The Weary Generations

by Abdullah Hussein

  ‘According to what they have seen?’ Naim asked with a smile.

  ‘No. Because of the kind of eyes you have.’ There was a note of sadness in his voice.

  After a few seconds, Naim said farewell.

  Niaz Beg didn’t prove as difficult as Naim had expected. ‘You have been lonely since you came back,’ he said. ‘If you want to go and see your friends in the big cities, by all means go. It will make you happy. I am not yet too old to look after everything on my own in your absence.’

  CHAPTER 12

  LYING ATOP A thin cotton-wool quilt spread on the floor in a pitch dark room, Naim said to himself, ‘It is the fortieth day.’ He put his hand beyond the edge of the quilt and felt the cold of the stone floor. ‘Forty days have passed and I have done nothing. I have merely become one of them. I haven’t had the chance even to try to do what I came here to do. Who can get through to these illiterate idiots anyway? If only Kishan Das knew these people. “You are my son,” he said to me before I left, “but first of all you are the son of Hindustan.” Ho ho! If he knew what this son is doing for Hindustan!’

  The wooden plank covering the hole in the wall that served as a passage between the two rooms of this mountain hut shifted to the side, casting a wide band of lantern light in the darkness of the room. Sheelah’s round face appeared in the space.

  ‘Ay, Wood-bound, how are you?’ she asked.

  Naim produced a grunt in reply.

  ‘Why did you not go today?’

  ‘I am not well.’

  ‘Afraid of planting the powder?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Why, even I can fix the powder under anything.’

  Naim didn’t answer. A childlike smile appeared on Sheelah’s face. ‘Do you want a cup of tea, Wood-bound?’

  ‘No.’

  She stepped in and replaced the plank to cover the hole. Darkness returned to the room. Naim sat up, wrapping his arms round his raised knees. The girl came and sat down beside him. Naim peered into her face in the dark.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ she asked, fluttering her eyelashes near his face.

  Naim stood up and went silently to the sole window in the room. This was a roughly cut small opening in the stone wall with a plank fixed in it, the holes around it filled with broken stone. He struggled with its rusted bolt for a minute.

  ‘Don’t open it,’ Sheelah said, coming to stand by him.

  ‘I need some air,’ he said.

  ‘Baba will be unhappy.’

  ‘I can’t figure out to this day whether Baba is on our side.’

  ‘He is,’ she said.

  ‘Could be an informer.’

  ‘No. Listen, Wood-bound –’

  ‘Don’t call me that. My name is Naim.’

  ‘My brother told me that this,’ she said, shyly touching his left hand, ‘is made of wood.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘In our village there was a man with only one leg and another who was mad. We called the one who was lame Lame, and the mad one Mad.’

  ‘Only idiots talk like that. We say Naim Ahmad Khan and Sheelah Rani. Say it.’

  ‘Naim Ahmad Khan and Sheelah Rani.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Now am I good?’ ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why don’t you talk to me, Naim Ahmad Khan?’

  ‘Just call me Naim.’

  ‘All right. Why don’t you talk to me?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘In many months you have spoken to me only –’ counting on her spread fingers, ‘one, two, three, four, five, six times.’

  ‘Only one month and ten days.’ ‘Do you count them?’

  ‘I do. Every day.’

  ‘Why did you come here?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You came here from many miles and you don’t know?’ ‘Five hundred miles.’

  ‘How could you count them, you didn’t come on foot.’

  ‘I read books. That is how I know. Look,’ Naim touched her face with wooden fingers, ‘this is your cheek, this your nose, these lips. I can feel them.’ He kept passing his lifeless fingers over the girl’s dark, spotless face and felt very clearly that he could in fact sense the touch of her skin, as though blood actually flowed through that piece of wood. Sheelah, stunned for a minute, looked up at him with wondering eyes. Then she laughed quietly with embarrassed pleasure and touched his left hand again, holding on to it for a second.

  ‘It is warm,’ she said. A bird of the night flew silently across the window. ‘An angel passed,’ she said, putting her hand breathlessly on Naim’s arm.

  ‘Only an owl. Or a bat.’

  ‘Don’t say that. It’s a sin. I heard the sound of its wings. When it passes good things come to you.’

  ‘Are you a good thing that has come to me?’

  She was quiet for a moment. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘So now it is you who don’t know why you have come, see?’

  ‘I know why you have come,’ she said, laughing. ‘You have come to do nothing but eat our food for free.’

  ‘I have gone out with them and done my share,’ Naim said.

  ‘Only three times.’

  ‘Were you counting?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  She had a strange face. On dark skin, her lips were naturally red. She was now looking out of the window at the distant hills where wooden houses, built one above the other like steps to an enormous palace, glimmered in the half-dark of a starry night.

  ‘I had a village once,’ she said.

  ‘I know. Madan told me.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When he and I went for the line the first time.’

  ‘What else did he tell you?’

  ‘Many secrets.’

  ‘What, what?’

  ‘That you used to run around.’ Naim laughed.

  ‘The cholera spread. First my father died, then my mother. Madan ran away. I was left alone with my aunt. Then Madan came back.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘He had ideas in his head. He said, let’s go. After two years we finished up here.’

  ‘Did you have a boy as friend in your village?’ Naim asked with a smile that she couldn’t see.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Madan said that you did.’

  ‘No, no,’ she said fiercely.

  They were quiet for a while, standing side by side, their bodies touching, looking out the window.

  ‘Will you go with them tomorrow?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I am not going again, Naim thought, enough blood on my hands, faces of the dead still fixed in my eyes.

  ‘Will you go back then?’ Sheelah asked.

  ‘Maybe.’ ‘Don’t go.’

  Naim turned to look at her red lips glistening in the dark of the room.

  ‘They will be coming back soon,’ she said. ‘I’ll go now.’

  But she made no move to go.

  ‘Where do you sleep?’ Naim asked her.

  ‘By the door.’

  ‘Behind the wood?’

  ‘Yes, yes. It’s months and months and you don’t know?’

  ‘It’s not months and months, it’s less, why don’t you listen?’

  ‘You snore. Sometimes I can’t sleep for the noise you make. I feel like pushing the wood on top of you.’

  Soon the three men returned to the hut. One of them started trying to light the already half-ashen twigs in the hearth. The others took off their damp clothes.

  ‘How did you get wet?’ Naim asked.

  ‘We dived in the lake for fun,’ Bannerji said.

  ‘It’s a clear sky,’ Naim said.

  ‘We weren’t sitting at home like you. It’s raining on the other side of the hill.’

  ‘Is the powder wet?’ asked Iqbal, spreading his shirt near the smoking twigs.

  ‘It was under my vest on my belly,’ Bannerji replied.

  ‘Keep it away from the fire.’

  Banne
rji swore. ‘How many times do you have to tell me?’

  Iqbal took out the desi handgun from his waist and hung it by a nail on the wall. ‘Got a cigarette on you?’ he asked Madan.

  ‘No.’

  Iqbal shrugged and sat down, leaning his back against the wall. He closed his eyes. The lantern cast deep shadows on his skin-and-bone face, and he looked completely spent. Naim walked over and offered him a cigarette. Iqbal lit the cigarette and asked, ‘How are you feeling now?’

  ‘Better,’ answered Naim.

  ‘What did you do all day?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘Just thinking.’

  ‘Can you think?’ Bannerji asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Naim said, looking at him menacingly.

  ‘Better stop thinking. I have.’

  ‘Just as well,’ Madan said. ‘Must have been a hard job for you.’

  ‘Well, I am happy,’ Bannerji said, dragging up his two blankets nearer to him.

  ‘Can’t stay away from his bed for a minute,’ Iqbal said, screwing up his nose. ‘Like a woman.’

  ‘Can’t even open the fucking window. What do you expect?’

  Naim leaned towards him. ‘Madhukar Bannerji, are you really happy?’

  ‘Yes. Why are you looking so dreadful?’ Bannerji said, tossing his half-alight cigarette into the fire. ‘Bloody wet!’

  ‘Should have saved your cigarettes instead of the powder,’ Naim said.

  ‘You are right, I should have.’

  ‘Now smoke the powder.’

  Sheelah came in carrying a pan of water. She put it down on top of the fire in the stone hearth.

  ‘Is Baba giving us something to eat?’ Madan asked her.

  ‘Don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Sheelo,’ Madan said to her mildly, ‘I am starving.’

  ‘I think he is cooking something.’

  Sheelah stood there with hands on her hips. Naim thought that her mouth and nose had a close resemblance to her brother’s. The old man entered from the outer room holding a stone cooking pot full of thick broth.

  ‘Potatoes, boys, potatoes,’ he announced and put the pot down on the ground.

  The pot was black on the outside from wood smoke; inside it were potatoes broken and boiled in water, red with chillies, giving off an appetizing smell, a thin steam curling upwards from the surface.

  ‘And bread?’ two men asked at the same time.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ The old man produced from the pocket of his long, military-style old coat a packet of brittle maize rotis. After handing them the food the old man sat down to smoke his small, portable hukka, closing his eyes the better to enjoy the feeling as he pulled at it. Everyone ate hungrily and in silence, their jawbones working prominently in the lantern light, the only sounds in the room being those of their noisy chewing and the hissing of burning pinewood.

  ‘Leave some for the girl,’ the old man barked without opening his eyes.

  The men frowned at him. But they stopped eating, leaving a little potato at the bottom of the pot and one roti on the cloth spread on the ground. They wiped their fingers with the cloth, drank cups of water and gathered round the fire.

  ‘What happened today?’ Naim asked Iqbal.

  Iqbal turned away to put on his shirt.

  ‘Done the forest office?’ Naim asked again.

  ‘Un-hunh,’ grunted Iqbal.

  ‘Can’t you speak?’

  ‘No,’ answered Bannerji instead.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Just the chowkidar.’

  ‘The chowkidar? You killed the chowkidar?’

  ‘No. He will survive. We made a mistake.’

  ‘Why the chowkidar?’

  ‘I said a mistake was made, it all went wrong,’ Bannerji said harshly.

  Naim glowered at them, his hands trembling. He turned his face to the wall and tried to calm himself. Iqbal seemed to have gone to sleep in a sitting position by the fire, his head resting on the wall. Madan had unwrapped the strip of dirty cotton from around his old calf wound. Sheelah was washing it with warm water.

  ‘I saw the chowkidar the other day,’ Naim said in a quiet voice after a while. ‘He was a poor old peasant. There was no need.’

  Iqbal suddenly lifted his head off the wall and said angrily, ‘A mistake is a mistake. They will be made until we get it right.’ He put his head back on the wall and closed his eyes.

  ‘He was innocent, only earning his bread for the day,’ Naim said insistently. ‘You may shut your eyes, but you will see his face behind them.’

  ‘I am not seeing anybody’s face, behind the eyes or in front of them,’ Iqbal said without either opening his eyes or turning his head. ‘Why did you not come with us if you are so clever?’

  ‘I am not blaming you, only regretting injury to one who was just like us, poor and tyrannized. We are not achieving anything by attacking these people. We have to get them on our side. Numbers are important. What can we do by staying in small pockets of people, isolated and with no programme ahead of us, except to behave like beasts?’

  ‘Look,’ Madan said to Naim. He broke off, grimacing with pain from the hot brick that his sister put on the swelling on his leg.

  ‘It’s going down. Be still,’ Sheelah said to him, ‘it’s gone down quite a bit.’

  All of a sudden, Bannerji started laughing. ‘Ho ho ho! Seeing behind the eyes. Why, Balay, are you seeing – ho ho – behind the eyes? Ha ha ha – are you –?’

  Iqbal ignored him, staying still against the wall.

  Madan spoke to Naim again. ‘You say you learned things in the war. All right, did you go and talk to the enemy to get them on your side? Do you know what you are talking about? I have learned something in life as well. I will tell you what it is. I ran away from home and went to Nagpur. For six years I worked as a sweeper in a bookshop. You are not the only one who has read books, I read them too. From them I learned that in order to wake up those millions you have to knock them. Before you become a bullock to till the land and produce food, you have to become a beast. You know why? Because you are castrated.’

  ‘That is where you are wrong. We cannot win by adopting the ways of the beast, because it is not just the landowners but those who own the landowners. And they have big guns. We have only one option and that is to get a million people together and show that we can defeat them by having the population on our side.’

  ‘Listen, Naim Khan sahib, I am what you call an achhoot, given the respectable name of scheduled castes. In my village we ate with other people’s dogs. That was the schedule of our caste. You have seen a year or two of war and boast about it. In my twenty-five years every single day was a war to stay alive with respect. I remember everything. If I join your millions and offer myself for prison, my sister will live on the street and go from hand to hand.’ He poked a stiff finger in Naim’s chest. ‘You know what you should do now? You should finish your speeches and be off.’

  Iqbal sat up from the wall. He pulled out a burning stick from the fire and struck it hard on the floor. It broke into small pieces of live charcoal that flew up and dropped on the ground around it. A spark fell on Bannerji’s arm. He sprang up from the floor and started rubbing his singed flesh, hissing with pain, ‘Sss – what the devil? Sss –’

  ‘Shut up, all of you,’ Iqbal shouted, ‘I am trying to sleep.’ He pushed the red hot end of the stick close to Naim’s face. ‘And you, shut your nonsense up. You are coming with us tomorrow, no more excuses, you hear?’

  Naim got up and stepped across the gap to his room. Iqbal threw the stick into the fire, lifted up the glass of the lantern and blew it out. Naim covered the hole with the plank of wood. Darkness returned to the room. Lying on his blankets, he passed his hand over his thigh and felt the pistol in his trouser pocket. It gave him confidence.

  He awoke at a slight noise in the room. The plank had been moved aside halfway and he could see the faint glow of the dying embers in the next room.
The light was not sufficient to penetrate the pitch darkness of the rooms and he could see nothing else. He stayed under his blankets, listening to the rain falling on the window. After a while, he sat up and started crawling on all fours towards the gap, taking care not to make a sound with his wooden arm on the hard floor. He imagined himself walking like a four-legged creature, a calf, a bear or a wolf, and felt a sensation that, to his surprise, he did not find disagreeable. He poked his head through the space vacated by the plank and could just about make out the sleeping figures of the three men and hear their breathing in between the snoring of one of them. Someone tugged at his shirt, causing him to jump. Straining his eyes, sitting on his hind legs, he put out his hand to feel the face and hair of the figure sitting on his side of the plank and knew that it was Sheelah. He sat there, breathing hard. Then he took her by the arm and led her back to where he had made his bed.

  Before she lay down beside him on the thin quilt, she went and soundlessly shifted the plank back to cover up the hole in the wall. They lay in the dark for many minutes as the sound of rain outside died slowly away.

  ‘I am cold,’ Sheelah whispered.

  Naim pulled out his heavy army coat, which served as his pillow, from underneath his head and spread it over Sheelah. ‘Pull your feet in,’ he said.

  Pulled up, Sheelah’s knees dug into Naim’s side. He felt her belly harden and shiver and knew that she was laughing silently.

  ‘When did you wake up?’ he asked in a low whisper close to her ear.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘How long was I asleep?’

  ‘Some while.’

  ‘It’s way past midnight then.’

  ‘Yes. Why were you arguing with them tonight?’

  ‘Only saying some things.’

  ‘Don’t argue with them.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They are dangerous.’

  ‘I have to talk to them. That is why I came here.’

  ‘They don’t like talk. They killed a man for that.’

  ‘Who? When?’

  ‘Last year. He was sent to us, like you. From Bombay. We were in Bihar at the time. He talked to them all the while. Then Iqbal shot him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He said he was fed up with the man making speeches.’

  ‘Who was he?’ Naim asked.

  ‘Some man. I don’t know.’