Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (38 page)

“What should I do?” Nimmo asked, trying unsuccessfully to keep the trembling from her voice.

“You can come here, to our house. We can hide you,” Kaushalya suggested. She did not sound very sure of herself.

Nimmo shook her head. She knew the strengths and weaknesses of her own home. She knew how to take care of herself and her daughter. She would be prepared.

“I will stay at home,” she said finally.

“Lock every door and window,” Kaushalya warned.

Nimmo re-entered her home, shut the door and locked it securely behind her. She surveyed it thoughtfully and then, dragging the heavy wooden cot from the inner room, pushed it against the door.
The back door,
she thought,
the back door.
She rushed there as well and shot the flimsy metal bolt into place. Then the windows; she was grateful there were iron bars on them already, and wished that the front door had a crossbar to drop into place.

“Mummy, stop locking everything like that. You are making me very frightened!” Kamal followed Nimmo around the house, biting her thumb and looking very small. “Nothing will happen!”

“Don’t keep saying that! Stupid girl, inviting evil into our house!” snapped Nimmo.

The hours ticked away. Why had she let her son leave the house? She should have insisted on keeping him here.
Foolish woman what have you done?
And Satpal, where was he? Why hadn’t he phoned? Perhaps he had, and that Asha hadn’t bothered to call her. Should she go over and find out? Nimmo peered out of a chink in the window and saw nothing.

It seemed to her that there was a waiting stillness on the normally busy street. She came away from the window and busied herself with hemming a pair of trousers. Kamal bent over her schoolbooks, working on some sums.
If only I had a bharoli to keep her safe,
Nimmo thought, a bharoli of corn in a corner, just like the one her mother had.

Kamal looked on with wide, startled eyes as her mother dashed into the inner room and furiously started to empty all their clothes from the steel cupboard, throwing
them in a corner on the floor. Then she removed the shelves and panting from the weight, piled them on top of the cot blocking the front door.

She turned to Kamal. “If they come, you go inside there, understand? And don’t make a sound until I open the door. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mummy.” Kamal’s voice was very small.
They?
she thought nervously. Who was her mother referring to?

It was late in the evening and Nimmo was just beginning to relax her guard when she heard the sound of scuffling feet outside, some yelling and then a knock on the door. She dropped her sewing and sat still.
They were here.
She had always known they would come one day, those men from her village who had made her mother moan like an animal in pain. She glanced across at Kamal, who looked petrified, and placed a finger on her lips.
Shhh!
She rose to her feet and pulled the girl after her to the inner room and the steel cupboard.

“Get inside,” she whispered. “Don’t make a noise.” Kamal entered the cold metal cupboard reluctantly and sat down. Despite its size it was a tight space, and she had to make herself thin in order to fit in.

“Stay there till I come for you,” Nimmo whispered. She shut the door and locked it. She stuffed the key into a bowl full of other keys, coins and odds and ends. They would not think of looking for it there. Let them kill her if they wanted, but they would never get her daughter. She slipped into the kitchen and grabbed a heavy iron poker. Unlike her mother, she was prepared.

The banging on the door became louder and more insistent. There was the sound of glass breaking. The window-pane. Thank goodness for the iron grill. More banging, and then the door burst open, flinging the cot away and scattering the steel shelves ranged on it.

Nimmo glared at the intruders. She recognized some of them—there was the fellow from the ration shop who always cheated her on her sugar rations, there was that Doctor Jaikishen who prayed forty times a day and sold medicines made of sugar and wheat flour to his poor patients. And behind them all, hiding like the coward that he was, was Asha’s husband.

“What do you want?” Nimmo asked, holding the iron rod firmly in her hands.

“Where are your men?” one of the men asked.

Nimmo looked at Asha’s husband. “Why are you here, brother?” she asked.

He shifted his eyes away from her straight gaze. “You better tell them what they want to know. Otherwise I can’t say what will happen,” he mumbled.

“You have known us for twenty, twenty-five years, brother. Why didn’t you tell them that my men are never here at this time of the day?” Nimmo said. “Satpal is in Modinagar, he called at your house, you know that. You were there, and Asha—you heard me talking to him.”

“Enough talking,” shouted one of the other men. There were only men in the group, Nimmo noticed. “Search the house. Tear it down till you find the rats who killed our Madam-ji!”

“I said they are not here, didn’t you hear me?” Nimmo
screamed. She swung the rod around. “Set one foot inside this house and see what happens!” She was not her mother.

She heard a woman shouting outside the house. It was Kaushalya, her neighbour, owner of the chickens.

“What is going on here?” she called. “Nimmo, is everything all right?”

Nimmo shouted back, “Call the police, Kaushalya!”

The men advanced into the house and Nimmo lifted the rod high over her head before bringing it down hard on the nearest shoulder. The man she had attacked screamed obscenities at her. Somebody else grabbed her around her waist and prised the rod out of her hand.

“Help me!” shouted Nimmo. “Kaushalya, call the police!”

It was too late, of course. The men flooded through the house. One of them entered the bedroom and banged on the steel cupboard in the corner.

“What’s inside here?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” Nimmo said sullenly. She turned again to Asha’s husband, who was standing near the front door staring at the mess with a slightly shocked expression on his face, as if he had not really expected it. “Brother, why are you doing this to us?” she said to him. “We have been neighbours for so many years, tell these people we have nothing to hide, tell them. Please.”

Asha’s husband looked away uneasily. “Just tell them where Satpal and your son are and they will go away,” he said.

“They are not here,” Nimmo said. “Why don’t you believe me?”

“Open this cupboard,” said one of the men. He kicked at the door.

Nimmo glared at him. “I don’t have the keys,” she said.

“What is in here?”

“Just some clothes, that’s all. We are not rich people,” Nimmo said.

The man banged the cupboard hard so that it rocked slightly. “Is somebody inside?”

Perhaps it was Nimmo’s guarded expression, perhaps it was just an instinct. The man looked around the room and his eyes fell on the clothes that were heaped on the floor. “I asked, is there somebody hiding in here?” he asked again.

Nimmo shook her head. “I told you, my husband and my son are not here. I am telling you the truth. They are in Modinagar.”

Without another word the man picked up a sheet from the ground and started to tear it into strips. He jerked his head towards Nimmo and said gruffly to the other men, “Take her outside.”

“Why? What are you doing? I told you there is nobody here,” Nimmo shouted as she was hustled outdoors and to the front yard. “What kind of people are you? Have you no shame? No conscience?”

A moment later, their leader came out of the house and left with the other men. Nimmo looked after them, bewildered and relieved that she and Kamal were still alive and unhurt. Then, from the window of the bedroom, a spire of smoke emerged. Choked by dread, Nimmo ran back inside and saw that the man had lit a
bonfire with the bedsheets, her children’s textbooks, clothes and anything else that would burn. A strong smell of kerosene filled the room mixed with the odour of smoke. In the centre of the fire stood the steel cupboard. Nimmo heard herself screaming, a high-pitched stream of sound that seemed to belong to somebody else.
Nononono!
She tried to bat the fire down with her bare hands
. Kamal, I am coming.
She ran to the kitchen and rushed back with a bucket of water. Then another and another. Blankets, towels, anything. And screaming all the while,
Kamal Kamal Kamal.
She raced to and fro, her hair wild about her face. The fire wasn’t dying down. It licked the steel cupboard into a white heat, the green paint curling away, and was that her daughter shouting from inside?
It was the last safe place in the world, that bin of grain, stay there my daughter, stay there, you will be safe. Don’t make a noise or they will get you.
She ran madly back and forth and tried to enter the flames, which leapt about the room making everything blood-red and smoke-black.
Where are the keys? Where is the bowl with the keys? Must get to Kamal.
Nimmo crawled around the room, along the edges of the fire, looking for the key in the mess of things on the floor.
The bastards have stolen the keys. The murderers, the bastard murderers.

Strong arms dragged her out of the room. Kaushalya’s husband. Kaushalya stood behind him in the room that was not burning and clucked like one of her chickens: “Nimmo, let it be, let it be. You will get hurt. Those are only things that are burning, Nimmo. Let it be. The police said they will come as soon as possible. I told them
what happened. They said you must come and file a report. Nimmo, come out!”

Nimmo fought to get back to the room where the cupboard held her daughter.
Kamal I am coming.

The hen again: “Cluck, cluck, cluck, it’s okay, it’s okay!”

“No, it is not okay,” Nimmo panted, still tearing at the arms around her waist. “My Kamal is inside!”

Dawning realization in the hen’s eyes. “In the room? Where is she? I didn’t see her.”

“Inside the steel cupboard, the safest place—she is there, my little daughter,” wailed Nimmo. “Nobody can touch her there.”

Across the city, Pappu searched for a new set of tires for the scooter that needed repairs. When he reached the supplier’s shop, it was shuttered and the normally busy street was deserted. A tea-shop owner, seeing Pappu standing uncertainly on the sidewalk, shouted at him to go home and stay inside.

“They are beating up the sardars all over the city. Better go home, son,” said the wizened old man. He too was busy pulling the shutters down on his tiny shop.

By the time Pappu returned empty-handed to his father’s shop, the busy street there had been shuttered as well, and a dense silence had descended. Mohan Lal, his father’s partner for the past twenty-five years, waited anxiously outside the closed shop for him.

“Son, I decided to close the shop. Everybody is advising this,” Mohan Lal said as soon as he saw Pappu.

Pappu looked uncertainly at the grey-haired man,
stooped from years of hunching over machine parts. “So should I go home?” he asked.

“No, no, my house is closer. You are too conspicuous with that turban and beard, especially today, son, especially today. I live a few minutes away, and you will be safe in a Hindu home—they won’t look for you there.”

Pappu followed him down the narrow gully, a familiar path that he had taken often enough to celebrate many festivals and family occasions with this elderly man who had been a part of his life since his birth. There was the tiny temple dedicated to Shiva, there the quilter’s shop, the drain outside thick with floating puffs of escaped silk-cotton, the chatai-maker’s warehouse, all shuttered and watchful somehow. Pappu was uneasily aware of eyes following the two of them.

As if sensing the young man’s feelings, Mohan Lal said in reassuring tones, “Don’t worry, I know all these people. They are harmless.”

Finally, after a walk that seemed far longer than the ten minutes it actually took, they reached a small house at the end of the lane. Mohan Lal’s wife, Shanti, cautiously opened the door and ushered them in.

“I will phone your mother and tell her that you are here with us,” Mohan Lal said. “If the phone booth is open, that is.” He turned to his wife. “Don’t open the door to anyone, you hear?”

“I know, I know.
You
be careful also,” she warned before shutting the door.

She turned to Pappu and said kindly, “Sit, sit. I will get you some tea.”

Pappu sat on the charpoy Shanti had unrolled in one corner of the room that served as both living area and kitchen. He had come to this house many times when he was a boy, but his visits became less frequent as he grew older, largely because Mohan Lal’s daughters were also grown up and it would not look right for an unmarried man to visit a home with young women in it.

“It is very kind of you to help me like this, Chaachi-ji,” Pappu said shyly.

“My child, where is the kindness in taking care of one of our own? These are difficult times for you, and it is our duty to help. Your father would do the same for us, I know that.” The thin, grey-haired woman, squatting before the gas stove that sat on a raised platform constructed of bricks and a wooden plank, waited patiently for the water to boil. If she was unhappy about allowing danger into the fragile safety of her home, she showed no sign of it.

She handed Pappu a glass tumbler of boiling tea and settled down to chop vegetables for the day’s meal. The silence was broken by the sound of a child screaming in one of the neighbouring houses, and then suddenly there was a knock on the door, tentative at first and then more authoritative. She looked up and whispered to Pappu, “They are here. What to do?”

“I’ll go outside, Chaachi-ji. I don’t want to cause trouble,” Pappu replied softly. He could handle this; what could they do to him?

Shanti shook her head. “No, son, no, you are not causing trouble,” she said. “And my husband would never forgive me if something happened to you out there.”

There was more banging on the door and several voices shouted at Shanti to open the door.

“I’m coming, wait,” she called back. “I am in the bathroom! What is the hurry?”

She pushed Pappu ahead of her and into the tiny bath. “Stay here. Maybe they will go away.”