A Suitable Boy, Page 32

  ‘I hope I can be of some help to you,’ said Haresh, shaking his hand warmly.

  ‘You already have, Veena tells me.’

  ‘I meant, by way of business.’

  ‘I certainly hope so,’ said Kedarnath, ‘and, well, if I can help you in any way—’

  They shook hands.

  ‘Tell me—’ said Haresh suddenly. ‘I have been meaning to ask you this for several days now—how did you get all those scars on the inside of your hands? They don’t look as if they’ve been caught in a machine—they’d be scarred on both sides if they had.’

  Kedarnath was silent for a few seconds, as if adjusting to a change of thought. ‘I got those during Partition,’ he said. He paused and continued, ‘At the time that we were forced to flee from Lahore, I got a place in a convoy of army trucks and we got into the first truck—my younger brother and I. Nothing, I thought, could be safer. But, well, it was a Baluchi regiment. They stopped just before the Ravi Bridge, and Muslim ruffians came from behind the timber yards there and started butchering us with their spears. My younger brother has marks on his back and I have these on my palms and my wrist—I tried to hold on to the blade of the spear. . . . I was in hospital for a month.’

  Haresh’s face betrayed his shock. Kedarnath continued, closing his eyes, but in a calm voice:

  ‘Twenty or thirty people were slaughtered in two minutes—someone’s father, someone’s daughter. . . . By the greatest of luck a Gurkha regiment was coming from the other side and they began to fire. And, well, the looters fled, and I’m here to tell you the story.’

  ‘Where was the family?’ asked Haresh. ‘In the other trucks?’

  ‘No—I’d sent them on by train a little earlier. Bhaskar was only six at the time. Not that the trains were safe either, as you know.’

  ‘I don’t know if I should have asked these questions,’ said Haresh, feeling atypically embarrassed.

  ‘No, no—that’s all right. We were fortunate, as these things go. The Muslim trader who used to own my shop here in Brahmpur—well. . . . Strange, though—after all that happened there, I still miss Lahore,’ said Kedarnath. ‘But you’d better hurry or you’ll miss your train.’

  Brahmpur Junction was as crowded and noisy and smelly as ever: hissing clouds of steam, the whistles of incoming trains, hawkers’ shouts, the stench of fish, the buzz of flies, the scurrying babble of passengers. Haresh felt tired. Though it was past six o’clock it was still very warm. He touched an agate cufflink and wondered at its coolness.

  Glancing at the crowd, he noticed a young woman in a light-blue cotton sari standing near her mother. The English teacher whom he had met at Sunil’s party was seeing them off on the down train to Calcutta. The mother’s back was turned towards Haresh, so he could not get a proper glimpse of her. The daughter’s face was striking. It was not classically beautiful—it did not catch at his heart as did the photograph he kept with him—but it had a quality of such attractive intensity that Haresh stopped for a second. The young woman seemed to be determinedly fighting back some sadness that went beyond the normal sadness of parting at a railway platform. Haresh thought of pausing for a little to reintroduce himself to the young lecturer, but something in the girl’s expression of inwardness, almost despair, stopped him from doing so. Besides, his train was leaving soon, his coolie was already quite far ahead of him, and Haresh, not being tall, was concerned that he might lose him in the crowd.

  Part Five

  5.1

  Some riots are caused, some bring themselves into being. The problems at Misri Mandi were not expected to reach a point of violence. A few days after Haresh left, however, the heart of Misri Mandi—including the area around Kedarnath’s shop, was full of armed police.

  The previous evening there had been a fight inside a cheap drinking place along the unpaved road that led towards the tannery from Old Brahmpur. The strike meant less money but more time for everyone, so the kalari’s joint was about as crowded as usual. The place was mainly frequented by jatavs, but not exclusively so. Drink equalized the drinkers, and they didn’t care who was sitting at the plain wooden table next to them. They drank, laughed, cried, then tottered and staggered out, sometimes singing, sometimes cursing. They swore undying friendship, they divulged confidences, they imagined insults. The assistant of a trader in Misri Mandi was in a foul mood because he was having a hard time with his father-in-law. He was drinking alone and working himself into a generalized state of aggressiveness. He overheard a comment from behind him about the sharp practice of his employer, and his hands clenched into a fist. Knocking his bench over as he twisted around to see who was speaking, he fell on to the floor.

  The three men at the table behind him laughed. They were jatavs who had dealt with him before. It was he who used to take the shoes from their baskets when they scurried desperately in the evening to Misri Mandi—his employer the trader did not like to touch shoes because he felt they would pollute him. The jatavs knew that the breakdown of the trade in Misri Mandi had particularly hurt those traders who had over-extended themselves on the chit system. That it had hurt themselves still more, they also knew—but for them it was not a case of the mighty being brought to their knees. Here, however, literally in front of them, it was.

  The locally distilled cheap alcohol had gone to their heads, and they did not have the money to buy the pakoras and other snacks that could have settled it. They laughed uncontrollably.

  ‘He’s wrestling with the air,’ jeered one.

  ‘I bet he’d rather be doing another kind of wrestling,’ sneered another.

  ‘But would he be any good at it? They say that’s why he has trouble at home—’

  ‘What a reject,’ taunted the first man, waving him away with the airy gesture of a trader rejecting a basket on the basis of a single faulty pair.

  Their speech was slurred, their eyes contemptuous. The man who had fallen lunged at them, and they set upon him. A couple of people, including the kalari, tried to make peace, but most gathered around to enjoy the fun and shout drunken encouragement. The four rolled around on the floor, fighting.

  It ended with the man who had started the fight being beaten unconscious, and all of the others being injured. One was bleeding from the eye and screaming in pain.

  That night, when he lost the sight of his eye, an ominous crowd of jatavs gathered at the Govind Shoe Mart, where the trader had his stall. They found the stall closed. The crowd began to shout slogans, then threatened to burn the stall down. One of the other traders tried to reason with the crowd, and they set upon him. A couple of policemen, sensing the crowd’s mood, ran to the local police station for reinforcements. Ten policemen now emerged, armed with short stout bamboo lathis, and they began to beat people up indiscriminately. The crowd scattered.

  Surprisingly soon, every relevant authority knew about the matter: from the Superintendent of Police of the district to the Inspector-General of Purva Pradesh, from the Home Secretary to the Home Minister. Everyone received different facts and interpretations, and had different suggestions for action or inaction.

  The Chief Minister was out of town. In his absence—and because law and order lay in his domain—the Home Minister ran things. Mahesh Kapoor, though Revenue Minister, and not therefore directly concerned, heard about the unrest because part of Misri Mandi lay in his constituency. He hurried to the spot and talked with the Superintendent of Police and the District Magistrate. The SP and the DM believed that things would blow over if neither side was provoked. However, the Home Minister, L.N. Agarwal, part of whose constituency also lay in Misri Mandi, did not think it necessary to go to the spot. He received a number of phone calls at home and decided that something by way of a salutary example needed to be provided.

  These jatavs had disrupted the trade of the city long enough with their frivolous complaints and their mischievous strike. They had doubtless been stirred up by union leaders. Now they were threatening to block the entrance of the Govind Shoe Mart at the
point where it joined the main road of Misri Mandi. Many traders there were already in financial straits. The threatened picketing would finish them off. L.N. Agarwal himself came from a shopkeeping family and some of the traders were good friends of his. Others supplied him with election funds. He had received three desperate calls from them. It was a time not for talk but for action. It was not merely a question of law, but of order, the order of society itself. Surely this is what the Iron Man of India, the late Sardar Patel, would have felt in his place.

  But what would he have done had he been here? As if in a dream, the Home Minister conjured up the domed and severe head of his political mentor, dead these four months. He sat in thought for a while. Then he told his personal assistant to get him the District Magistrate on the phone.

  The District Magistrate, who was in his mid-thirties, was directly in charge of the civil administration of Brahmpur District and, together with the SP—as the Superintendent of Police was referred to by everyone—maintained law and order.

  The PA tried to get through, then said: ‘Sorry, Sir, DM is out on the site. He is trying to conciliate—’

  ‘Give me the phone,’ said the Home Minister in a calm voice. The PA nervously handed him the receiver.

  ‘Who? . . . Where? . . . I am Agarwal speaking, that’s who . . . yes, direct instructions . . . I don’t care. Get Dayal at once. . . . Yes, ten minutes . . . call me back. . . . The SP is there, that is enough surely, is it a cinema show?’

  He put down the phone and grasped the grey curls that curved like a horseshoe around his otherwise bald head.

  After a while he made as if to pick up the receiver again, then decided against it, and turned his attention to a file.

  Ten minutes later the young District Magistrate, Krishan Dayal, was on the phone. The Home Minister told him to guard the entrance of the Govind Shoe Mart. He was to disperse any pickets forthwith, if necessary by reading out Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code—and then firing if the crowd did not disperse.

  The line was unclear but the message disturbingly clear. Krishan Dayal said in a strong voice, but one which was fraught with concern: ‘Sir, with respect, may I suggest an alternative course of action? We are talking with the leaders of the crowd—’

  ‘So there are leaders, are there, it is not spontaneous?’

  ‘Sir, it is spontaneous, but there are leaders.’

  L.N. Agarwal reflected that it was puppies of the ilk of Krishan Dayal who used to lock him up in British jails. He said, calmly:

  ‘Are you being witty, Mr Dayal?’

  ‘No, Sir, I—’

  ‘You have your instructions. This is an emergency. I have discussed things with the Chief Secretary by phone. I understand that the crowd is some three hundred strong. I want the SP to get the police stationed everywhere along the main road of Misri Mandi and to guard all entrances—Govind Shoe Mart, Brahmpur Shoe Mart and so on—you just do the needful.’

  There was a pause. The Home Minister was about to put down the phone when the DM said:

  ‘Sir, we may not be able to spare such a large number of police at short notice. A number of policemen are stationed at the site of the Shiva Temple in case of trouble. Things are very tense, Sir. The Revenue Minister thinks that on Friday—’

  ‘Are they there at the moment? I did not notice them this morning,’ said L.N. Agarwal in a relaxed but steely tone.

  ‘No, Sir, but they are in the main police station in the Chowk area, so it is sufficiently close to the temple site. It is best to keep them there for a true emergency.’ Krishan Dayal had been in the army during the war, but he was rattled by the Home Minister’s calm air of almost dismissive interrogation and command.

  ‘God will take care of the Shiva Temple. I am in close touch with many members of the committee, do you think I do not know the circumstances?’ He had been irked by Dayal’s reference to ‘a true emergency’ as much as by his mention of Mahesh Kapoor, his rival and—as abrasive chance would have it—the MLA from the constituency contiguous to his own.

  ‘Yes, Sir,’ said Krishan Dayal, his face reddening—which luckily the Home Minister could not see. ‘And may I know how long the police are to remain there?’

  ‘Until further notice,’ said the Home Minister and put down the phone to pre-empt further backchat. He did not like the way these so-called civil servants answered back to those above them in the chain of command—who were besides, twenty years older than them. It was necessary to have an administrative service, no doubt, but it was equally necessary that it should learn that it no longer ruled this country.

  5.2

  On Friday at the midday prayer the hereditary Imam of the Alamgiri Mosque gave his sermon. He was a short, plump man with short breath, but this did not stem his jerky crescendos of oratory. If anything, his breathlessness gave the impression that he was choked with emotion. The construction of the Shiva Temple was going ahead. The Imam’s appeals to everyone from the Governor down had fallen on deaf ears. A legal case contesting the Raja of Marh’s title to the land contiguous to the mosque had been instituted and was at present going through the lowest court. A stay order on the construction of the temple, however, could not be immediately obtained—indeed, perhaps could not be obtained at all. Meanwhile the dung-heap was growing before the Imam’s agonized eyes.

  His congregation was tense already. It was with dismay that many Muslims in Brahmpur had, over the months, seen the foundations of the temple rising in the plot to the west of their mosque. Now, after the first part of the prayers, the Imam gave his audience the most stirring and inflammatory speech he had given in years, very far removed from his ordinary sermon on personal morality or cleanliness or alms or piety. His grief and frustration as much as their own bitter anxiety called for something stronger. Their religion was in danger. The barbarians were at the gates. They prayed, these infidels, to their pictures and stones and perpetuated themselves in ignorance and sin. Let them do what they wanted to in their dens of filth. But God could see what was happening now. They had brought their beastliness near the very precincts of the mosque itself. The land that the kafirs sought to build on—why sought? were at this very moment building on—was disputed land—disputed in God’s eyes and in man’s eyes—but not in the eyes of animals who spent their time blowing conches and worshipping parts of the body whose very names it was shameful to mention. Did the people of the faith gathered here in God’s presence know how it was planned to consecrate this Shiva-linga? Naked ash-smeared savages would dance before it—naked! These were the shameless, like the people of Sodom, who mocked at the power of the All-Merciful.

  . . . God guides not the people

  of the unbelievers.

  Those—God has set a seal on their

  hearts, and their hearing, and their eyes,

  and those—they are the heedless ones;

  Without a doubt, in the world to come they

  will be the losers.

  They worshipped their hundreds of idols that they claimed were divine—idols with four heads and five heads and the heads of elephants—and now the infidels who held power in the land wanted Muslims, when they turned their faces westwards in prayer to the Kaaba, to face these same idols and these same obscene objects with their heads bowed. ‘But,’ continued the Imam, ‘we who have lived through hard and bitter times and have suffered for our faith and paid for our faith in blood need only remember the fate of the idolaters:

  And they set up compeers to God, that

  they might lead astray from His way.

  Say: “Take your joy! Your homecoming

  shall be—the Fire!”’

  A slow, attentive, shocked expectation filled the silence that followed.

  ‘But even now,’ cried the Imam in renewed frenzy, half-gasping for air, ‘even as I speak—they could be hatching their designs to prevent our evening devotion by blowing their conches to drown out the call to prayer. Ignorant they may be, but they are full of guile. They are already
getting rid of Muslims in the police force so that the community of God will be left defenceless. Then they can attack and enslave us. Now it is too clear to us that we are living not in a land of protection but a land of enmity. We have appealed for justice, and have been kicked down at the very doors where we have gone pleading. The Home Minister himself supports this temple committee—and its guiding spirit is the debauched buffalo of Marh! Let it not happen that our holy places are to be polluted by the proximity of filth—let it not happen—but what can save us now that we are left defenceless before the sword of our enemies in the land of the Hindus, what can save us but our own efforts, our own’—here he struggled for breath and emphasis again—‘our own direct action—to protect ourselves. And not just ourselves, not just our families but these few feet of paved earth that have been given to us for centuries, where we have unrolled our mats and raised our hands in tears to the All-Powerful, which are worn smooth by the devotions of our ancestors and ourselves and—if God so wills—will so be by our descendants also. But have no fear, God does so will, have no fear, God will be with you:

  Hast thou not seen how thy Lord did with Ad,

  Iram of the pillars,

  the like of which was never created in the land,

  and Thamood, who hollowed the rocks in the valley,

  and Pharaoh, he of the tent-pegs,

  who all were insolent in the land

  and worked much corruption therein?

  Thy Lord unloosed on them a scourge of chastisement;

  surely thy Lord is ever on the watch.

  O God, help those who help the religion of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon Him. May we also do the same. Make those weak, who weaken the religion of Muhammad. Praise be to God, the Lord of all Being.’

  The plump Imam descended from the pulpit, and led the people in more prayer.

  That evening there was a riot.