The Weary Generations

by Abdullah Hussein

  ‘He is going to be charged,’ Naim said to the man standing next to him.

  With great sarcasm, the man nodded his head repeatedly and said, ‘Yes, oh yes, yes indeed. Who will be the judge and who the jury? Not your uncle, young man, not your uncle.’ The man hastened away.

  Naim was met by a kammi of his father’s who had brought a severely ill-nourished mare for Naim to ride. Naim rode the wretched animal for fourteen miles to the village while the kammi walked alongside, talking without pause.

  ‘… Chaudri Niaz Beg raised his wheat by his own hands this year. It was a heavy crop, everybody says there is God’s will in his hands. Gave me three maunds, just to me, you see, full three maunds only to me. And he bought this fine animal.’ He struck the horse with the flat of his hand, but it paid not the slightest attention. ‘She comes from a fine line, believe me, but she was with the weavers of Jat Nagar, and they brought her to this condition. The weavers, may God take them from this earth, keep ever a tight fist with their animals. To be cruel to a tongueless creature is a crime against man and God. In his absence, Niaz Beg’s lands had gone to the devil. It is good now. Oi, you low-caste dogs, we are not going to stop in your godless village, go away. There were not enough rains and not enough water in the canal this year so the rice crop was light. But not to worry …’

  Dusk was falling as the trees of Roshan Pur came into view. ‘Do not worry,’ the talkative kammi went on, ‘these are our dogs. They bark from habit, but once they recognize us as one of their own they will stop. Ah, here comes Chaudri Niaz Beg …’

  The dogs of Roshan Pur never recognized Naim and kept yapping at his heels. But Niaz Beg did. He jumped up from under a kikar tree, threw away a thin stick that he was carrying and, despite the dimness of light in his sight, had no difficulty in running straight to Naim, putting his arms round his son’s body and kissing him, first on the chest, then on his face several times, mumbling unintelligibly as he did so. Naim felt his rough whiskers and the smell of sweat and fresh grass from his father’s body. Above a hard, gaunt body the old man had a ruined face.

  Niaz Beg immediately started admonishing the servant. ‘What kept you so long? I know, you jumped on the mare and made my son walk, didn’t you? Don’t I know the nature of you kammis?’ He got hold of the horse’s reins and started walking ahead as the servant, spreading his hands before him, tried to explain that the railway train was late by many hours, which Naim knew wasn’t true and that there had been no delay in their coming.

  ‘Lies, lies,’ cried Niaz Beg. ‘Don’t I know you, don’t I? People like you have a dark heart and a lit-up tongue. Just you come begging for a share of wheat next time and I will give you the dung of an ant, just you wait and see …’

  Outside the house, two women, one old and the other much younger, stood weeping loudly. Niaz Beg addressed them angrily. ‘Did I not say we should not send this talkative merasi for this important job? Now look, he has spent all day talking to himself. Did I not say I will go myself and get my son back before sundown?’

  ‘Not on the weavers’ mare, chaudri …’ the servant said.

  With his wiry, light body, Niaz Beg executed an astonishing leap, landing clean on top of the horse. Digging his heels in the animal’s flanks, he rode it round the two weeping women in a tight circle and jumped back down. He picked up a light little stick from the ground and started beating the horse with it. ‘Miserly weavers, gave you nothing to eat, took my money and sold me a dead donkey …’

  The older of the two women threw her arms around Naim and held him tight for a long time. Then she began passing her hands all along his body, feeling his features with the tips of her fingers like a blind person trying to figure out through touch the appearance of her son. Two dogs started fighting near them. Niaz Beg ran after them with a raised stick in his hand, uttering terrible oaths. After driving the mongrels ‘to the ends of the earth’ as he had promised, he returned on the trot. People were coming out of their houses with lanterns in their hands to look. Taking his hand, Niaz Beg pulled Naim towards the house.

  ‘Pay no attention,’ he said, pointing to the two women with his stick, ‘they are silly, they know nothing.’

  A young Sikh lad called out. ‘Chacha, has your son arrived?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ answered Niaz Beg shortly, then said to Naim, ‘Pay no attention. These are people with no education.’

  In the courtyard of the house, two buffaloes sat chewing cud and two bullocks stood eating from fluffy heaps of cut grass with their mouths in the trough. ‘This one,’ Niaz Beg said, patting one with his dry, calloused hand, ‘I bought for the price of four maunds of wheat two months back. It got a paper from the gora saab at the last cattle fair. Finest blood. Well, Dittay, true or not?’

  Ditta merasi agreed. ‘Sixteen annas true, chaudri. No answer to it within twenty miles. Famous bull of Jat Nagar’s chaudris cannot finish an acre before it starts crying for its mother. This one tills an acre and a half again by the time the sun even begins to go down.’

  ‘True, true,’ said Niaz Beg proudly. He turned to the two weeping women. ‘Stop doing hoo hoo hoo, you silly women. Have you laid out the rice? Come, Dittay,’ he addressed the kammi, now patting him warmly on the back, ‘eat rice with us.’

  A large rough cloth with printed flowers on it had already been spread out on the ground of the inner courtyard. The women brought out a round tray of fired clay heaped with white boiled rice which they set in the centre of the cloth. The women, a twelve-year-old boy and Ditta merasi sat down around the tray. Before Naim could sit with them, Niaz Beg ran inside and brought out a low wooden stool for his son.

  ‘Sit on it,’ he said. ‘I have made it with my own hands. Go on, sit, sit.’

  Naim sat on the stool, above the others on the ground. The younger woman sprinkled raw brown sugar on the steaming rice and then poured on melted butter which quickly got absorbed by the fluffed rice. The four men, including the young boy, started eating around the large tray, gathering up rice in their fingers. After a couple of mouthfuls, Naim got tired of having to bend down each time he wanted to scoop up the rice. He knocked away the stool and joined the others on the ground. Hungry after a full day’s journey, he ate heartily the delicious sweet rice fragrant with flavours of white buffalo butter and reddish-yellow shakkar. He hadn’t eaten these things for years, and before he knew it the top of the arch he made in front of him in the heap of rice was approaching the centre of the tray. Naim pulled himself up. His mother took his hand and carefully cleaned the grease off his fingers with the hem of her muslin kurta. Then she poked the young boy in the ribs with the wooden handle of her fan.

  ‘Stop eating,’ she admonished him. ‘Your bottom will start running again.’

  ‘Who is he?’ asked Naim.

  ‘The old woman’s nephew,’ Niaz Beg answered.

  ‘He is your uncle’s son,’ the woman gently told Naim. ‘The low woman my brother married put a spell on him.’

  ‘Don’t tell lies,’ Niaz Beg said to his wife. He turned to Naim. ‘Pay no attention. She was the best-looking woman for ten villages around. Why would she let herself die if she had magic in her hand? Lies. They both died in the cholera epidemic.’

  The old woman quietly gathered up part of the rice left in the tray in a little heap in front of her husband, upended the melted butter cup and, wiping the bottom of the vessel with her fingers, let the last drops of liquid fall over the rice. Niaz Beg began picking up great big dollops of rice to his mouth. Smoke from the slow-burning dung cakes was spreading in the still air, obscuring the little light that came from the single lantern. The dark circles around Niaz Beg’s eyes touched his cheekbones, and below them the flesh on his jaws had dried up like parched earth. He ate with concentration, the bones of his face, from temple to neck, rising and falling prominently like a starving bullock’s. It vaguely disturbed Naim to notice how much his own features resembled his father’s. A baby began to cry next door. The younger woman stood up to go
inside the other room.

  ‘She was weeping just for show,’ the older woman said to her husband, ‘only to appear as if she was happy at my son’s coming home.’

  ‘Hunh?’ Niaz Beg grunted.

  ‘She will put a spell on us during the night.’

  ‘What spell, hunh? Hunh? You are taking out of the heels of your feet where your sense is.’

  ‘Who is she?’ Naim asked diffidently.

  ‘The other woman,’ answered his mother. ‘No need for you to have anything to do with her. She is a proper witch.’

  ‘Stop barking like a mad bitch,’ Niaz Beg said, bent over the rice, as if admonishing not his wife but the food in front of him.

  By the time Niaz Beg was finished not a lot was left in the tray. He pushed it towards the two women, who began to pick at it. Niaz Beg wiped his greasy fingers on his beard and the few hairs that were still left on his head, burping loudly.

  ‘When did you come back?’ Naim asked him.

  ‘In the sixth month of the last year,’ Niaz Beg replied in a matter-of-fact way.

  Although it was a hot night and the air was teeming with mosquitoes grown fat on the waste matter and dung of cattle tethered in the same courtyard where they all slept, Naim slept as soundly as he had ever done. He was surprised at how quickly the night had gone when he was woken by a shrill noise close to where he slept. The two women were fighting. The sudden shock of the clamour made Naim leap out of bed, putting his foot straight into a small pat of warm dung freshly deposited by an untethered buffalo wandering about his cot. Pulling back his foot, he jumped to clear the greenish mass and landed in a puddle of cattle urine, which splashed all around his ankles. Swearing under his breath and blinking in the early morning sun, he went to the water pump and washed himself. The women were shouting at each other.

  ‘You lured him off to bed when it was I who cooked and fed him the day before yesterday, you dirty little bitch.’

  ‘And who cooked and fed him last week when I had to go and see my sick mother, leaving him for you? Did you not lie down with him after I had slaved over my hearth to fill his belly?’

  ‘So where would he go with all that food inside him? To lie with your mother? And hah, sick mother! Don’t I know that you went to see your paramour who was dying for you back in your village, and you for him?’

  ‘Hold your vile tongue, you shameless witch. Only yesterday your six-foot son came home and you warmed your bed with the man the very same night. God forgive me, have you no shame?’

  ‘Hah, a fine one to talk of shame. He,’ pointing to Niaz Beg, ‘had not even been home for full nine months before you dropped a kitten.’

  ‘I am not scared of your son. I only think of your white hair and stay my hand,’ the younger woman said, shaking her head of black hair vigorously in the direction of Niaz Beg, who had come out of the older woman’s room moments before and stood between the two women, looking nonplussed. Then he saw Naim across the courtyard and suddenly came to life.

  ‘Shut up, shut up, you silly women,’ he shouted. ‘I will kick both of you out, I will beat you to the next world, bitches, barking like bitches, I will buy you two dogs to satisfy you. Will you be satisfied then?’ His head trembled, his beard shook, and his arms were waving in the air like a vision of some wild village dance. His shouted threats had no effect on the women. Advancing on one another, they exchanged a series of fierce blows, pulling each other’s hair, screaming obscenities. Giving up the struggle, Niaz Beg withdrew. He went up to Naim and, gently pushing him towards the door of the courtyard, said to him, ‘Pay no attention, these are women with no sense, only full of urine and jealousy. Turn yourself away from them. Go, while I kill them and bury them in the devil’s ground.’

  Outside, two pups wrestled, a fat buffalo wandered aimlessly, two sparrows jumped up and down on the buffalo’s wide back, picking fleas from the black skin. A suckling bitch sat sleepily watchful on top of a heap of manure, feeding her young. The Sikh youth Naim had seen the previous night stood yawning as if he were just out of bed.

  ‘You are chaudri Niaz Beg’s son?’ he asked roughly.

  ‘Yes,’ Naim replied.

  The Sikh youth picked up one of the pups by the ear and flung it into the pond. The pup, yapping loudly, climbed on top of one of the buffaloes that were bathing themselves in the dirty water. Some small boys, staying afloat by holding on to the buffaloes’ tails, started crying in imitation of the pup and splashing water over it.

  ‘Old women are fighting again,’ Sikh youth said, laughing. ‘They do it every other day.’

  Controlling his anger, Naim asked, ‘Why?’

  ‘Chaudri often eats from one and sleeps with the other. Every time they fight, chaudri says he will kill them dead, but he has never raised his hand to them.’

  Naim smiled wanly.

  ‘Mind you,’ the youth continued with simple cheerfulness, ‘it only started after chaudri came back from gaol. All the time that he was away, the women lived in peace, like sisters, and never looked at another man’s thigh.’

  The Sikh boy started walking along the edge of the pond.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Naim asked him.

  ‘To lift our wheat.’

  Naim followed him. They turned left at the end of the pond and there at some distance before them were a couple of fields of ripe wheat, partly harvested. Most of the neighbouring fields had been cleared. The sun had crept up and covered the shorn fields with its hot white blanket. Wheat stalks were scattered in the harvested fields, and feathered creatures of every kind, from tiny sparrows to fat doves, pigeons and sleek crows, sat among them, picking out stray seeds of wheat along with insects that had lost their cover. Trees were only grown near and around the village, mostly sheesham and mango that provided dense shade, and under them the peasants tethered their cattle away from the heat of the sun while they rested on cots or sat and talked to while away the hours.

  ‘Why is your crop still standing?’ Naim asked.

  ‘We sowed late.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Thakur Mahinder Singh.’

  They walked on towards the standing crop.

  ‘Have you come from the city?’ Mahinder Singh asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which city?’

  ‘Delhi.’

  ‘Is that where you live?’

  ‘No. I live in Calcutta.’

  ‘Kalkuttaah,’ the Sikh repeated slowly. ‘I know. My uncle went there.’

  ‘What did he do there?’ asked Naim.

  ‘What business is it of yours?’ Mahinder Singh said with no hint of malice in his voice.

  Ruffians, thought Naim. Probably thieved in Calcutta, his uncle.

  They were crossing the dry bed of a nullah whose sand had already become hot under the rising sun.

  ‘Don’t you want to know my name?’ Naim asked.

  ‘I know,’ replied Mahinder Singh confidently. ‘You are chaudri Niaz Beg’s son.’

  Following him across the nullah, Naim laughed quietly. They were now approaching the wheat field. The wind was gusting through the crop, moving it in waves that shone gold-like in the bright sun. Naim idly broke off an ear of wheat, rubbed it between his fingers to separate the grains, put one in his mouth and threw away the rest.

  ‘You are a city boy,’ said Mahinder Singh, who had been watching him. ‘You don’t know the value of anaj.’

  ‘I do,’ Naim said. ‘The other grains are for the birds.’

  Mahinder Singh smiled good-naturedly. A girl was coming up from the side, a tall, slim girl carrying a cane tray on her head and an earthenware, narrow-necked pot in her hand. Mahinder Singh blocked her way. She tried to squeeze past. The boy wouldn’t give way. A frown and a smile appeared together on her face.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Mahinder Singh asked her.

  ‘Took food for my bhapa.’

  ‘I am hungry too,’ Mahinder Singh said.

  ‘Is your mother dead?’ the
girl taunted.

  ‘Are you your bhapay’s mother then?’

  ‘Don’t show your shameless teeth. Let me go.’

  Mahinder Singh plucked the pot from her hand. It was empty. He returned it by pushing it into the girl’s hard, flat belly. She bent over under the blow and grabbed the pot. Mahinder Singh didn’t let go of her. The girl pushed back and with all the force of her chest and one arm she moved the young man several steps back. Mahinder Singh bit his lip and shoved her further back than she had done him. Drops of sweat had appeared on their faces and their breath came hard and fast through their heaving chests. One side of the sheet loosely tied around the girl’s waist was swept up by a combination of the struggle and the wind, revealing a brown-skinned thigh of rounded, healthy flesh, young sinews straining against the weight of the young man.

  ‘Come,’ Mahinder Singh said to her, pointing with his head to the shoulder-high wheat crop.

  ‘No,’ the girl sank her fingernails into the boy’s neck, ‘swine, let me go.’

  Mahinder Singh, now the stronger of the two, push-dragged her into the standing crop, saying shamelessly, ‘Come lie with me, come …’

  ‘Your bhapa is sitting over there,’ the girl threatened. ‘I am going to call out to him.’

  ‘What can he do?’ Mahinder Singh said fearlessly.

  ‘He can break your bones.’

  ‘He has to find us first.’

  ‘You pig,’ the girl cried. ‘You smell.’

  Mahinder Singh forced the girl down to the ground and for a moment they both disappeared from view. Suddenly, a heavy, rough voice came up from the other side of the field, calling Mahinder’s name. Mahinder Singh’s head appeared above the crop, then the girl’s. Mahinder Singh swore and came out of the field. The girl followed, adjusting the sheet around her waist. She picked up her roti tray and fixed the lassi pot in the crook of her arm.

  ‘I will see you here tomorrow,’ Mahinder Singh said menacingly.