The Weary Generations

by Abdullah Hussein

  He had asked Azra to find a stonemason. Azra got one through the gardener. Roshan Agha interviewed him and, having satisfied himself about the workman’s skill, engaged him. He was asked to bring back two things the following day: a large marble slab and a wooden board of equal size. The man returned the next day with a donkey cart on which were loaded the two required items. Roshan Agha ordered the marble to be stood against the wall in a corner of his room, and the wooden plank to be brought to him where he lay in bed. After receiving detailed instructions from the sick man, the stonemason sat on the floor and wrote the words ‘ROSHAN MAHAL’ on the wood. It didn’t come out at all right, so he was asked to change the script. He changed it. Roshan Agha was not satisfied. The workman altered the script yet again. Roshan Agha shook his head and told him to go away and return the next morning. This went on for almost two weeks. The stonemason would continuously change the shape of the words and his master would reject it on one account or another. Despite the fact that the man, hardly educated enough in the first place to write more than a few words, ran out of scripts that he knew and then some more, he persevered because Roshan Agha had about forty old silver rupees in the pocket of his gown of which one, a fortune to the poor man, he tossed to the mason every third day. Several times, after examining the writing on the wooden board, Azra had said, ‘That’s it, Papa, exactly as it was on Roshan Mahal.’ Each time Roshan Agha would shake his head. The curvature of one letter, the line of another, the look of the whole word or the balance of the two wasn’t quite right; it wouldn’t do. The daily toil of the stonemason would go on. After a fortnight of this activity, still reluctantly, tilting his head this way and that to view the script from many angles, the old man brought himself to approve the final lettering and gave the mason the go-ahead to etch it into the marble in indelible colours. Another week, and the marble slab was ready. It stood against the wall in Roshan Agha’s room, the stonemason on orders to be ready to report at short notice, while the Agha waited for the ordinance to be issued. All five members of the family were thus in a state of continuous alert, so to speak: Pervez for his promotion to the Federal Secretariat, Naheed for the claim on the estate to come through, Imran for the date of the competitive examination to be announced, and Azra for an imaginary face to appear out of the air and restore her memory in all its detail.

  Roshan Agha ran out of time; his kidneys began to give out. Fighting for his life, he still asked Pervez every single day about the ordinance.

  ‘There is a way,’ Azra said to Pervez one day.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Tell Papa that the ordinance has been issued.’

  ‘What, just like that? What if he insists on putting up the bloody sign straight away?’

  ‘Put it up so that he can see it once. He hardly ever goes out.’

  ‘Don’t bet on it, he might sit there every day looking at it.’

  ‘Look, Pervez, it will ease his days. We ask the mason to stick it up temporarily. By the time someone from the government comes round, we can take it down. Who cares about these things anyway?’

  ‘It is a question of my job, Azra,’ Pervez said doubtfully.

  In the event, things were made easy all round. A few hours after Roshan Agha heard the news from a reluctant Pervez and gave the order for the slab to be put up first thing in the morning, he sank into a coma. He was moved to a hospital, where he died three days later without regaining consciousness. His other wish was to be buried within the perimeter of the house; this was granted to him. Instead of the common graveyard, he was interred in the grounds of ‘Rai Manzil’. There were no postal or telephone contacts with India, so Pervez telephoned a few families he knew of who had migrated to Pakistan. Their letters of condolence, along with their regrets at not being able to participate in the funeral, arrived a few days later. The mourners included the remaining four members of the family plus three of Pervez’s colleagues. Three house servants made up the rear of the namaz janaza.

  Having no one to look after any more and nothing to take with him, not even the mule and the cart, Ali ran on through fields and forests, making it to the Wagah border. From there he headed for the Lahore railway station. Both times that he had been in the city, once for two days and the second time for nearly three years, he had found his friend Hasan at the tea stall. This time Hasan was nowhere to be seen. Lost in a crowd of thousands of refugees fighting to get into or on top of the trains leaving for India and others arriving in trains from the other side, Ali’s legs gave way beneath him. He slumped against the green-painted iron railings of the station platform and closed his eyes. He had no desire in his heart – not even for a morsel of food if he could get it down to his appetite-dead stomach – stronger than the desire to sleep. Here, finally, there was no one after him to take his life or his possessions; his life, good enough only to take revenge on across the border, was worth even less on this side either to him or to other Muslims, and he had on him no more than a shirt, torn in many places, and an equally ragged shalwar. He had lost his shoes. In these unusual times, what had been a fatal threat to him on the other side proved to be his greatest asset on this: his name, and his genitals. Some time after he collapsed into sleep, he was woken by a kick on his shins. He opened his eyes to see a group of men and boys, some as young as ten, armed with swords and long knives.

  ‘Who are you?’ one asked him.

  ‘Refugee.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘Hindustan.’

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Ali.’

  One of them cut the string of his shalwar with a knife. Lowering the garment, they saw that he was circumcised.

  ‘Musalman,’ they said, a hint of disappointment in their voices.

  They turned their attention to a newly arrived train from the north full of refugees going to India. A mob attacked the train. Ali saw a boy, hardly sixteen, shoot a crude home-made pistol into the face of a child who was looking out of the carriage window. The split-second-disfigured face of the child disappeared back into the compartment without a sound. A very fat woman came running awkwardly up the platform and suddenly came to a halt, face to face with the group of men that had questioned Ali. They raised their swords. The woman lifted the front of her muslin kurta, baring two enormous breasts that hung down to her navel. She put her hands underneath them and lifted them up, pushing the swollen, fleshy teats into the men’s faces.

  ‘Look, look at them,’ she wept. ‘I am your mother, don’t kill me –’ Feeling his empty guts rising to his throat, Ali turned his face to the railing with a groan, soon sinking into a deep sleep once again. When he next awoke somebody had his shoulders in their hands and was shaking them. It was a woman.

  ‘You have been lying here for two days,’ she was saying to him. ‘You want to be dead?’

  Ali had barely enough energy to open his eyes. He couldn’t move.

  ‘Come on,’ the woman said, ‘can you stand up? You can’t even speak, you wretched man, you are half dead already. Who told you to sleep here? Come, put your arms round my shoulders, come, oh, you dead body, make an effort. Yeees – like this, stand, stand up, up –’

  The woman walked him out of the station. Ali slumped again. The woman took nearly half an hour to drag-walk him to her hut at the edge of a sprawling refugee camp two hundred yards from the station. Inside the hut, she dropped him to the floor, herself out of breath. She warmed up some milk in a dented pan, black with soot on the outside, and put the milk to Ali’s mouth in a cup.

  ‘Open your mouth,’ she said to him, ‘it’s only milk, not poison, it’ll put some life into you. Sit up. Ohhh –’ She put the cup of milk on the floor and dragged Ali up by the armpits to sit him against the wall. ‘Now, open your mouth, here, that’s it, drink it up, swallow it …’

  Ali tried to swallow the mouthful of milk and immediately threw up. The woman cleaned up the front of his shirt with a corner of her dopatta and put the cup to his lips again.

  ‘D
on’t worry, just get it down – swallow.’ She put her hand under Ali’s shirt and passed it gently over his stomach. ‘Your belly is sticking to your back, I can feel your spine from the front, no wonder you can’t swallow anything. Drink, don’t worry about throwing up, drink.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Ali said his first words.

  ‘I am not surprised,’ the woman said, laughing lightly. ‘At least you can speak. I saw you at Ambala station. You had an old man with you and two bundles of things. I was in the train. You tried but couldn’t get on the train. Nobody could, we were already dying inside with everybody on top of us. When I saw you here at first I thought you were dead. There are so many dead lying around. The second time I was there today you had turned over in your sleep and I recognized you. I bent down and saw that you were breathing. I go to the station every day to look for my son. We were together but got separated when the train was attacked at Amritsar. I know he is alive. He is only six, but he is clever. I will find him one day. See, you can swallow if you really try, you have half a cup of milk inside you. You will be all right. Now you can go back to sleep. Here, lie yourself down on this quilt, it’s soft, give your bones a rest.’

  The woman tended to Ali in her hut, gradually getting solid food down his throat over several days. The second time Ali opened his mouth it was to answer the woman’s question about his name.

  ‘Ali,’ he said.

  ‘My name is Bano,’ she said.

  By the fourth day Ali could sit up on his own, and on the seventh he walked.

  ‘What do you do?’ was the next thing he asked.

  ‘Clean houses. What did you do in your home over there?’

  ‘Worked with electricity.’

  ‘Worked with electricity? What’s that?’

  ‘I mend electricity.’

  The woman laughed out loud.

  ‘Why do you laugh?’ Ali asked her.

  ‘I have never seen electricity,’ she said.

  ‘You clean houses, have they no electricity?’

  ‘They have. But I can’t touch it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Not allowed to.’

  ‘I can get work,’ Ali said suddenly.

  ‘What work?’

  ‘Electricity work.’

  ‘For money?’

  ‘I will get money for it. I did it here before.’

  ‘Here? When?’

  ‘Some years ago.’

  ‘You know this city?’

  ‘Yes. All of it.’

  ‘And me a stranger here bringing you home from the station!’ Bano said, her eyes mockingly wide. ‘I don’t believe it!’

  For the first time in weeks, Ali laughed.

  ‘You are not strong enough,’ Bano said to him. ‘Wait some more. You can give me money when you earn it from – electricity?’ She laughed again.

  By the time a fortnight had gone by, Ali walked out of the hut. He returned after a few minutes and lay down on top of his quilt on the floor. Still weak in his legs, he also lacked the confidence to venture far on his own, although he knew all the streets and alleys of the city.

  ‘If you get me some clothes,’ he said to Bano, ‘I can go out to the city.’

  ‘I will get you clothes,’ she said, a slight alarm in her voice, ‘but stay here, get some food into you first.’

  ‘And shoes,’ Ali said.

  ‘Yes, shoes. I will try.’

  Dressed in a clean shalwar-kameez and shoes a size too big that Bano got him from the owners of houses she cleaned, day by day Ali went further and further into town, finally, by the end of the month, reaching the shop where he last worked. The Hindu owner-electrician had fled and in his place was a white-haired man, fiddling with a switchboard.

  ‘Are you a refugee?’ he asked Ali.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘Everywhere,’ Ali said, laughing a little. ‘My village was near Rani Pur.’

  ‘I am from Jalandhar. Sit down. Here.’ The man handed Ali the wooden board with screwed-on switches and sockets and wires hanging out of it. ‘Let’s see what you can do.’

  Twenty minutes later, Ali handed the board back to the man.

  ‘All the men who knew anything here were Hindus. Can’t find good men any more.’ The white-haired electrician tossed Ali an eight-anna piece and told him to start coming to work at his shop the following day.

  Back in the hut, Ali gave the silver piece to a wonder-struck Bano. ‘Eight annas? For only three hours? What did you do?’

  ‘Only half an hour. This is just something so that I go to work every day. I will get ten rupees a month.’

  ‘God help me.’ Bano put her hand to her mouth. ‘I get a rupee a month from each house and it takes me a whole day to do three houses.’

  ‘You get clothes and shoes too,’ Ali said, laughing.

  ‘Only sometimes, for myself, an old shalwar-kameez or something. This was the first time I asked for a man’s clothes and the begum asked me if I’d got myself a man. I told her no, they are for a poor refugee boy. There is a sick old man in the house, mad too, I think he will die soon. They gave me his clothes and shoes.’

  ‘They are nice clothes.’ Ali said. ‘You never wear clean clothes.’

  ‘My work is with dust and muck. What do I want to wear clean clothes for?’

  ‘You can wear them when you come home.’

  ‘Why bother for such a short time? It’s dark here anyway. None of your electricity here, now or ever.’

  ‘When I get my money I will give you more than you earn from cleaning. Then you can stop work.’

  ‘No. I would die of not working. I would die of remembering my son all the time.’

  For the first time in Ali’s presence, Bano began to cry. Ali took her dopatta in his hand and wiped away her tears.

  ‘He will come,’ he said to her. ‘I am sure he will come. As you say, he is clever. Where is his father?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Bano said. ‘He went away after a while.’

  ‘Where was your home?’

  ‘Nowhere, although we lived in a village in Bihar when I was small.’

  There was silence in the hut for a few minutes. ‘Tell me more,’ then Ali said to her.

  ‘What is there to tell?’

  ‘Tell me how you lived.’

  ‘My mother and father died when I was young. My brother and I lived in other people’s houses. After some time Madan, he was my brother, ran away. I was ten, old enough to start working in houses, all cleaning work, we were cleaning people, not allowed to touch any other thing. My brother returned one day and took me away with him. He had fallen in with some wild people. They were outlaws, mixed up with dangerous things. We wandered from place to place. Many new people came to stay with us and then went. One time my brother went out and did not return. It was like that with those people. They were looking for death. I ran away from there. I did not like cleaning homes so I got work in shops and factories, still cleaning work, but at least they were shops and factories and not homes full of women and children. There I met Kamal. He was half owner of a shop. I liked him. He said he would marry me if I became a Muslim. I didn’t know about these things. He only asked me to repeat some holy verses after him and changed my name to Bano. After my son was born my husband took up with another woman and went away. I wasn’t angry with him. But I knew I had made a great mistake. Not by marrying him but changing my religion. If I hadn’t done that I wouldn’t be a refugee today. But I am not angry with him or me. I made a mistake for love.’

  ‘You don’t like cleaning homes?’

  ‘No. I am doing it because there is no other work here. But I keep looking. One day I will get work in a shop or a factory, in a big shop or a big factory. I can do hard work.’

  ‘When I start getting money from my job,’ Ali said, ‘I will give you all of it.’

  ‘You don’t have to. I will get my own work in a big place.’

  It was late at night. The last of the monsoo
n clouds were hovering above the earth, thundering in the distance. With clean clothes on him and a half rupee that he had earned and given to Bano, Ali’s heart was big.

  ‘Your clothes are dirty,’ he said to her. ‘Go and change them.’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Yes. Go on.’

  Bano got up and went a few feet to the other wall of the hut where her bundle of clothes lay. She pulled out a shalwar-kameez from the bundle. Turning her back to Ali, she quickly took off her kurta and shalwar and put on the thin white silken suit. But Ali had had a glimpse of the straight body of a woman who was perhaps ten years older than him but who had a sinewy, arched back and slim hips with not an ounce of fat on them, moulded by a lifetime’s toil as though cut from black stone. She came back to sit by him.

  ‘Is it all right now?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ali said, looking at her with unblinking eyes. She looked back.

  ‘You should eat more if you want to go to work every day,’ she said to him.

  ‘I will,’ he said.

  The flame on the wick of the lantern began to flicker, indicating the last of the oil. Bano reached out to blow it out. She did not go to her side of the hut but lay down beside Ali on the soft quilt on the ground.

  ‘You can keep your money,’ she said to him in the dark, ‘but don’t go away after a while.’