister together and laid the newspapers out separately on the floor. He looked at them and began reading the descriptions underneath the pictures.
‘We declare victory in _____: countless enemy soldiers killed. We are advancing.’
‘Bullets rain down from our plane _____.’
‘_____’
Shekhar asked, ‘Who is this “we”?’
Ishwardutt said, ‘The British are fighting the Germans.’
Then Shekhar saw a picture of Sikh soldiers advancing with bayonets on their rifles. Next to it was written, ‘We charged _____ with bayonets; _____ enemy soldiers killed, some of our men also died and were wounded.’
Shekhar said, ‘But these aren’t British.’
His brother explained that the Sikh soldiers were fighting for the British. The British ruled over India, so Indian soldiers were sent to fight for them. And Father had said that about 1,00,000 Indians had died.
Shekhar asked, ‘How do they die?’
‘They die, that’s all.’
‘What happens when you die?’
‘Idiot! You aren’t alive, can’t walk or speak, and then they take you and burn you.’
‘If you drown, is that how you die?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘You stop breathing and then life goes out of you.’
Shekhar thought about this for a while. Then he suddenly asked, ‘What is life?’
‘It just is, all right!’
He was persistent, ‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know. Go ask Father!’
After a little while, Shekhar asked, ‘Where does life come from?’
/> ‘From God.’
‘Where does it go?’
‘Back to God.’
‘God takes them?’
‘Yes.’
Shekhar wasn’t convinced, ‘Humph.’
After a little while, he asked again, ‘Are all these lives with God?’
‘Yes.’
‘Even the Germans?’
‘Yes.’
‘And God makes all the bodies, too?’
‘Yes.’
‘God does everything?’
‘Then did God cause war?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then—’ he started to speak but then stopped. He recalled that he had read in the newspaper that the Germans were very cruel. They beat their prisoners, they starved people, they whipped women, dragged them through the streets, etc. Does all of this happen just because God wills it?
*
Shekhar was sitting in a tonga with his brothers and going for an outing. On the way, he saw a half-dead horse tied to a broken-down cart coming towards them. The cart was full, and the horse couldn’t pull the weight but the driver kept whipping him, cursing him.
Shekhar thought to himself, ‘Our tonga is so splendid.’
The driver put down his whip and took out a rod. He struck the horse repeatedly and hard across the back. The horse picked up his head somehow and jerked, and then dropped his head like before. The blows kept coming, his body trembled, but he didn’t move forward.
Once, he made a serious effort—and Shekhar watched as his knees buckled and he fell—and then never got up.
The tonga-wallah explained that this sort of thing happened quite often. When there is no grain for the horse, and it grows weak from hunger, it is fed cannabis and jaggery, and more work is extracted from it. He pointed to the horse that was pulling the tonga and said with a tone of pride, ‘Once, I made this one go forty miles that way pulling the tonga.’
Ishwardutt asked, ‘Doesn’t that kill the horse?’
‘How could it kill the horse? This is how it gets stronger. That horse died because it was starving.’
The tonga kept moving.
On the way back, when they passed the same spot, Shekhar asked ‘Do men who die from hunger also die like this?’
No one gave him an answer.
*
Shekhar had picked up a terrible habit—he would sit for long periods of time by himself and think.
And it seemed to him that he could remember things that he hadn’t seen with his own eyes. He remembered . . .
One day, Father came back home from the office at an odd hour. As soon as he got home, he spied Shekhar’s mother sunning herself in the courtyard. And he said in an annoyed voice, ‘So it’s begun.’ And then he went inside. Mother got up and left, too. Shekhar couldn’t work out whom to ask the question that was eating him up inside—what has begun?
He remembered . . .
One day, a letter arrived addressed to Mother. Mother read it, was stunned after she finished reading it, and her eyes soon filled with tears. With a concerned tone, Father asked, ‘What’s the matter?’ She handed the letter to him. Father read it and fell silent. Then, while still thinking, he started reading it aloud, ‘Ramachandra has enlisted and is being deployed.’ Shekhar didn’t understand anything.
It was a full year later that Shekhar learned what ‘enlisted’ meant, when some unconscious chain of thought led him to remember his uncle Ramachandra and he asked his mother, ‘When is uncle Ramachandra coming?’
His mother looked at him as if afflicted, but couldn’t answer him.
His uncle was, at that time, lying in some hospital in France—blind, having lost one arm and unconscious.
One day, when Shekhar came inside the house after playing, he saw his mother crying softly. He turned around and left. When he came back an hour later, she was still crying. She was doing her chores while crying, and when her eyes would fill with tears, she would wipe them away.
Shekhar timidly asked, ‘Mother—’
His mother looked at him. She wiped her tears. Then she turned away and said, ‘Son, your uncle won’t be coming any more.’
Shekhar couldn’t bring himself to ask why.
One day, when Father delivered the news that the war was over and that we had won, that a treaty had been signed, and that now things were good again, the first question on Shekhar’s lips was one that he couldn’t bring himself to ask, ‘So will Uncle be coming back?’
Shekhar had heard that there were riots in Punjab, that people had been fired upon, that many people had been killed, and that the military was being sent in. Some police stations had been set on fire, railway lines had been torn up . . . He disentangled these things, put them back together and went to his father and said, ‘There’s going to be a war in Punjab, too.’
His father said, ‘One doesn’t say such things. Let’s at least end the first one.’
‘The first one is long done.’
‘But we still have the consequences to deal with. Prices are so high these days, and—’
Shekhar responded haughtily, ‘And what of it? If God wills it, they will go even higher.’
His father glared at him and said, ‘Get out!’
*
Father began to notice that Shekhar was asking a lot of questions, and being home-schooled hadn’t rid him of this habit. After all, what authority could Saraswati’s teaching exercise have? He called Shekhar to him and said, ‘Shekhar, you will have to go to school. You’ll go with the servant tomorrow and get enrolled.’
What his education was like at school is a matter for another time. The first thing that happened was that Shekhar was informed that the Viceroy of India was coming in a few days and the students would have to learn drills for his welcome ceremony.
Shekhar had a uniform made for the drills. He decided that he would stay at school his whole life. He had been studying with Saraswati for eons and no Viceroy had ever come, nor had he ever had a uniform to wear.
The Viceroy was coming on a steamboat. It was led by two riverboats from Shekhar’s school rowed by his schoolmates—their white uniforms with red borders looked quite striking.
Shekhar was standing at the edge of the water—he was among those assigned to guard the spot where the Viceroy would dock. The boat was still far. Even with a great deal of effort it was impossible to get a glimpse of His Excellency the Viceroy, and so Shekhar was observing the masses of Kashmiris that had gathered on both sides of the river.
Both sides of the river were crammed with Kashmiris wearing long robes and scarves. Some had gleaming white robes and white turbans on their heads; in some places there were dense throngs of women wearing red hats that looked like turbans.
Suddenly both sides of the river erupted as if the heavens thundered, and the thunder developed a rhythm of its own. Shocked, Shekhar saw the assembled masses on both sides of the river, men and women (except for those Pandits wearing white turbans) beating their chests in unison and saying something as if they were gasping for breath, something which he could only understand after much concentration.
‘Increase food aid! Increase food aid!’
The steamboat came close. Shekhar tried to locate the Viceroy but that terrifying scream had cast a shadow over the atmosphere. It weighed so heavily on everything that he couldn’t find the Viceroy. If he saw anything it was those countless faces and the wailing with raised arms . . .
When he came home, he asked his father, ‘Why were those people screaming?’
Father explained that prices had gone up because of the war and those people were starving. The Viceroy was the representative of the Emperor, who could do anything, and so these people had come to plead with him for rice.
‘What did the Viceroy say?’
‘The Viceroy can’t listen to everyone.’
‘But the war is over, so why are the prices still high?’
‘. . .’
‘Did the Germans raise the prices?’
‘No.’
>
‘Why doesn’t the Viceroy bring prices down?’
‘How can the Viceroy do that?’
Shekhar didn’t care for his question being answered with another question. But the poor fellow was powerless. He asked again, ‘Can God do it?’
‘Yes, God can do anything.’
‘Did he also raise the prices?’
‘Yes, now run along. Don’t you have studying to do?’
The question on Shekhar’s lips ran off with him—‘Why?’
*
The war was over but its best friend had arrived. People started being confined to their cots everywhere and one day, Shekhar’s cot was placed next to the ones for his father, mother and brothers. Saraswati was the only one saved from this fate.
Saraswati was ordered to stay away from everyone as much as possible. If she ever sat with Shekhar after giving everyone their medicine, a voice would immediately reprimand her from inside, ‘Go, don’t sit there, otherwise you’ll get sick.’ Shekhar grumbled to himself about this order and thought, ‘What’s the big thing if she gets sick? She’ll just lie here with us.’ Or he would get angry at the war which kept him confined to his cot. Whenever Mother would say, ‘Son, don’t worry, God will take care of everything’ it would make him want to burst, to explode, and ask whether this war was worth it? Was hunger worth it? Was it worth Uncle not coming home? Was it worth that horse dying? Was it worth it, all of these people falling ill? Was it worth it, all the death? That God did everything wasn’t something he had a problem with, but he couldn’t stand the notion that everything he did was worth it. This lie was outrageous to him . . .
Everyone got better. Father started going back to work. Shekhar was the only one still confined to his cot. This didn’t bother him too much since he got his own room, and Saraswati could come and go without any restrictions.
One day, a sitting-by-the-headboard Saraswati said, ‘My head hurts a lot today.’
Shekhar said, ‘Now you’ll get sick.’
Shekhar Page 10
