Cracking India (42 page)

Three horse-drawn carts are crowded any-old-how to the far side of our neighbors' compound and in front of them, quite close to the wall, is the scene of battle: an entwined jumble of arms and legs and torn clothing tumbling through a mesh of snarled hair. Yousaf, Himat Ali and the other men in the forefront are trying to restrain and lift the hefty Sikh guard. The Sikh is entwined with someone on the floor and is viciously attacking and bellowing: “Dog! Motherfucker! Son of an owl!”

Just then the men succeed in pulling the fighters apart and slowly, assisted by several pairs of hands and dusting his clothes, a man arises from the dust. His face and arms are grimed with blood and dirt and his hand is twisted at an unnatural angle. Someone wipes his face with a wet rag and as the man, in obvious pain, pushes the rag away, I see frantic amber eyes.

“It's the Ice-candy-man,” I scream to Mother. “They've beaten him up!”

A group of men hastily bundle him into a cart and three scruffy-looking
goondas
in singlets and lungis jump in after him. One of them, standing up in the carriage, whips the horse savagely
and the cart, followed by the other carts, groans and creaks down the rutted drive.

The remaining men group around the outraged Sikh who is hollering: “I'll break the bastard's neck next time! I've never had trouble before! Let anyone touch the women ... See what I'll do to their cocks and balls! They are my sisters and mothers!” He thumps his massive chest. His knee-length hair, mauled by Ice-candy-man, is in dramatic, spiky disarray. The men stare at him in wonderment and nod their heads.

Imam Din plucks me off the wall and deposits me near Hamida. Mother is yelling at the gate. Trailed by Hamida I run to her as Mother screams after the departing cart,
“Duffa ho!
Show your blackened faces at someone else's door! That scoundrel! He can't deceive me again! If he dares show his face I'll call the police and have him hung upside down!”

She is flushed and fuming and panting in a fierce way.

Her penetrating voice I am sure can be heard by the men in the disappearing carts.

Maggie and Mr. Phailbus try to soothe Mother. Mr. Phailbus, who has the power to heal and calm in his hands, strokes Mother's head and shoulders and Mother's rage subsides somewhat. The Phailbuses say goodbye at the gate and saunter away, talking in subdued voices, and Mother marches up our drive with a preoccupied expression that betrays the battle she is still engaged in with the object of her recriminations.

Hamida and I run to the back and rush up the stairs to the servants' roof. The women and children from the quarters are already looking over the short parapet wall into the courtyard. Since it would be improper for Moti and Hari to look at the women, they are squatting at a polite distance, anxious for whatever news of Ayah they can acquire secondhand. The women in the courtyard appear agitated. They flutter in and out of the rooms and answer our insistent queries with more animation than they have ever displayed before. Their voices rise up to us from upturned faces: Ayah is exhausted. She's all right. She doesn't wish to see you ... best leave her alone. She's being registered.

“Let her be. It'll take hours if she's being registered,” says Hamida, slapping her forehead in a gesture of sympathy, and talking from experience. “They'll be asking her a hundred-and-one questions, and filling out a hundred-and-one forms.” She is referring to the clerks from the Ministry for the Rehabilitation of Recovered Women. “Yes, sister, let her do as she wishes ... ,” say the women on the roof.

And I chant: “Ayah! Ayah! Ayah! Ayah!” until my heart pounds with the chant and the children on the roof picking it up shout with all their heart: “Ayah! Ayah! Ayah! Ayah!” and our chant flows into the pulse of the women below, and the women on the roof, and they beat their breasts and cry:
“Hai! Hai! Hai! Hai!”
reflecting the history of their cumulative sorrows and the sorrows of their Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Rajput great-grandmothers who burnt themselves alive rather than surrender their honor to the invading hordes besieging their ancestral fortresses.

The Sikh guard, noisily splashing himself at the tap outside the gate, stands up to look at us—and when he beholds only the women and children on the roof, he holds his peace—and once again settles to wash the blood and mud from his clothes and hair.

“Ayah! Ayah! Ayah!” we chant and
“Hai! Hai! Hai!”
the weeping women: and supported by two old women Ayah appears in the courtyard. She looks up at us out of glazed and unfeeling eyes for a moment, as if we are strangers, and goes in again.

 

I institute a vehement and importunate enquiry. After a great deal of painstaking probing and prying, I ferret out a fairly accurate account of the events that led to Ayah's extradition from the Hira Mandi.

The long and diverse reach of Godmother's tentacular arm is clearly evident. She set an entire conglomerate in motion immediately after our visit with Ayah and singlehandedly engendered the social and moral climate of retribution and justice required to rehabilitate our fallen Ayah.

Everything came to a head within a fortnight. Which in the normal course of events, unstructured by Godmother's stratagems,
could have been consigned to the ingenious bureaucratic eternity of a toddler nation greenly fluttering its flag—with a white strip to represent its minorities—and a crescent and star—from the National Assembly building behind the unqueened garden and its eviscerated marble marquee.

Brand-new flags flutter, too, from the filigreed turrets of the pink High Court and the General Post Office and other government offices and the new fronts of bazaar shops in the Shalmi and Gowalmandi and the oil and engineering companies—those ubiquitous visitants from foreign lands and the domes and minarets of new mosques erupting all over Lahore ... some beautiful as poems and some bedraggled.

And armed with the might of a small and fluttering green flag, a posse of policemen in a jeep—and a wired black van—squeezed their way right into the constricted, drain-divided heart of the Hira Mandi and stopped before the popsicle-man's splintered door. The police, waving signed papers and batons, swarmed through the rooms of Ice-candy-man's
Kotha
and finding Ayah there took her away, a willing accompanist, to the black van. And all the Mandi pimps and poets and musicians ... and all the flower-sellers, prostitutes, butchers, cigarette and
paan
vendors, wrestlers and toughs of the cultured
Kotha
could do nothing about it. Nor do Ice-candy-man's threats, pleading, remonstrance, bellows, declamations, courtly manners, resourcefulness or wailing impede the progression of the van in its determination to deposit Ayah, with her scant belongings wrapped in cloth bundles and a small tin trunk, at the Recovered Women's Camp on Warris Road. To be followed there in three galloping carts by Ice-candy-man and his cronies—all their outrage and broken bones and pimpy influence to no avail.

-Iqbal

 

Ice-candy-man has taken to patrolling Warris Road, his broken left arm supported in a sling and pressed to his chest as if affirming a truth.

Sometimes he squats across the road from our wall and sometimes inside Rosy-Peter's compound—patiently, and from a distance, watching the tin-sheet gates. Occasionally he recites Zauq:

The guard is getting used to his presence; and to his poetic outbursts. When he first spied him, the Sikh advanced threatening to tear him limb from limb and stuff his genitals every-which- where. Our household, attracted to the wall by the shouting, saw Ice-candy-man's splintered arm raised to defend himself from the blows, and his tearing eyes, and Imam Din and Yousaf shouted: “Let him be,
yaar
, he's harmless.”

The Sikh merely pulled the popsicle-man to his feet by his unbroken and frail arm and Ice-candy-man meekly walked away.

Even the Sikh has given way to his indefatigable persistence and now eyes him with a certain awe. For Ice-candy-man is
acquiring a new aspect—that of a moonstruck fakir who has renounced the world for his beloved: be it woman or God. Repeating a couplet by Faiz as if it is a prayer, he murmurs:

Driven more, I suspect, by private demons than by fear of Mother's threats, Ice-candy-man has not stepped inside our gates. Sometimes he brings with him his thermos of popsicles and does business in a desultory fashion, giving away more ices than he sells. And sometimes, when the Sikh guard accompanies our unseeing and unfeeling Ayah to Mr. Phailbus for homeopathic treatment, Ice-candy-man squats patiently outside the Phailbuses' wall.

Often I accompany Ayah to Mr. Phailbus's; and when we walk past the candy-man, he greets us courteously and does not stare at Ayah, but casts his eyes down. Ayah behaves as if he is invisible. And, his overgrown hair shading his eyes, he sometimes murmurs a couplet by another romantic poet, Ghalib:

Ayah behaves as if he is inaudible too.

He has become a truly harmless fellow. My heart not only melts—it evaporates when I breathe out, leaving me faint with pity. Even the guard lets down his guard and at times, when in the mood for company, squats by Ice-candy-man, gleaning wisdom from his comments on life and its ways and the wayward ways of God and men and women, until it's time to accompany Ayah back. Then, Zauq's poems and Ice-candy-man's voice humming in our minds, we murmur:

Each morning I awaken now to the fragrance of flowers flung over our garden wall at dawn by Ice-candy-man. The courtyard of the Recovered Women's Camp too is strewn with petals; and
sometimes with the added glitter of cheap candy wrapped in cellophane. And after Himat Ali sweeps up the red roses crushed by the sun, and the camp women the petals scattered near the tin gates in their courtyard as if they were no more than goat droppings, Ice-candy-man's voice rises in sweet and clear song to shower Ayah with poems.

Until, one morning, when I sniff the air and miss the fragrance, and run in consternation to the kitchen, I am told that Ayah, at last, has gone to her family in Amritsar.

... And Ice-candy-man, too, disappears across the Wagah border into India.

I thank Rana Khan for sharing with me his childhood experiences at the time of Partition. He still bears the deep crescent-shaped scar on the back of his head and innumerable other scars.

I would also like to acknowledge my friend Nergis Sobani for typing my manuscripts; Phillip Lopate and Rosellen Brown for their good cheer and support; Ali Asani and Noman Haq for assisting me with the selection of the Urdu poems; the late Venketash Kulkarni whose literary enthusiasm I miss, and Reetika Vazirini, my flatmate, who so tragically passed away. I thank the Bunting Institute and the National Endowment for the Arts for providing me with the time and means to complete this novel and Inprint, in Houston, for the encouragement it gives all writers.

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from Urdu Literature edited by D. J. Matthews, C. Shackle, and Shahrukh Husain.

I thank Deepa Mehta for transforming
Cracking India
into the warm and poetic film
Earth
, and my friend Nasreen Rehman for her superb translation of the script into Urdu.

As always I thank my husband, Noshir, my brothers Minnoo and Feroze, and my children Mohur, Koko, Baku, and Parizad for their support and encouragement.

And finally I thank Emilie Buchwald, Hilary Reeves and all at Milkweed, and the friends of Milkweed, for their dedication to the cause of literature and quality publishing.

Born in Karachi and raised in Lahore, Bapsi Sidhwa has been widely acclaimed as Pakistan's finest contemporary novelist. She is the author of four novels:
An American Brat, Cracking India, The Bride,
and
The Crow Eaters
. Her work has been published in translation all over the world.