The Weary Generations

by Abdullah Hussein

  ‘The rascal,’ Naim said angrily, ‘I will put him right.’

  His one hand gripping the other behind his back and looking at the ground in front of his feet, Naim started pacing the room, as if in thought, while Ali finished the last of his butter-spattered roti, wiping clean the plate that had contained spinach cooked with fenugreek and green chillies.

  ‘I had thought,’ Naim said, still pacing the floor, ‘that you could help me.’

  ‘I will,’ Ali said. ‘I haven’t forgotten how to work the land.’

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ said Naim. ‘I thought different.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Among the workers. I did some thinking while I was inside. The next stage now is to wake up the labourers, all labourers, railway coolies, grain carriers, everyone who works as a casual worker on daily wages. But we can start with industrial labour. There are many of them in one place and they can be easily organized.’

  ‘Organized for what?’

  ‘More money, overtime payments, paid holidays, those things.’

  ‘I can do that,’ Ali said eagerly. ‘I have many friends. I can go every day and talk to them.’

  ‘That won’t do,’ Naim said. ‘You have to be inside with them to be effective.’

  ‘You mean,’ Ali stood up, ‘that I cannot come back?’

  Taken aback by Ali’s agitated state, Naim said to him calmly, ‘Of course you can come back. I just thought that for the time being –’

  ‘The time being? I have waited for you for years. Aisha – she has become barren. Waiting for you. We couldn’t come back here for fear –’

  ‘Don’t worry about Rawal, he will do as I tell him. He is not bad, he has looked after the land and the house –’

  ‘And your mother,’ Ali interrupted him. ‘You take his side because he is your mother’s nephew.’

  ‘Look, all right, if you do want to come back, listen –’

  But Ali wouldn’t stop. It was as if the whole vaporous mass of years of misery and fear had solidified into a weight that suddenly dropped on his heart in the face of ruined hope. ‘He is your uncle’s son. You have made him the owner of everything. I am nothing to you, not your mother’s son.’ He flung himself out through the door.

  ‘No, no, Ali,’ Naim ran after him. But Ali was already across the courtyard. At the main door, Ali stopped and turned.

  ‘And he is living in my mother’s room. My room!’ he shouted.

  ‘I will get him out of there,’ Naim called out. ‘Stop, Ali, I will get him out of the house. He is nothing –’

  Ali had cleared the threshold and was gone before Naim could finish the sentence. Standing at the outside door, looking at the receding back of his brother running away, he said, almost to himself, ‘He is nothing to me …’

  Tears streaming down his face, Ali ran on until he had no breath left in his chest. He sat down on a large stone by the roadside. He put his hands on the craggy surface of the stone to support himself. A mile outside the village, this piece of rock had always been there. Nobody knew where it came from; there was no sign of its origin, a hill or a valley, for as far as the eye could see in this soft-soil flat land; nor any clue how and by what means the heavy stone, weighing tons, had been brought there. Nobody thought about it either, for the stone had grown to be part of the earth with age and had become invisible. Everything in Ali’s mind too had become invisible. The sudden rage having subsided just as quickly as it came, his head was empty of thought. Once his breath levelled out, he got up and started walking. After he had walked for a while, passing other villages on the way, he found himself at the railway station. He sat by the railway line, full of a mass of figureless grief. A train came and he boarded a third-class compartment. He didn’t know where it was going, nor did he think about it. There was no room on the wooden bench seats, so he sat on the floor of the compartment. He did not move for hours. At times he dozed off, only to be woken, in the middle of a dream he didn’t remember, by the bustle of embarking and disembarking passengers, most of them peasants like him or small shopkeepers from villages and towns. It was a passenger train that stopped everywhere and took twenty-four hours to reach its destination. Ali had been lucky on two points: first, no ticket-checker came to look for ‘free’ travellers to demand money or throw them out, or if he came it was at a time when Ali had slipped under the nearest seat to sleep in peace for an hour or so, hidden behind and beneath a mass of bodies and left unspotted; second, he had a little money in his pocket to last him a day or two. By the time he left the train at the large and crowded station of the great city of Lahore, he had partially regained his sense of time and place and the shadow on his heart had shrunk to a dense spot, but one that was to stay heavy on his chest for the rest of his life.

  He hadn’t eaten for nearly a day and a night. He went to a tea stall and asked for a cup of tea. The stallholder, recognizing the accent of Ali’s speech, asked him, ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘Roshan Pur. It is near Rani Pur station.’

  The stallholder, a man of thirty, immediately extended a hand to Ali. ‘Shake hands then,’ he said, smiling. ‘I come from Ludhiana. I have relatives living near Rani Pur.’

  Ali shook his hand.

  ‘My name is Hasan,’ the man said. ‘What is yours?’

  ‘Ali.’

  ‘Have you come looking for work?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ali replied after a pause.

  ‘I came last year. I was lucky. After nine months labouring I got permission from the railways to sell tea from this pitch. I know this town well. There are plenty of labouring jobs here. Have you anywhere to stay? No? Any money? Don’t worry, I have a hut of my own by the river. There is only me and my wife. You can stay with me until you make your own hut. You can pay me whatever you figure is proper when you have money. If you are a hard worker you can earn enough by labouring in the markets. You see that road, if you follow it for a mile you get to the fruit and vegetable market. Lots of work there, loading, unloading for wholesalers, carrying for shopkeepers and customers. You are a young man, you will be all right here. Have another cup, no charge, save your money until you start earning.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Ali said shyly.

  ‘It is not every day that one finds someone from home,’ Hasan said. ‘So far away …’

  This was the third stroke of luck for Ali. It was, though, not to be of much use to him as events turned out. After Hasan closed up the stall late at night, the two of them walked for miles on dark, abandoned roads and paths to reach the river Ravi. The hut was made of river reeds and cardboard, with irregular planks of wood, some driftwood, tied up cleverly in places to hold the structure together. Across the opening for the door hung a dirty piece of cloth serving as a curtain for privacy. Hasan and Ali ate a simple meal of roti and daal cooked by Hasan’s wife. Ali found the husband and wife good-natured and cheerful. Afterwards, Hasan spread a thick sheet of cloth on the ground in one corner for Ali while the couple slept in the other corner by the hearth. So tired out was he that Ali felt as if he had only slept a wink before the sounds of the day awoke him. He accompanied Hasan to the railway station and from there, following his friend’s directions, took to the road.

  Still in a daze, Ali knew only where he was but not why, nor what he was going to do in that strange place and for how long. He was not going to go to the fruit and vegetable market and do a labouring job, for sure. He took some turnings, carefully making a note of them in his mind so he could remember his way back to the station. He also knew that he didn’t have to spend his own money for a day or two, little that he had, for his food and lodging were already taken care of. His belly was full from what he had had, a big roti left over from the previous night, eaten with mango achar followed by a cup of tea at the hut, and another cup at the railway station before he started off. He liked the city. It was the first time he had been in a city as large, clean and well-built as this, and the look of it helped lift his spirits a little bit. The peo
ple, men as well as women, looked healthy and strong and they talked to each other loudly in a different Punjabi. Within an hour he found himself in a densely populated area, bazaars running into narrow streets and through to other bazaars. He wondered whether it was the centre of the city. There was an abundance of food shops where very fat men sat deep-frying pakoras of cauliflower, aubergine, onion, long green chillies and potato covered in gramflour batter, grilling fat morsels of lamb marinated in yogurt, mint and coriander and spiced beef mince kebabs on open coal fires; tandoor operators cooking hot naans one after the other with their quick-clapping hands; and sweetmeat makers with huge open-mouthed pans full of jalebis floating in bubbling syrup. The look and smell of all this made Ali wish he had more money in his pocket to buy some of it. He had to console himself with the thought that it was unnecessary because he was full up. He was beginning to enjoy just walking through this big city that he had only heard of, like Dilli, Bombai and Kulkutta. He thought with some bitterness about his brother who had been to all these places and many more. But also, for the first time since he arrived here, he felt a sense of pride that he too had travelled far from home to the centre of a city.

  Walking from one street into a bazaar, he saw a change in his surroundings: the bazaar was quieter and, instead of going about their business, people were standing about, talking in low tones and looking towards the corner where the next bazaar began, running across the first. All the shopkeepers had paused in their business and were looking around with apprehension. Ali could not see anything unusual from where he stood. He walked on. As soon as he turned the corner, he was brought to a halt. About a hundred men, members of the Khaksar Movement, stood at attention, four-deep, shoulder to shoulder in straight lines, clad in their distinctive khaki uniforms and carrying clean, shining spades on their shoulders, a symbol of the movement’s armed defiance. Facing them, a short distance away, were policemen, most of them Indian constables and sergeants, but heading them were white officers. On both sides of the street, parallel to the Khaksar lines, stood a motley gathering of men, chanting muffled slogans as if they dared not shout with full throat yet wished to express their anger. The Khaksar ‘soldiers’ stood motionless and mute with their bodies erect, perfectly disciplined in the manner for which they were renowned. Ali walked up the street and stood on one side among the crowd. The stand-off between the Khaksars and the police did not last for long. A white officer advanced from the police ranks. He was in a different uniform. He had no police insignia on his lapels and was wearing a solar hat, although he carried a revolver in a black holster. To Ali he did not look like a policeman either in his bearing or in the way he barked an order.

  ‘Get back,’ he said to the massed Khaksars, pushing the air with an open hand.

  Nobody moved. The crowd on both sides of the street fell silent. The ranks of the Khaksars seemed to be made of stone with their feet embedded in the earth. The officer, a man of indeterminate years with a red face and a fine sandy moustache on his upper lip, turned redder. He unholstered the revolver and waved it in the air.

  ‘Go back,’ he shouted. ‘Go. Disperse. Go away. All of you.’

  There was a long moment in which the officer glowered at the men before him. He slowly raised his revolver. Suddenly a tall, hefty Khaksar at the head of a row of them broke ranks. He took two steps forward, raised his spade above his head and brought it down with its sharp end on the head of the officer, uttering a loud humph from deep inside his chest to back up the power of his enormous arms. The spade cut through the solar hat and the skull like a cleaver, sinking down to the eyes, and the head parted visibly on one side, an ear hanging lopsidedly under the mangled hat. The white man fell backwards, going slowly down on his feet, his hand automatically firing the revolver in the air. Soldiers appeared from behind with cocked rifles and started firing at point blank range.

  It all happened so quickly that the men at the receiving end only moved after they saw bodies falling. Then they fled. They turned back, running, and were hit in the back, or they entered side streets or dived into shops, pursued by the soldiers. Some fell without being hit and crawled under the footboards of shops. Gripped by fear, Ali leaped up the three brick steps leading to the closed door of a house and started thumping on it with both hands. The bullets flying past him pinned him to the wall. Blind with panic, he pushed and kicked at the door, thinking fast at the same time about finding another escape route. Just when he was about to give up, the door was unbolted from inside and a woman’s face appeared in the slim crack. Ali pushed the door open and threw himself inside. The woman quickly bolted the door. A woman of fading youth, she looked at the man’s face for a moment and uttered a foul oath.

  ‘Run upstairs,’ she said, ‘motherfucking pig.’

  Dark narrow steps climbed straight from the door at a steep angle. Ali ran up, stumbling, falling and scrambling halfway up in his haste. The woman followed. They emerged in a room lit dimly by the sun coming in through dirty squares of glass fitted in two small shut and bolted windows.

  ‘What do you think this is, your fucking mother’s house?’ the woman asked in anger. ‘Who are you?’

  Ali looked at her without answering.

  ‘Are you dumb? I am asking you, who are you?’

  ‘I don’t know anybody here,’ Ali blurted out.

  ‘You are right, I don’t know you either. Who are you and why have you barged in here?’

  ‘They are firing guns,’ Ali said.

  ‘You think I don’t know, you think I am deaf? You wanted to get me killed, you son of a dog?’

  ‘I am a stranger,’ Ali said. ‘I only came to this city yesterday. I didn’t know where to go.’

  ‘So you chose my door. Are you a fool?’

  ‘No,’ Ali said, now almost blubbing. ‘Forgive me.’

  The woman calmed down. ‘Sit down, now that you are here.’

  She went to the window and peered through the glass. Down in the street the shooting had stopped. The woman had a masculine roughness not just in her voice but in the way she bore herself and walked.

  ‘Why are you sitting on the floor?’ she asked Ali. ‘Get up, sit in the chair.’

  Reluctantly, Ali sat straight up in the armchair.

  ‘Why are you sitting like that?’ the woman asked with a hint of a mocking smile. ‘Lean back. Are you a peasant?’

  ‘No,’ Ali said, ‘I am an electrician.’

  She went to sit on the bed. ‘You came to this city to look for work?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This bitch city is falling down, haven’t you noticed? Only dogs will live here. Go back where you came from. Have you any money?’

  ‘N-no.’

  ‘God help me,’ the woman said. ‘No beggar comes up to my room.’

  ‘I thank you,’ Ali said awkwardly.

  ‘Oh, shut up. Have you eaten anything?’

  ‘No. I am not hungry.’

  ‘You don’t look very fat. Are you very poor?’

  ‘No – yes.’

  ‘You poor beggar, don’t even know what to say.’

  There was a loud knock on the door below. The woman ran to the window to look. By the time she hurried back, they were kicking at the door. The woman pulled Ali up by the arm and, shoving him in front of her, went to a door in the back of the room, pushing it open. There were steps leading down. They were equally dark, with a ray of light filtering in through a hairline slit in the door at the bottom of the steps. Ali fell in the dark and rolled down a few steps, hurting his leg and an elbow. The woman caught up with him. A few steps up from the bottom, she slid a plank of wood in the wall to one side, pushed Ali in the dark hole revealed behind the plank and put it back in place. She rushed back up the stairs. The black hole was not a proper hiding place but an irregular space gouged out of the thick wall, perhaps left as such during construction. Hardly able to stand in it, Ali sat down, bunched up in a corner against sharp brick ends sticking out of the surface. The soldiers, having kic
ked the bottom door down, ran up the stairs and were all around her as she got back up.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The man you let in.’

  ‘I don’t know what man you mean –’

  The policeman cut her off with a slap on the face. The others were looking around the room, under the bed, inside the almirah, snatching clothes off the pegs and flinging them to the floor.

  ‘Keep your hands off me,’ the woman shouted.

  The policeman slapped her again, twice, across the face. Then the others joined in. They punched her to the ground and kicked her. ‘Get up, slut. Stand up, cheap prostitute …’

  ‘Pigs,’ she was shouting back, ‘dogs.’

  A young white officer ran up the steps into the room. The woman spoke to him.

  ‘Are you finished killing men? Have you now started on women?’

  Paying scant attention to her or to the men beating her, the officer quickly looked around and went to the door at the back. He opened the door and went down the steps. Three policemen followed him. They descended the steps and opened the door at the bottom, looking to left and right along the back street and came back up.

  ‘I know nothing of any man,’ the woman, slumped on the floor, was whimpering under the blows. ‘I know nothing, you dirty sons of dogs.’

  The officer raised a hand to stop the men. ‘Nobody here,’ he said, and motioned them to leave. They all followed him out of the room and down into the bazaar.

  The woman lifted herself up from the floor, crying silently and pressing her hands to her sides. She went down to shut the door but found it had been kicked off its hinges. She clambered back up and after bolting the door of her room from inside she lay down on the bed, scrunched up on her side with her knees up to her chest, until her sobs stopped. Slowly, she got off the bed, her face screwed up with pain, and went down the back steps. She went all the way down to shut the bottom door and bolt it. On the way back up, she carefully removed the plank and gestured with her head for Ali to come out. Up into the room, she went back to the bed and lay on it, gathered up as before. Ali sat beside the bed on the floor.