Cracking India (23 page)

“Yes! That's a surprise,” says Mrs. Singh unexpectedly. The fact she has spoken out her thoughts indicates the measure of her inner turmoil. “I hear they had hoisted the green Pakistani flag and all. There's bound to be trouble,” she says, making what is for her a remarkably pertinent statement.

Father nods significantly. He snaps his fingers to summon Yousaf, and turning his thumb down mutely indicates his wish for more water.

Now that Father is here, Mr. Singh spreads his thighs comfortably and, placing his hands on his knees, leans forward: “Sethi Sahib, we have just received orders from our leaders... We are to leave Lahore forever!”

Father raises surprised, questioning eyebrows and Mr. Singh continues: “I'm meeting them tonight. They've worked out plans for a complete Sikh evacuation. We'll form our own armed escort. I'll take our buffaloes... And whatever essentials we can pile into a truck. Each family is allotted a truck.”

Father's sharp eyes grow severely comprehending and
sympathetic. He frowns and clears his throat. “Is there anything we can do?”

“Can you store a few things for us? Furniture and what we can't take?” says Mr. Singh. “You know, houses are being looted. Empty ones especially. They haven't come to the better neighborhoods yet, but who knows? I'll come back for them later. Things have to subside.” Mr. Singh spreads his hands in a confused and helpless gesture.

“Sure,” Father nods.

As always economical, Father makes the single word work on both counts: that he will be glad to store anything for Mr. Singh; and that things must subside.

“Of course!” says Mother warmly. “Bring anything! We'll keep it with the Shankars' things. You can leave it with us for as long as you want!”

Mr. Singh's and Father's eyes glisten in the dusk. The sun has disappeared. Mr. Singh hawks and directs his spit in a long arc into the portico, near some flowerpots with ferns. Father directs a commiserating gob of spit to nestle next to Mr. Singh's.

A sob escapes Mrs. Singh. Mother's mouth twitches and she sniffs. “Go and play outside! Or inside!” she says sternly to me, indicating Rosy and Peter with her quivering chin. She gets up to switch on the lights.

We go into the kitchen to Imam Din for chapatties with sugar and butter. Imam Din sprinkles a more generous helping of sugar than usual, and flapping his arms and crowing pretends to be a rooster to amuse Rosy-Peter. They are amused.

They follow me to the back of the house where I go looking for Ayah.

Things have become topsy-turvy. We've stopped going to the Queen's Garden altogether. We've also stopped going to the wrestler's restaurant. There is dissension in the ranks of Ayah's admirers. In twos and threes, or singly, they come instead to our
house and sit with Ayah on the patch of lawn at the back or, as on this evening when Rosy-Peter and I join them, on the Shankars' neglected veranda. Ayah comes and goes, as duty or Mother calls, and the visitors talk among themselves. Butcher and the restaurant wrestler have ceased to visit.

Tonight, illuminated by the dusty yellow veranda light, we are grouped around a radio. Masseur is there. Also Hari, Sher Singh and the Government House gardener. Imam Din and Yousaf are still catering to the demands of my parents and their visitors. Adi is clinging to Ayah's back, rocking her to and fro and pulling strands of hair out of her bun. Rosy, Peter and I settle down on the brick floor to listen. The broadcast is fragmented by static.

“So! Gurdaspur's gone to India after all,” says the zoo attendant, shaking his outsize, turbaned head.

“Shush!” says the Government House gardener, cupping his hand behind his hoary ear to listen better.

The radio announces through the crackling: “There have been reports of trouble in Gurdaspur. The situation is reported to be under control.”

“Which means there is uncontrollable butchering going on in Gurdaspur,” says the gardener flatly, reflecting the general opinion. “It is the Kali-
yuga
, no doubt about it,” he says to a collective and resigned sigh of assent.

Masseur turns the radio off. Moti and his untouchable wife Muccho have silently joined the group. They sit on the veranda steps, just a little bit apart.

“If the worst comes to the worst, you can go to Gurdaspur—or to Amritsar,” says Masseur to the Sikh youth.

“I'm not going anywhere,” says Sher Singh, bristling. But he sounds more obstinate than determined.

“I said, if the worst comes to the worst,” says Masseur mildly.

“Whoever must go, will go,” says the Government House gardener, leaning forward laboriously to pick up his curly-toed slippers. He taps them on the floor to shake off the dried manure and picks off bits of grass adhering to the sides.

“Aeeee!
You rascal!” groans Ayah, tugging her hair out of Adi's fists and tumbling him forward on her lap. “I'll teach you to behave,
you badmash!” She grins and holds Adi struggling in the powerful vise of her thighs. Raising her arms she calmly plaits her hair.

We stir and stretch, preparing to break up for the evening. And just then, in the muted rustle, we hear the rattle of a bicycle hurtling up our drive at an alarming speed. We grow still, expectant. And emerging from the night like a blundering and scraggy bird, scraping his shoe on the veranda step to check the heedless velocity of his approach—Moti and Muccho scramble out of his way—Ice-candy-man comes to an abrupt and jolted halt. He is breathless, reeking of sweat and dust, and his frantic eyes rake the group. They rest for an instant on the Sikh, and flutter back to us. “A train from Gurdaspur has just come in,” he announces, panting. “Everyone in it is dead. Butchered. They are all Muslim. There are no young women among the dead! Only two gunny-bags full of women's breasts!” Ice-candy-man's grip on the handlebars is so tight that his knuckles bulge whitely in the pale light. The kohl lining his eyes has spread, forming hollow, skull-like shadows: and as he raises his arm to wipe the perspiration crawling down his face, his glance once again flits over Sher Singh. “I was expecting relatives... For three days... For twelve hours each day... I waited for that train!”

What I've heard is unbearable. I don't want to believe it. For a grisly instant I see Mother's detached breasts: soft, pendulous, their beige nipples spreading. I shake my head to focus my distracted attention on Ice-candy-man. He appears to have grown shades darker, and his face is all dried up and shriveled-looking. I can see that beneath his shock he is grieving.

Instinctively I look at the zoo attendant. Sher Singh is staring at the popsicle man. His pupils are black and distended. His checked shirt is open at the throat, and his narrow pigeon-chest is going up and down, up and down, in the eerie veranda light.

A crowd has gathered in the narrow alley in front of the
tobacco-naswar
shop. If it is one thing I am, it's inquisitive. I slip
away from Ayah, and sliding between the thicket of legs ease my way into the center. I see the Pathan. Sharbat Khan has returned from the mountains!

I shout,
“Saalam ailekum, Khan Sahib!”
But busy pushing the pedal on his scraping and sparking machine he doesn't hear me. People are holding out to him their knives, choppers, daggers, axes, staves and scythes. And in the clamor, nose to the grindstone, Sharbat Khan sharpens one blunt edge after the other.

The crowd swells as more and more people get to know that Sharbat Khan is back. Children, sent by their mothers and grandmothers, run up with an assortment of kitchen knives and meat cleavers and circle the crowd trying to squeeze in. Some are good-naturedly picked up and passed through, but for the most part the men appear nervous and so anxious to get their own implements sharpened that they threaten and abuse the children. They must have a lot of wood to chop. A lot of meat to cut. A lot of grass to mow with their scythes.

I spot Sher Singh. He is struggling towards Sharbat Khan with a tangled armload of daggers and swords. He has to be carrying the entire stock of his family's religious arsenal! He has a touchy, defensive look that I have noticed on his face of late. It makes me want to bring him into our house and ask everybody to be nice to him. Ayah, too, is very careful how she talks to him. He bristles even at her mildly flirtatious teasing. She handles him with the caution Sher Singh lavishes on the nervous little lion cubs in the zoo. He has taken us to see the cubs. It's all very well to see them romp and mew, but within a year they will roar their way into my nightmares and sink their fangs in me. Kittens are drowned. Why not them?

A hand suddenly grips my arm and yanks me out. It is Masseur's unerring hand. “What are you doing in this crowd?” he asks. “You could get hurt.”

We spot Ayah. She appears panicked. And when she sees us she rushes up to me and picks me up and fusses over me as if I've been lost and found.

“It's all right,” I say, wishing to reassure her, “I was only looking at Sharbat Khan.”

“Oh,” she says. “He's back?”

“Yes,” I say, pointing at the crowd. “He's sharpening their knives.”

 

That evening Sharbat Khan visits us, bringing Ayah almonds, pistachios and dried apricots tied in a square of red satin. “How long've you been back?” asks Ayah, undoing the knots in the bundle with her teeth and examining the contents with her fingers.

“Two days,” he says, his voice honeyed with adoration. “I would've come earlier but there was such a rush of business. I never knew there were so many daggers and knives in Lahore!”

“If you'd waited much longer my presents would have rotted,” says Ayah.

I am surprised. Ayah appears to have lost her sense of awe and excitement in Sharbat Khan's presence. She is not the least bit awkward. Instead of hiding her face and fidgeting with her sari she looks at him out of calm and bemused eyes.

Masseur, perfumed and primed, comes half an hour later. He is wearing a long creamy silk shirt over his heavy linen lungi and his moustache is oiled and gleaming. The men appraise each other with cautious suspicion as Masseur, hitching up his lungi, hunkers down on the floor.

“You've been away for quite some time,” drawls Masseur, twirling the pointed tips of his moustache with a significance I miss. “Three months or so?”

“Yes,” says Sharbat Khan, pensively smoothing the thick growth of hair, cropped like a rug, on his upper lip. “And you've been here all that time?”

“Obviously,” says Masseur coolly.

They look as if each is a whiskered dog circling the other-weighing in and warning his foe.

Ayah, meanwhile, is cracking the almonds with her small strong teeth and chewing them with appreciative smacks. She offers
the kernels to me and then to Masseur. Masseur smiles and shakes his head, no. He lifts his shirt and withdraws from a knot tied in his elegant lungi a small packet of prepared
paan.
He holds the betel leaf out to Ayah. Ayah looks at the succulent
paan,
plump with cardomom, and then at Masseur's mouth. Her face reflects an answer. And Sharbat Khan turns away his face, honorably conceding the round.

Enough is enough! They have stared at each other and secretly communicated until Ayah's mouth is red with
paan,
and I am fit to scream. Sharbat Khan carefully places the gold
kulla
—around which his turban is wrapped—on his head and stands up. Without a word he mounts his bicycle and wobbles away with his machine clattering dejectedly behind him.

His departure brings to mind the Chinaman. It occurs to me that I haven't seen him for a long time. “Where is he? Tell me. Tell me,” I shout into Ayah's ears, and holding her by them, force her to turn to me.

“The Chinaman?” she asks absently. “Oh, he went away at the first smell of trouble,” she says, with melodious indulgence for the cowardly Chinaman.