The Pakistani Bride (3 page)

The child saw her father's brown legs flash towards them through the green stalks. Something in his movement checked Munni's usual delighted greeting. She clung to her mother's sari.

Sikander, panting, reached the open yard. He shouted, “A train is leaving at four o'clock from Ludhiana. We must make it.”

Zohra turned her face away, sick with fright and the realization of loss. The moment she had vaguely dreaded hit her like a physical blow.

The angry chants, fragmented by the distance, urged them into action.

“Hurry, for God's sake,” panted Sikander.

Zohra dragged out their tin trunks and bedrolls. Listlessly she wrapped odds and ends into clumsy cloth bundles. The calf and two goats were tethered, ready for departure.

Sikander ran round to the back and, trotting abreast of the horse, brought their two-wheeled
rehra
to the spread of
luggage. “We can't take all this!” he cried. “A trunk apiece, that's all. Hide the jewelry somewhere on your body. Come on, hurry up.” He bustled Zohra out of her stunned apathy. Munni was lifted into the cart. Sikander hauled in the calf and goats while Zohra fetched the sleeping baby boy from inside. They drove through the fields on to a dirt road.

 

The train at Ludhiana station already swarmed with Muslims who had boarded it at earlier stops. Panic-stricken families were abandoning their animals and possessions in an attempt to get on. Zohra glanced back at their mound of luggage now scattered and indistinguishable among the mounting litter of tin trunks and bundles. Their goats had already run off. She pressed closer to Sikander, roughly yanking Munni by the hand. The baby, secure on her hip, looked about him with interest.

Carrying the calf, protecting it with his arms, Sikander forced a way for his family. Inches from the train they were suddenly pushed back by a swell in the crowd. Sikander dropped the calf. Lunging desperately, he at last got a grip on an open window. Quickly he clambered on to the roof of a compartment. Zohra held up the baby. Someone took him and passed him to his father. Lifting Munni, arms outstretched, Zohra too was hoisted up by friendly hands.

“Abba, the calf! There it is!” cried Munni, pointing it out. It tottered below them on spindly, unsteady legs, its face raised, mute and trusting.

“Get the calf, Abba. Don't leave it, she's a baby, she'll die!”

“Shush,” her mother scolded. “We haven't room for ourselves and you want to take that beast!”

“Abba, don't leave the calf . . . I want my calf,” Munni wailed, and Zohra, overwrought and on the verge of tears herself, raged, “Shut up, or I'll slap you.”

“Don't be angry with the child,” said Sikander, holding his daughter close.

A few paces from them, jammed between two men, a boy sat cradling a newborn calf. Munni dug her face into her father's shirt. She wept inconsolably.

 

The train sped through the throng awaiting it at Jullundur and stopped instead at a siding a few furlongs past the station. It was a prearranged halt and the small, clandestine group awaiting it squeezed in as best they could. Qasim, a roistered pistol slung across his chest, a rifle swinging down his back, walked rapidly towards the engine, scanning the compartments. He tried one, but was churned out by the pressure of brown bodies. Afraid that the train might leave without him, he began to run. Just as it pulled away, he hauled himself on to the roof of the carriage nearest the engine.

Sitting on the roof Qasim could see the refugees who had been bypassed at the station closing in like a tide. Men and women carrying children surged forward with their cattle. The train picked up speed. There was an angry roar from the scrambling mass, and some, leaving their families, rushed forward.

But the train, with an indifferent hiss, drew away into the growing darkness.

 

An old man with a wispy beard sits next to Qasim. Their legs dangle over the roof and from time to time the old man, afraid of losing his balance, grips Qasim's thigh. He chirps like a bird, philosophizing, sermonizing, relating the histories of various members of his family in his impeccable Aligarh Urdu. Qasim, who has picked up only a broken, make-do Urdu in his three years in the plains, is at a loss before the onslaught of such poetic fluency. Yet he nods his head. He gathers that the old man is from Central India and is eager to settle in Pakistan with his
wife, four sons, and their families, all of whom are scattered about the train.

Smoke from the engine spews into their faces, and except for their irritated red eyes, they are black with soot. Brushing away sparks and tears, patches of Qasim's skin show unexpectedly white. Tall and bristling with weapons, he is unmistakably a mountain tribal. His narrow eyes, intent on the landscape, combine wariness with the determination of a bird of prey.

 

It is nearly four years since Qasim left his mountain village. From the remote Himalayan reaches of Kohistan, he had traveled straight to Jullundur where his cousin worked as a messenger in a British firm. His cousin found him a job as watchman in the National and Grindlays Bank. The work suited Qasim perfectly. He stood all day, resplendent in a khaki uniform and crisp turban, guarding the bank entrance. The double-barreled gun that he stood beside him and the bullet-crammed bandolier swathing his chest gladdened his heart and gratified his pride, for a gun is part of a tribal's attire. It shows his readiness to face his enemy and protect his family's honor.

Touchy and bewildered to begin with, Qasim nevertheless had been fascinated by Jullundur, a busy city in the North Indian plains. Each common object he saw was to him a miracle. Torches, safety pins, electric lights, cinemas, and cars whirled magically before his senses. The language posed a problem. Although he spoke Hindko, a distorted mixture of Punjabi and Pushto, Qasim was able to follow only very little of the zestful Punjabi spoken in Jullundur. Urdu and Hindustani were entirely beyond him.

In the evenings, with his Kohistani friends, Qasim perched atop the backrests of park benches, seeking with his mind's
eye the heights and valleys of the land he had left. Like prime-hooded hawks, the tribesmen squatted on the thin edges of roofs and walls, and their eyes sank into the women's brisk buttocks and bare midriffs. Qasim developed a taste for spicy curries and vegetables, a far cry from his daily mountain diet of flat maize bread soaked in water.

The difference was greatest in the really basic values. The men of the plains appeared strangely effeminate. Women roamed the streets in brazen proximity. These people were soft, their lives easy. Where he came from, men—as in the Stone Age—walked thirty days over the lonely, almost trackless mountains to secure salt for their tribes.

 

The old man has not spoken for some time. Nervously he glances at Qasim's pistol when the holster stirs between them. He is certain the jerks will trigger a shot and shatter his thigh. At last he pats Qasim gingerly on the back.

“Do you think you could move this thing to the other shoulder, Khan Sahib?”

Qasim obligingly shifts the holster strap.

The old man gives a thin smile. Holding on to the roof-edge with one hand, he combs his scant beard.

“Say, why do you carry this dangerous weapon?” he asks in fatherly tones.

“To kill my enemies.”

In the dark, Qasim feels the man's shoulder twitch and move away. Enjoying the situation, he boasts: “I killed a baboo just before getting here.”

“Why . . . what had he done?”

“I settled a score with him before leaving.”

Qasim pats his gun.

“But why?” persists the old man.

“He was a bloody Hindu bastard!” says Qasim with a finality that checks the old man's curiosity back into his throat.

 

It was a fact. Qasim had killed a man before leaving.

His enmity with Girdharilal, a puckish, supercilious little clerk, had started a few months after he became watchman at the bank. Besides his clerical work, Girdharilal was responsible for cleanliness in the bank building, right down to the toilets.

Qasim performed his ablutions before reporting for work, but sometimes he was compelled to use the public place reserved for lesser employees. It was of sophisticated Indian style: a clock-shaped china basin embedded in the floor to squat over, with a rusty chain dangling from the ceiling to manipulate the flush. A tap was at hand and a mug stood under it ready for use.

On his rare visits, Qasim left the contraption clogged with stones and scraps of smooth-surfaced glass. Colleagues visiting the lavatory later would rush out in consternation. Girdharilal had the mess cleared out a couple of times and everyone wondered who had caused the mischief. Happily oblivious, Qasim understood none of their talk.

But Girdharilal had his suspicions. One day he followed Qasim and discovered him to be the culprit. He accosted him directly, asking, “Did you throw the stones in there?”

Qasim, who did not follow the quick-spoken, alien words, merely smiled. A bunch of peons and clerks gathered around them. They explained the charge to Qasim. Admitting the facts, still smiling, he looked from one astonished face to the next, wondering what really was the matter. But there was no mistaking Girdharila's truculence. He spluttered and gesticulated insultingly. He poked him in the ribs, and the smile left Qasim's face.

He realized he was being ridiculed. And then Girdharilal used a particularly vile obscenity. “You filthy son of a Muslim mountain hog!” he cried. Qasim's face darkened. Lifting the slightly built man he pressed him against a wall, and with his hands around the clerk's neck, he started to choke him. Death was the price for daring such an insult to his tribe, his blood, his religion.

Frantic cries rang out of “Murder! murder! The Pathan will kill him!” and the two were wrenched apart.

Girdharilal, faint with shock, trembled while Qasim hurled abuse and threats of vengeance at him in his hill dialect. Girdharilal did not catch a single word, but he could not miss the meaning.

A senior officer appeared. The situation was explained to him, and Qasim was ordered to apologize. He refused, and his clansman was sent for. After a roaring argument, the clansman finally persuaded Qasim to say the necessary words. He uttered them with the grace of a hungry tiger kept from his victim by chains. An uneasy peace ensued. Qasim learned from his cousin that killing, no matter what the provocation, was not acceptable by the laws of this land. He would be caught and hanged. These were the plains, with no friendly mountains to afford him sanctuary.

 

Time passed. Tales of communal atrocities fanned skirmishes, unrest, and panic. India was to be partitioned, and that summer the anger and fear in people's minds exploded. Towns were automatically divided into communal sections. Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, each rushed headlong for the locality representing his faith, to seek the dubious safety of strength in numbers. Isolated homes were ransacked and burned. The sky glowed at night from the fires. It was as though the earth had
become the sun, spreading its rays upward. Dismembered bodies of men, women, and even children, lay strewn on roads. Leaving everything behind, people ran from their villages into the towns.

Qasim had not been to work for a month. Riots were in full swing in Jullundur. One night, defying the curfew, Qasim stealthily made his way to Girdharilal's quarters on the first floor of a squalid tenement.

He stood on the landing, letting his eyes get accustomed to the dark. Then, pressing a shoulder against the cheap wood, he quietly tried to force the doors. They were chained to each other from inside.

“Who's there?” a woman's frightened voice called.

Qasim paused. Regaining his composure, he knocked politely.

“I want to speak with Girdharilal. It is urgent,” he said, disguising his accent.

Girdharilal cleared his throat noisily. Any intruder would know there was a man in the house. Qasim heard him shuffle into his slippers. Next, the chain was being slackened enough for him to peep through the crack.

“Who is it?”

Qasim examined the slit of light, bright at the top, but dark where the clerk's face and naked torso blocked it. The crack looked paler where the light filtered through the white loincloth between his legs.

“Who is it? Speak up,” asked Girdharilal, peering into the dark, unable to see who it was.

Slipping the muzzle of his pistol between the door panels, Qasim felt it touch soft flesh. He pulled the trigger.

As he raced away, the clerk's wretched moan and a woman's scream rang in his ears. He wondered that Girdharilal had
had time to moan. His hand twitched, and the naked gun still seemed to jump as crazily as it had when he fired it. Even as he fled, lights all over the building were coming on.

The next day Qasim heard of the train and rushed to board it.

 

The train glides through the moon-hazed night, with a solid mass of humanity clinging to it like flies to dung.

From time to time a figure loses its hold, or is forced off and drifts away like discarded rubbish. A cry, then silence.

Compartments and lavatories are jammed with stifled brown bodies; some carry the deadweight of children asleep on swaying shoulders. Women hold on to flush chains, they lean on children cramped into wash basins. The train speeds on.

Zohra sits on the train roof within the protective crook of Sikander's outstretched arm. He holds on to a projecting waterspout to secure his family against the sway and jerk of the train. The girl sleeps cramped between his legs, her head bobbing on his chest. Zohra holds the baby snugly between her thighs and breasts. The baby presses against a sachet of gold and silver ornaments hanging from her neck. The metal bruises her flesh and the young mother makes little squirming shifts.