Two Short Novels (12 page)

Long before he got to the courtyard of the hospital, he was challenged by the sweeper Fatah, who having asked: ‘Who are you?’ ran terror-stricken into the servants’ quarters in the courtyard.

‘Oh Hatto! It is me, Sherwani,’ Maqbool said in whispers loud enough to be heard. But the diffused terror of the invaders possessed Fatah like a ghost. And he was lost to view among the babble of voices in the servants’ quarters.

Luckily for Maqbool, Rahti looked out of the iron bars of the back window of her room and recognised him.

‘It is our Maqbool,’ she said to her husband Salaama, who had awakened from the late sleep into which he had fallen.

Salaama was nearly delirious and looked with bleary eyes,
incomprehensively at his wife, who had been keeping a vigil by him all night.

Rahti went out and brought Maqbool in, quietly, allaying the fears of the other servants, who had come out to their doors and windows, to see if this presaged a new attack by the raiders.

‘They are all scared,’ Rahti began, ‘that the Pakistanis might come back. And, to be sure, there is no knowing what they will do next — if the monsters return! They nearly killed him —’ And as she uttered the last words her control broke down. A lump came into her throat and her eyes filled with tears.

‘Uncle Salaama,’ Maqbool said.

Rahti moved her head up and down affirmatively and her demure, housemother’s face lit up with anguish.

‘Is he badly hurt?’ Maqbool asked as they got into the raised verandah of the servants’ barracks.

She stopped outside the door and told him in whispers: ‘They shot at him while he was guarding the front gateway. And, praise be to Allah, the bullet just grazed past his skull. But the bone was chipped and he lost nearly a pitcherful of blood. He collapsed. He has been delirious since. And the whole day, yesterday, and all night, he has been
. . .
groaning
. . . .
He had just dozed off a little till your coming awakened him.’

Maqbool entered the neat little room with the big bed and came and leaned over Salaama.

‘I am sick, sick
. . . ,
’ Salaama burbled like a drunkard from a slobbering mouth which he could open with seeming difficulty: ‘Sick!
. . .
And those sons of the Devil. They murdered the little mother.’

‘Do not strain yourself!’ Rahti cautioned him. ‘I shall tell him everything!’ And she turned to Maqbool. ‘They killed Sister Teresaline, the Assistant Mother Superior, wounded the Mother Superior and relieved themselves in the chapel!’

Maqbool perched on the edge of the big bed, his face covered with sweat from the terror that arose in him at this news. And he was ashamed by the truth of his prognostications. Or was it his inner timidity, he wondered. Or the humility before the terrible things.

He put his hands into Salaama’s and, for a while, there was silence in the room. Then Salaama groaned and moved his head uncomfortably from side to side.

‘Why have you come back to this hell?’ Rahti said as she turned from where she was lighting the primus stove.

The young man paused to explore the level of his mind which had been blurred by what he saw before him. And, then, without raising his voice, so that he should not sound heroic, he said: ‘We have to resist the monsters.’

Having said this, he felt that some bigger sanction than his own voice was necessary, because inside him he was even now shrinking from the final words he had left unpronounced, ‘or die’. So he added: ‘Our comrades in Srinagar think that
. . . .
And if our luck is good, then, already as I talk, Nehru may have gone into action and sent the Indian army to our relief. The Maharaja has joined India, Srinagar was free when I left yesterday afternoon —’

‘We heard different tales,’ said Rahti impatiently. ‘All we know is that Baramula is completely in the grip of the Pakistanis! And they are filling their trucks with loot. There is no hope here! If only they would leave us alone now and not come back here . . . salt tea — or with sugar?’ All her words were shrill except the last ones.

Maqbool felt a constriction in his throat as he tried to react to her despair. And he could not say anything. He merely sat noticing her nervous hands washing the teapot with hot water to get it ready for tea. The valley seemed to him to have become an orchestra of bitter feelings of despair instead of human voices.

‘If there is sugar, I will have it with sugar,’ he said after all.

‘Ya Allah!’ Salaama pronounced the Islamic incantation even as he turned his head from one side to the other. ‘The ache is terrible,’ he said. ‘Ya Allah
. . .
forgive us. But crush those sons of Shaitan, the marauders!’

Maqbool felt his pulse and knew that Salaama was running high temperature.

‘Try not to speak,’ Rahti said in her familiar housemother manner.

‘O woman,’ he burst out, ‘how can I forget these sons of Iblis, when they murdered the little mother in cold blood. I want to get up and murder them all! Maqbool, they are no good! They have not
only murdered Christians, Hindus and Sikhs, but also Muslims . . . .
And I hope Allah will punish them for this! This woman has no faith. She neither believes in Allah nor in Shaitan! Perhaps she believes in Yessuh Messih
[1]
. . . .
’ At this he was seized with a fit of coughing and lifted his head, while Maqbool supported his back.

‘But is there an Allah?’ Maqbool whispered, hoping his uncle would not hear. ‘Yessuh Messih was a real person and suffered for mankind — was crucified!’

‘Here is some tea,’ Rahti said to her husband. Her sorrow seemed to have turned into a cynical tight-mouthed hopelessness.

‘I will give it to him,’ Maqbool said as he took the cup from her.

This caused a tremor of tenderness to go through Rahti and she melted towards Maqbool and thus towards her husband.

‘No, I will give it to him,’ she said. ‘You have your tea. There it is
. . .
’

Maqbool got up and yielded his place to her, so that she could help Salaama sip his tea. And, he took up the cup she had poured for him and stood sipping it, even as he looked out of the window at the mountains beyond.

The twilight was reddening, as though in anticipation of the sunrise. And for a moment he felt that nature would overwhelm the thought of the marauders in his head, even engulf the invaders.

‘Our people have hearts,’ Salaama said taking his mouth away from the cup. ‘I wish I could get up
. . .
I would teach these ruffians the lesson of their lives!’ He coughed and nearly spilled the tea.

‘Drink up your tea first,’ Rahti scolded him. ‘You haven’t the heart to kill a sparrow. So why boast so much! There is no choice for the poor but to suffer like Yessuh Messih.’

‘O go away Hatto, go
. . .
,’ he said impatiently and brushed the tea cup so that it fell on the floor at Maqbool’s feet. ‘I am not like others who will not shout,’ Salaama continued defiantly. ‘I want to fight!’ And he lay back exhausted by the effort to say his say.

All three of them were silent for a while. Rahti was angry, but taciturn, with her anxiety for her husband.

‘That is what the people of Srinagar are saying,’ put in Maqbool, as though talking aloud to himself. ‘We will not accept their rule. And we shall defend ourselves — our freedom
. . .
’

‘Brave words are not bullets!’ said Rahti cynically, but in a soft voice.

Maqbool came and sat by Salaama again for a while. Then he touched his hands in silence and got up.

‘Don’t run your head into the noose,’ Rahti said. ‘They must be looking for you. Stay here a while.’

‘No, I must go,’ said Maqbool grimly. ‘I have chosen my path!’

‘That path leads straight to hell!’ Rahti shouted.

‘Go, go Hatto, go!’ said Salaama excitedly as he raised his head again. ‘Go
. . .
you will find that the heart of your uncle Salaama is in the right place still.’

‘Lie back still,’ Rahti ordered.

Maqbool who had stopped to hear Salaama, issued out into the courtyard.

The cover which the darkness had supplied for his descent upon the convent was being removed by the dawn that rose blood-red from the mountains below the eastern sky. The impetuousity that had made him emerge from the safety of Rahti’s room soon gave place again to timidity. He feigned an easy natural gait, however, and headed, through a deserted plain, towards the north end of the main street of Baramula, where the big house of the landlord Sardar Muhammad Jilani stood. His head was bent, as though it was weighed down by the thoughts of Allah in a pious Muslim. But his eyes were like gaping pits, unable to believe in the desolation of the once alive Baramula.

In this heightened consciousness of the doom which had settled upon his home town, he was aware that there were two kinds of people now left, the many like Rahti who where inclined fatalistically, to accept what had happened, in spite of their detestation of the misdeeds of the Pakistanis, and the few like Salaama and himself, who were self-willed and were increasingly possessed by the feelings of protest and resistance. There may be others, he felt, who did not know anything of anything, who were merely like innocent jelly cast into the mould of daily habit and the routine life, wrapped up in the symbols of a religious negativeness, a state of benumbed spirituality or ritualistic five-prayers-a-day worship or mere family loyalty.

Suddenly, he saw some coolies of Baramula by the octroi post, bearing huge boxes and trunks and sacks into the waiting trucks, which was ostensibly the loot on the way out to Pakistan.

He must not be seen near the octroi post because the police station was near at hand; and once seen by a policeman he, who was known to the law as a notorious rebel against the Maharaja’s rule, would be done for. And yet the mansion of Sardar Muhammad Jilani was at this end of the town.

Anyhow, what guarantee was there that he would be any safer in that house, because, if the information that Babu Ishaq had given him in Pattan was correct, the big landlord of Baramula was acting as the head of the fifth column. Ghulam was at his best, a callow, spoilt child, irresponsible, weakwilled and impressionable in the extreme. It was true that he had given money for the struggle against Maharaja Hari Singh but his fear of his father may have damned up his rebellious sympathies, unless he was still under the influence of his business partner, Muratib Ali. But as against Muratib, there would be the more powerful voice of the ambitious little lawyer, Ahmed Shah, who, Maqbool had heard, had gone over to the Pakistanis. But Ghulam was also his friend, who listened to poetry.

He changed his direction back towards the convent. And, taking cover behind a broken tonga, which stood deserted in the clearing before the congested town, he tried to deliberate on his strategy.

As soon as he stopped, however, all thoughts seemed to fly away from his head, and he had left to him only a beating heart.

It was queer how, when one paused on one’s way anywhere, fear seemed to become almost concrete, a kind of electric shock sent into the body by each sight and sound. He tried to stare at fear itself.

The tonga — had it been broken by the raiders? And were there any Pakistanis in the stables beyond there?

He applied his ears to listen to the possible neighing of horses, but there was a dread silence.

His loneliness gripped him, until he had to cough deliberately to relieve the tension.

He must begin to walk, but whither
. . .
?

The answer came: Muratib Ali was the safest bet. Also, his own house was near Muratib’s.

The thought of going nearer home was exciting like the prospect of Muratib’s past generosity. For however shallow the opinions of this businessman, his heart could be depeneded upon. The thing was to get there without being challenged, or without running into someone who may recognise him. There was an approach to Muratib’s house from his own lane.

But the dangerous distance to be crossed was the foot-bridge across the river to the main bazaar near his own house.

An alternative course was to get to his own lane, from the dry pond in the fields to the east of the town, by wading into the river half a mile further back on the Pattan road.

He began to walk and this activity dissolved the enveloping anxiety to an extent.

He had not gone far when cries of
‘Allah ho Akbar! Allah ho Akbar!’
rent the air from the side of the octroi post.

Obviously, it was the Pakistanis. And he felt it was a wise decision on his part not to go into the main bazaar. But, perhaps, if they were concentrated in this area, he had the chance to steal across the foot-bridge across the river to his own lane.

The resonant praise of Allah repeated itself, but the tone in which it came spread an involuntary chill into his soul. It was fear in the worst sense because it made him shiver. He paused to control himself, to prevent the feeling from becoming the obsession of cowardice.

‘Maqbool!’ he mumbled to himself.

A vague apprehension of the distance, through which he would have to expose himself on the open bridge came to him. In order to avoid such exposure and master his fear before it could become cowardice, he decided, on the spur of the moment, that he should go back to the haystack.