‘Oh I’m used to it, sister,’ the son replies easily. ‘Bauji despises me because I’ve only produced three daughters, but they’re my pride and joy!’
‘Daughters!’ The old man gnashes his teeth. ‘Bah!’
After a moment the son says, ‘Bauji, Munna’s afsar told me that he’s recommended him for a medal, a Vir Chakra. If he gets that he will be awarded five acres of fertile agricultural land by his home state, isn’t that good news?’
There is a long pause.
‘Really?’ There is strength in the old man’s thin voice for the first time.
‘I wouldn’t get my hopes up on that, you know,’ remarks a fourth voice, a deep, clipped rumble that belongs to a colonel from the infantry. ‘They’ll find some excuse not to give you the agricultural land – or they’ll say there isn’t any land available right now, so please take money instead. And the rate they will offer you will be rubbish – only about thirty paisa per acre or something equally dismal. I know, it happened to a course-mate’s son during the ’65 war. He got both his legs shot off and was awarded a Mahavir Chakra. I’m not trying to be competitive, you understand, just giving you the exact facts so you’re clear – and he’s still chasing the IAS babus for his ten acres in Punjab.’
This long speech is met with much tsk-tsking (by the matron) and several aggrieved mutters.
‘At the end of the day,’ the colonel sighs gustily, ‘a medal is just a metal disk, while a leg … well, a leg’s a leg.’
Silence. The colonel has comprehensively ended all conversation for the night.
Inside the ward, Juhi’s attention wanders. She stares at Raka and remembers a picnic Raka, Maddy, Baaz and she had gone on at the beginning of the year.
They’d zoomed out of the base at five in the morning on three motorcycles, zipped up in leather jackets and swathed in mufflers.
She’d packed boiled egg sandwiches with lots of coleslaw, their favourite, and a big pineapple upside-down cake. On the back of Baaz’s bike was an icebox stacked with chilled beer and Fanta.
They’d played Frisbee and cards, and (on Juhi’s special request) a rather raucous game of Stappoo. Once they’d polished off the food and drink and were sitting tired and happy by their warm campfire, Maddy had produced a mouth organ and played it as the sun went down. She’d looked at the three of them, laughing, joking, sharing the chores with such easy camaraderie, and felt … full. With these three men in my life, she’d thought, I am complete. Please God, let Baaz and Maddy marry nice women – not prettier than me but not too plain either, or they’ll resent me – women I can get along with, basically, and then we’ll all have lots of children, and when the boys retire we’ll get houses close to each other in some nice, green and leafy Jal Vahu Vihar-type Armed Forces scheme and be happy forever.
And now, this.
A cold, white hospital ward, the smell of disinfectant, the reek of blood…
Baaz lost, Maddy lost, and Raka…
Here with her, but not here with her at all.
She grips his unresponsive hand tighter, her eyes dry, beyond tears.
I’m responsible for Baaz crashing. I am, I really am. I said some very stupid things to him – I realize they’re stupid now. Are you listening?
Her eyes scan his face. Raka lies there, his chest rising and falling gently.
‘Come back to me,’ she is whispering out loud now, her voice fervent. ‘The doctors say that’s almost impossible, but doctors don’t know anything, do they – all that studying makes them stupid. You’ll get up, Raks, and you’ll be fine, and even if you’re not initially, you’ll become fine! And look at the bright side,’ she gives a wild little laugh, ‘at least your middle wicket’s intact! I’m praying and fasting for you. Ma says that’s silly because I need my strength, so I sent her away, I sent away Mrs Carvalho and Mrs Pomfret too. I’m praying for Baaz and Maddy and all the others. My prayers have great power, Ma always said so, and it’s true – I used to pray for easy questions in the board exams and they always came, and I used to pray that you would fall in love with me and you did, and whenever we played teen patti, I prayed for good cards and I always got a trail! Remember?’
‘Didi?’
She looks up.
It is the JCO’s elder brother.
‘I’m going to the canteen to get chai. Would you like a cup?’
Juhi nods.
‘Yes, please.’
He gives her an awkward sympathetic smile and walks away, the sound of his chappals echoing down the corridor, and Juhi goes back to her vigil, the little burst of earnest bargaining with God over, the sick, cold numbness descending again, more desperately unhappy than she’s ever been in her young life.
• • •
There is mud in his mouth. Gritty, squelchy mud. When he tries to spit it out, the back of his throat hurts agonizingly. Ignoring the pain, which feels like somebody has taken his tonsils out, grated them raw with a kaddoo kas and shoved them down his throat again, he manages to spit, cough and rise to his hands and knees.
It is dark.
How can it be dark? It was morning just fifteen minutes ago.
One of his shoulders is hurt, he can’t tell which one. It is throbbing with a pulse that is beating through his whole body as loudly as a parade ground drum.
He stays on his hands and knees for a while, like he is about to take young Jaideep Singh horsy-back riding, and scans the little bit of Bangladesh he’s fallen into.
It smells green and clean and wet.
And doable.
Pushing down on the moist ground with his palms, he tries to get on his feet and ends up flopping back weakly on his face into the mud.
When he awakens again, the sun is out and a trio of very Indian-looking crows are studying him with their heads cocked to one side, swaying on the ends of a long grassy plant.
Putting out a hand, Ishaan tries to greet the crows, and immediately wishes he hadn’t.
His throat is on fire.
The crows fly away and study him from a distance, their eyes brightly enquiring.
Clutching at his throat to make it hurt less, he manages to roll over onto his stomach and stare up at the sky.
It is a clear day, perfect visibility. But nary a plane in sight.
He props himself on his elbows and surveys his surroundings.
There’s the tangle of parachute ropes and material in a little puddle around him, and beyond that, fields of paddy as far as his eyes can see.
It’s almost ready to be harvested, Ishaan can tell. The ears are heavy with grain. He breaks one off and chews on it; it is like chewing particularly crunchy grass. Rice is a sort of grass, he remembers. Nanaji had told him that years ago.
Damn, his throat hurts.
Wiping the sweat off his face with his sleeve (why is he sweating, it’s really cold!) he unbuckles his parachute and sits up shakily.
His mind starts to issue nagging little instructions.
Drink some water.
Piss.
Ditch your IAF overalls.
After doling out these orders, it also feels the need to update him on other stuff.
Tinka hates you, you poor bastard.
Raka’s probably dead.
So is Maddy.
You knocked down three Sabres.
This last makes him pause and grin.
Three fucking Sabres!
Yes!
He scans the field of ripening rice. It is alive with humming insects but not much else. Even the crows seem to have flapped off somewhere. Surely the Pakistani pilot he’d taraaned should’ve fallen around here too? Where is the bugger? Lurking in the long grass clutching some lethal weapon?
‘You’ll never know if you don’t get to your feet, Shaanu,’ he says out loud, his voice sounding raw and croaky even to his own ears. Also, he has reverted to Haryanvi, which is weird because he hasn’t spoken it in years. He repeats the sentence in Hindi and in English, feels a little more in control of the situation and
manages to haul himself to his feet.
Panting lightly from the effort of standing up, he studies the area. The paddy looks flattened in several places. It is high enough to hide a human being, but certainly not high enough to hide a downed plane.
‘East is thataway,’ he mutters to himself, squinting at the sun. He has some dim recollection of the fork between the Meghna and Padma rivers – surely it lies in the east? ‘So then … I should go … this way.’
As he stares blankly at this way, he spots, through the gently swaying ears of paddy, the unmistakable glitter of sunshine on water.
Water!
Electrified, he stumbles towards the water through the squelchy paddy and drops down at the edge of what turns out to be a gushing tubewell. Plunging his hands into the stream of bubbling water, he takes several long reviving gulps and then slumps down in relief onto the wet earth, leaning back against the tubewell’s cemented wall.
There is a body in the tree.
Ishaan’s ragged breathing catches, for almost an entire minute.
The body is hanging head down, the legs tangled among the lower branches. Its parachute is draped limply on the top branches, filled with puddles of water. Its hands dangle, almost touching the earth, its fingers look cold and white and clearly dead.
It is dressed in PAF overalls. There is a name stitched into the slightly singed lapel on its chest.
Bilawal Hussain.
An hour later, Shaanu in leaning nonchalantly against a milestone on a winding country road lined by fields of verdant paddy. He is dressed in the uniform of an officer from the Pakistani Air Force, with the insignia and pips of a Squadron Leader. Under his overalls is a white Bangladeshi kurta-pyjama and around his throat is a silver tabeez on a black thread.
A black three-wheeler tempo, tricked out as gaily as a bridegroom on his big day, comes phatpatting merrily down the broken road.
Wincing a little at the throbbing in his left shoulder, Ishaan puts out his arm and raises his thumb stylishly.
• • •
The Tempo Traveller driver is singing a song about lovers rendered asunder. It features a beautiful village belle, a dashing potter and a lustful older woman who is obsessed with the dashing potter. When our hero spurns the older woman’s advances (because she’s married to his elder brother), she chham-chhams sneakily into his kiln and poisons the clay he has been working with. The poison leaks into his blood through his fingers and kills him. The village belle, seeking to feel closer to him, drinks from the last pot he had been shaping and dies too.
The chorus, a maudlin, lustful piece about how we all come from clay and return to clay is sung by all the passengers in the tempo in mournful gusto. They close their eyes, shake their heads and thump their hand against their chest to the beat. They all sit up, rather put out, when the tempo slows down.
‘Ki holo?’ one of the passengers, an old gentleman, hunkers lower and peers through the windscreen.
‘Soldier,’ the driver grunts. ‘West Pakistani.’
The ancient gent, travelling with a bevy of veiled womenfolk, leans forward, breathing heavily. In a tone far removed from the mood of the song he has been singing, he growls, ‘There’s no space for him here.’
Having said this, he closes his eyes again and goes back to giving the chorus all he’s got.
On the road, the soldier now holds out a crisp ten-rupee note.
The driver slows to a wistful crawl. Customers are customers. He’s pretty sure he can squeeze in the soldier if everybody would just adjust a little.
He says as much.
The passengers start to argue loudly. Some men are in favour of stopping for the soldier, some are against. Then the burly burqa-clad lady sitting next to the ancient gent points with a shaking finger, and exclaims, in blood-curdling accents, with an exquisite flair for the dramatic:
‘Rokto!’
‘There’s blood on his shirt. Look!’
Everybody peers at the soldier. Some offer the opinion that the ‘blood’ is just a design on his overalls, others think it might be mud.
Meanwhile, the soldier twiddles his fingers a little, and the one ten-rupee note reveals itself to be two ten-rupee notes. The thin, angular face of the Great Leader, very distinguished in his karakul hat, twinkles benignly at the driver in the sunshine.
The driver halts.
‘I cannot insult Quaid-e-azam like this!’ he declares decisively, beckoning to the soldier. ‘You! Soldier! Come!’
The elderly gent grunts disapprovingly.
‘Anything for money,’ he shakes his head. ‘Pull your veils down properly, all of you! Too much wind is blowing today!’
The Pakistani soldier runs lightly up to the tempo and clambers in beside the driver, squeezing onto half his seat and putting his unhurt arm around the driver’s neck chummily.
‘Shukriya,’ he says. ‘I need to get to Dacca.’
The driver takes the tenners that have been dangled so negligently and slips them into the breast pocket of his Pathan suit.
‘Work the gears,’ he tells the soldier laconically.
‘With pleasure,’ the new arrival responds.
‘What happened to your shoulder?’ one of the slimmer veiled ladies ask.
The soldier smiles, a brave, dashing smile.
‘Just a small wound that I was proud to get for my country,’ he says whimsically.
‘Which country, that’s the question,’ grumbles the ancient gent.
The soldier turns to face him.
‘I’m a loyal son of Pakistan, janab.’
‘Which Pakistan, that’s the…’ the old man starts to mutter, but he is drowned out by a loud whisper from the burly lady beside him.
‘Oho, can’t you see he’s wounded? He can’t do us any harm. Let him be!’
The old man subsides.
The soldier smiles gratefully at the lady and then reaches forward and squeezes the bhompu of the tempo. It responds with a musical wail.
The soldier turns and grins at the driver. It is possible that his grin is met with an answering gleam, somewhere behind the beard and the kohl and the inscrutable stare, but one cannot say for sure.
The driver proffers a small tin of jet-black kohl. The soldier, without missing a beat, dips his little finger into the goo and lines the rims of his lower eyelids with it.
‘Bah! Ki bhalo kawta chokh,’ murmurs the burly lady, who clearly seems to think the Pakistani soldier is cute.
And truth be told, he is. Very cute.
The tempo restarts.
The driver resumes his plaintive love song. The passengers join in with gusto on the chorus, swaying as one to the beat.
• • •
‘Two an’ two – twenteh-two.’
‘Four an’ five – forteh-five.’
‘Seven an’ three – seventeh-three.’
‘Nikka’s heart isn’t in it today,’ Julian whispers wheezily. ‘What is this bland, monotonous calling out? Whatever happened to two little ducks, twenty-two, and goodness me, forty-three and all that?’
‘I’m surprised he’s even here, grandfather,’ Leo drawls in reply. ‘Everybody knows he’s up shit creek without a scrap of toilet paper.’
‘The crowd’s looking thinner too,’ Tinka whispers, looking around the Defence Club lawns. ‘Hardly any people today – wow, things are moving fast.’
Things are indeed moving fast. In the eastern theatre of the war, the PAF has been brought to its knees. The Indian Army is surging forward, knocking on the gates of Dacca. The Pakistani generals’ gamble – that attacking India in the west would result in weakening her focus in the east – has failed dramatically. Rumour has it that President Yahya Khan and Foreign Affairs Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the man who was so comprehensively defeated by Mujib ur Rahman in last year’s election, have stopped taking Nikka Khan’s calls. Nikka and his boss, the Governor of East Pakistan, are increasingly being isolated. There is no sign of Chinese intervention either, and the American
s seem to have restricted their support to mere sword rattling.
‘He keeps licking his lips today,’ Julian whispers. ‘Look – like a snake, there he goes again, sshviccck!’
‘All men are snakes,’ Tinka says suddenly in a hollow voice.
Her two colleagues exchange glances.
Tinka has been acting very strange recently. Ever since she received a phone call from her aunt two days ago, to be exact. Julian and Leo don’t know what she said to her, but whatever it was, it has turned her all dark and care-a-damn-ish. Yesterday she had rushed out to click pictures of a flare-up between the Pakistani Army and the Muktis in the street behind the hotel without even bothering to put on a bulletproof vest, and almost got herself killed. And tomorrow, she’s planning to visit a very unsafe part of old Dacca, where none of the other journos have yet dared to go.
‘Surely not?’ Julian says gently. ‘I grant that some men are like this seedy, ancient lecher here, but some are sporty and healthy and clean – like me. Just keep the faith, eh, Tinka?’
‘Shushhh,’ she replies, her eyes still on the general. ‘Ugh, he does flick his tongue over his lips rather snakishly.’
Nikka shakes the numbers drum and produces another number.
‘Six an’ nine – six-teh-nine.’
‘No risqué sixty-nine jokes?’ Leo rues. ‘Aah, poor Nikita Khan, my heart goes out to him! But why are the shammi kebabs taking so long to come?’
‘Maybe because your credit here isn’t good,’ Tinka says tartly.
‘There he goes again!’ Julian nudges Tinka. ‘Sshviccck!’
Now that Julian has pointed it out to her, Tinka finds Nikka’s lip-licking quite hypnotic.
‘Five an’ three sshviccck! Fif-teh-three.’
‘Seven an’ eight sshviccck! Seven-teh-eight.’
‘Two an’ nought sshviccck! Twen-teh.’
‘That has got to be the quickest Tumbola ever,’ Leo remarks as he studies the little group of players, all struggling to keep up with the speed of the call-outs. ‘These poor ladies are moving their heads so fast from line to line, I’m worried they’re going to give themselves whiplash.’
‘They should just discontinue it,’ Tinka says crossly. ‘It’s so silly, all this false bravado when basically everybody is shivering in their shoes, waiting for bombs to drop on their heads.’
Baaz Page 26
