Cracking India (24 page)

“What trouble?”

“This Pakistan-Hindustan business...”

“Where did he go?” I ask.

“Oh, I don't know,” says Ayah. “Probably back to his China.”

 

Masseur's been with Ayah practically all evening, yet there's no sign of Ice-candy-man. I wonder about it.

The next evening Masseur has Ayah all to himself. And the next. Still no sign of the popsicle vendor.

I am disturbed. So is Ayah. “Where is everybody?” she asks Masseur: meaning the Government House gardener, the wrestler, the butcher, the zoo attendant, Ice-candy-man and the rest of the gang. Even Yousaf and Imam Din appear to have become less visible.

Papoo and I are helping Hari bathe the buffalo in the afternoon when Adi walks up in the slush and, maneuvering himself between me and the buffalo, stands absolutely, intensely still. As if this alone is not enough to rivet my attention, he murmurs in my ear: “Follow me!”

He turns and casually walks away. I can tell he is wild with excitement and has exercised all his self-control not to break into a run. I'd follow him to the ends of the earth to discover the cause of his excitement.

When we are outside the Shankars' empty rooms, he turns to me his shining eyes. He has no right to look like this... As if lit up from within. Regardless—I'd follow him to the ends of the earth.

“What is it?” I whisper in a frenzy.

“The black box is back in the bathroom.”

It is a rare occasion: Adi-made-of-mercury standing still, and confiding in me.

Not only is the black box back, says Adi, but he also knows what's in it.

“What? What? Tell me,” I plead.

But Adi, like a cat playing with the poor tail-less mousey, says: “See for yourself.”

I tiptoe up the bathroom steps and approach the long box. It is as sinister as ever. I take Adi's word for it that it is open but I dare not lift the lid. I have no wish to be scared out of my wits: What if it's a grinning, skeletal corpse?

Adi puts a cautioning finger on his lips and lifts the lid. Nestled in scarlet velvet, in a depression specially carved for it, like a dark jewel in its setting, is an enormous double-barreled gun. I feel its smooth barrels and its polished wood.

No wonder we couldn't carry the box. The gun is heavy.

Between us we carry the gun, Adi cautiously leading at the barrel end, and me at the other. Nervous that we might be discovered, or that the gun might fire its double barrels into Adi's behind, we at last reach the gate.

Adi takes first turn. I help him stand up the gun and he looks like a diminutive Gurkha with a cannon.

I don't know how long we take turns holding the gun. An hour—perhaps two. We hear the ubiquitous chanting of the mobs in the distance:
“Allah-o-Akbar!”
comes the fragmented roar from the Muslim
goondas
of Mozang.
“Bole
so
nehal: Sat siri akal!”
from the Sikh
goondas
of Beadon Road. Standing at attention with the gun I feel ready to face any mob.

There is little traffic; a few tongas, half a dozen cyclists. A group of prisoners, the chains along their arms and legs clanking, eye the gun speculatively and the policeman shepherding them prudently crosses the road. No one talks to us. The presence of the dual barrels is intimidating.

Luckily it's not my turn when Father cycles up and comes to a grim halt in front of Adi. Not loquacious at his calmest, Father is rendered speechless. He glares at Adi. “Put it back at once!” he says at last. He slaps Adi for the first time in his life.

Pushing the cycle with one hand Father comes to me and thumps my back. As thumps go it is a half-hearted thump—unlike Mother's whole-hearted whacks that cause us to stagger clear across rooms—but no beating of Mother's ever hurt so much.

After dinner Father sits us on his lap and explains: “Your lives weren't worth two pice when you showed off with that gun.”

The black box again disappears.

Ice-candy-man visits at last. Once again we are gathered on the Shankars' abandoned veranda. I cannot believe the change in him. Gone is the darkly grieving look that had affected me so deeply the evening he emerged from the night and almost crashed into us with the grim news of the trainload of dead Muslims.

Ice-candy-man has acquired an unpleasant swagger and a strange way of looking at Hari and Moti. He is full of bravado—and still full of stories. “You remember Kirpa Ram? That skinflint we all owe money?” he asks, barely bothering to greet anyone as he settles among us, chomping on a
paan.
His mouth, slimy and crimson with betel juice, bloated—as if he's become accustomed to indulging himself.

“That money-lender would squeeze blood from a fly!” he says, bending over to spit betel juice into a flowerpot holding a delicate tracery of ferns. “Well,” he continues, “Kirpa Ram's packed his family off to Delhi. But can he bear to part from those of us he's been fattening on? No! So, he stays. He thinks he's that brave!” Ice-candy-man's mouth curls in a contemptuous sneer. “But the instant we entered his house I saw his fat dhotied tail slip out of the back door! Ramzana the butcher noticed a damp patch on one of the walls. It had been hastily whitewashed. He scraped the cement and removed a brick. What d'you think he found? Pouches with nine hundred guineas sewn into them! Nine hundred golden guineas!”

Ice-candy-man studies us, moving his swaggering eyes triumphantly from face to face.

Ayah, the Government House gardener, Hari and Moti stare back with set, expressionless faces. Masseur frowns. Yousaf scowls at the naked veranda bulb. Imam Din gets up, leaning heavily on the Government House gardener, and invoking Allah's mercy and blessings and sighing, heads for the kitchen.

“Show me your hand,” says Ice-candy-man to Ayah.

Ayah, surprised into thinking he wants to read her future, opens her plump palm and shows it to Ice-candy-man. I also think he is initiating seduction through palmistry. Instead he places a gold coin in her hand. Ayah studies it minutely and bites it to test the gold.

It is bitten and passed from hand to hand and on to me. I examine Queen Victoria's embossed profile with fascination. Despite the difference in the metals it is the same profile she displays in her statue.

Ayah returns the coin to Ice-candy-man.

“Keep it. It's for you,” he says grandly, folding her fingers over it.

“No,” she says, shaking her head and hiding her hands behind her back.

She's like me. There are some things she will not hold.

“But I brought it specially for you! Please accept it,” pleads Ice-candy-man, for the first time sounding like his old ingratiating self.

Ayah averts her face. “Where's Sher Singh?” she suddenly asks. As if the zoo attendant is somewhere he ought not to be.

There is no reply.

“He's left Lahore, I think,” says Yousaf at last, glancing at Ice-candy-man.

Ice-candy-man makes a harsh, crude sound. “There's natural justice for you!” he says, spitting the red juice into the ferns again. “You remember how he got rid of his Muslim tenants? Well, the tenants had their own back! Exposed themselves to his womenfolk! They went a bit further... played with one of Sher Singh's sisters... Nothing serious-but her husband turned ugly... He was killed in the scuffle,” says Ice-candy-man casually. “Well, they had to leave Lahore sooner or later... After what one hears of Sikh atrocities it's better they left sooner! The refugees are clamoring for revenge!”

“Were you among the men who exposed themselves?” asks the Government House gardener. His tone implies more a mild assertion than a question.

“What's it to you, oye?” says Ice-candy-man, raising his voice and flaring into an insolent display of wrath. “If you must know, I was! I'll tell you to your face—I lose my senses when I think of the mutilated bodies on that train from Gurdaspur... that night I went mad, I tell you! I lobbed grenades through the windows of Hindus and Sikhs I'd known all my life! I hated their guts ... I want to kill someone for each of the breasts they cut off the Muslim women ... The penises!”

In the silence that follows, the gardener clears his throat. “You're right, brother,” he says. I feel he cannot meet Ice-candy-man's
eyes. He is looking so deliberately at the floor that it appears as if he is hanging his head. “There are some things a man cannot look upon without going mad. It's the mischief of Satan ... Evil will spawn evil ... God preserve us.” His voice is gruff with the burden of disillusion and loss. “I've sent my family to Delhi. As soon as the
Sarkar
permits I will join them.” The gardener turns his weary gaze upon Hari. “Have you made plans to go, brother?” he asks.

“Where to?” says Hari, shaking his head and wiping his eyes with his arm. “I'll ride the storm out. I've nowhere to go.”

“You'll find someplace to go,” says the Government House gardener. “When our friends confess they want to kill us, we have to go... ” He makes no move to wipe the tears running in little rills through his gray stubble and dripping from his chin. The red rims of his eyes are blurred and soggy and blend into the soft flesh as if he has become addicted to weeping.

Moti and Papoo are sitting bowed and subdued on the veranda steps. “What about you two?” Masseur asks. “Are you leaving?”

After a pause, during which we hear Moti's knuckles crack as he presses his fingers against his palm, speaking hesitantly and so low that I can barely hear him, he says, “I talked to the padre at the Cantonment Mission ... We're becoming Christian.”

Ice-candy-man, appearing restless, nods casually. “Quite a few of your people are converting,” he says. “You'd better change your name, too, while you're at it.”

The longer I observe Ice-candy-man the more I notice the change wrought in him. He seems to have lost his lithe, catlike movements. And he appears to have put on weight. Perhaps it's just the air of consequence on him that makes him appear more substantial.

“The Faletti's Hotel cook has also run away with his tail between his legs!” he informs us, unasked. And once again he appears bloated with triumph ... and a horrid irrepressible gloating.

 

It is very late. The frogs are croaking again. We might have some rain yet. Except for Masseur, everyone has gone. We move to the patch of grass near the servants' quarters. There is a full moon
out but it is pitch dark where we sit under a mulberry tree. There is no breeze. And except for the occasional rustle in the leaves caused by a restless bird, or the indiscernible movement of a frog, the night is still.

Ayah is crying softly. “I must get out of here,” she says, sniffing and wiping her nose on her sari-blouse sleeve. “I have relatives in Amritsar I can go to.”

“You don't need to go anywhere,” says Masseur, so assuredly possessive that I feel a stab of jealousy. “Why do you worry? I'm here. No one will touch a hair on your head. I don't know why you don't marry me!” he says, sighing persuasively. “You know I worship you... ”

“I'm already yours,” says Ayah with disturbing submission. “I will always be yours.”

“Don't you dare marry him!” I cry. “You'll leave me ... Don't leave me,” I beg, kicking Masseur.

“Silly girl! I won't leave you ... And if I have to, you'll find another ayah who will love you just as much.”

“I don't want another ayah ... I will never let another ayah touch me!”

I start sobbing. I kiss Ayah wherever Masseur is not touching her in the dark.

Rosy-Peter have gone. The Government House gardener has gone...

And the gramophones and speakers mounted on tongas and lorries scratchily, endlessly pouring out the melody of Nur Jehan's popular film song that is now so strangely apt:

Instead, wave upon scruffy wave of Muslim refugees flood Lahore—and the Punjab west of Lahore. Within three months seven million Muslims and five million Hindus and Sikhs are uprooted in the largest and most terrible exchange of population known to history. The Punjab has been divided by the icy card-sharks dealing out the land village by village, city by city, wheeling and dealing and doling out favors.

For now the tide is turned—and the Hindus are being favored over the Muslims by the remnants of the Raj. Now that its objective to divide India is achieved, the British favor Nehru over Jinnah. Nehru is Kashmiri; they grant him Kashmir. Spurning logic, defying rationale, ignoring the consequence of bequeathing a Muslim state to the Hindus, while Jinnah futilely protests: “Statesmen cannot eat their words!”