‘So you advise me to use religion like some kind of pill?’
‘That, my dear man, is exactly what I call negative attitude.’
‘Don’t you think I am a bit old to turn myself to this kind of thing at this stage?’
‘You are never, never too old to become a believer.’
‘Can I get back all that I have lost?’
‘No one can. But you can start a new life. The past doesn’t exist if you are a believer. There is only the future – a new future.’
When Dr Ansari left, Naim kept thinking about this – although he did smile at the doctor’s passionate phrase, ‘a new future’. The doctor’s speeches sparked off trains of thought, but his vehemence had the opposite effect on Naim. The renewal not of life but a hollowed-out memory cast a shadow over his brow. ‘What has belief in God or religion or whatever got to do with me, my everyday life, with me and Azra, she who picks up my arm and leg and exercises them but is lost for words, except the renewed concern she shows in her every movement? Who is she doing it for? For me or for herself? Why is it always like this between me and her, passion flaring with blinding light and then dying quickly, like a soft, hollow driftwood fire? Belief! What place does it have in lives that have gone wrong? All she ever says now is “when”, “when I get better”, “when I will walk into the world”, into life again, when, when – the future, the coming into new life. What about the dead, what shall we say about them? Having made a compromise with death once and for all, why should we make any other? Belief! What has it got to do with love?’
Yet slowly, over months and years and without taking the good doctor’s advice other than by exercising his muscles, Naim entered the physical world once again. Gradually the unfeeling flesh moved, dripping strength into the joints, and one day he stood up and walked. As he tread the floor, hobbling a step at a time on crutches, and later, leaning heavily on Azra, learning to pace the room and then the balcony outside it, later still shifting his weight from Azra’s shoulder to a strong walking stick, he felt as if he had been born again. Born again or not, he had none the less acquired an altered vision of the world in which he had come to accept, with diminished resentment, his place in the house of a man he had disliked and dependence on a woman who, he thought, had once loved him.
It was a hot evening as, supported on the right-hand side by his stick and held lightly on the left by Azra, he came descending step by single step down the staircase and on to the long veranda, then on to the lawn for his prescribed daily walk. ‘Can’t we have a room downstairs?’ he asked.
‘I don’t want to ask for it,’ Azra replied. ‘Besides, Dr Ansari said climbing the stairs is good for you.’
‘Roshan Agha has offered you a whole suite of rooms on the ground floor.’
Azra looked up sharply. ‘Who told you?’
‘Pervez.’
‘When?’
‘He came up to see me a few days back.’
‘Oh, so he is trying to be nice to you, is he?’ Azra said, looking through the corner of her eyes to the far side of the lawn where Pervez, his wife, their friend Khalid and Khalid’s wife sat around a table playing cards.
‘He has visited me a few times,’ Naim said.
‘You never mentioned it to me before.’
‘Didn’t think about it. Why?’
‘Oh …’ Azra shivered as with revulsion, ‘he’s so two-faced. And that woman, his wife, cold fish.’
‘Aren’t you being a bit harsh on them?’ Naim said to her.
‘Naim,’ she said, a look of shock on her face, ‘how can you say that? You know he hasn’t spoken to me for years. And you know quite well why. He has no right to see you behind my back.’
Sudden black clouds began crowding the sky and gusts of wind shook the trees in the garden. The cards flew off Pervez’s table and the two men ran to pick them up from the grass. The women at their table laughed. Naim looked towards them and lifted his walking stick to answer their hands waving to him in greeting. Azra turned her back on them and started back to the house.
‘Are we going back already?’ Naim asked her as she led him on to the veranda.
‘I think it is going to rain,’ Azra replied, hurrying him away.
Darkness quickly fell. Laboriously climbing the steps, Naim was out of his breath by the time he reached his room and dropped himself on his bed.
‘I need to do something,’ he said after a while.
‘What?’
‘Something. Anything. I am fed up with having nothing to do.’
‘You are not strong enough yet,’ Azra said to him.
‘I will never be strong enough if I don’t do something.’
‘You want to go back to Roshan Pur?’ Azra asked. ‘We can go, if you want. You don’t need much medication now, just exercise.’
Head bowed, Naim sat on the bed for a few moments. Then he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, in a faint but definite voice, ‘I am all right here.’
Amazed, Azra went and sat by him at the edge of the bed. ‘You want me to talk to Roshan Agha?’
Naim nodded silently.
Azra, now near bewilderment, made as if she was going to bury her face in his chest but stopped short, looking closely at his face. ‘You never go to see Papa,’ she said questioningly. ‘He is not well.’
‘I will,’ said Naim, his face beginning to contort. ‘I will go along with whatever he says.’
Azra, still unable to contain her astonishment, got up and started, with brief, nervous strokes of a feather-duster, to clean the little glass, copper, bronze and gold-plated ornaments, statuettes and replicas of birds and buildings that lined the mantelpiece. For the first time she had heard her husband speak in a way that signified a decline in his challenge to her world. Strangely, it upset her. She looked at the proud, handsome head of Naim bowed low and felt as if he had finally withdrawn from her the small, defiant pride that she had won from her union with him.
‘Why don’t you let the servants dust the room?’ Naim asked her.
‘I will not allow them in here. Don’t you see how they look at you? They all pity you. And me. Do you think I get pleasure out of having nothing to do with Pervez or his wife? But I hate them for the way they treat you.’
‘They treat me all right, I think.’
‘Yes, politely, civilly, the way we were taught to behave with – with – never mind, you can’t see it, but I can. You were not brought up like we were …’ Even as the words left her mouth, she was startled by the sound of them. She froze, her hand holding the feather-duster, looking at Naim with unblinking eyes and expecting the old anger to rise in him. Instead Naim raised his head as if it were a heavy object.
‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘I have spoiled your relations with your own family.’
His words broke the spell. An unaccountable rage rose up in Azra. ‘You couldn’t spoil them if you tried,’ she shouted at him. ‘I have done that myself.’
Then just as quickly she fell silent. She dropped the feather-duster to the floor, went round and sat down on the other side of the bed, covered her face with her hands and began, as if mourning a lost treasure, silently to weep.
CHAPTER 27
TIRED OF WAITING for promotion, Ali moved two hundred miles north to a newly built cement factory. On the basis of his years of experience and a successful test, he got a job as an electrician. His new job earned him more money plus other amenities such as a small kitchen and a latrine attached to his one-room living ‘quarter’. These facilities gave little comfort to Aisha, however, for whom the distances proved too great to bridge. From the cloth mill she had been able go to her nearby village to visit her mother whenever she felt like it. The journey from the cement factory was possible only once a year, if that. The unfathomable disease which was the withering of her soul drove her to bed, where she spent most of the day and night, eventually losing all desire to eat. In the end she became virtually bed-ridden.
With her appetite Ali’s also disapp
eared. For him work in the factory offered only the prize of ‘promotion’, and he did his job more or less competently by habit alone. His day began like this: he rose early to make tea, gave a cupful to Aisha and had one for himself, then went to the factory. In the beginning he used to take with him a piece of left-over roti which he ate with a cup of tea in the middle of the day. As he lost his hunger, he began getting through the day on just the one cup of tea from the canteen, until he went home and cooked a roti. He could never get the hang of swinging the dough ball between the palms of hands to make real chapattis, an art that belonged properly only to women who learned it in childhood. As a result he made a thick roti, which was just as well as the two of them needed no more than one. He boiled vegetables on alternate days and ate them with the roti, using a cup of milk instead on the other days. After he had finished three-quarters of the roti, he put the rest of it by Aisha’s side. She took a morsel from it and complained of stomach ache and nausea. Ever since Ali stopped taking a roti to the factory for his midday meal, Aisha had insisted that he break up whatever was left into small pieces and throw them outside the house for the sparrows to eat in the morning. She believed that the birds, and the little sparrows especially, would bless her and God would make her well again. It didn’t work, nor did the medicine that the ‘doctor’, actually only a compounder, who visited her once a week, this being another of the amenities that came with Ali’s job, gave her to take twice a day. No matter how tired Ali was at the end of the day or how late he was getting to go to work in the morning or how much resistance Aisha put up to the taking of the medicine, he administered it to her first thing in the morning and again upon arrival home from work before he started anything else. Aisha wasted away in her cot until she became almost invisible under the sheets. Ali endured; he lost all the fat on his body but the grain and milk and greens that he forced himself to eat at the end of the day prevented his hunger from eating into his muscle.
He had one friend at work, a young labourer named Salim who lived with his mother in a cardboard hut they had erected some distance from the factory. The boy had attached himself to Ali in the hope of learning the trade from him if and when the chance arose in the factory for him to become electrician’s mate. Salim brought a roti with him every day, tied up in a piece of cloth, which he ate at noon with wild berries and other such fruit as he could pick off bushes and trees on his way to work. Quite often he offered Ali a piece of bread or a few berries which Ali sometimes took and nibbled at. Salim never took his leftovers, whether roti or berries, back home with him but offered them to whoever was around, and if there were no takers he fed them to the factory dogs and cats, before shaking the crumbs off the dirt- and fat-soaked piece of cloth and tying it tightly round his head. Afterwards he would break into a simple song till the half-hour break was over and it was time to return to work. Salim’s hopes for a step up in the world came and went during a brief labour strike that occurred in the factory.
Everybody knew that Ali was the one man in the whole works who could live on next to nothing and yet perform his duties. For this reason they gave him the title of ‘Saeen’, meaning in simple terms, Man of God, although Ali had never had any reason to be close to God, much less understand it. But there was one quality that had all the workers fix their sights on him as a possible leading player in what was going to come about. It was this: two years into Ali’s work in the cement factory a labour union had been formed which, with the help of outside agents, had decided to strike in favour of their demands for better wages and facilities. The agents, some of them political workers of the Congress Party, had advised the labour force to go for a hunger strike as they did not think a simple walk-out would achieve much. They solicited Ali’s agreement.
‘Saeen, with you sitting on a hunger strike we can get what we want in two days, at the most three. What do you say?’
Ali stayed silent, saying neither yes nor no; he simply didn’t feel involved in the affair.
‘Saeen, Saeen, no harm will come to you, no harm at all, we know that …’ they pleaded.
They did not get a nod from Ali. But they had already assumed that when the time came the ‘silent Saeen’ would join them.
The day arrived. The managers were well informed about the strike and were joined by a young man from Delhi, the son of one of the three brothers who owned the factory, for the occasion. In addition they had arranged for a police presence. About a dozen constables, carrying no firearms but simple lathis, led by a head constable from the local police station walked around the premises, going in and out of the main gate and generally keeping an eye on things. The workers of the four o’clock shift left their places without being relieved of their duties by the men on the next shift, who had in turn been stopped outside the gate by the leaders of the strike. They had all gathered outside the main gate, raising slogans against the Management. Ali went up to the gate and stopped. The workers outside called out to him.
‘Saeen, come on out, your shift is finished. Run, Saeen, run, don’t worry, there will be no hunger strike, we will win anyway.’
Ali did not run. Nor did he go with the foreman who had come up behind him to ask him, politely, to come back to the millhouse. Just before the police, gauging the situation, shut the gate and locked it from inside, young Salim broke away from the crowd of strikers and ran back into the factory. He stood by Ali’s side, looking up at him. Half of the constables were outside the gate, keeping order but not otherwise interfering with the men. The rest of the police were within the boundary of the factory. Ali stood a few feet inside the locked gate, listening to an outside leader, a political activist lawyer from the nearby town, make a speech to the strikers.
‘Brothers, labourers, the time has come for you to offer a sacrifice for the sake of just rewards in return for the labour you give. Until today, you have given your sweat. Today you are required to give blood. Hundreds of labourers and hundreds of donkeys have together spilled their sweat on this earth to raise these great factories, and the owners think there is no difference between you and the donkeys. But no. Can a donkey push dry stone into a crusher at one end and draw cement from the other? No, brothers, men do that, and you are men, not donkeys. And who buys the cement that you make? Not you. In your villages you and your old fathers and mothers live in huts made of mud and reeds while the cement goes to build great houses in big cities. Until today you have toiled for your masters’ bellies. Today you are asking for the rights of your own bellies …’
At this point the crowd, getting restless, began chanting slogans. They started off simply with shouted phrases of ‘We want bread’ and ‘Money to buy meat’ which gradually became more complex as ‘Long Live Inqalab’, finally sloping off to the simplest yet emotion-packed religious ones as ‘Allah-o-Akbar’ and ‘Hari Krishan Maharaj Ki Jai’, which, although they had no connection with the business in hand, served to lift the workers’ spirits to a higher level and inflame their passions. Some people turned round and tried to coax Ali to scale the gate and jump over to their side. He did not seem to hear their pleas. The foreman came up again and, taking hold of his arm, led him back into the millhouse.
‘Toadies!’ a few voices taunted him and Salim from behind. Entering the millhouse with a few other men that were rounded up, Salim and Ali got separated. Ali went and sat on the plinth of the grinding mill. A short while later, Salim came in, jumping up and down.
‘Saeen, I have been looking for you.’ In the roar of the grinding mill, Salim was shouting with excitement. ‘I will be made electrician’s mate, your mate. The manager told me himself, do you know, himself!’ He sat down beside Ali.
The foremen, the engineers, the assistant managers, together with the general manager and the young son of one of the owners, were bustling in and out of different buildings – from the crusher through the grinding mills, the kiln, the boilerhouse, the workshops and the packing plant, making sure that the skeleton staff kept the plant running. ‘Keep the chimney smoking�
� was their slogan, resounding in each building through which they passed. The electrical foreman, Ali’s immediate superior, appeared at the door of the millhouse and shouted to him. The foreman’s voice got lost in the ear-splitting noise of the huge revolving mills. He then put two fingers in his mouth and blew a whistle that reached Ali’s ears. The foreman moved a hooked finger to call Ali out, leading him to the kiln platform. The three-hundred-foot-long kiln, where the pulverized mixture of limestone and clay was burnt at fourteen hundred degrees centigrade, was the heart of the factory. To make perfect clinker in the kiln was the job of the ‘burners’, men highly valued as skilled technicians. But the burners, not being supervisory staff, were out with the strikers and the kiln was being managed by the lone head burner, a man renowned for being able to look at the kiln from a hundred yards and tell the temperature inside it. Ali’s foreman left him as help with the head burner and went away. The head burner told him to go and fetch a cup of tea for him from the canteen. Good food – meat, vegetables, rice and hot rotis – was being prepared in the canteen by the head cook, who was running around with great urgency to manage several pots on the boil at the same time. Tea was constantly on the hot stove and was provided, along with as much food as anyone could eat, free of cost to those who had stayed behind. Ali got two cups of tea, one for himself and the other for the head burner. They had barely finished their tea when the whole gang of officers climbed the few steps to the kiln platform: young ‘Seth’, the general manager, engineers, assistant engineers, general foreman, everyone. They were talking about the negotiations that their representatives had been conducting with the strike leaders. The most senior technical man among them took the welder’s shade from the head burner and looked through the green glass into the blinding white heat where the slowly revolving kiln turned the pulverized powder into grape-sized round balls of incandescent clinker. Then the general manager made a brief speech.
The Weary Generations Page 33
