Two Short Novels (11 page)

‘But what are you saying?’ protested Mahmdoo. ‘I would rather be with you than cooking for the raiders all night under Babu Ishaq’s orders! And, after I took sides with you, he would surely have betrayed me to the murderers. You don’t know Ishaq! He believes he is a great man, because he is a school teacher.’

The warm breath issued out of Mahmdoo’s mouth in wisps of smoke as he sat by Maqbool and spoke these words. And his peculiar devotion, born through the chivalry of the host, which had made Mahmdoo come so far, overflowed into space. Maqbool was sure that though he could not see the face of his companion, there would be tears in the cook’s eyes. He would feel lonely, when the father and son would leave him, as he had now decided they must, but the wheel of time was turning in his brain and he felt he must turn with it.

‘You came with me!’ he began in a gentle whisper, ‘because my presence with you forced you to take my side in the argument with Ishaq. You would have cooked for Ishaq and his friends out of sheer necessity. I cannot expect you to face possible death for something you may not understand. Perhaps, tomorrow, after you have been in Baramula, you may know what I mean. Even I ran away to Srinagar, thinking everything was lost in Baramula. But I have come back, because I believe help will come to us. I do not want you to stay with me tonight —’

‘Sire!’ Mahmdoo protested.

‘No, if you believe in me, you will have to obey my orders,’ said Maqbool sharply. ‘You can do something for me. By then you will have time to think and become stranger in your faith. You take Gula to Juma’s house. In the morning, if you think the road is clear, send Gula to me here with a message. This plan has to be carried out. Otherwise, all three of us will die a needless death.’

Mahmdoo had no words against this logic. Besides, the suggestion to go met the curve of his own inner desire for safety. Maqbool had guessed rightly.

‘I would like to sleep here by Gula — but if you say I must go, I will go
. . . .
’ Mahmdoo said by way of apology.

‘If anything happens to me,’ Maqbool said, ‘Gula can take that motorcycle I have left behind your shop. The locksmith’s son in Baramula will teach him how to ride it.’

‘What inauspicious talk you do!’ protested Mahmdoo.

‘Go then —’

Mahmdoo tried to lift his son Gula in his arms. The boy was heavy. So Maqbool got up and, raising Gula from the hay bed, put him silently on Mahmdoo’s back like a sack. Having once been a coolie, Mahmdoo could carry the weight easier that way.

‘May Allah be with you,’ Mahmdoo mumbled.

‘Send Gula if you can in the morning,’ Maqbool repeated his request. And, as the man walked away slowly, he began to scoop out some hay from the stack before making a cave for himself.

As soon as he lay down anyhow, he was filled with warmth for Mahmdoo, who had put himself into this awkward situation through the old Kashmiri sense of chivalry.

The hay had been piled up very compactly. He found that the bushels he had detached were only four feet long. And he was uncomfortable as he lay curled up like a baby. So he took another two bushels out from the side.

For a little while, he felt too desolate to go to sleep. It was strange that now, after the heat of the walk had died down in his body, he began to miss the presence of Mahmdoo and Gula and felt lonely — a kind of emptiness tinged with an endless series of anxieties, vague and amorphous, like menacing shadows cast by the captors of Baramula.

But, outside, the wind rushed through the poplars with a cold swish. Instinctively he clung to himself and pillowed his head with his left arm. Now he felt snug and calm and lay listening to the breeze and to the wetness of the earth sucking up its own moisture. And the fatigue of his body rose like the smell of country liquor to his head and closed his eyes, dissolving his heavy body into the small space around him, and starting off a series of nightmares in his head.

A lengthy exchange of distant rifle and machine gun fire aroused him from the crazed sleep, in which the last broken edges of dreams showed Mahmdoo and Gula as stags goring him with their horns. He lifted his head and listened, stifling the sentiments about Mahmdoo with a deliberate prejudice in favour of the fat shopkeeper. The distant rat-tat-tat of the machine gun increased. And he was filled with the forebodings which had obsessed him all the way from Srinagar. The only machine guns would be in the hands of the Pakistanis, for he had seen the abject dump of crude single-barrelled and double-barrelled rifles which the people’s militia had shown him in the store rooms of the Palladium cinema. But the well equipped Indian army may have come . . .

He took a deep breath and listened more intently to locate the exact direction where the sound of firing came from. It was on the Gandarbal side of Baramula. Perhaps the raiders were about to attack Srinagar from that flank, in force. Not that he knew anything about how armies fought, but it seemed strange to his youthful mind that they could advance so far on the flanks, leaving their middle undefended. For if an army had moved with him from Srinagar, on or near the main road to Baramula, it could have got behind them in Gandarbal through the tracks from Pattan and cut them off. But they were no fools, the men who had organised this invasion, Generals Gracey and Tariq. And Liaqat and Abdul Qayum Khan dare not have a defeat on their hands, for Jinnah wanted a
fait accompli
,
the possession of Kashmir, knowing he could tackle all the moral hullabaloo of the United Nations afterwards. Dr. Taseer, who had come once to persuade Kashmir to accept the blood brotherhood, but who had found them recalcitrant, had said at last with ruthless logic: ‘He who has the big stick will have the buffalo!’

If the fighting was on, he must get up and go and do something. He had no right to rest here. If he had any courage, he must be in the fray now
. . .

But what exactly could he do? He could only sound opinion, tell them the news of imminent help from India and wait.

He wondered what the Russian guerillas had done in similar circumstances under Hitler’s occupation? Or the people of the French resistance? And now he regretted that he had only heard rumours of what had happened in the war and had read no books. Never had he felt so abject at his lacks as now. Still he knew that this sudden descent of murder on his land was not an act of God, but a planned brutality to cow people down to submit, and resistance to it was the only virtue. Later he must ask questions and learn the things, so necessary for a young poet. He could not even afford the fare to go to a poetical festival in Srinagar, when he was at school before the world war years. His father had been angry, because he could not give him the money he had asked for, and his mother and sister had been giving him cash from their small savings. And yet his spirit (or was it ambition?) demanded more and more until he had begun to believe that he was one of the most selfish men around Baramula. And the torment of this guilt had made him try
to cultivate humility for its own sake, and he had drowned himself in political work. Reading the poems of Faiz, Majrooh Jafri, Sahir, Nadim, from borrowed books. They had certainly heightened his emotions to a pitch. And this was truly romantic. But why were they not in Kashmir? — Except Nadim.

The rifle fire was sustained. And he felt he could not enjoy the luxury of self-pity any more. He must in the absence of any other concrete plans, go and reconnoitre the position in Baramula. The cover, which the darkness afforded, would help him. Only Gula would not find him here, if he came in the morning with a message from Mahmdoo; but he knew that the shrewd Mahmdoo would understand. So he crawled out of the haystack and began to shake off the straw from his clothes.

The snow flakes which had obviously fallen during the night seemed to have melted and the land was slushy as he began to trudge in the diminishing pitch dark before twilight. A sharp wind blew and cut through his woollen jacket. He gathered his muffler around his neck and felt like a scarecrow walking along. That was an advantage, because in case he was observed he could just stand and stretch his hands out, though the tribesmen were more sharp-eyed than he gave them credit for.

Now that he was going along he wanted to make certain where he was going.

The smoke, which still arose from the middle of the town decided him: It would be futile to plunge into Baramula just like that. He must keep afloat on the sea of existence. And, for this reason, it was best for the while not to yield to the longing for home, but to attend to the bigger anxiety and avoid being caught.

A shiver went down his spine as he realised that he might walk straight into the arms of a Pakistani sentry or be picked off by a
bullet from one of the hawk-eyed ones. And, again, his body and mind were in the grip of the crisis which had occupied him before he had dozed off in the haystack: Did one grow up just to be ready to be shot? What did it all mean? Where was Allah Mian? These were questions arising from fear. He sensed the tremors inside himself.

And, in this agitation, the choice before him became an obsession. He stopped for a moment, his chin uplifted and his eyes exploring an avenue, chafing at himself for his bad nerves. And then he reasoned, almost audibly: ‘Fear is the natural humility of man before ugly reality!’

A little way away from the town, he knew, stood the Presentation Convent, where people were perhaps sufficiently near to be in the know of all that had happened in the three days he had been away and sufficiently far to be out of the trouble spots. As Christians and white folk they would be immune. Besides his father’s cousin, Rahti, worked as house mother in the hospital and her husband, Salaama, was the watchman of the convent.

Skirting around the fields, so that he could keep out of visible distance from the town, he headed towards an uprise from which he could descend on to the convent, without the risk of being observed.

In spite of the agitation in him, he pretended to be as matter of fact as though he had been to the fields for a walk from the convent.

As he sighted the group of buildings of the Presentation Convent, he found the main house smoking.

Footsore and weary from a further trudge after the long walk from Pattan, he felt listless.

He stopped to see things clearly, imagining that, in the deceptive darkness, he was mistaking the smoke of the chimney for fire. Perhaps it was some other building in the nearby town.

But as far as his eyes could peer into the distance, and figure things out, it was, indeed, the main convent house which was smouldering slowly, the smoke like a dense morning mist.

He tried to remain calm and absorb the shock, arguing that he did not really feel any emotion or sentiment about a holy place like a mosque, a temple or a convent. But, all the same, he realised that the raiders had sacked this place. He wondered how the Pakistani officers, who knew of the help given to them by the White generals, had allowed the burning of a missionary centre. The marauders seemed to have engulfed not only the town but also the outskirts, as the weeds in the forest engulf the shrubs and flowers.

So his plan to seek safety among the Christians had failed.

He stood for quite a while wondering what to do next, unable to believe that the Muslim brethren could set fire to a holy place. But the truth smouldered into his brain with the smoke. Clearly this incendiarism had been recently committed.

At last he was encouraged by the view of the standing houses in the convent courtyard, to push on.

Gingerly, he advanced towards the hospital side of the convent, in the courtyard of which Salaama and Rahti had a room.

The frost crinkled under his feet and the beautiful frozen bushes made him feel lonely.

He dared not think of danger, or imagine a catastrophe, for he knew that would be the end of him. And he feigned a casual air, deliberately toughening his sinews, tightening his face and stiffening his neck in the process. This made him a trifle theatrical, but he allowed himself this willed artificiality in the interests of morale. The decision to go forward was like crossing the rubicon from fear to courage. Pausing to look before and after, again he saw that the coast was clear. He hurtled down the hillside.