The Weary Generations (29 page)

‘This scene was such that although for the next two days the city was like a graveyard, yet I could not stay indoors. And because all the food shops were shut I was able to sell most of my fish, even those that were half rotten which I had placed on top of the pile in the bucket. I made some money which I saved on top of the rupee I got from the man before he was dead. Now I was left with only a few fishes which I was bent upon selling as well. What I did not know was that the third day was to be the day when life in this city ended. I had not even reached my spot in the bazaar when I saw large groups of people moving in silence from one place to the other. Later I realized they were not going to different places but procession after procession of them was heading towards this place where we are now. I joined one group and went along. I also attempted to hawk fish by calling out loudly with my usual words once or twice but was silenced by the ugly looks I got from fellows around me.

‘When we got here the bagh was already nearly full of people, yet they
kept coming. They were pouring in from every side. At one time it seemed that not another soul could squeeze into this place but men of all ages from young boys to old men kept coming. I was pushed along by the crowd towards the middle of the bagh, where I held my ground with the full strength of my legs. I also kept a hold on my bucket although it was becoming hard in the crush. I saw a man standing on a raised surface like an empty crate or something by the opposite wall. He had a long black beard and a green turban like a maulvi or a Sikh sardar, I could not make out which because I am small, you see, and could only see through holes in other people. He was shouting at the people while making wide gestures with his arms like a very angry holy man in the usual way. Nothing could be heard clearly from where I stood. Some time passed.

‘When I had entered the bagh I did not see any goras, only our people from the city. But then a gora officer appeared. He pushed the shouting man down from the crate and mounted it himself so that he could be seen clearly. He started saying something that also could not be heard. But slowly the sight of a gora officer in uniform made the people fall silent. The gora spoke in Urdu. “Go away,” he was saying, “get out, out,
out,”
he shouted,
“now!”
There was complete silence for a moment. Then a shoe was thrown from the crowd. It fell well short of the gora. There then followed a hail of shoes coming from everywhere, not one reaching the gora officer but falling on the people in front. Sometimes when my boat strayed into the wild ducks' feeding ground they would take off in hundreds, forming a cloud that would make the sky dark. It was the same with the flying shoes above our heads. When the shoes finished and everyone was barefoot they started throwing their clothes. Shirts and vests and everything, making balls of them and pitching them forward, but being lighter than shoes they flew only a few yards and fell while men at the very front stood motionless, not daring to throw anything straight at the gora within sight of him. The silence was also broken. People were now shouting and chanting slogans, of a political kind at first and then, as always, the religious ones, with Hindu, Muslim and Sikh calling upon their own gods to do nothing special but only to rouse pious emotions which as I have seen always turn angry and more angry for God knows what reason. Looking at the men pushing and shoving with their naked bodies dripping with sweat, the white officer was getting more and more nervous until the moment of misfortune arrived.' The old man stopped speaking for a long minute.

‘What, the firing?' his listeners asked impatiently.

‘No, the fish.'

‘The fish? What fish?'

‘My fish. I was the unfortunate man. When there was nothing left to throw the man next to me started trying to snatch the bucket from me. I clung to it as long as I could but it was taken away and passed from hand to hand. Soon it disappeared from my sight. Then the fishes began to fly. They were good fresh fishes, too, which I had put right at the bottom to attract the last customers so they wouldn't think it was left-over stuff. The men picked out the poor dead creatures from my bucket and threw them. They too landed on the men in front. Except one fish. The man on whom it landed picked it up and threw it. I can understand his action from another point of view. You see, some men cannot stand the sight or the smell of fish. I have known such men, and they do not come anywhere near me. So this must have been one of these strange men, because he handled my fish as if it was poison and threw it fiercely forward as far away from him as he could. That was it. The fish struck the officer squarely in the face. The force was such that it made him stagger backwards while slapping away the slippery animal. He regained his posture and raised his arm. That was the moment.

‘Nobody had so far looked around them along the walls. Suddenly the heads of soldiers appeared above the walls on all sides as if from nowhere. They started shooting. For a moment we did not know what was happening although we felt that something was definitely on because the noise of the people stopped. In the silence the rat-tat-tat of bullets was coming from all three sides. Within moments we became aware of people being hit and bleeding and falling, and then we were running. Except that there was nowhere to run. We were all packed against each other like fishes in the net as it is pulled up, and like fishes we were wriggling, but whichever way we turned we saw only other men. I imagine that is what fishes see as they wriggle in the hold of the net – other fishes. There was movement in the crowd, but it was going in circles like eddies in a river. It was a river of heads and bodies turning and doubling back on itself, and still the bullets kept coming.

‘As luck would have it, men after men started falling, making room for others to run over them, and some who were weak although not even hit by a bullet fell in the crush and died under the feet of running men. I am small, but I am quick. My smallness worked to my advantage so I could slip through other men's holes without falling. Near the opening in the wall which is the only exit, as you see, there is a well. It is a dry well, but deep. I saw that people were so blinded by the bullets which chased them that they were running and falling into the well and others were falling on top
of them. There were rumours afterwards that the well was half filled up by the men who could not get out of it. But who wanted to wait and confirm it at the time? I made good my escape. But no, sir, I tell you it was no escape.

‘We were all running until we came to the bazaar and there was another scene going on there. This was the spot where the gori woman had been attacked two days before. On that stretch of twenty yards there were soldiers with rifles taking straight aim and everyone who came there had to drop face down and crawl. Not on their elbows and knees either. No, sir. On their bellies like lizards. There I saw another river of men squirming and slithering like a herd of pythons with their heads buried in the earth and faces bleeding in attempts to crawl, for which they were not trained. But they were in fear of their lives because whenever a head was raised a bullet came a hand's width above it. The crawlers had great difficulty. Not me, though. I was only three when my father threw me in the river and taught me how to lie on it face down without moving a limb or sinking. So I was familiar with the job and the fastest to get through the crawl. Only this little bit of difficulty on my back was higher than other backs, and bullets passed two fingers above it but did no harm to my progress. The crawling of men did not stop that day but went on for many days after until people stopped going that side and still the soldiers went to other bazaars and drove the people ahead of them with rifle butts to this place and forced then to crawl through it. Many days. Oh, children, what do you know about how this rebel city was punished.'

There was complete silence from the six members of the committee. They started to shuffle without moving away. Dusk was not far away.

‘You should go now,' the old man said. ‘Soon there will be curfew.'

‘And you? Are you not going home?' Mr Deshpanday asked him.

‘The soldiers know me and let me sit here until late. I will tell you how. They traced me to my hut from my bucket that they found in the bagh and arrested me. I expected the worst because it was my fish that started it all. They put me in a small room with many others and asked questions of each of us for seventeen days. Me too. They asked me who I knew in the city, who were the leaders, who the speechmakers, whether I was a Muslim or a Hindu or a Sikh or Christian. I said I don't know, I am only a fisherman. They asked what my father was, Hindu or Muslim. I said he did not know, nor did he tell me. He was a fisherman. And my mother? She was a great cooker of fish, I said, who could cook fish many different ways and beyond that did not know much. On the seventeenth day they let me go. I don't know about the others. They did not give me back my bucket, so from that
day I stopped working altogether. That is how they know me and let me walk after the curfew. I am in no danger.'

In the failing light of the day they saw the last three teeth flashing in the old man's mouth and knew that he was laughing soundlessly with his mouth wide open.

A
LTHOUGH INITIALLY URGED
by Azra to give consent and later included, as a result of her efforts alone, in the inquiry committee, Naim had nevertheless returned from his trip to Amritsar a deeply affected man. Not so much by the hundreds that were killed, for life had always been cheap in India – claimed yearly by the elements as well as man-made starvation – as by the manner of their dying. A further jolt was provided by what followed. The government had set up a body, called the Hunter Committee, to conduct an inquiry into the incident. The unofficial report prepared by the Congress Party was submitted but never considered with any degree of seriousness. General Dwyer, known as the ‘butcher of Jalianwala Bagh', was called up before the Hunter Committee. He had earlier boasted that he had ‘put a loop through the nose' of the mutinous city and that in return his superiors in London were dragging him before a committee of ‘nincompoops'. The Hunter Committee, however, completely exonerated him, although as a token of conciliation he was transferred from his post.

The effect of these events on Azra, although equally deep in the beginning, proved, by the very nature of the way she perceived such things, to be transitory. She had had her name and a photograph of herself displayed prominently in the newspapers as being the only woman member of the Congress inquiry committee, and the excitement and ‘glamour' of that provided the momentum which took her some way along this path. Too soon, it wore off and she began to stay back. Naim, on the other hand, was riding this path, the fire within him reignited, washing away the bitter memories, the resentment and the wounded pride of the past, along with the inertia that had afflicted him since his return to the village. His feelings turned gradually into a passion that was to take him in the following years from one end of this vast land to the other.

Delegating the village work to the munshi and the management of his
own acres to Rawal, now grown up, he let the Congress Party know that he was available for any work they wished him to do. He went and lived with the tillers of the land, eating and sleeping with them for days. It was a hard job to do – not to live day and night in their dark huts and eat their rough food but to break through their resistance, their sullenness nurtured through generations, and finally to spark their deceptive quietude into anger. Matters took a turn between him and Azra when Naim's groundwork progressed to an open defiance of what was known as the ‘Landlords' Law'. It was triggered by an incident that occurred in a village not far from Roshan Pur. Naim had been staying with the peasants in the village for a few days. He was sitting with a handful of them one evening in a hut belonging to one of them, partaking of a round of hukka and chatting, when a noise arose outside. It kept coming nearer. Leaving him in the hut, Naim's companions went out to look. What happened next Naim saw from the doorway of the hut when the sounds outside, of men swearing and threatening, became louder. Three men, two of the landlord's relatives and a munshi, were demanding the owner's share of the crop, long overdue according to them, from the muzaras.

‘There was no crop, not a seed, you know that,' the peasants said.

‘Then put your thumb imprint here.' The munshi pushed forward a sheet of paper with an inkwell in the other hand.

‘What for?'

‘To show that you owe it from the next crop.'

‘There were no rains. You were here, don't you know that? Then the floods took the earth away. How can we owe you anything?'

One of the munshi's two companions, both of them on horseback and carrying thick batons, poked the man who spoke in the neck, ‘Come on, liar, your thumb.'

‘Look at this,' the young peasant said, pushing his fingers into the deeply corrugated flank of his bullock. ‘All four fingers go in the ribs, look. And this,' he lifted his shirt from the front, baring his sunken belly with the ribs showing starkly around his trunk.

One of the men on horseback jumped down and struck the young man on the knuckles of his hand with a baton. ‘Your thumb,' he ordered.

The peasant hid both his hands behind his back like a little boy before a schoolmaster.

‘Search the houses,' the horseman thundered.

The munshi went into an unlit house. A woman's voice arose from within. ‘My man is not home, I am alone –'

‘Lying slut.' The munshi dragged the screaming woman out to the door.

‘Your thumb,' the second horseman was saying to an old peasant.

The old man was quiet for a second. Then he said, ‘I would sooner cut off my thumb with an axe than put it on paper.'

The horseman laughed. ‘Then you will not be able to cut the next crop, will you? You will starve.'