The Great War

by Rakhshanda Jalil

  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 havildar. 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 sickbed — except that these were the enemy. Bloodless and disfigured, they were mostly white and hence strangers to him. The day he first glanced at one, he 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 a 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 recognise 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 thus 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. ‘Sun,’ he said, pointing to the large window just behind him, ‘all day, I burn.’

  Naim nodded and hastily withdrew. Still, he couldn’t keep himself from going to speak to the doctor in charge.

  Dr McDonald smiled sarcastically. ‘Does he think he is in a hotel?’

  ‘But, sir,’ Naim said, ‘he is badly wounded. At least we can stop the sun coming in. It is very hot in there and he is suffering.’

  ‘Suffering, hah! Can you imagine how many people he may have made to suffer?’

  ‘Very true, sir,’ Naim said, but didn’t go away.

  The doctor looked at his amputated arm and relented. ‘Don’t look to me to do anything, I can only attend to his wounds. But you are free to do what you can.’

  After a bit of looking around, Naim found a piece of tarpaulin that he hung up, with the help of another soldier on guard duty, a partly shell-shocked man who had the use of both arms, in front of the window. It stopped the sun coming in.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the prisoner several times, gratitude showing in his eyes.

  From then on, Naim stopped by the man at least once in a day to ask him how he was, to which the man always replied, ‘Thank you,’ with a smile.

  A few days later the man spoke to Naim once again. ‘I Harold. Thank you for favour.’

  ‘No favour,’ Naim said to him, ‘only my duty.’

  ‘I return favour,’ Harold said.

  ‘Thank you. But there is no need.’

  ‘I make hand.’

  ‘Hand? What hand?’

  ‘That.’ The man pointed to Naim’s empty sleeve.

  ‘This?’ Naim asked, raising his left upper arm. ‘How?’

  The man simply said, ‘Yes, yes,’ vigorously nodding his head.

  Naim came away from there saying no more than ‘thank you’. On the following days, Naim did not stop by the man; and by generally ignoring him he tried to discourage the man from speaking to him. Some days later, however, with the help of another wounded prisoner who spoke better English than Harold, Naim came to understand the prisoner’s offer: Harold and his father, coming from a long line of cabinet makers, had worked all their lives in a factory that made artificial limbs before Harold was taken into the army. All he needed, the prisoner speaking on behalf of Harold said, were some tools and a piece of wood. Throughout this conversation, Harold, with a smile on his face, kept saying ‘thank you’ and pointing to the back of his shoulders and neck, where the tiny boils that had come up on the skin from the heat of the African sun were already beginning to lose their angry red colour and were drying up. On top of his guilt, Naim felt embarrassed. Conspiring with another guard, he stopped going to Harold’s ward altogether. Days passed without Naim setting eyes on Harold. The longer he stayed away, however, the stronger the image of the man with a pathetic smile on his lips impressed itself on Naim’s mind. At the same time, as if by coincidence, the feeling of the loss of an arm became intensified inside him, obliging him in the end to give up his dignified resistance and go to the doctor once again.

  ‘It is against the rules,’ Dr Majo
r McDonald said. ‘They cannot be given even the smallest sharp instrument. They can open up their wounds, or kill themselves right off. These people are fanatics.’

  ‘I am sure he won’t do any such thing. I trust him. Sir, it is a question of my arm.’

  ‘We are setting up an artificial limb factory in India. You will get it properly done as soon as you are back there.’

  Naim persisted. ‘Sir, I think this prisoner can make a good one and quickly.’

  It went like this, back and forth, between Naim and the doctor, for a few days. Eventually, perhaps again as a compassionate gesture towards Naim, the doctor said, ‘All right. I can use my discretion in this matter, but if anything untoward happens, the responsibility will be entirely yours.’

  The doctor decided that Harold should be shifted to a vestibule near the entrance so that he could not be seen by the other prisoners, and that Naim should spend the whole time with him for the few hours a day the man was using the tools he was given. Furthermore, he decreed that the tools should be taken from him at the end of each day’s work and put away. After the job was finished, the prisoner would be shifted back to his previous place in the general ward.

  This was done. Naim procured a few carpenters’ tools and a piece of cured hardwood, of which there was plenty in those parts. He would take them all away from Harold in the afternoon and bring them back the next morning. Over the next two weeks, Naim saw that shapeless piece of wood take on the form, at Harold’s meticulous hands, of a forearm almost exactly the size of the one Naim had lost, a wrist and a hand — complete with criss-crossing veins, bits of knobbly bone sticking out in the right places, the wrinkled skin on the wrist, finger joints and fingernails — all perfectly carved with nothing more than a penknife, aside from a couple of bigger tools, which he used initially to cut the wood to the proper size. Finally, Harold asked to examine the stump-end of Naim’s arm more closely for dents and depressions so he could work out where to cut into the joining end of the wooden limb. This took the longest time and required several fittings. The only thing Harold couldn’t do was to fix the small metallic catches and hinges that would hold the attachment securely in place. For that, Naim would have to go to a factory in India.

  Naim took the wooden arm to the doctor. Although surprised to see the workmanship, the doctor said without a smile, ‘Good. Move him back to the ward.’

  Taking him from the vestibule, Harold’s independent home for over three weeks, to the ward, Naim said to him, ‘Sorry for this. And thank you.’ He took the artificial arm and put it in his trunk, safely wrapped in woolly clothing.

  Four weeks later Naim received his honourable discharge with a letter of commendation and a small pension. Before boarding ship for his voyage home, Naim paid a last call to the sick prisoners of war. When he learned that Naim was going home, Harold produced the broadest smile that anyone had so far seen on his face. Naim lingered there. There could be no conversation other than broken phrases between them. But Naim had a question on his mind that he didn’t want anyone else to interpret for him. Finally he asked it. ‘Why did you do it for an enemy?’

  Harold first answered with a pause and a shrug, as if he didn’t understand the question. Then he said, ‘I not know you enemy, only man.’

  Twelve weeks after returning to Roshan Pur, Naim was called up to Delhi by the army authorities and decorated with a Distinguished Conduct Medal. With it came an award of ten acres of land in his village, a promotion-on-retirement to Subedar and an increase in his pension.

  1 This is an extract from Abdullah Hussein’s seminal novel The Weary Generations. It has been reproduced with the permission of the publisher Harper Collins.

  She Had Said

  Chandradhar Sharma Guleri

  Our appeal to the residents of the big cities whose backs have been blistered by tongue lashings and whose ears are filled with the abuses of ekka1 drivers, is to apply the sweet balming speech of the bamboo cart drivers of Amritsar.

  On the wide streets of big cities, when an ekka driver thrashes his horse’s back with his whip, all the while insulting the horse, and also makes his intimate relations with the horse’s grandmother known, or when he pities the pedestrians for not having eyes to see as he rides over their toes and bemoans his fate, the universe and his luck, then men from his fraternity come out onto the streets and start navigating the narrow and confusing lanes with endless patience. He would shout out, ‘Save yourself, Kalsaji’, ‘Move aside, brother’, ‘Stop, brother’, ‘Let us through, Lalaji’, ‘Move aside, kiddo’, as he would wade through a crowd of white turbans, mules, ducks, sugarcane sellers, et al. Of course, no one would think of moving without hearing ji or sahab as a suffix!

  It isn’t as though the ekka drivers of big cities don’t have sharp tongues; but here they are like a stiletto that moves swiftly and smoothly.

  If an old lady were to not give way to these bamboo cart drivers, despite warnings, they would cry out: ‘Move aside, you deserve a long life… Move, you fortunate one… move aside, if you value your life, watch out!’ All of which basically means, you are fortunate and loved by your family, you have a long life ahead of you, why would you want to come under my cart? Save yourself!

  In the midst of such bamboo cart drivers, a boy and a girl met at a shop in the chowk. From the boy’s long hair and the girl’s loose-fitted clothes, it could be made out that they were both Sikh. He was there to buy some curd for his uncle’s hair and she was there to buy some badiyan2 for her kitchen. They waited while the shopkeeper was wrangling with a stranger who insisted on counting each and every papad in the pile before moving.

  ‘Where is your house?’

  ‘In Maghre; and yours?’

  ‘In Manjhe. Where do you live here?’

  ‘At Avtar Singh’s house. He’s my maternal uncle.’

  ‘Even I live with my maternal uncle. His house is in Guru Bazaar.’

  At this moment, the shopkeeper interrupted them and gave them what they had come for. The boy and the girl walked out together after making their purchases. After walking for a while, the boy asked the girl with a smile, ‘Are you engaged?’

  At this the girl frowned and said, ‘Dhatt!’3 Then she ran off. The boy stood there and watched her go.

  On the second or third day, they began to bump into each other at the vegetable seller’s shop, or at the milkman’s. This went on for a month. Twice or thrice the boy asked, ‘Are you engaged?’ and each time he got the same answer: ‘Dhatt’. Then, one day, when the boy asked her the same question again, laughingly, this time the girl replied against all expectations: ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday. Don’t you see this embroidered silk shawl?’

  The boy ran away. He headed home. On his way back, he pushed another boy into the gutter, ruined a day’s worth of a hawker’s earnings, threw a stone at a dog and poured milk all over a cauliflower vendor’s cart. He bumped into a Vaishnava woman returning from her holy bath and earned the epithet blind from her, and only then reached home.

  ‘Ram, Ram!4 What kind of war is this! My bones are stiff from sitting for days and nights in these trenches. Here, it is ten times colder than Ludhiana and on top of it, it rains and snows constantly. We’re up to our calves in mud. We can’t see the ground; after an hour or two, we hear the ear-piercing boom of an explosion as it shakes the trench, and the ground beneath us shakes for miles.’

  ‘If we can save ourselves from these bombs, only then can we fight. We had heard of the earthquake at Nagarkot, but here, such earthquakes take place at least twenty-five times a day. If ever the tip of a turban or an elbow is seen above the trench, we immediately feel the crack of a shot. We don’t know whether the wretches are hiding in the mud or in the grass.’

  ‘Lahna Singh, it is just three more days to go. We have already spent four days in this bunker. On the third day, the relief will reach and then we’ll have a seven-day leave. We’ll kill an animal together and then eat till our
stomach is full, then we’ll sleep soundly in the firang mem’s5 garden, which has a velvety green lawn. She showers us with fruit and milk. Everyone says that she doesn’t even take a penny for it. She says that you are all kings who have come here to save my country.’

  ‘I haven’t slept a wink for four days. Without exercise even a horse becomes restless and without fighting, a soldier grows weary. I wish they would let me fix a bayonet to my rifle and allow me to march ahead. Then, if I don’t return after killing at least seven Germans, may I never have the good fortune of bowing my head at the threshold of Darbar Sahab. Seeing our bayonets and tanks, these morons start screaming and begging for mercy, but as soon as it’s dark they fire thirty-pound bombs at us. That day we didn’t leave a single German alive within a four-mile radius. We were ordered to retreat by our General, or else…’

  ‘Or else we would have reached Berlin by now! Right?’ said Subedar6 Hazar Singh with a smile. ‘Wars are not run by jamadars or naiks. Instead, senior officers have to think far ahead. The front is three hundred miles long. If we run away in one direction, what will happen then?’

  ‘Subedarji, it is true,’ said Lahna Singh, ‘but what should we do? The cold has now seeped into our bones. The sun is never out, and water trickles into our trench from both sides like the streams gushing into the baolis7 of Chamba. Another attack should warm us up nicely.’

  ‘Restless man, get up and add some coal to the brazier. Vazira, gather up four men and use these buckets to collect the water and bail it out of the bunker. Maha Singh, it is evening now, go and change the guards at the entrance.’ While giving these orders, the Subedar started making his round around the bunker.

  Vazira Singh was the jester of the platoon. While dumping the dirty water from the trench, he said, ‘I have become a pasha. Now pay obeisance to the king of Germany!’ At this everyone burst out laughing and the clouds of sadness parted.