The Weary Generations

by Abdullah Hussein

  ‘Why are you loitering all by yourself?’ she asked, a mischievous glint in her eyes.

  Startled, Naim didn’t know what to say. Instead he picked up his cup and drank a mouthful of scalding kahwa.

  ‘This is my favourite tree,’ said Azra, stroking a branch. ‘I spend whole days in it during our summer holidays. Before we go to Simla.’

  In the weak, flickering light from up in the tree, her eyes were dark grey, hair brownish and her skin the colour of wheat. Her arm, resting on the branch, was healthy and round, its flesh seemingly trying to wriggle out of the tight half-sleeve of her blouse, making a round, ridged fold. Naim felt like reaching out to touch it there.

  ‘Your kahwa must have gone cold. Do you want another one?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ replied Naim, ‘it’s hot. Too hot, actually.’

  She laughed. ‘Did it burn your mouth?’

  ‘It did,’ he said, making a painful face.

  ‘Good!’ she said.

  As she laughed with her head thrown back, her neck flattened out and her throat quivered, causing Naim to imagine a small animal shivering in the cold. Placing her own kahwa cup upon the branch beside Naim’s, she put both her hands on the branch and swung on it, then immediately checked herself. ‘I mustn’t do this. Papa wouldn’t like it. Not tonight, what with all the guests and me in a sari. You didn’t mind my little joke, did you?’

  ‘No. But you are drinking my kahwa.’

  ‘Oops, am I? I am sorry. Let me get you another cup.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘You don’t want any more kahwa?’

  ‘I’ll drink from my cup.’

  ‘From this?’ she asked, opening her eyes wide.

  ‘Yes.’

  She paused, looking up at him, and suddenly the look of aggressive playfulness had gone from her face. ‘The cups,’ she said, embarrassed, her voice almost vulnerable for a fleeting moment, ‘are so much alike.’

  They stood sipping kahwa in silence. The uncertain May wind had begun to rise once again, gently playing with a tuft of hair on Azra’s forehead.

  ‘Very interesting – er –’ Naim said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The ceremony.’

  ‘Yes. From today Papa is Roshan Agha. As Abba was.’

  ‘Who was the old man?’

  ‘The one who placed the hat on Papa’s head? He is – was Abba’s very old friend. From childhood, I think.’

  Naim thought that the old man probably knew his grandfather as well; he had seen that Ayaz Beg was one of the very few who had been greeted warmly by the man.

  ‘And the lady?’ he asked.

  ‘She is my aunt.’

  ‘I didn’t see your mother.’

  ‘She passed away.’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘It was a long time ago. Listen, do you have Western clothes?’

  Feeling bold, Naim jested. ‘I can have them made.’

  It took Azra a second to catch on. ‘No, don’t. Look, we are having a party on Sunday to celebrate Pervez’s passing his BA. Will you come?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ Naim said.

  ‘Oh, do come. Five o’clock. Don’t forget. You will come, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good night,’ she said, and walked away, crossing over to where her father was sitting with the guests wearing the conical blue velvet hat, the top of which moved floppily as he talked. After a while Naim went and sat beside Ayaz Beg, who was talking about the architectural flaws in a well-known building in Calcutta, to the man with a wooden leg who, in turn, was more concerned with the aesthetic faults in the enormous pile.

  It was near midnight when the guests began to depart. Saying good night to the nawab and Azra’s aunt, they went, yawning and some of them burping loudly, each to his manner of mount. A few of the street people, who lived in huts not far away, were still up, watching the motor cars start up and leave in billows of smoke. Following Ayaz Beg, Naim approached their behli. Before stepping into it he couldn’t resist a last look at Roshan Mahal. A dozen servants were busy among the sofas and chairs quietly picking up the crockery from low coffee tables. There was no one on the veranda. The lights swayed in the wind that moved through the trees, making a desolate sound. Naim put a foot on the pedal and heaved himself on to the seat.

  ‘Azra has invited me to a party on Sunday,’ he said after a while.

  A huge mosquito struck his cheek. He looked at his uncle. Ayaz Beg’s was an open face on which every flicker of emotion could be clearly read. Naim saw unhappiness.

  ‘You weren’t taken there to deliver a speech,’ Ayaz Beg said. ‘You well know that even a mention of Tilak is tantamount to terrorism. Had we not been in Roshan Mahal the matter wouldn’t end there. You could possibly be arrested.’

  ‘I am sorry, Uncle,’ Naim said. ‘He is such a hero to us all.’

  For a while, the two were silent. Then Ayaz Beg spoke, not in anger, but slowly, haltingly, in remorse. ‘Our family has been destroyed just because of such things. I took you away – educated you – put my life’s ambition in you –’

  They swayed and swung in their seat, holding on to its sides, as the behli left the area and travelled along pitted roads.

  CHAPTER 3

  IT WAS AN unusually warm day. On the lawn of the big house the party had already begun. At the main gate stood a high-roofed black car. Pervez was standing there chatting to the car’s owner as Naim arrived. Pervez introduced him to the young man. His name was Sahibzada Waheeduddin. He had been a year senior to Pervez at college, had recently passed the Civil Service competitive examination and had been posted to the Department of Education. The three of them were walking along the driveway when an English girl crossed over from the left wing of the house. Pervez introduced her to Naim.

  ‘Sorry; my hands,’ she said, rubbing the soot off her hands with a duster. ‘Glad to meet you.’ She stepped on to the lawn.

  There was a loosely dispersed crowd under a century-old bargad tree. No chairs or tables were to be seen on the lawn, just a couple of low stools on which sat talking two boys and a girl. Next to them, two slightly younger people lay on their stomachs on the grass leafing through picture magazines. A few paces away Azra was trying to light a large oil stove. She was surrounded by four or five boys and girls, dispensing instructions. Two girls were coming up from the left wing, one of them carrying a cane basket, the other holding a large iron kettle by the handle. The English girl kneeled down on the grass beside Azra and whispered to her.

  ‘Look, your handsome friend!’

  Azra looked up. Her eyes lingered on Naim for a few seconds.

  ‘But today,’ continued the other girl, ‘he is looking a proper person without his red cap.’

  ‘Shush, Lydia,’ Azra said to the girl. ‘Salam alaikam,’ she said to Naim and immediately took his hand, unconsciously transferring some of the soot from her hands to his.

  ‘It was Lydia’s proposal to make tea out here on this silly old stove. That will make it a “real” picnic party, she said. And look what happened.’ She spread her hands.

  She had come away, leaving a bunch of them to struggle with the stove. Her face was red from working. Her mouth stretched a bit too wide as she smiled, thought Naim; but the full lips made his heart fly.

  ‘Waheed,’ a girl in a straight-cut pyjama trousers and kameez said, ‘you haven’t thrown us a party to celebrate your appointment.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ enjoined Lydia, ‘now you are in employment, you owe us a party. Come on, pay up, Miser Tom.’

  ‘You’ve had so many from me and you call me a miser?’

  ‘But not one for crawling out of a state of unemployment.’

  ‘What is it about Mrs MacMillan, Waheed?’ asked Pervez. ‘You go to the Civil Club.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Rumours that she forced her husband to resign?’

  ‘Rumours, yes. I don’t know the whole story.’

  Bored with the boys’ con
versation, the girls walked away. Finding himself with just Pervez and Naim, Sahibzada Waheed lowered his voice. ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Got too big for her boots, started behaving as if she was the Governor’s lady and not the Deputy Commissioner’s. Those Patel boys made it worse for her, going round every day for salaam and sitting at her feet as she played bridge and what not. She couldn’t get me or Nawabzada Aftab or magistrate Kalloo to do it. Eventually, in utter frustration she made her husband resign. Was from the wrong class.’

  Pervez nodded in agreement. A group of five had climbed up the bargad and were sitting there comfortably. The boy on the stool was reading the palms of two girls. Another girl was getting cups and saucers out of the basket and placing them on a durree spread on the ground. Lydia was carefully picking out little cakes from another container and arranging them on plates, licking the crumbs off her fingers.

  ‘Come, children,’ Azra shouted. ‘Tea’s ready.’

  Pervez, Waheed and Naim came and stood by the kettle.

  ‘Send up our tea over here,’ shouted a boy from up the tree.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Azra replied. ‘No pigeons here to take your food to you. Come and get it.’

  ‘We’re not coming down,’ several voices shouted back. ‘It’s nice up here.’

  ‘Ignore them,’ the girl in straight-cut trousers said sharply. ‘Let’s start our programme.’

  Azra fixed her straying hair with hairpins, covered her head with a dopatta and got up. ‘Ladies and gentlemen.’ Her voice was drowned by the noise others were making. ‘Waheed, tell everyone to be quiet, please.’

  Waheed, who was still talking to Pervez, heard the order and cried in an authoritative tone, ‘Silence! Azra Begum wants to say something.’

  Azra began by reciting an old Persian verse, misreading it. Naim couldn’t suppress his smile.

  ‘Speech shall not be in Persian,’ someone interrupted.

  ‘It’ll be in English,’ Lydia said.

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘All right,’ said Waheed. ‘In English then, stop interrupting.’

  ‘Today,’ Azra began again, ‘today –’

  ‘Is Sunday,’ said someone from up the tree.

  ‘Hear, hear!’

  Several people, concealed in the branches of the tree, started whistling the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’.

  ‘Shut up,’ Azra said angrily.

  ‘Silence! Silence!’

  ‘Today, on the occasion of Nawabzada Pervez Mohyyeddin’s success in his graduation exam, I herewith announce the opening of the tea party in his honour.’

  Azra then handed a half-full cup of tea to Pervez and added a spoonful of sugar to it. Everyone, including the tree people, who had reluctantly climbed down, followed a prescribed procedure. They came one by one and added their spoonfuls of sugar to the cup, until the tea spilled over into the saucer and the cup filled up with sugar to the brim. Pervez had to take a nibble at the wet sugar.

  ‘Clap,’ ordered Waheed.

  Solemnly the girls clapped while the boys slapped their thighs lazily. After that, proper tea was served.

  ‘Right. Listen, everybody,’ announced Waheed. ‘Whoever climbs the tree with a cup full of tea in hand without spilling it shall get a prize.’

  ‘What’s the prize?’ they asked.

  ‘That will be announced later.’

  ‘No, now.’

  ‘Oh all right. He or she will be taken on a ride in my car to the river.’

  ‘Fine.’ A girl called Ghazala, a gymnast and also captain of the college basketball team, came forward.

  Balancing herself and the cup in hand, she started, slowly, expertly to climb, amid a clamour of discouragements from the ground. Diverted by the noise, she slipped just as she had reached the first branch. She let go of her cup of tea and sat, legs dangling in defeat, on the branch, glaring at the crowd hounding her from below. A boy and a girl continued the contest by starting to climb from opposite sides of the tree. One of them didn’t even make the first branch, while the other did but gave up the effort. ‘Chicken!’ arose the jeers from below. Some others began half-hearted attempts at accomplishing the feat. Soon a scattering of upended cups and broken china covered the grass under the tree. Bored with the game, Pervez wandered off towards the right wing of the house, where his aunt was talking to the head gardener. Naim and Azra and a few others sat by the kettle drinking tea. Lydia was talking to the girl sitting next to her on the grass.

  ‘These Indian nawabs, it will do them a world of good if they are sent to my country for a short while. Listen, Jamila, my family too has an estate in Scotland, and the price of a tea-set is the same to us as to these people here. But the value of it is different. If we break it intentionally, we are punished.’

  The sky had been threatening since the morning. The clouds were getting lower, turning blacker, causing a close, sweaty, windless day. It began to drizzle. Leaping off the tree and jumping up from the lawn, everyone ran to the shelter of the veranda. Naim looked towards the dwarfish tree on his left.

  ‘You said it was your favourite place,’ he remarked.

  ‘It is,’ Azra said.

  ‘Why did you not take up the challenge then?’

  ‘Because the bet was for the bargad, sleepy brain.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go for the bargad?’

  ‘Because I wasn’t sure I could do it,’ she laughed. ‘I hate losing.’

  ‘Let us go to your tree,’ Naim suggested. Azra thought for a moment. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Let’s.’

  Teacups in hand, they ran to the tree and stood the cups on a low branch.

  ‘They’re again exactly the same,’ Azra said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The cups.’

  ‘So they are.’

  ‘They weren’t. I had one from a different set at first.’

  ‘Where did that go?’

  ‘I changed it with Jamila’s.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just so they get exchanged again,’ she said, laughing.

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said emphatically.

  ‘Let’s exchange them.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘They have to be exchanged accidentally.’

  ‘Well, let’s exchange them accidentally.’

  Without warning, Azra began to climb up the tree. Naim followed her. Azra’s round pink heels were close to his eyes, her foot almost touching his face. The wind, full of tiny drops of rain, swept across her, losing raindrops in the tree. Her mauve silk dress of shalwar-kameez fluttered, defining her calves, thighs and hips, their firm flesh straining against the heave. Reaching the middle of the tree, she sat herself snugly in a nook formed where two thick branches joined, her feet wedged against a third. Naim sat beside her, dangling his legs.

  ‘You asked me whether I had – er – what was it, Western clothes?’

  Her face, already red from the climb, became flushed.

  ‘Well,’ said Naim, ‘how do I look in jacket and trousers?’

  ‘You still look funny.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You are the only one with a jacket on. It’s hot, you know, or haven’t you noticed?’

  For the first time the old mocking tone had crept into Azra’s voice. Naim blushed.

  ‘Well, did I not have to show you my proper Angrezi libas?’

  Azra looked at him intently for a moment in the semi-darkness of the tree. ‘You really looked funny with that tassel bobbing about on your head.’ A moment later she laughed.

  It was the same brief laugh with a hint of hoarseness, rather like a gust of wind through thorny shrubs, that seemed forever to be enclosed by her lips, ready to emerge even when there was little cause for it. Looking back at her through the wet, dark leaves, he suddenly saw the resemblance between her and her father. Both had a certain something – a wildness that imparted a shade of brutality to their eyes and the corners of their lips.

&
nbsp; ‘What about your father’s hat the other night?’

  ‘That was only ceremonial,’ she said, laughing again. ‘I must say he looked funny as well.’

  There was a commotion in his heart. He tore off a sprig and waved it in the air. It bounced the drops of rain resting precariously on the leaves of the tree. He laughed.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’ asked Azra.

  ‘I never ask you why every time you laugh.’

  ‘Two errors,’ she said. ‘First, I never ask you each time you laugh. Second, why does it make the question unnecessary?’

  ‘I remembered monkeys up a tree in Calcutta Zoo.’

  Slowly, a smile spread on her face. The rain became heavier. The others had all gathered on the veranda, looking at the rain and singing.

  ‘Why do you throw your head back when you laugh?’ he asked.

  ‘Do I? I don’t know. Why?’

  ‘I like it.’ He kept looking at her quietly. ‘Your mouth opens when you laugh.’

  ‘Doesn’t yours?’ she asked.

  ‘Not as much. It’s your lips. They make me want to touch them.’

  ‘You come from Roshan Pur,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘My family live there. I live in Calcutta.’

  ‘Will you go there?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He reached out to touch her lips, running his fingers on them, then on her nose, eyes. Next he pressed the base of his hand on her cheeks, feeling the bones underneath, the jaw and the chin, as if trying to capture the memory of her looks in his fingertips, while the peculiar smell of the wet tree entered his nose, warm and humid.

  From the veranda came the sharp sound of her aunt’s voice, calling out to her. After a moment’s pause, staring at him with unblinking eyes, Azra said, ‘Let’s go,’ without moving.