The Weary Generations

by Abdullah Hussein

  They grabbed one another’s hands and kept pressing and shaking them for minutes on end without saying another word, their eyes twinkling with old warmth. Finally, Naim laughed and said to him, ‘You are alive! And dirty. Great!’

  Mahinder Singh laughed. ‘I am going to have a bath today.’

  ‘Good. Then you will be alive and clean.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Mahinder Singh asked.

  ‘We are going to Africa. I am in the 129th Baloch. A machine-gunner. And you?’

  ‘No. 9, Hudson Horse, Ambala Brigade.’

  ‘Have you been fighting?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  Mahinder Singh pointed in an indefinite direction with his hand. ‘There.’

  ‘Against whom?’

  ‘Turks – Germans,’ Mahinder Singh said vaguely, as if he was not sure who they were.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Naim asked.

  ‘Yes. You?’

  ‘I got a bullet. But only in the flesh. Healed quickly.’

  They walked on in silence.

  ‘You want to go and eat something somewhere?’ Naim asked him.

  ‘Er – no, I am going back to my unit. Come, there is a place where we can talk,’ Mahinder Singh said.

  Walking alongside one another, they left the neighbourhood. People, especially children, stopped to gape at this soldier with a beard and a turban wrapped round his head. The two of them entered a vast cemetery. Concrete-slab graves with headstones spread out from narrow red stone pathways on either side of which stood tended fruit trees. Looking at Mahinder Singh out of the corners of his eyes, Naim noticed that the young Sikh no longer had the agility in his limbs; he had grown fat and moved ponderously, like an old bull – something unlikely to happen to a soldier in the midst of war.

  ‘Any news?’ Naim asked.

  ‘There were floods.’

  ‘Somebody told you?’

  ‘Ramzan.’

  ‘The cobbler? He wasn’t with us.’

  ‘No, he was away when we were taken. He was caught six months later.’

  ‘Where did you meet him?’ ‘He was sent to our regiment.’

  ‘What else did he say?’

  ‘It came for four days non-stop after we left. Crops washed away. Many houses collapsed under the rains, Ramzan’s too. After the floods foot-and-mouth spread and killed many cattle. But our two best bulls were sold by Juginder in good time. Chaudri Niaz Beg also sold most of his animals before the disease came, so you’ll be all right.’ Bad though the news was, Mahinder Singh perked up as he spoke to Naim of their homes. ‘After we came away many Roshan Pur girls ran off with boys from Jat Nagar who had hidden and escaped being taken. Ishtamal was done by the land department. Our barley field by the pond was exchanged with one of yours by the graveyard. Our field is good soil, you have nothing to worry about. Everyone’s land is in one place now, what more do we want? Good for animals too, they don’t have to go from one field to the other …’

  In the growing dark of evening, they were the only two left in the sprawling cemetery. Much of their talk had been exhausted in the first half-hour. Still reluctant to part, walking up and down the paths in silence like ghosts from another time and another place, only occasionally breaking the quiet of the place with a word from Naim or a grunt from Mahinder Singh, they kept repeatedly looking at one another without words. As light of the day died, Naim stopped and put his hand on Mahinder Singh’s shoulder.

  ‘Mahindroo, are you well?’

  After a pause, Mahinder Singh said softly, ‘I am well. Only tired. Much tired.’

  ‘Of the war?’

  Mahinder Singh shrugged.

  ‘I didn’t think war would do you any harm,’ Naim said, laughing. ‘Remember back in the village? You could kill without blinking an eye.’

  Mahinder Singh left the path and went to sit on the raised slab of a grave. ‘That was different,’ he said after a few long minutes. ‘To avenge the blood of one of your own, even a rat can kill. Here we don’t even know the people. It is like killing a pig, or a jackal in the jungle.’

  ‘Well,’ Naim said, ‘that is what war is.’

  Although supporting his weight on hands placed on either side of him on the stone, Mahinder Singh looked slumped, his back in the shape of a bow, his shoulders fallen, as if his body had taken on a different form.

  ‘Tell me,’ Mahinder Singh asked suddenly, ‘why are we here?’

  ‘Because of the war,’ Naim said. ‘The enemy has attacked.’

  ‘What, attacked our village?’

  ‘Attacked the British sarkar and their friends.’

  ‘What is it to us?’

  ‘They are our masters.’

  ‘Our master is Roshan Agha,’ Mahinder Singh said simply.

  ‘Yes, and the English sarkar is Roshan Agha’s masters.’

  A brief hollow sound emerged from Mahinder Singh’s mouth. ‘How many masters do we have?’

  Naim laughed. ‘Well, it’s just the way it is.’

  Mahinder Singh got up ponderously, as if making an effort to carry the weight of his clothes. ‘I like this place,’ he said, gesturing towards the graves. ‘Here good people are buried. With names.’

  Naim didn’t know what to say to awaken within Mahinder Singh the old friend he once had. Cheerily he pressed on. ‘And dates.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mahinder Singh. ‘Some with the names of their fathers and mothers too.’

  Naim laughed again. ‘But, Mahindroo, you can’t even read.’

  ‘But I know. On the stones are names and dates.’

  He thumped his sides, as if dusting his clothes, although there was no dust. Then he offered his hand to Naim. Naim grasped it in both hands and kept squeezing it as if to reach the inner places of the man.

  ‘I will see you. Later,’ Mahinder Singh said, freeing his hand.

  ‘Yes, yes. When all this is over. Once we are back in the village we will snatch all the girls from Jat Nagar’s scoundrels, won’t we?’

  After a long moment, during which Mahinder Singh looked around at the graves and their headstones, which had lost their contours in the dark, he said, ‘Yes.’ Without another word he walked away, quickly disappearing from view, leaving Naim standing there with visions of his village and the two of them as they had been, in past seasons so far back that it was hard even to recall them, although there was no more than a year and a half in between. In that time they had seen the face of a war they did not understand.

  Africa

  Making their way through six-foot-high grass with the help of bayoneted rifles, they emerged on the bank of a lake that divided the jungle into two halves. The sun was reflected like a conflagration on the waters of the lake.

  ‘Bah oh!’ exhaled Lance Naik Sajan, pressing a piece of cloth on to his face, which was covered with fine cuts that oozed tiny drops of blood. ‘Sharp as swords it is, and they call it bloody grass.’

  Naim, screwing up his eyes to scan the jungle on the opposite bank, suddenly felt his feet sinking into the earth. He looked down in horror.

  ‘Retreat,’ he shouted.

  The soldiers jumped, fell, leaped in panic and pulled themselves out of the shifting earth, withdrawing quickly into the grass.

  ‘Swamp,’ Naim told Sajan.

  Sajan swore. ‘Strange country. My blood has turned black. Look.’

  ‘Everything looks black in the shade.’

  ‘No, no, I am telling you. It is the mosquitoes. You know, I have crushed a mosquito and its blood was black,’ he said, uttering a forced, hollow laugh peculiar to men in battlefield.

  They had been camping in this part of Africa, undergoing exercises to ‘familiarize’ themselves with the African war in grassland and small dense forests where the rule was ‘fire first and apologize afterwards’. In this land of swamps, they lived among large mosquitoes that outnumbered them by a million to one. There were deaths from malaria. The condition of the white troops was worse, because
they fell victim not just to malaria but to diarrhoea and skin diseases as well. Many died without firing a shot. The only ‘healthy’ troops on their side were the African battalions who, although reputed to be poor fighters, were not in the least affected by the elements. Across the lake, in the other part of the jungle, was the enemy. There had been no engagement so far. All night long the men stayed half-awake, fighting the bee-sized mosquitoes. One of their men died of snake-bite. When a death occurred among the ranks, the men of the platoon stayed up, remembering the dead and killing mosquitoes which they considered their first opponents in the war, more deadly than the enemy soldiers because they were always there and attacking.

  ‘Such a useless death,’ Lance Naik Sajan said to Naim as they sat around, tired but sleepless. ‘I mean an insect that you can easily kill sneaks up on us and kills us.’

  ‘No more useless than any other,’ Naim said.

  ‘Except those that come from God,’ Sajan said with a certain satisfaction.

  ‘So you think a death in war comes from God,’ Naim asked after a while.

  ‘No,’ answered Sajan, ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘All right, why not?’

  Sajan was quiet for a moment. ‘You know, havaldar,’ he said then, ‘whenever I think I have killed someone, not hand to hand but even unseen, I feel the blood in my throat. Death that comes from God’s will does not stick in anyone’s throat.’

  ‘I think we will have an engagement with the enemy tomorrow,’ Naim said to change the subject, although he did not believe it. He had only had some doubtful information about their strength. ‘They are massed over there on the western side of the trees. Intelligence says they have sixteen thousand troops. Two thousand white and fourteen thousand black.’

  ‘Where do they get the blacks?’

  ‘Don’t know. Each company has two hundred men, sixty big guns and eighty machine-guns. We will have a job to do …’

  ‘Motherfucking mosquitoes,’ Sajan said. ‘Oh yes, sir, big job to do. Havaldar, are there mosquitoes where the enemy is?’

  ‘Of course, much more.’

  ‘Good.’

  Not long after, they had their first real engagement. There had been no word from Intelligence. They were on a routine exercise when it happened. Light-footed as forest foxes, they were advancing through thick grass when suddenly they came up against a company of white soldiers.

  ‘Black Bird!’ The company commander shouted the code word.

  He was answered by rifle fire. The company hit the ground and returned the fire. Birds flew up from the grassland and small animals scurried away. After a few minutes’ silence, a line of soldiers appeared virtually at arms’ length from them and attacked. Hand to hand began. Naim, still on the ground, took aim at a soldier’s chest and fired. The soldier, a husky, red-faced man, fell back and gathered up in the shape of a ball. He didn’t get up. Finding attacking soldiers almost looming above him, Naim jumped up. A few feet away he saw a soldier running across, his bayonet pointing at the body of Naim’s company commander. Without a moment’s pause, Naim charged and sank his bayonet in the side of the soldier. The commander, alerted by the cry of the wounded man, turned and fired his revolver at him. The soldier slumped to the ground. The commander glanced round and fired again at a soldier attacking Naim. At the same moment Naim looked to his side and saw that his left arm was hanging by thin threads of flesh and veins just below the elbow. Before he lost consciousness he distinctly recalled thinking, why was it always his left arm that got hurt?

  The hospital was in a building once used as a school. In a long narrow room, Naim lay among the other half-fallen, their heads touching others’ feet, squeezed into spaces too small for them. Amid cries and moans from the wounded, the maimed and the near-dead, the old bandaged ones looked at the new arrivals as a buffalo would look, with uninvolved concern, at another in the agony of giving birth. A Pathan soldier lay beside Naim.

  ‘How are you feeling, jawan?’ a doctor on his round asked the Pathan.

  ‘Son of a donkey,’ the Pathan said to the doctor, glowering at him with red, swollen eyes. Then suddenly, he burst into tears. ‘I have become lame – I will be a lame man, always –’

  The doctor threw a tired glance at the soldier and moved on to Naim. ‘Your last dressing will be on Friday,’ he said, looking at the patient’s papers, before moving on.

  Following the doctor came Nurse Doris. ‘Stop crying, you baby,’ she said to the Pathan affectionately.

  ‘He is not a baby, nurse,’ Naim said, laughing.

  ‘You are all babies here. When you arrived here last month you were crying too.’

  ‘No I wasn’t.’

  ‘Yes you were. You have forgotten. You were very small then,’ she said, sweetly mischievous, passing on to the next man.

  Naim got off his bed and went to sit on the Pathan soldier’s bed.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Amir Khan,’ the Pathan replied.

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘Kaka Khel. Near Peshawar.’

  ‘Where were you wounded?’

  ‘Some place out there. Don’t know the name.’

  ‘Unit?’

  ‘Frontier Force Rifles.’

  During this exchange the soldier’s gaze remained fixed upon Naim’s arm. Naim smiled and showed him the bandaged stump. ‘Yes. It had to be cut off.’

  The Pathan soldier shook his head in aggrieved sympathy, looking from Naim’s half arm to his own half leg for a few seconds, then smiled, as if taking strength from the other man who looked alive and well minus an arm.

  After his discharge from the hospital, Naim reported to his unit, from where he was sent to brigade headquarters. He was sitting on a bench outside an office, waiting to be called, when he felt someone’s hand on his shoulder. He looked up and saw it was Khalik from Jat Nagar. Naim stood up and they shook hands. Khalik kept looking at Naim’s empty sleeve, knotted up below the elbow.

  ‘Yes, this,’ Naim said, moving his arm. ‘I was wounded.’

  ‘Bad,’ Khalik said. ‘Very bad. Do you remember the time we came to Roshan Pur for a kabaddi match and you broke my ear with a blow of this hand?’

  ‘N-no,’ Naim said, ‘I don’t remember. Where are you posted?’

  ‘Here, in headquarters. I am with the supply corps.’

  Khalik gave him a cigarette and helped him light it.

  ‘What’s the news?’ Naim asked.

  ‘My brother Tufail has made a havaldar. Darshan Singh became disabled and was sent home. Roshan Pur’s Mahinder Singh died.’

  The cigarette in Naim’s fingers trembled. ‘In action?’

  ‘Yes. But not at the enemy’s hand.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘His unit was ordered to advance, but he stayed put, wouldn’t move. After many warnings, finally his company commander shot him.’

  Naim inhaled deeply on the cigarette several times.

  Khalik continued in a low, flat voice. ‘He had, you know, grown a bit poor in the head. Oh, I don’t know, don’t want to talk bad about the dead. Anyway, there was something wrong with him.’ He saw signs of distress on Naim’s face and said, ‘Mind you, he may have died in some other way. This is just the story that I heard.’

  Naim’s thoughts were still muddled as he was called in.

  ‘You have been recommended for a medal for bravery, and we are all proud of you,’ the adjutant told him. ‘Final approval has to come from high up, takes time. Look, can you handle a rifle?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I mean, can you fire it?’

  ‘I can,’ Naim answered without thinking.

  The officer looked at him as if he had doubts about the statement. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter. You will do guard duty on the enemy wounded.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The wards of wounded prisoners of war were in a small church building. On the second day of his new assignment, Naim went down a corridor and stopped dead
; it was as if the earth had gripped his feet. So far he hadn’t looked at the wounded with any interest. To him they were like every other wounded man he had earlier seen in his own sick bed – except that these were the enemy. Bloodless and disfigured, they were mostly white and hence strangers to him. That day he first glanced at one who had a face swollen to the size of a large watermelon, his features lost in the distended, fluid-filled flesh. As he turned his face away, Naim caught sight of another, lying still, with his head propped up on a rolled-up piece of cloth that served as a pillow. Naim turned pale and quickly retraced his steps. It’s him, he said to himself. I saw his face. He turned towards me for a second before he fell. His bayonet was inches away from the captain’s ribs when I pushed mine into his side. He had on his face the grimace of pain as he looked at me. How can I forget his face, the imprint of his twisted face on my brain, the face of the first man I drew blood from under my eyes, near enough to touch him and smell his sour blood? Why the hell did he not die and disappear into the earth? He took a bullet from the captain too. Ya khudaya, how hard these bastards are!

  Naim stayed away from that part of the ward for the rest of the day. The next day he tried to steady himself and passed by the sick man, who was looking straight ahead. Will he recognize me? he thought. Actually I have only exposed my profile to him, whereas he saw me from the front earlier in the grass. Is my face fixed in his eyes? I once heard a story that a police investigator looked into the open eyes of a dead man and saw the image of the man who had killed him. I don’t really believe that story. Anyway, this man is not dead. But that is the whole problem. He is alive … On the third day, the foolishness of the situation dawned on him – that he, Naim, was now this man’s master and had no need to fear him; that he held the weapon and the man was his prisoner and powerless. He looked the man straight in the face and passed on. The man, yellow-skinned, sunken-cheeked and heavily bandaged around the chest, looked back without a glimmer of recognition in his eyes. It’s all right, thought Naim, we are completely different in appearance from these people and probably look all the same to them. He can never pick me out.

  Satisfying himself thus, Naim went about his guard duties, gradually losing his self-consciousness until a couple of days later when he was brought to a halt again: he imagined that the man had smiled at him. Without stopping, he managed a wan smile back. On his next round the man spoke to him. In a heavy, thick voice, he said, ‘Officer.’ Naim stopped near him. The man knew few English words but made himself understood.