This Is Not That Dawn: Jhootha Sach (72 page)

‘Bhai, it depends on how you look at it,’ Kaushalya Devi disagreed with the driver on this issue.

Tara was sitting with her eyes closed, one hand over her nose, driving the flies away with the other. When she tired of waving one hand, she changed over, and used the other to fight the flies. The drone of the engine in low gear made her head ring. A sorry fate for the people at whose hands she had suffered so much, she was thinking, the ones who had killed Hindus. But these did not look like murderers. Both Hindus and Muslims suffered and were killed. Were her heartless villainous torturers to be found among these people?

She opened her eyes when the vehicle again came to a stop. The sun was just above the treetops to her right, and its rays were shining directly into her eyes. As both her hands were busy keeping the flies off her face, she could not shade her eyes. The dust raised by the caravan was making everyone choke.

‘Have we reached Wagha?’ Kaushalya Devi wanted to know.

‘Yes, bahinji. It took us an hour and a half to cover just four miles. Waheguru! Waheguru!’ the driver replied. ‘If Waheguru wills it, we might find the road ahead less busy. On the other side, the police makes some effort to keep the road cleared for traffic. This border checkpoint is on the Pakistan side.’

A few armed constables walked past the vehicles, peering into the windows. The convoy moved after about five minutes, and halted again after another two.

This was the border checkpoint on the soil of Hindustan.

When the convoy went forward again, the motors seemed to growl in protest against the constraint placed on their power as they moved slowly in low gear, cutting through the crowds. The sun dipped below the trees. Its rays, tuned pink by the dust cloud, seemed to be saying farewell.

Tara had closed her eyes again. Despite the deafening roar of the engines,
the sound of empty kerosene tins being beaten like kettledrums fell on her ears. But she kept her eyes shut. Her mind was overwhelmed with sadness about leaving the land of her birth for another.

‘
Dur
phitemunh! Damn you shameless people!’

Hearing the driver swear very loudly at someone, Tara opened her eyes. The women were looking to their right towards a group behaving like performers in some ludicrous circus act.

The women averted their eyes as cold shivers of fear ran up their spines.

One man, like an acrobat performing in the arena, was holding a pole upright. Others around him were beating empty kerosene tins like drums. A few others in the troupe, by pressing their lips against the back of their hands and blowing, were imitating the noise a he-goat makes when it meets a she-goat in heat. The body of a naked woman was fixed vertically to the top of the pole. Her legs were splayed, and wet with blood that shone in the rays of the dying sun. Her head and arms hung limp and lifeless.

A few naked women, hiding their faces in their hands were being marched in front of the man holding the pole. This group of men hurled profanities and filthy curses at the people walking in the caravan, yelling, ‘Take them with you! Take your mothers and sisters with you to your Pakistan!’

‘They rape the mothers and sisters of others. And those others, in turn, maim their womenfolk in revenge. Women are doomed either way!’ Banti, sitting behind Tara, said with a sigh full of pain.

Satwant said angrily, ‘The only crime women are guilty of is giving birth to them. Phitemunh to them! Damn you to hell a hundred, a thousand times! Men fight with other men and kill each other, but they don’t strip one another naked and disgrace their bodies.’

‘Damn them! Damn them!’ The driver sitting in front of Tara kept on cursing and spitting out of the window in disgust at the drummers and others around them.

Kaushalya Devi said in distress, ‘Why don’t the army and the police stop these shameless people?’

‘Who can stop them?’ the driver replied. ‘Who’s thinking sanely any more? Who considers it to be their duty?’

‘Show some decency, you shameless bunch!’ The driver shouted at the revenge-crazed group of men, ‘Don’t cut off your noses to spite your faces.’

The sun disappeared below the horizon. At this sign of approaching night, the caravan heading towards Lahore left the road. The river of people split into two and flowed off the road, settling down and spreading out to the left and right. The convoy heading to Amritsar picked up speed. The women from Shaikhupura began to breathe more easily. Dusk was turning into night. Makeshift cooking fires were being kindled as far as the eye could see, on stretches of land beside the road. No end of the caravan was yet in sight along the road when the convoy turned off the Jarnaili Road on to a side road.

The buses and the station wagon carrying the refugees halted in front of a gate in the boundary wall of a large brightly lit compound, in which the tops of tents and bivouacs inside could be seen from the outside and the hum indicative of a large crowd could be heard.

‘At last, sisters, we’ve arrived!’ Kaushalya Devi said to the women by way of assurance. ‘Get down! You’ve had to leave your homeland, but now you’re in a new nation, to which you belong, and you’re among your own people. Give thanks to God.’

Homeland and nation! Homeland! Nation! Her words echoed in Tara’s ears.

Tara could not understand what Kaushalya Devi meant. She was willing to offer her thanks to Kaushalya Devi, but Kaushalya Devi wanted Tara and the other women to thank God for what they had been through, for having to leave their homes and native land. She kept silent. Those words kept echoing in her mind: homeland and nation.

The driver got down and was standing beside his vehicle. As Tara got out, his words fell on her ears.

‘The people in that other caravan were going to their new country too, leaving behind their old homeland. The countries of human beings have been turned into nations by religion,’ Tara heard him say in a loud voice.

‘Those that God had created as one have been torn apart by the distrust of others, and all in the name of God.’

JAIDEV PURI WAS STANDING IN A QUEUE IN FRONT OF THE DEPOT
distributing free ration to the refugees. There were three women and three men ahead of him, and the woman at the head of the queue was pleading with the supervisor of the depot:

‘Bhai, there are four of us including two children. What will we do with this measly ration of one-and-a-half
pao
of flour and one-and-a-half
chhataank
of lentils? Give me at least a seer of flour.’

‘Mai, you got the amount they’ve allocated for one person. Only those showing up in person get their share,’ the man explained his helplessness.

A few spoke up in support of the woman.

Others supported the supervisor, ‘We’ve all got more family. If some of us have five, there’re others who have ten. What if someone claims ration for fake family members, and then sells it in the bazaar? It’s only fair that the person making the claim should show up in person.’

Two of the men and a woman who were ahead of him, Puri saw, stood on one side holding their rations. The men put their portions of flour and lentils in the woman’s dupatta. The older man said to the younger, ‘You two go on ahead. I’ll go get some firewood.’

Puri’s bedroll was under his arm. He thought of taking the sheet from it to collect his ration. If he left his place to open his bedroll, he realized, he’d have to go back to the end of the queue.

He held on to his bedroll, and when his turn came, took the flour in the tail of his shirt and the lentils in the other end. He came out of the Mandi bazaar, and walked about in search of a dhaba, the makeshift eating place with a tandoor. He had hardly gone a hundred paces when he smelled chapattis being cooked, and then saw a dhaba. Soon he could hear the noise of hands flattening balls of dough into chapattis.

The cook–owner of the dhaba demanded one anna and his rations in exchange for cooked chapattis and daal.

Puri, desperate for food, asked for a smaller portion in lieu of money.

The cook continued to flatten a ball of dough as he ran his gaze over Puri, ‘Don’t you even have one anna? So you got the ration on dole?’

Puri had to admit the truth of this.

‘I’ll give you two chapattis and a helping of daal and vegetables.’

Puri handed over his ration to the cook, went inside the dhaba, and sat down to eat on a piece of jute matting spread on the ground.

He came out after his meal, washed his hands and rinsed his mouth with water from an empty oil drum to which a faucet had been attached. As he bent down to pick up his bedroll, the cook said to him:

‘You’re a strong young man; do you like taking free ration? Until you find something else to do, why don’t you come and work here with me on a daily wage.’

‘Yes, I’ll do it,’ replied Puri. He did not pick up his bedroll.

‘The lad working here came down with fever. There’s not much to do, anyway. Only cleaning up the utensils. You can eat all you want twice a day, and I’ll give you four annas on top of that.’

‘All right,’ Puri agreed.

‘Bravo!’ the cook said approvingly. ‘Get to work, young fellow. Collect all the thalis; get your own too. No shame in doing honest work, is there?’

Puri felt stronger after eating the meal. He rolled up his trousers over his knees, and his sleeves too, and got down on his haunches and began to scrape the metal thalis, in which meals were served, with a jute-fibre scrubber and a handful of ash from a can, and rinsed them out. His head still ached, but he ignored it. Customers drifted by in ones and twos for their meals.

In Lahore, Puri had always lived at his parents’ home. There had not been many occasions to eat out at a dhaba. Only during the chaotic times of the Quit India movement of 1942, and in March and April of 1947, when he was helping his communist comrades to maintain communal peace in the city, and when the hectic pace of work gave him little time to return home for his meals, had he ever eaten at a dhaba.

But he knew how the dhaba worked. The chef, sitting next to the tandoor, shaped balls of dough into chapattis by flattening them between his palms and stuck them to the inside wall of the glowing tandoor. He then removed the cooked, steaming, speckled chapattis with a pair of iron spikes that jangled merrily. Several customers asked for chapattis spread with ghee, and for a dash of spiced ghee added to their daal. For such special orders, the cook would draw a measure of ghee from a container, heat it over the tandoor, add some chopped onions and spices, and pour it over the daal.
The cupful of daal would sizzle and sputter, and the aroma of hot ghee would rise and spread all around.

Puri’s job, as the cook’s helper, was to serve chapattis to the customers in a metal thali and daal in a bowl, with a serving of curried squash and a dab of spicy chutney. And a tumbler of water. Then he collected the empty thalis and sat down again on his haunches to scrub and rinse them. The throbbing in his head began to subside. ‘If only I can spend the night here,’ he was thinking, ‘I’ll make up my mind about tomorrow.’

The afternoon passed into evening. The bazaar was brightly lit. The cook switched on the light in his dhaba too. He joined his palms in the namaste gesture and bowed before the electric bulb, as if it represented Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. More customers began to arrive. A man, wearing a khadi kurta–pajama and Gandhi cap, showed up. He asked the cook to send some food over to the house of one Soodji, who lived nearby. The dhaba owner again grumbled about his assistant not showing up.

The khadi-clad gentleman replied that Soodji’s servant was also absent because of fever.

The dhaba owner first cursed and swore at malaria for making everyone sick, then called out to Puri who was scrubbing the thalis, ‘Hey, it’s only a few steps from here. Go with this babuji and have a look at the house where you’ve to deliver the thali of food.’

Puri followed the messenger about fifty paces into the bazaar when the man pointed to a flight of stairs, and went off on some further errand.

On his return, Puri saw the cook take some ghee from the container, and add a dab of it first to the dough as he shaped it between his palms, then some on the cooked paranthas. He added spiced ghee to a bowlful of daal, and also to a bowl of curried vegetables. The spoonful of chutney was neatly laid out on a leaf. Then he covered this platter with another thali. The thali was being prepared, Puri realized, for some one important.

The dhaba owner explained to Puri, ‘Just deliver the thali. Say nothing about payment. If he asks, say it’s eight annas. Watch your step, he’s an important person.’

The flight of stairs was lit, apart from the glow of lights from the bazaar, by a light somewhere overhead on the landing. Puri went up, balancing the thali carefully. The stairs opened on to a small aangan. He called, ‘Ji, I’ve brought food from the dhaba.’

Puri had spoken as if acting out the role of a servant on a stage, but it
was no play-acting. His tone of voice and his manner had automatically changed to suit the work he was doing.

‘Yes, yes, bring it in here,’ someone answered.

Puri saw an open door to his left, and went towards it. The room beyond was brightly lit. He was taken aback to see the man sitting on a wooden takht, studying some papers in his hand. The platter of food almost fell from Puri’s hands.

The man continued to peer at the papers, absent-mindedly stroking his closely cropped hair with the other hand. Without raising his eyes he ordered, ‘Pull that little table over here and put the thali on it.’

Puri controlled himself. Emotions welling up from somewhere deep down in his heart choked his throat. He quietly placed the thali on the table, lifted and moved the table next to the takht. He wanted to go back without the man seeing him, but hesitated for a moment in indecision.

His eyes still on the papers, the man said, ‘Bring some water in a lota for me to wash my hands.’

‘Where’s the lota?’ Puri had to ask. His voice was hoarse and cracked.

‘There, beside the water tap,’ the man replied, looking up.

He stared intently at Puri’s face. Drawing a short breath of surprise, he said, ‘Puri! Jaidev! Arrey Puri bhai, what has happened?’

He grabbed Puri’s arm and sat him beside himself on the takht.

Puri’s head was bent. Controlling the tears gathering in his eyes and swallowing the lump in his throat, he said, ‘Soodji, what can I tell you?’

A telephone lying in one corner of the takht rang. Sood reached over and picked up the handset.

Puri had a moment to regain his composure.

Sood reproached Puri like an elder brother, his speech peppered with his characteristic phrase ‘what’s-its-name’. ‘How could you behave this way? Whatever happened, didn’t you know that Sood lives in what’s-its-name Jalandhar? It’s not that the people of this city don’t know Sood. You could’ve asked anyone, at what’s-its-name the Sewa Samiti refugees centre, at the Congress party office, at any shop. Any tonga or tumtum carriage driver would have brought you here if you had just asked him.’

Touched by Sood’s caring words and brotherly concern, Puri told him briefly how he had gone to Nainital and Lucknow at the beginning of August on the invitation of a parliamentary secretary of the UP government. That he was in Nainital on 15 August. There were few signs of trouble until 10
or 11 August, with the situation quieting down after the League and the Congress had reached an agreement about the Partition. He got news in Nainital on 19 August that all Hindus were being evacuated from within the walled city of old Lahore. He left immediately to help his family stranded in Lahore. There was no reason for Sood to misconstrue his words, or interpret his story in any other way. Puri also told him how he had lost his suitcase when the mob attacked the Muslims in the train, and how he had been robbed outside the refugee camp at Islamia College on the previous night. He made it obvious that he desperately wanted to get to Lahore, or look for his family in India, wherever they were.

Chandan the dhaba owner was worried. The young man he had hired earlier in the day had not come back after delivering the thali of food at Soodji’s. He had been away for over two hours. Either he had gone off to some other address, Chandan suspected, or in his hunger could not resist the temptation to eat free paranthas, and had run away taking the two thalis and two bowls with him. The bedroll of the hired hand was still at the dhaba, but who knew what was in it, if there was anything in it at all. It was past 10 o’clock. When he did not return, Chandan went to Sood’s house in search of him.

What he saw amazed Chandan. His hired help was sitting on the takht, next to the big leader and talking with him. Chandan said namaste respectfully, and squatted down on the threshold of the room.

Sood spoke angrily to Chandan, ‘Why didn’t you tell him about me or give him my address? He’s my brother, lives in what’s-its-name Lahore.’

Chandan touched the ground, and then touched his ears with his hands in a gesture of repentance, then joined his hands and pleaded, ‘Maharaj-ji, how could I know that? Sarkarji, he said nothing to me, and he asked no questions.’

Sood said to Chandan, ‘Achchha, go now and take this thali with you. Do you call this thing you sent me a chapatti? Cold and hard as bits of what’s-its-name pottery. Aren’t you ashamed that you’ve no consideration for what’s-its-name your neighbours! Go, and get us two fresh thalis with proper food.’

The thali that Puri had brought still lay untouched. Chandan took it back. When he returned with hot fresh meals, he had Puri’s bedroll under his arm. He again sat on the threshold, and whined with his palms joined:

‘Sarkar, you’re my saviour. Master, I have a permit for only three bags of flour. I have three children. The bazaar prices are sky-high. Flour is selling at thirty-five rupees a maund. Girdhari, Son Singh, Moola all have permits for five bags. Huzoor, this servant of yours should also get a permit for five bags.’

‘Aarey Chandan, you’re a real what’s-its-name badmaash. I know all about you. You snake, you mix millet with the wheat flour at your dhaba,’ Sood scolded the cook affectionately.

‘Hare Ram! Hare Ram! What makes you say that, maharaj!’

‘Three bags should be enough. You want to sell the flour in what’s-its-name black market, I know.’

‘Hare Ram! Hare Ram! Maharaj, if I sell so much as one seer in the black market, may the curse of spilling a cow’s blood fall on me.’

‘Isn’t the inspector of this area what’s-its-name Jameet Singh?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Come back tomorrow morning. Remind me when you come to give back the thalis. Get lost now, and stop bothering me.’

The bright sun of the fag end of the monsoon had blazed over the city all day. Around midnight the sky became overcast and it began to rain. The house servant was still running a fever. Sood started to pull a charpoy into the room from the back veranda.

Puri rushed towards him, saying, ‘Wait! Wait! I’ll do it.’

‘I’ll take care of it in a minute. You take rest.’

The telephone rang again.

Puri insisted, ‘Answer the phone. Let me handle this.’

‘Here, the phone rings all the time,’ said Sood. He set the charpoy down in the place he had chosen, then answered the telephone.

Sood spread a sheet over a dhurrie on the charpoy for Puri. He himself took the takht. The light was switched off. Gusts of wind, carrying a fine rain came through the window that opened towards the bazaar. The ceiling fan turned slowly. Puri’s body and mind enjoyed the moment with a feeling of utmost peace.

A heat rash had broken over Sood’s body on account of his having to move around under the blazing sun all day long. The cool breeze soothed his skin. He lay in the darkened room, gently stroking his body where the rash and his old eczema itched most, and discussed serious matters with Puri:

‘Now that it’s time for the Congress to form a ministry in Punjab, these
people want to keep everything in the controlling hands of their little clique, just like the old days. The high command has deputed two people to make decisions over what’s-its-name everything. Those two want the members elected from our eastern districts to act as what’s-its-name figureheads, but keep all the real power in their own hands. Let’s see how they manage to run the government. I’m the one who understands these local areas, not the people who’ve just come from what’s-its-name outside.’