Two Short Novels (9 page)

Death of a Hero
Epitaph for Maqbool Sherwani

T
he poplars whirred past him. And they still came towards him, on both sides of the road. Long unending lines of poplars . . .

But when he thought about it he found that it was actually he who was whirring past them on his motor-bike.

The leaves of the trees had been much more green two days ago, when he had fled from Baramula to Srinagar, than they were now in the light of the declining sun, while he was returning from Srinagar back to Baramula.

‘Perhaps,’ he said to himself in the diffused language of the wordless colloquy within him, ‘perhaps, I fancy the leaves were much more green because the autumn is a sad season in our land.’

‘Or perhaps it is the sunset
. . .
’

‘Also death — the death of those whom the invaders had murdered! And fear for oneself!’

And he became conscious of his increasingly morbid preoccupation with the poet’s lament, which was forming on his tongue without becoming fluid, the lament about the possibility of his own death.

As the rutted, straight tarmac road dissolved under the wheels of his ‘Triumph’, he had another fateful echo augury in his mind from the days of his childhood in the convent school, the Biblical phrase: ‘How sweet for our souls to be borne to the skies, our journey done, our journey done
. . .
’

But he felt afraid of the potency of the phrase if it should apply to himself. He looked away.

The wintry sky on this late afternoon, the red sun tinting the snowy clouds above the mountains, and the chill mist covering the shallows and the swamps of the threatened valley, all seemed to bring the shadows nearer. The front was only ten or twelve miles away and yet it was as quiet as in the peaceful village in the middle of the valley.

‘
La hol billah
!’ he mumbled the cautionary phrase to calm himself.

He recalled that he had gone through so many emotions during the last three days: the feeling of weakness during the flight from his little home town after the Pakistani raiders had occupied it, the fear that he might not get to Srinagar, the elation of being in that odd room with the others in Amira Kadal, the shock of finding out that those who had begun this sudden invasion, with loot as soon as they arrived in the villages, were the so called ‘Muslim brethren’, the utter frustration of the confusion which prevailed in the city, then the mixed exaltation and fear of being chosen to go back to Baramula to rally the people, and, underneath it all, the complete innocence about what would happen to him if the tribesmen were already there. But there was, below the surface, a feeling he did not wish to acknowledge, the sense of chivalry: against tribalism — the genuine human response of pity.

And now, this was more boring than ever, this ride back home, because he could not even think in the state of emotional stress, did not know his destination, or the way to get there if the road was blocked.

The noise of the machine dispelled his confusion, even as it sent the sparrows in the poplars scattering into the chenars in the fields by the road. Only the sights and sounds of the evening landscape filled his senses: bleak, dreary uncultivated fields with the stubbles of the last harvest, the melancholy willows leaning over small pools, the pine forests on the slopes of the mountain, weighted down by dark, ominous clouds on the right above Gulmarg, and the peaks of the mountain ranges standing steel grey in the distance.

There was not a soul stirring on the landscape on either side of him
. . .

Instinctively, he jerked his head up, against fear, as though to rise above the natural humility of his being before reality.

And he decided in his private colloquy that he must go on, once he had decided to go. Things were badly mixed up. But he must go right ahead and not be craven and panicky and confused any more. He was going to Baramula, perhaps to certain death. But the head of the volunteer corps had said to him: ‘Maqbool Sherwani — we are in peril! We must do everything we can to avert the disaster! We must save our people! We must stand by them and each other
. . . .
We must resist the butchery with our bare hands.’ Apart from other things, it was the horror of the butchery which had moved him, and his advance into danger became a kind of protest against occupation of Baramula by the raiders.

Somewhere between the impact of these words and his own uneasiness, lay the fear; somewhere, under his skin, in the nerves above the tendons and the sinews of his body, there were uncontrolled tremors, as though the taut muscles were relaxing, and accepting the choice he had made.

Neither he nor his people had provoked this onslaught. And yet they were being punished. But to the poet in him, this seemed always to be so, Allah notwithstanding.

The situation had arisen all in three days, in which every Kashmiri would be tested. Those who believed in God would accept their fate as though it was the trial on judgement day. But those who hoped for a new morning for Kashmir would have to fight because only through survival would there be a chance to metamorphose the thoughts, opinions and beliefs of the young from the past servility. In such a strange situation, he told himself, the only thing to do was to go on, like a sleepwalker, to transcend the occasion, as though inspired.

Lest his naive resolve seems too heroic to himself, he relaxed the stance of his head from the rigid inclination to the left and looked on to the right.

The rice fields of Pattan were showing up now, tiers of lush gr
een, yellowed here and there by the setting sun where paddy was ripe for cutting. The world of nature engulfed his ardent young poet’s spirit. His fondness for the lush vegetation and flowers of Kashmir had always been the nostalgia of a man living with poor arid souls, the heightening produced by the lovely gardens and falling waters as an escape from his own burning heart. And soon the big village itself stood before him with its wooden houses. He knew it to be as shaky and ramshackle and decaying as Baramula, and dirty, with garbage dumps and smelly little rivulets of drains in the gulleys, but it looked, at this distance, like the picturesque villages of Switzerland, such as the nuns had shown him at school in their photograph albums. The groups of chenar trees on the outskirts, looked purple and gold and turquoise in the departing light.

Now he could see a few dim figures crouching by the putrid pond, seemingly women fetching water.

And soon a shepherd was leading his goats and sheep with uplifted stick by the willows on the right hand side of the road.

But the rows of the straggling roadside shops, on the half a mile or so before Pattan; were closed, and the congeries of Kashmiris, who usually sat huddled in their cloaks smoking the common hookah, were absent.

This general emptiness betokened the spreading fear of the Almighty, or perhaps, worse still, the actual occupation by the raiders.

A drowsy mongrel dog woke up from under the boards of a wayside stall and yelped at the motorcycle.

He slowed down the engine, which backfired noisily and made the dog run abreast of the machine and bark more viciously. This seemed like the proverbial warning from hell — as it sent shivers through his weakening legs.

He decided to pull up by Mahmdoo’s cookshop, which stood about a hundred yards outside Pattan. If anyone could give him the news, it was Mahmdoo.

But the noise of the motorcycle may create panic. He shut off the engine and free-wheeled along.

The dog snarled away, back to its shelter.

The door of Mahmdoo’s cookshop was closed. But from the chinks in the rough wooden boards, Maqbool could see a cotton wick earthen saucer lamp lighting the gloom.

‘Mahmdoo,’ he whispered.

There was no response. Only the flickering light glowed.

‘Oh Mahmdoo, Hatto! It is me — Maqbool Sherwani!’

With his eyes more accustomed to the gloom, as they rivetted into the interior through the chinks, he could now see the huge platform above the earthen oven on which Mahmdoo usually sat, baking hot bread, or stirring the various meats in the cauldrons, or brewing salt tea from the brass
samovar
.

Obviously, Mahmdoo had not been cooking.

Maqbool surmised that the shrewd cookshop-keeper had accounted discretion the better part of valour, for the place where food was to be had would be one of the first to be visited by the hungry invaders. At least that had been so in the half of Baramula which the raiders had taken before he left. Did this mean that Pattan had been occupied? But there would have been Pakistani sentries all over the place, and certainly on the main road, if they had already reached here.

‘Mahmdoo!’ he called again.

Not from inside the shops, but, from behind him, across the road, came a whisper: ‘Come this side.’

Maqbool turned round and saw Gula, the young son and assistant of Mahmdoo, in his own tunic and salwar, standing by his motorcycle.

‘Father is in the sitting room of Pandit Janki Nath,’ Gula said. ‘He would like you to come there. But, he says, hide the motorcycle somewhere before you come. Shall I take it to the back of the shop?’

‘No, it is heavy and you will fall with it,’ Maqbool said. ‘I shall wheel it there and hide it, if you show me the way.’

Gula, excited at the prospect of being able to handle the motorcycle after Maqbool would go up to see his father, went ahead into the alleyway eagerly enough.

The alley was narrow and the energy and the concentration required to manouevre the heavy machine up to the doorway of the courtyard brought sweat to his face. Fortunately, the space outside the backdoor was wider. And he negotiated the cycle into the small courtyard, full of pitchers and dirty utensils and fuel and all the other muck of the cookshop.

‘Don’t you tinker with the machine!’ he said to Gula with an affectionate smile. ‘The motor has a habit of running away.’

The boy who had been itching to handle the machine, docilely followed Maqbool to where his father sat in Pandit Janki Nath Kaul’s room.

Mahmdoo got up cordially and shook the right hand of Maqbool with both his puffy hands.

‘Hatto, you have grown fatter with doing nothing!’ Maqbool greeted him. ‘And you are beaming with happiness! Have you been eating up all the food in your cookshop yourself?’

‘Maqbool!’ Mahmdoo protested at the banter and apologised: ‘I can’t help my fat body. You know — the oil and butter get into one’s skin when one’s cooking!’

‘What is the news?’

‘Please do sit down, sire.’

‘A wonderful carpet and cushions! How did the Pandit trust you not to make them greasy?’

‘Sire, when it is a question of life and death, even a money-lender like Pandit Janki Nath can forge about his property. You are a learned man and don’t know much about the ways of men. They fled to Srinagar three days ago after they received news of the death of three relations in Baramula, a little while after you left.’

Maqbool searched Mahmdoo’s face. The cookshop keeper obviously thought him to be a useless, unpractical fellow. Perhaps that was true, Maqbool admitted, because he had always seemed so unsure about everything to people. But was there also the insinuation that he was weak like Janki Nath?

‘You had your own reasons for going to Srinagar, Maqbool Sahib, but they were protecting their skins!’ Mahmdoo said to confirm Maqbool’s prognostications.

‘Mahmdoo, no one is better than another in the face of
death
. . . .
If I am to confess the truth, I also ran away. And it needed some persuasion to bring me back.’

Against such truthfulness, Mahmdoo could only be silent. And, after a while, he also mustered the necessary courage to speak of his own fears:

‘I have closed the shop because the Pakistanis may be here any moment. And they will be hungry and will not spare me. Some half a dozen of them have already arrived at the Baramula end of this town and are staying at the Pattan house of Sardar Muhammad Jilani of Baramula. Now, when will they send us help from Srinagar?’

Maqbool stared vacantly in front of him for a moment. He was unnerved by the news of the nearness of the raiders. And he wondered how to explain the position to Mahmdoo without causing him to panic.

‘Our people are busy
. . .
strange
. . .
I have never seen a Sarkar run like this. They work from a room on top of the Palladium cinema. There they sit and talk, old and young. The wiser heads debate. The young men have formed an army and have collected all kinds of arms. Jawaharlal has condemned Pakistan for helping the Pattan raiders to attack Kashmir.’

‘Then we are totally against Pakistan?’ Mahmdoo asked.

‘To be sure!’ answered Maqbool a trifle impatient. ‘These are not Muslim brethren, who have come attacking us! If they were brothers, they should have talked to us — not begun to murder us!’