The Weary Generations (11 page)

‘Don't tell anyone, don't say a word,' he said, and locked himself in.

The two women got up in panic, stood a cot in front of the storeroom door and spread a quilt over it, concealing the entrance to the room. Then they sat in the yard, waiting. The boy ran out of the house, returning a few minutes later.

‘The police have come,' he announced. The women made a sign to him to be quiet. The three of them sat there, looking out the door of the house.
Chickens picked at the grain on the ground and at the insects in the air, making small contented noises.

Out in a field, Naim spotted Mahinder Singh engaged in what looked like a wrestling match with a buffalo. He went and stood looking at them. Mahinder Singh had a large black piece of clinker in his hand that he must have picked up from the brick kiln. He was making repeated attempts to get a hold on the buffalo's head. Each time, the huge animal jerked him away with such force that he fell back on his haunches on the ground. From there, Mahinder Singh jumped right back up to continue the fight. ‘Have you not found a woman today?' Naim said, laughing.

Mahinder Singh gave no answer.

‘You won't kill it with a brick,' Naim said to him.

‘Shut up,' Mahinder said between gritted teeth, rejoining his battle with the buffalo.

Both creatures, man and beast, had the same animal wildness on their faces, the same desperation in their respective struggles. The buffalo, which at first had been trying to run away, now stood her ground, determined to fight as Mahinder Singh became more reckless with the passing of each second. Naim stood transfixed by the two warring beasts. Eventually, as the voices of some men, coming from the other side of the field, seemed to be approaching them, fear appeared in Mahinder Singh's eyes. With an enormous heave and a hoick that seemed to come from the very depths of his being, Mahinder Singh lifted the buffalo's head, parted its lips and with a savage blow of the iron-hard clinker, broke one of the buffalo's upper teeth clean in half. He threw the rock away in the standing crop and fell on his back, exhausted.

A constable and a villager appeared around the corner of the field. The constable untethered the buffalo and took the two boys with him back to the village, delivering a blow of his lathi to each of them as they went.

All the Sikhs' cattle had been herded outside their house and the three brothers were lying face down, bare to the hips, being beaten with a leather strap by two constables. Long, raw marks of the lash had come up on the skin of their backs and buttocks from which blood seemed about to ooze. As the small group of four men and a buffalo appeared from the fields, a farmer sitting near the police party jumped up and ran to them.

‘Here it is,' he cried, ‘my buffalo, this is it, they stole it, wounded my servants, murderers, thieves, dirty Sikhs.'

Mahinder Singh put his hand on the animal. ‘Shut your filthy mouth, you liar, I will pull your tongue out. Look,' he said, lifting the buffalo's upper lip, ‘I bought this mother of yours with a broken tooth from the
market three months ago. Did your buffalo have a broken tooth?'

‘Thieves, robbers,' the man wailed, spreading his hands before the head constable, ‘let it loose and it will go straight to my home, its own home, it was born there, I swear, it is mine.'

Ignoring the man, Mahinder Singh was running around, identifying each of the cattle. ‘This is my half-tail bull, tail cut off when it was a baby, and this – this my one-eyed cow, eye lost in fight with another cow, and this my horse with a cracked hoof…'

As he passed the head constable, the policeman felled him with a blow of his lathi. The constables forced him face down to the ground and started giving him the lash. Unlike his brothers who had borne the pain in silence, Mahinder Singh began to make a racket. Every few minutes the head constable would give a sign to the beaters to stop and ask the boy to tell the truth. Each time he would be answered with oaths of the most foul kind from the mouth of Mahinder Singh.

‘Give him the smoke,' the head constable ordered finally.

They tied up Mahinder Singh's feet with a rope and strung him upside down by a thick branch of the shisham tree under which they were sitting. Then they burned red chillies under his nose. The evil smoke getting up his nostrils, Mahinder Singh cried out, ‘All right, I will tell, in guru's name stop.'

The burning chillies were removed. Mahinder Singh sneezed non-stop for several minutes, at the end of which he let out a string of even viler curses at the police. The operation was repeated over and over, Mahinder Singh saying, between tears and sneezes, ‘I don't know who lifted your fucking mother,' until he passed out. He was then let down and kicked ferociously while he lay unconscious. Not a word that would incriminate them could be got out of any of the brothers. The police, however, returned the buffalo to the rightful owner and went away without charging anyone for lack of witnesses.

The buffalo was of no value to the Sikh family; the point had been made and Juginder Singh had won his coming-of-age ‘pug'. In the evening, relatives and friends came to congratulate the brothers, bearing gifts of home-made sweetmeats as gestures of support and jubilation for the victorious events of the day and night.

A friend was tending to Karam Singh's wounds. The medication consisted of a folded muslin rag, dipped in hot linseed oil mixed with powdered cloves, which was put on his sore back and buttocks. He was crying with pain.

Juginder Singh, sitting by his wife's side, mocked his younger brother.
‘What a woman! Did we not get the same lash? Hunh, crying like a woman dropping a baby!'

Karam Singh's friend placed another piece of cloth dripping with boiling oil on his back. Uttering a cry of pain from the oil's sting, Karam Singh reached behind him and flung the dressing away. ‘Stuff it up your mother's arse,' he said to his friend.

‘Hunh! A woman,' Juginder Singh said contemptuously.

‘Pig,' Karam Singh snarled at him. All the men laughed.

A short while later a stranger entered the house. He was a tall, black-bodied peasant, barefoot and dressed only in underpants. His legs were covered in mud, and he appeared to have travelled over rough ground.

‘Victory to wahguru,' Juginder Singh said. ‘What brings you here this time of night, Ram Singh?'

The stranger, who had been leaning against the wall, slid down it to sit without answering the greetings. Juginder Singh got up, frowning, and went to sit by the man. They talked in whispers. A sudden change came over Juginder Singh. He clenched his fists.

‘When?' he asked.

‘Last night,' said Ram Singh.

Karam Singh and Mahinder Singh stood up. They went to join the two men. All four started talking in low, agitated tones. Their faces had turned pale and their eyes red. Juginder Singh got up.

‘All right, tonight,' he said to the others, ‘this very night.' Fixing his turban with lightly trembling fingers, he went out.

The visitors, sensing a crisis, got up and left. Sitting where he was, Naim asked Mahinder Singh, ‘What happened?'

‘Our cousin got murdered.'

‘What for?'

‘Over water turn.' Mahinder Singh walked up to Naim. ‘We are going to finish them tonight. Are you coming? Our friends come with us for revenge.'

For a moment Naim didn't know how to answer. Mahinder Singh was looming over him, swaying slightly. ‘Unless they are cowards,' he said.

Naim looked at him angrily. ‘I will come,' he said, and left their house.

Naim and Niaz Beg took turns sleeping out in the fields during this season to guard their young crop against marauding wild boar, foxes and suchlike. Naim had made himself a kind of machan up a shisham tree where he spent the night wrapped in quilt against the cold. Some time after midnight he dozed off for a few minutes. He was woken by the sharp point
of a spear in his ribs.

‘Who is it?' he asked.

‘We are off,' Mahinder Singh answered from below. ‘Come.'

Their black bodies rubbed with oil from head to the bare feet and dressed only in brief underpants, all four brothers carried full-length spears in their hands, sharp dagger-like weapons tied firmly to their ends, and a bellyful of kikar liquor inside them, its strong smell floating on their breath, protecting them from the cold. They were accompanied by their mother and Kuldip Kaur, the women carrying large cane baskets on their heads.

‘Why are the women coming along to fight?' Naim asked Mahinder Singh in a whisper.

Nobody answered. They moved, shadow-like, quick and silent, through fields green with crops, several of them being irrigated through outlets from the canal. The still, cold air of the night, rich with the mixed aroma of linseed, alcohol and wet earth, seemed to be travelling with them. The soft ears of the wheat were just growing heavy with the milk-filled seed that would harden within weeks and turn to edible golden grain. The men and women were approaching their dead cousin's village along the canal bank in the pitch black night under an overcast sky. Mahinder Singh stopped at a certain spot.

‘Here,' he said, pointing with his lance to the edge of a field that had been broken up; water from the canal had collected outside in a large puddle and had then been stopped at its source. ‘Was feeding his crop right here. The pig – died with just one blow of a spade.'

‘Shut your mouth,' hissed Juginder Singh.

‘Pig.' Mahinder Singh spat on the ground where their cousin had fallen.

Further down, they spotted three people sleeping under heavy quilts in a clearing between a field and the canal bank. Approaching on tiptoe, the four men approached them while the women hung back, crouching behind a tree. It was quick, the whole thing over within a few minutes. They flung the quilts off the sleeping men with their lances and sank the blades into their chests. Juginder Singh grabbed a sword and cut off their heads with a single lightning blow to each of them. They died without a sound. The women came up. Juginder Singh took an axe from a basket, chopped the bodies into small pieces and threw them in the canal. The women scraped off the bloodied earth, filling the baskets with it and emptying them in the canal. The men levelled the ground with a spade and spread the dead men's quilts over it. Naim had gone off in the middle of all this to stand by the bank of the canal. A cold shiver had spread over his body.

‘Come on,' Mahinder Singh said to him.

Naim followed them on unsteady legs. There was a taste of blood in his mouth. He felt as though he had swallowed a handful of pebbles, making his stomach heave. A few stars peeped through a break in the clouds, throwing the faintest of light upon dark earth. The seven shadowy figures sped through silky-green wheat crops standing in field after field. In a field of low green millet grown for fodder, Mahinder Singh stopped.

‘I am going to cut some for my one-eyed,' he announced.

‘Have you no sense?' Juginder Singh said to him. ‘You want to be seen and caught, fool?'

‘Go,' Mahinder Singh said in a loud, threatening voice. ‘Go.' Juginder Singh and the others, if only to keep him quiet, hastened away. Mahinder Singh put out the long shaft of his spear across Kuldip Kaur's stomach as she passed him.

‘Stay,' he ordered.

‘What for?'

‘Help me cut it,' he said, looking fixedly and pushing her with the weapon's handle towards the middle of the field. Juginder Singh stopped just for a moment to look at the two of them, then turned away, swearing as he went, the rest of the party following him. Pulling out a sickle tied up in his turban, Mahinder Singh started cutting the soft green plants, rapidly clearing an area. Kuldip Kaur followed him, bundling and tying up the crop with ‘ropes' she made by twist-winding the stalks. The sound of the water in the canal reached them from afar. They heard someone approaching.

‘Lie down,' Mahinder Singh whispered, ‘down.'

Kuldip Kaur lay down flat on the ground. The man was a farmer tending to the watering of his field. Carrying a spade in hand, he passed by.

‘I could see your chest above the crop,' Mahinder Singh said. ‘What if that fucker saw it?'

‘So? There just would have to be another one,' the woman said. ‘Your dagger's still sharp, isn't it?'

‘Don't shoot off your mouth. Come here.'

She sat up. ‘Let's go. It will be daylight soon.'

Mahinder Singh grabbed her breasts.

‘Animal,' she hissed in the dark.

‘I am tired,' he said. Spreading his arms, he rolled over, landing with his head in her lap.

‘I am cold,' Kuldip Kaur said.

‘Come here.'

She lay down beside him. He put his arms around her. ‘Are you still cold?'

‘Your hair smells.'

‘Bitch,' he said.

‘Don't squeeze. I can't breathe.'

He laughed. ‘I can squeeze the life out of you.'

‘Pig. You are not stronger than me.'

‘I am the strongest of all.' He wrapped his legs around hers and did several rolls on the ground, taking her with him in his arms. ‘Son of a bloody cow,' she cried. ‘Let go of me.'

‘I am the strongest,' he said.

‘Juginder is stronger than you. He cut them all tonight.'

‘Bastard bitch.'

‘Did he not?' she mocked.

He swore at her. ‘Were they your fuckers, that you mourn them?'

He released her. Picking himself and his spear off the ground, Mahinder Singh stabbed at the roll of green millet leaves that Kuldip Kaur had made. The blade of the lance went right through the bundle.

Kuldip Kaur got up, pulled down her shirt, pulled up the lance and handed it to Mahinder Singh. Then she carefully placed the bundle of fodder in the basket and lifted it on to her head. They started off. After a short while Mahinder Singh started singing.

‘Shut up,' Kuldip Kaur said, ‘someone will hear us.'

He kept on singing. The morning star was shining brightly as they got home. Mahinder's mother was on her way to milk the cow with the milk pail in her hand.