A Suitable Boy

  A chain lashed out, and he staggered back, to lie gasping in pain against the ledge of a shop. Upon his dark-blue skin a red stain formed and spread.

  The crowd went berserk. What all the forces of Ravana had not succeeded in doing these bloodthirsty Muslims had managed to do. It was not a young actor, but God himself who lay wounded there.

  Crazed by the sight of the wounded Rama, the man with the fireworks seized a lathi from one of the organizers and led the crowd in a charge against the tazia procession. Within seconds, the tazia, many weeks’ work of delicate glass and mica and paper tracery, lay smashed on the ground. Fireworks were thrown on to it and it was set alight. The maddened crowd stamped on it and beat it with lathis until it was charred and splintered. Its horrified defenders lashed out with their knives and chains at these kafirs, leaping about like apes on the very eve of the great martyrdom, who had dared to desecrate the holy image of the tomb.

  The sight of the crushed and blackened tazia made them mad.

  Both sides now were filled with the lust to kill—what did it matter if they too suffered martyrdom?—to attack pure evil, to defend what was dear to them—what did it matter if they died?—whether to recreate the passion of Karbala or to re-establish Ram Rajya and rid the world of the murderous, cow-slaughtering, God-defiling devils.

  ‘Kill the bastards—finish them off—the spawn of Pakistan—’

  ‘Ya Hassan! Ya Hussain!’ It was now a battle cry.

  Soon even the crazed cries of the time of Partition—‘Allah-u-Akbar’ and ‘Har har Mahadeva’—were heard above the screams of pain and terror. Knives and spears and axes and lathis had appeared from the neighbouring houses, and Hindus and Muslims hacked at each other’s limbs, eyes, faces, guts, throats. Of the two policemen, one was wounded in the back, the other managed to escape. But it was a Hindu neighbourhood and, after a few terrifying minutes of mutual butchery, the Muslims fled down side lanes, most of them small and unfamiliar. Some were hunted down and killed, some escaped and rushed back in the direction from which they had come, some ran forward towards the Imambara by circuitous routes—guided from far off by its illuminated spire and festoons of light. They fled towards the Imambara as one would flee towards a sanctuary—where they would receive protection among those of their own religion and would find hearts that could understand their own fear and hatred and bitterness and grief—for they had seen their friends and relatives killed and wounded—and be inflamed by them in turn.

  Soon Muslim mobs would be roaming around other parts of Brahmpur setting fire to Hindu shops and murdering any Hindu they could find. Meanwhile in Misri Mandi, three of the Muslim drummers who had been hired for the Bharat Milaap, who were not even Shias, and who did not care much more for the tazias than they did for the divinity of Rama, lay murdered by the wall of the temple, their drums smashed in, their heads half hacked off, their bodies doused in kerosene and set alight—all, doubtless, to the greater glory of God.

  15.12

  Maan and Firoz were sauntering along through the dark lane of Katra Mast towards Misri Mandi when Maan stopped suddenly. The sounds he heard approaching them were not those he had expected. They were the sounds neither of a tazia procession—and surely it was too late for a tazia procession—nor the joyful sounds of Bharat Milaap. The sound of drums had stopped on either side—and neither ‘Hassan! Hussain!’ nor ‘Jai Siyaram!’ could be heard. Instead he made out the ominous, inchoate sounds of a mob, broken by screams of pain or passion—or shouts of ‘Har har Mahadeva’. This aggressive invocation of Shiva would not have sounded out of place yesterday—but today it chilled his blood.

  He let go of Firoz’s hand and turned him around by the shoulders. ‘Run!’ he said, his mouth dry with fear. ‘Run.’ His heart was pounding. Firoz stared at him but did not move.

  The crowd was rushing down the lane now. The sounds grew closer. Maan looked around him in desperation. The shops were all closed, their shutters down. There were no side lanes within immediate reach.

  ‘Get back, Firoz—’ said Maan, trembling. ‘Get back—run! There’s nowhere to hide here—’

  ‘What’s the matter—isn’t it the procession?’ Firoz’s mouth opened as he registered the terror in Maan’s eyes.

  ‘Just listen to me,’ Maan gasped—‘Do as I say. Run back! Run back towards the Imambara. I’ll delay them for a minute or two. That’ll be enough. They’ll stop me first.’

  ‘I’m not leaving you,’ said Firoz.

  ‘Firoz, you fool, this is a Hindu mob. I’m not in danger. But I won’t be all right if I come with you. God knows what will be happening there by now. If there’s rioting going on, they’ll be killing Hindus there.’

  ‘No—’

  ‘Oh God—’

  By now the crowd had almost reached them, and it was too late to flee.

  Ahead of the pack was a young man, who looked as if he was drunk. His kurta was torn and he was bleeding from a cut along his ribs. He had a bloodstained lathi in his hand, and he made for Maan and Firoz. Behind him—though it was dark and difficult to see—must have been some twenty or thirty men, armed with spears and knives or flaming torches doused in kerosene.

  ‘Mussalmans—kill them also—’

  ‘We’re not Mussalmans,’ said Maan immediately, not looking at Firoz. He tried to control his voice, but it was high-pitched with terror.

  ‘We can find that out quickly enough,’ said the young man nastily. Maan looked at him—he had a lean, clean-shaven face—a handsome face, but one that was full of madness and rage and hatred. Who was he? Who were these people? Maan recognized none of them in the darkness. What had happened? How had the peacefulness of the Bharat Milaap suddenly turned into a riot? And what, he thought, his brain seizing up with fear, what was going to happen?

  Suddenly, as if by a miracle, the fog of fear dispersed from his mind.

  ‘No need to find out who we are,’ he said in a deeper voice. ‘We were frightened because we thought at first you might be Muslims. We couldn’t hear what you were shouting.’

  ‘Recite the Gayatri Mantra,’ sneered the young man.

  Maan promptly recited the few sacred syllables. ‘Now go—’ he said. ‘Don’t threaten innocent people. Be on your way. Jai Siyaram! Har har Mahadeva!’ He could not keep the rising mockery out of his voice.

  The young man hesitated.

  Someone in the crowd cried: ‘The other’s a Muslim. Why would he be dressed like that?’

  ‘Yes, that’s certain.’

  ‘Take off his fancy dress.’

  Firoz had started trembling again. This encouraged them.

  ‘See if he’s circumcised.’

  ‘Kill the cruel, cow-murdering haramzada—cut the sister-fucker’s throat.’

  ‘What are you?’ said the young man, prodding Firoz in the stomach with his bloodstained lathi. ‘Quick—speak—speak, before I use this on your head—’

  Firoz flinched and trembled. The blood on the lathi had stained his white sherwani. He did not lack courage normally, but now—in the face of such wild, unreasoning danger—he found he had lost his voice. How could he argue with a mob? He swallowed and said: ‘I am what I am. What’s that to you?’

  Maan was looking desperately around him. He knew there was no time to talk. Suddenly in the erratic, terrifying light of the blazing torches his eyes fell on someone he thought he recognized.

  ‘Nand Kishor!’ he shouted. ‘What are you doing here in this gang? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You’re supposed to be a teacher.’ Nand Kishor, a middle-aged, bespectacled man, looked sullen.

  ‘Shut up—’ said the young man to Maan viciously. ‘Just because you like circumcised cocks do you think we’ll let the Mussalman go?’ Again he prodded Firoz and drew another smear of blood down his sherwani.

  Maan ignored him and continued to address Nand Kishor. He knew that the time for dialogue was short. It was miraculous that they had been able to speak at all—that they were still alive.

&nb
sp; ‘You teach my nephew Bhaskar. He’s part of Hanuman’s army. Do you teach him to attack innocent people? Is this the kind of Ram Rajya you want to bring about? We’re doing no one any harm. Let us go on our way. Come!’ he said to Firoz, grabbing him by the shoulder. ‘Come.’ He tried to shoulder his way past the mob.

  ‘Not so fast. You can go, you sister-fucking traitor—but you can’t,’ said the young man.

  Maan turned on him and, ignoring his lathi, caught him by the throat in sudden fury.

  ‘You mother-fucker!’ he said to him in a low growl that nevertheless carried to every man in the mob. ‘Do you know what day this is? This man is my brother, more than my brother, and today in our neighbourhood we were celebrating Bharat Milaap. If you harm one hair of my brother’s head—if even one hair of his head is harmed—Lord Rama will seize your filthy soul and send it flaming into hell—and you’ll be born in your next life as the filthy krait you are. Go home and lick up your own blood, you sister-fucker, before I break your neck.’ He wrenched the young man’s lathi from his grasp and pushed him into the crowd.

  His face flaming with anger, Maan now walked with Firoz unharmed through the mob, which seemed a little cowed by his words, a little uncertain of its purpose. Before it could think its way out again, Maan, pushing Firoz in front of him, had walked fifty yards and turned a corner.

  ‘Now run!’ he said.

  He and Firoz ran for their lives. The mob was still dangerous. It was in effect leaderless for a few minutes and uncertain what to do, but it soon regrouped and, feeling cheated of its prey, moved along the alleys to hunt for more.

  Maan knew that at all costs they had to avoid the route of the Bharat Milaap procession and still somehow get to his sister’s house. Who knew what danger they might have to face on the way, what other mobs or lunatics they might encounter.

  ‘I’ll try to get back to the Imambara,’ said Firoz.

  ‘It’s too late now,’ said Maan. ‘You’re cut off, and you don’t know this area. Stay with me now. We’re going to my sister’s. Her husband’s on the Ramlila Committee, no one will attack their house.’

  ‘But I can’t. How can I—’

  ‘Shut up!’ said Maan, his voice trembling again. ‘You’ve put us through enough danger already. Don’t have any more stupid scruples. There’s no purdah in our family, thank God. Go through that gate there and don’t make a sound.’ Then he put his arm around Firoz’s shoulder.

  He led Firoz through a small washermen’s colony, and they emerged in the tiny alley where Kedarnath lived. It was a mere fifty yards from where the stage had been set up for the Bharat Milaap. They could hear the sound of shouting and screaming from close by. Veena’s house was in an almost entirely Hindu neighbourhood; no Muslim mobs could range here.

  They stared at Firoz as he stumbled into the room in his bloodstained white sherwani—and at Maan, clutching the bloodstained lathi in his hand. Kedarnath stepped forward, the other three shrank back. Old Mrs Tandon clapped her hands to her mouth. ‘Hai Ram! Hai Ram!’ she gasped in horror.

  ‘Firoz is staying here until we can get him out safely,’ said Maan, looking at each of them in turn. ‘There’s a mob roaming around—and there’ll be others. But everyone here is safe. No one will think of attacking this house.’

  ‘But the blood—are you wounded?’ asked Veena, turning to Firoz, her eyes distracted with concern.

  Maan looked at Firoz’s sherwani and his own lathi, and suddenly burst out laughing. ‘Yes, this lathi did it, but I didn’t—and it’s not his blood.’

  Firoz greeted his hosts as courteously as his own shock and theirs would allow.

  Bhaskar, still tear-faced, seeing the effect of all this on his parents, looked strangely at Maan, who placed the long bamboo staff against the wall, and kissed his nephew on the forehead.

  ‘This is the Nawab Sahib of Baitar’s younger son,’ said Maan to old Mrs Tandon. She nodded silently. Her mind had turned to the days of Partition in Lahore and her memories and thoughts were those of absolute terror.

  15.13

  Firoz changed hurriedly out of his long coat into one of Kedarnath’s kurta-pyjamas. Veena made them a quick cup of tea with plenty of sugar. After a while, Maan and Firoz climbed up to the roof, to the pots and plants of the small garden. Maan crushed a small tulsi leaf and put it in his mouth.

  As they looked around them they saw that fires had already broken out here and there in the city. They could make out several of the main buildings of Brahmpur: the spire of the Imambara still ablaze with light—the lights of the Barsaat Mahal, the dome of the Legislative Assembly, the railway station, and—far beyond the Subzipore Club, the fainter glow of the university. But here and there in the old city it was not lights but fire that lit the sky. The muted din of drums came to them from the direction of the Imambara. And distant shouts, more distinct at times as the breeze changed, reached their ears, together with other sounds that could have been firecrackers, but were more likely the sounds of police firing.

  ‘You saved my life,’ said Firoz.

  Maan embraced him. He smelt of sweat and fear.

  ‘You should have had a wash before you changed,’ he said. ‘All that running in your sherwani—thank God you’re safe.’

  ‘Maan, I must get back. They’ll be worried crazy about me at the house. They’ll risk their own lives to look for me. . . .’

  Suddenly the lights went out at the Imambara.

  Firoz said in quiet dread: ‘What could have happened there?’

  Maan said: ‘Nothing.’ He was wondering how Saeeda Bai would have got back to Pasand Bagh. Surely she must have remained in the safe area near the Imambara.

  The night was warm, but there was a slight breeze. Neither of them said anything for a while.

  A large glow now lit the sky about half a mile to the west. This was the lumberyard of a well-known Hindu trader who lived in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood. Other fires sprang up around it. The drums were silent now, and the sounds of intermittent firing were very clear. Maan was too exhausted to feel any fear. A numbness and a terrible feeling of isolation and helplessness came over him.

  Firoz closed his eyes, as if to shut out the terrible vision of the city in flames. But other fires beset his mind—the fire-acrobats of the Moharram fair; the embers of the trench dug outside the Imambara at Baitar House burning with logs and brushwood for ten days; the candelabra of the Imambara at the Fort blazing and guttering as Ustad Majeed Khan sang Raag Darbari while his father nodded with pleasure.

  He suddenly got up, agitated.

  Someone shouted from a neighbouring rooftop that curfew had been declared.

  ‘How could it be declared?’ asked Maan. ‘People couldn’t have got home by now.’ He added softly, ‘Firoz, sit down.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ shouted the man. ‘But it has just been announced on the radio that curfew has been declared and that in an hour police will have orders to shoot on sight. Before then, only if they see actual violence.’

  ‘Yes, that makes sense,’ Maan shouted back, wondering what, if anything, made sense any more.

  ‘Who are you? Who’s that with you? Kedarnath? Is everyone safe in your family?’

  ‘It’s not Kedarnath—it’s a friend who came to see the Bharat Milaap. I’m Veena’s brother.’

  ‘Well, you’d better not move tonight, if you don’t want to get your throat slit by the Muslims—or get shot by the police. What a night. Tonight of all nights.’

  ‘Maan,’ said Firoz quietly and urgently, ‘can I use your sister’s phone?’

  ‘She doesn’t have one,’ said Maan.

  Firoz looked at him with dismay.

  ‘A neighbour’s then. I have to get word back to Baitar House. If the news of the curfew is on the radio, my father will hear of it at the Fort in Baitar, and he will be terrified about what’s happened here. Imtiaz might try to come back and get a curfew pass. For all I know Murtaza Ali might already be sending out search parties for me,
and at a time like this that’s crazy. Do you think you might phone from the house of one of Veena’s friends?’

  ‘We don’t want anyone to know you’re here,’ said Maan. ‘But don’t worry, I’ll find a way,’ he said when he saw the look of sickening anxiety on his friend’s face. ‘I’ll talk to Veena.’

  Veena too had memories of Lahore; but her most recent memories were those of losing Bhaskar at the Pul Mela, and she could conceive the Nawab Sahib’s agony of mind when he heard that Firoz had not returned home.

  ‘How about trying Priya Agarwal?’ said Maan. ‘I could go over to her place.’

  ‘Maan, you’re not going anywhere,’ said his sister. ‘Are you mad? It’s a five-minute walk through the alleys—this isn’t why I tied the rakhi around your wrist.’ After a minute’s thought she said: ‘I’ll go to the neighbour whose phone I use in an emergency. It’s only two rooftops away. You met her that day—she’s a good woman, the only trouble is that she is rabidly anti-Muslim. Let me think. What’s the number of Baitar House?’

  Maan told her.

  Veena came up to the roof with him, crossed over the connected rooftops, and descended the stairs to her neighbour’s house.

  Veena’s large and voluble neighbour, out of her usual friendliness and curiosity, hung around while Veena made the call. The phone, after all, was in her room. Veena told her she was trying to get in touch with her father.

  ‘But I just saw him at the Bharat Milaap, near the temple—’

  ‘He had to go home. The noise was too much for him. And the smoke was not good for my mother either. Or for Pran’s lungs—he didn’t come. But Maan is here—he’s had a lucky escape from a Muslim mob.’

  ‘It must be providence,’ said the woman. ‘If they had got hold of him—’

  The telephone was not a dialling machine; and Veena had to give the Baitar House number to the operator.

  ‘Oh, you’re not calling Prem Nivas?’ said the woman, who knew that number from Veena’s previous calls.