The Weary Generations (43 page)

‘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.

‘Well done, men. You have sided with the management and stayed beyond your duty time. For this you will be rewarded. We have one mission and one only, and that is to keep the kiln chimney smoking. With your help we shall show the traitors outside the gate how to run a factory with the help of a few faithful men. We will lock them out for ever. Just remember:
Keep the chimney smoking.
That alone will defeat the mischief of the slogan raisers.'

By the time he finished, a few labourers had brought some tables and chairs and laid them out on the kiln platform. Then they went back to fetch the food. There were three different kinds of food and they were all meat dishes, even the rice fried and cooked as pulao with lamb. The assistant engineers and foremen, who were not properly ‘management', sat beside the higher-ups with looks of gratitude on their faces. But the lower-grade workers, even after much persuasion, refused to occupy the chairs alongside their superiors, although they accepted the food and sat on the ground to eat it. They couldn't believe what they were witnessing: these men, near-gods to them, whose place was way up there in the clouds, were sharing their food with the lowly, the ones who were as dirt and hardly deserved better; and sharing not only food but also talk, speaking to those sitting near their feet on the ground with pleasant, affectionate faces and cheery words. Like friends, the labourers thought; like friends. The meal
over, the labourers took it back, the utensils, the spoons, the dishes, trays, tables and chairs. Ali joined them hauling the things back to the canteen. He hadn't eaten much and was not feeling joyful like the others; during all the agitation, he thought of Aisha and remembered that he had missed giving her the second dose of her medicine. He hung around the canteen for an extra free cup of tea. As darkness fell, he wanted to go home. He found himself in the midst of pandemonium as he went back to where he had been directed: the kiln wasn't turning. Ali sprinted the last hundred yards to the point where everyone, from the general manager to the labourer, was crowding. The electrical motor that turned the main shaft of the kiln had gone dead. It was a hot end-of-May evening that made it impossible to go near the motor, for this was a spot that made men's faces burn even in the severest of winters. They all stood a few yards away from it, leaving the foreman and a ‘senior' electrician, their heads and faces wrapped in their shirts and other dirty rags from the workshop, to work on it. The heat was so intense that the two men weren't even sweating, their bare bodies dry and roasted red.

‘Where were you?' the foreman shouted at Ali. Silently, Ali tore off his shirt, wound it round his head and face and jumped on to the concrete plinth of the motor. Not until then did he see and recognize a third man, masked like the other two, struggling with a large nut on the side of the motor. It was Salim. Ali tried to get the spanner out of his hand, but Salim wouldn't yield. Nor would the nut. Under the eyes of not only the electrical foreman but all the owners of the whole factory as far as he knew, Salim was reluctant to give up the job for which he had volunteered. Straining his sinewy body, his chest lowered on the spanner handle and his fingers jammed on it, shoulder and arm muscles rippling like long thin fishes and his face contorted with effort, Salim was determined to move the nut that had seized as if this was a job for which he had been preparing himself for his entire life. Ali put his strength behind it as well by placing his hand on top of Salim's and pushing. The nut proved unmovable. The firing of the kiln was stopped and the smoke coming from the chimney at the other end got progressively thinner.

As the slogans of the strikers, still there outside the gate after five hours, got louder upon seeing the smoke disappear, so the faces of the officers grew more frantic. The chief engineer got so out of control that he started accusing the electrical engineer of being ‘the most useless man in the world', disregarding the fact that the man might be good for some other things in his life. As the chief engineer's angry voice rose, so also did Salim's ceaseless efforts. Ignoring Ali's advice to let the machine cool
down a little before going any further, he continued to wrestle with the obstinate nut, as if his promotion to electrician's mate would come there and then if only he could prise open the death-bite of the nut-and-bolt teeth with the last ounce of his strength. Suddenly, in the middle of a pull, Salim's hand slipped off the long spanner handle and he fell over on top of the motor. He didn't spring back up. For a few seconds they watched him silently as he lay with both arms spread wide on the hot casing of the motor. Then the realization came that Salim had simply keeled over.

Three men lifted the boy's collapsed body and laid it carefully, face up, on the ground. In Salim's bloodless face his eyes were half-open, fixed in a terrible gaze which seemed to look at nothing beyond the eyelids. Someone ran to fetch the ‘doctor' from the works dispensary. The young rotund, bespectacled owner's son threw a glance up at the smoke stack whose emission of curling white cloud had turned to thin black strands, dispersing forlornly into the air. He turned his eyes away from it and had a word with the general manager, who in turn spoke to his assistant. The assistant manager, taking the chief accountant and an engineer with him, walked quietly away. The man from the dispensary arrived. He examined the unconscious Salim and shook his head in despair. The men put the body on a trolley and wheeled it towards the dispensary.

Within an hour, the assistant general manager and his team of negotiators had reached an agreement with the leaders of the striking workers. The gates were opened and the mob of workers poured in, chanting the usual slogans. Not many of their demands had been met, yet they were carrying two members of the management team on their shoulders in victory. The negotiators had proved cleverer than their labour opponents, giving away little but playing upon the gratitude of the lowly for merely being treated as equals across the bargaining table. Ali had earlier wandered off towards the main gate after they had removed Salim's body from near the kiln. He met the incoming crowd on the way. Few noticed him in their euphoria. He walked out of the gate into the night, thinking of Aisha without emotion.

A
NEES
R
AHMAN WAS
Personal Assistant to a member of the Indian Legislative Assembly – MLA (Centre) for short. He was both a relative of one of the only two Muslim members of the Viceroy's Executive Council, and a member of the ruling family of a small state in central India. Although he lived comfortably on a stipend from his ancestral state, he had no personal fortune by way of landholding or money. All he owned as property was two houses, one in Delhi and the other in a picturesque village situated on the banks of the river twenty miles from the capital. The only other thing of value he possessed was a fine education. Supported by his family, he had gone to England in the early thirties and qualified as Barrister at Law. He never practised the profession; he dabbled in politics but gave that up after a while. Helped by family contacts, he acquired his present non-governmental position and settled down in it. Although some years younger, he had been a friend of Roshan Agha and his family for many years. He had known Naim, but only slightly, barely a handshake or two and an Assalam-o-Alaikam. When Azra spoke to him, he agreed to take on Naim in a position in his office at the Assembly – rather less, it was understood, to get Naim to do any real work than to provide him with a place to go to each day and a routine to follow. Naim got an entry pass to the Assembly and a desk of his own in an office that he shared with three other staff. Once he got settled in, however, Naim found himself more and more involved in conversations initiated by Anees Rahman, and not always regarding work; Anees had found Naim an attractive listener to the outpourings of his active mind. Over a period of time the two men developed a personal friendship.

Azra had finally agreed to take a suite of rooms – a drawing room and two bedrooms – on the ground floor. Naim had amassed a great collection of books on various subjects. From books of general interest in the first
year of his confinement, he had gone on to specialized reading, picking up books on a single topic at a time until he exhausted it according to his liking and ability, before going on to the next: religion, history, general science, ending with philosophy. This did not particularly clear his mind about anything; what he got out of it was a permanent habit of reading, no longer now for the sake of acquiring knowledge so much as to use it as a veil between himself and the world. Meticulously following doctor's orders, Azra would be seen by the early risers in the neighbourhood of Roshan Mahal taking Naim for a walk, her hand on his left shoulder while he carried his old walking stick in his right hand. Naim had almost fully recovered, his limp nearly gone, but like his reading the stick in his hand and Azra by his shoulder had become a comforting habit, one that served to hide his embarrassment from onlookers. On their return, they had breakfast together, the only occasion after the walk in the morning when they sat face to face, although they exchanged no more than a few words. Naim habitually skipped the midday meal in order to control the weight he had put on during his confinement, causing him high blood pressure. Azra always took her evening meal with Roshan Agha who, suffering from chronic diabetes and heart problems, was almost permanently confined to his room. Naim had dinner in his room and afterwards read late into the night. They had separate bedrooms.

The country was in turmoil. The Cripps Mission had failed and Stafford Cripps's offer of freedom ‘after the war is over' had been rejected by the Congress Party. At the same time the ‘Quit India' Movement was launched, which engaged in sabotage. Hearing reports of the blowing up of railway lines and suchlike, Naim was reminded of a part of his distant past but felt no movement in his blood. He had even given up reading the newspaper. Only Azra felt momentarily excited by it, reading the papers out aloud to Naim at breakfast. Getting a feeble response from Naim, she gave up after a few days. The war was at its height and a famine was raging in Bengal.

Anees Rahman, a short, stocky bull of a man, moved with the agility of an athlete, his energy never allowing him to stay in one position for long. In the middle of looking at some papers, he would jump up and go to the window to look outside, often talking quietly to himself while gesticulating busily with his hands. Back at his desk, he would no sooner settle down than leave his seat and go to the outer office to speak to one of his staff. He had also had Naim's desk moved to his own private office, placing Naim's seat opposite his own so that he could talk to him without having to get up.

One day he invited Naim to his house in the village for a stay over the weekly holiday. He picked Naim up at the end of office hours on Saturday afternoon and took him straight to the village. The journey took less than an hour. The village, although situated only a short distance from the river, was built on high ground, so that it remained safe from flooding when the river burst its banks during the monsoons. Anees's house was right at the top of the hill from where the eye could see mile after mile of the plains on both sides of the river. The whitewashed house was simple but solidly built, with large gardens and old trees, lush green lawns sloping away from the front veranda of the house. The two men sat in cane chairs under the shade of an amaltas tree. The air was very still. There was not a sound to be heard, not even the chirp of a bird in the garden, except for the hiss of water coming faintly over from the great river that somehow had the effect of increasing the silence. Naim thought it was the quietest place he had been to, and mentioned it to Anees.