‘I am going to Jat Nagar tomorrow with my bhabi and not coming back until sowing starts,’ the girl said, arching her brow and smiling challengingly, before she went down the nullah’s slope on her way back to the village.
Mahinder Singh swore some more after her. The girl turned once she was on the other side of the nullah and lifted the flat of her hand towards the boy in a gesture of taunting victory. Mahinder Singh stood looking at her as she went, swinging her arms, her back, hips and legs making a single movement of boneless elasticity like a long thin eucalyptus twig swishing through the air. Mahinder Singh’s long hair had come loose from underneath his turban; thick tufts of it hung around his eyes, curved and stiff, framing his brow which was aflame with naked desire.
‘Who was she?’ Naim asked him.
‘A slut.’
‘Didn’t look like one to me.’
‘So did she look like your mother?’
‘Shut up.’
‘What else did she look like?’ the Sikh laughed.
‘Your mother, you swine.’
Mahinder Singh confronted him. ‘Don’t you try to talk back to me.’ He pulled out a thick wooden flute from the fold of the sheet tied around his hips and started twirling it slowly in his hand. ‘Don’t you know me?’
‘No,’ Naim said bravely. ‘I only see a stupid Sikh with a flute in his hand.’
Mahinder Singh extended his flute hand to Naim. ‘Here, you take it. I’ll still break your head.’
Naim stood his ground. ‘Show me how you will do it.’
After a few moments of squaring up to one another, eyes screwed up and menace in their bodies, Mahinder Singh laughed.
‘You only came yesterday. Drink your old lady’s milk for a few days before you come and fight me.’
‘Coward,’ Naim said.
‘I will fight you yet, but not today. We allow twenty-four hours to guests.’ Mahinder Singh put the flute to his lips and started to blow, producing, to Naim’s surprise, a nice sound.
Without taking the flute from his lips, Mahinder Singh started walking ahead. Following him still, Naim saw that the Sikh’s arms and shoulders were scorched black by the sun while the skin under his dirty printed vest was of a lighter shade.
‘Don’t you ever wear a shirt?’ asked Naim after a while.
Mahinder Singh turned to look at him without stopping and continued to blow on the flute. They turned to their right along the field and saw several men separating the wheat from the chaff with the help of huge wooden forks. Their black bodies shone with sweat in the glare of the sun. Mahinder Singh’s father told him roughly to stop playing the flute and get down to work with the fork. Hesitantly, Mahinder Singh joined them.
Months passed. Despite several messages from Ayaz Beg, Naim did not return to him. He had started helping his father with work. The rest of the time he slept. His brain had become scrambled and a hazy, unaccountable anger hovered about it. He was gaining weight, and it bothered him. Niaz Beg encouraged him lovingly in his own way. Sleep was good for a young man in hot weather, he said to his son.
At times Naim talked to his father. Why didn’t he start up his shop where he could make all the implements anyone wanted to work in the fields, like ploughs, forks, scythes. It was easier than working on the land, said Naim. The only emotion that showed on Niaz Beg’s face in response was one of black-eyed fear, quickly replaced by the regular blank look that permeated his features.
‘Yes, yes,’ the old man would say, ‘one day I will open the door of the workshop, but for now the land is good to us, gives us food to fill our belly.’
At times, too, Naim sought to advise his father. It was no good fighting with the women or letting them fight among themselves. They should all live in peace. And he shouldn’t swear so much all the time, Naim said to him. This angered Niaz Beg.
‘Have you come to read me a lesson? Keep your head to yourself. My head is heavy enough for me to carry around.’
For three days of the week they ate well. That was when Niaz Beg stayed with Naim’s mother. The rest of the week they had indifferent food. Regularly on the seventh day of the week Niaz Beg would take his cot and some simple food from home and go out to sleep in the fields.
One evening as Naim was returning from racing his mare against Mahinder Singh’s horse he found Ayaz Beg’s servant waiting by the side of the path leading to the village. He had come all the way from Calcutta to see Naim.
‘I went to your house, bhayya,’ he said. ‘Your father chaudri Beg saab swore at me and also threatened to kill me. I escaped with difficulty. Your uncle wants you to come back. He is much worried, has been to Dilli many times.’
Naim kept patting the mare’s neck. ‘How is his health?’ he asked finally.
‘He is all right, bhayya, but sick for you.’
‘Is everything else all right?’
‘Everything is well, bhayya. Thakur Darshan Singh has passed away. Roshan Mahal’s Pervez mian is going to become big officer in –’
All at once, a great anger swelled inside Naim. ‘I am not going back,’ he said to the servant and dug his heels in the mare’s ribs. Riding away, he heard behind him his father’s voice shouting at Ayaz Beg’s man.
‘You servant, you slave, your master is a mason, a weaver. Tell him my son is not coming back, he is staying here. You mason’s labourer, you bastard, you are not son of your father, go and ask your mother, the bitch …’
The man could no more bear the humiliation and lost his temper. He turned. ‘And you, do you not eat from your brother’s land? Come, give me an account of that.’
Naim rode his mount into the man, making him stagger and fall. ‘Go,’ he roared, turning again and riding away.
Niaz Beg was still screaming at the servant. ‘Go tell your master the mason, the weaver, that he is no brother of mine, he is a disgrace to my father. Be off, off.’
Behind him the village was shrouded in the blue haze of dung-cake smoke, which was giving off its peculiar, acrid smell of a country dusk.
CHAPTER 6
NIAZ BEG SLEPT only half the night. Once the sowing was over, he would often go after midnight to his fields and sit watching the crop grow. Now, however, the sowing season was on. Niaz Beg and Naim had worked hard the past few days to prepare the soil. They only had one pair of bullocks. Mahinder Singh had offered to get them another pair, but suspecting that it would be stolen property they had declined. Father and son had tilled four acres with their one pair, leaving two acres for the second sowing of the rainy season later in the year. That was their total ownership: six acres.
It was more than three hours before sunrise when Niaz Beg left his bed. He changed the water in his hukka, pulled out a still-smouldering dung cake that he had buried in the hot ash of the hearth at night before going to bed and placed it firmly on a tobacco leaf in the hukka’s headpiece. Within minutes he got it going by pulling deep into his lungs from the pipe. As the fire touched the raw-rubbed tobacco and its smoke hit his windpipe, Niaz Beg coughed. He sat there savouring the delicious sting of it for a few minutes and thought pleasantly of the coming night when he would sleep with his younger wife in the next room. From habit, he passed his hand over the loose flesh and dry bones of his elder wife who lay sleeping beside him. The old woman squirmed in her sleep at his touch. Although that body no longer lit a fire in the old man’s loins, he felt a sense of security from its touch, as though it were a wallet that contained no cash but concealed important papers within its folds. The peculiar smell of sleeping bodies and stale breath hung in the room. In a corner of the room slept Naim, snoring lightly. Out in the courtyard, moonlight fell silently on the walls, creating shadows on their uneven surface. Niaz Beg went to sit on Naim’s cot. The hukka’s sharp gurgle near his ear caused Naim to wake with a start.
‘I am taking the plough,’ Niaz Beg said to his son. ‘Get up and bring the seed out. Up, up! Farmers’ sons don’t sleep like women. Up you get.’
A katik moon threw a c
risp, cotton-white light over all the earth. A dog by the pond barked lazily at Niaz Beg. A peasant lying on a cot nearby raised his head and asked sleepily, ‘What are you about this early, chaudri?’
‘To sowing, to sowing,’ Niaz Beg replied.
‘God be with you,’ the peasant said and fell back.
‘Yes, yes, with you too,’ he answered shortly.
Everyone knew that Niaz Beg was impatient with God. He put his faith in a few of God’s things, like his labour on the land and the food he grew, as well as his cattle and his two wives; but not much else. With the plough on his back and the bullocks’ nose-lead in his hand, Niaz Beg still had the skill to carry his hukka in the other hand and to constantly pull at it through his lips to stop it going out, the inhaling of breath through the pipe and the rise and fall of his chest somehow keeping time with the pace of his steps, so that he was at one with the earth and the sound of bells around bullocks’ necks tinkling delicately in the silent moonlit night. In the hour of his labour, the man was of the elements, and that was what made him impatient with men who uttered God’s name and slept on, and with their God too. Under the kikar tree by the field, Niaz Beg unloaded his stuff, freeing his hands, and quickly hitched the plough between the two bullocks. Then he went into the field. He buried his hand in the soft earth that had already been ploughed and levelled. Bringing up the soil in his hand, he examined it: it bore within it just so much moisture that it broke up between his fingers in small round pieces and yet left traces of damp on them. ‘Right, right,’ he said happily, ‘it’s ready.’ A shadow approached him in the night as he stood, feeling the wetness of earth beneath his feet, waiting for his son to arrive with the seed. It was a tall Sikh man. He spoke to Niaz Beg.
‘Who are you talking to?’
‘The soil,’ replied Niaz Beg. ‘It is ready. Look.’
The Sikh felt the earth in Niaz Beg’s palm, rubbed it between his fingers and dropped it to the ground. ‘Yes,’ he said, nodding approvingly, ‘it’s ready.’
‘Where to, Harnam Singh?’
‘To water my field.’
‘What, now?’
‘My turn on the canal has only come now.’
‘When will you sow, then?’
‘Late. What else can I do?’
‘Yes, yes, very late. Last year too you did not cut your crop until the sixth month. I remember, for it was the month I came back.’
‘Still, it’s a matter of my turn on the canal, Niaz Beg. Do you think I keep lying down with my woman? I only have one.’ The Sikh laughed. ‘Our guru did not allow us more than one, not like your guru did.’
‘Damn the guru,’ Niaz Beg muttered after the Sikh had left. ‘Only excuses for lazy limbs.’
After waiting a few more minutes, he ran back to the house. Naim was spread-eagled on his cot, sound asleep. Niaz Beg poked him in the belly. ‘When we were young, our father stopped our lassi as soon as the hot months were over, lest we should become addicts to sleep.’
‘What are you shouting for?’ Naim said to him. ‘Half the night is still to come.’
Heavy with sleep, Naim pulled up his trousers, which ripped on one side with the force he used on them.
The two of them loaded the seed bag on to the mare and came out of the house. Niaz Beg had relaxed by now. Following in the footsteps of his son, who was walking alongside the mare holding up the seed bag from one side, Niaz Beg started singing an old village song.
‘Nobody sings it nowadays,’ Naim said.
‘I sang it when it was new. Everybody sang it then,’ answered Niaz Beg. ‘What is wrong with old songs?’
‘They are dead and gone.’
‘Maybe,’ Niaz Beg said. ‘But not forgotten.’
Near the kikar tree a jackal stood motionless, watching the bullocks. Spotting it at a distance, Niaz Beg put a hand on Naim’s shoulder and made signs to him to stop the mare and be absolutely still. Then he fell on his knees and leaned forward until he was lying on his stomach. Noiseless as a mouse, he started to crawl, concealing his movement behind stray wild bushes. He approached the jackal from behind and got quite near it before the animal became aware of his presence and ran away. Niaz Beg got up, swearing, and came back to where Naim stood with the mare like a statue in the night.
‘Laloo’s horse is stiff in the joints. He needs it.’
‘What, a jackal?’
‘Yes, its flesh has hot properties. Cooked and fed to the horse, cures paralysis.’
‘What about people?’ Naim asked with a smile.
Niaz Beg did not answer. He was already unloading the two-maund-heavy bag of seed. After standing it against the tree-trunk, he unfolded a cotton sheet he had brought with him and knotted its four corners, making a pouch of it. Into the pouch he poured several handfuls of wheat seed. Slinging it across his shoulders, he entered the field, driving the bullocks before him.
‘Come on,’ he said to Naim. ‘This is your first sowing. Watch.’ From one end of the field, he started sowing. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s different from tilling the earth. The soil is already soft now, you don’t put your weight on the handle and dig in, only just so the end of the pipe stays dipped in. Only just. Watch. Watch and learn.’
After a couple of runs up and down, he handed the plough, the sowing pipe and the seed pouch to his son and came to stand at the edge of the field.
‘Hunh! Hoonh!! Keep the line straight, keep it straight, straight, straiiight …’
Swearing under his breath, Naim got on as best as he could, pursued by his father’s relentless voice.
‘… seed, look at the seed, it’s dropping on the side, going astray, waste, pay attention, look, look …’
‘Aren’t your eyes sharp!’ Naim shouted back. ‘Seeing little grains in the night.’
Ignoring Naim’s remark, Niaz Beg kept his sights fixed on his son’s work. ‘Twist the Blue’s tail,’ he instructed; ‘drags his feet, the shirker, but when it comes to eating an acre’s fodder don’t fill his belly. Twist his tail hard, hard …’
Irritated to the limit after a time, Naim pulled up and walked out of the field. ‘Go and do it yourself,’ he said, dropping the half-empty pouch at his father’s feet.
‘The first day in my life that I did my sowing I got a kikar twig on my back one hundred and forty times from my father.’
‘So now it’s your turn to take your revenge? One hundred and forty times indeed! You can’t even count beyond twelve.’
‘Work, work, don’t cry, sun is coming up any minute now, then you will say it is too hot, another excuse.’
‘What, any minute? It will still be dark in two hours. You have no idea of the time, you never sleep.’
‘Hah! It’s those who don’t wake that don’t know the length of the night. Time doesn’t live in the face of that dead watch on your arm.’
‘Where does it live, then?’
‘In day and night,’ Niaz Beg replied. ‘Or a season. Or life. Do you think I learned to sow between my mother’s legs? No, sir, I worked days and nights, and season after season, and on my first day my father beat me more than he beat the bullocks.’
‘You are lying. You were very small when my grandfather died. I know.’
‘Don’t argue. Night is going to end soon.’
Niaz Beg had refilled the seed pouch. He flung it on Naim’s shoulder and pushed him back into the field. Naim resisted, made threatening gestures, but couldn’t stop his father shoving him towards the plough. The first light of day was breaking in the eastern sky and the stars were fading, the fainter the quicker, when Naim, drenched in sweat, finished the third pouchful of seed. He was tired to the bone but had at last acquired the skill of sowing. Not a single seed from his last pouch fell outside the feed pipe and not a plough-line up or down went anywhere but straight ahead. It was Niaz Beg’s younger wife’s turn that day to get the food out to the fields. Naim picked up the pot of lassi and drank straight from it till he had his fill. There were two thick millet-flour rotis in
the cane tray. The one with a greasy sheen to it had been buttered when hot. Niaz Beg claimed it and started eating hungrily. Naim got the other, dry roti. Both men ate their bread with cooked mustard greens. The baby started crying. The woman produced a fat milk-filled breast from underneath her kurta and thrust it in the baby’s mouth. After sucking for a few minutes, the baby fell asleep. Naim finished eating, drank a couple of mouthfuls of lassi and lay down on his back under the tree.
‘Here,’ Niaz Beg pushed the hukka toward him, ‘take a pull, helps with work.’
‘I don’t want it,’ Naim said. ‘And I am not going to work any more now.’
‘Why not? Only two-thirds of the sowing is done.’
‘We can do the rest tomorrow.’
‘Hah, tomorrow! If you say tomorrow, tomorrow never comes. We finish it today. The quicker we sow, the quicker we cut. My mouth is bruised with eating this cursed millet flour. I am hungry for a soft wheat roti. Come on.’
‘My limbs are aching, I am not working any more today, I have told you.’
Niaz Beg took one look at his son’s face and got up. He filled the seed pouch and went into the field. To release his anger, he began to swear loudly at the birds that had alighted in the freshly sown field to pick at the seed, waving his arms wildly to drive them away.
The baby slept soundly in his mother’s lap, the skin on one side of his face touched by the golden rays of the new sun. Naim reached out to lay his hand on the baby’s slumbering face. It was as if the mother had been waiting for this gesture.
‘Your mother thinks I am your enemy. Am I to blame now that Ali has come into the world? She says I am a witch.’
The baby’s face was hardly a foot away and Naim could smell mother’s milk on its mouth. It was the first time Naim had lovingly patted this baby, and the first time he had spoken to this woman who was a stranger and enemy to him in the same house.
‘You shouldn’t fight among yourselves,’ he said to his stepmother. ‘I have said this to my mother too. Feed all your milk to Ali, make him big and strong. Then we will compete in tilling the earth and father shall sit to the side and swear at us.’
The Weary Generations Page 7
