Cracking India (31 page)

 

The attack came at dawn. The watch from the mosque's single minaret hurtled down the winding steps to spread the alarm. The
panicked women ran to and fro screaming and snatching up their babies, and the men barely had time to get to their posts. In fifteen minutes the village was swamped by the Sikhs—tall men with streaming hair and thick biceps and thighs, waving full-sized swords and sten-guns, roaring,
“Bolay so Nihal! Sat Siri Akal!”

They mowed down the villagers in the mosque with the sten-guns. Shouting
“Allah-o-Akbar!”
the peasants died of sword and spear wounds in the slushy lanes and courtyards, the screams of women from the
chaudhry's
house ringing in their ears, wondering why the house was not burning.

Ranna, abandoned by his mother and sisters halfway to the
chaudhry's
house, ran howling into the courtyard. Chidda had spanked his head and pushed him away, shrieking, “Go to your father ! Stay with the men!”

Ranna ran through their house to the room the boys had been instructed to gather in. Some of his cousins and uncles were already there. More men stumbled into the dark windowless room—then his two older brothers. There must be at least thirty of them in the small room. It was stifling. He heard his father's voice and fought his way towards him. Dost Mohammad shouted harshly: “Shut up! They'll kill you if you make a noise.”

The yelling in the room subsided. Dost Mohammad picked up his son, and Ranna saw his uncle slip out into the gray light and shut the door, plunging the room into darkness. Someone bolted the door from inside, and they heard the heavy thud of cotton bales stacked against the door to disguise the entrance. With luck they would remain undetected and safe.

The shouting and screaming from outside appeared to come in waves: receding and approaching. From all directions. Sometimes Ranna could make out the words and even whole sentences. He heard a woman cry, “Do anything you want with me, but don't torment me ... For God's sake, don't torture me!” And then an intolerable screaming. “Oh God!” a man whispered on a sobbing intake of breath. “Oh God, she is the mullah's daughter!” The men covered their ears—and the boys' ears—sobbing unaffectedly like little children.

A teenager, his cracked voice resounding like the honk of geese, started wailing: “I don't want to die ... I don't want to die!” Catching his fear, Ranna and the other children set to whimpering: “I don't want to die ... Abba, I don't want to die!”

“Hush,” said Dost Mohammad gruffly. “Stop whining like girls!” Then, with words that must have bubbled up from a deep source of strength and compassion, with infinite gentleness, he said, “What's there to be afraid of? Are you afraid to die? It won't hurt any more than the sting of a bee.” His voice, unseasonably lighthearted, carried a tenderness that soothed and calmed them. Ranna fell asleep in his father's arms.

Someone was banging on the door, shouting: “Open up! Open up!”

Ranna awoke with a start. Why was he on the floor?

Why were there so many people about in the dark? He felt the stir of men getting to their feet. The air in the room was oppressive : hot and humid and stinking of sweat. Suddenly Ranna remembered where he was and the darkness became charged with terror.

“We know you're in there. Come on, open up!” The noise of the banging was deafening in the pitch-black room, drowning the other children's alarmed cries. “Allah! Allah! Allah!” an old man moaned nonstop.

“Who's there?” Dost Mohammad called; and putting Ranna down, stumbling over the small bodies, made his way to the door. Ranna, terrified, groping blindly in the dark, tried to follow.

“We're Sikhs!”

There was a pause in which Ranna's throat dried up. The old man stopped saying “Allah.” And in the deathly stillness, his voice echoing from his proximity to the door Dost Mohammad said, “Kill us ... Kill us all... but spare the children.”

“Open at once!”

“I beg you in the name of all you hold sacred, don't kill the little ones,” Ranna heard his father plead. “Make them Sikhs ... Let them live ... they are so little... ”

Suddenly the noon light smote their eyes. Dost Mohammad stepped out and walked three paces. There was a sunlit sweep of curved steel. His head was shorn clear off his neck. Turning once in the air, eyes wide open, it tumbled in the dust. His hands jerked up slashing the air above the bleeding stump of his neck.

Ranna saw his uncles beheaded. His older brothers, his cousins. The Sikhs were among them like hairy vengeful demons, wielding bloodied swords, dragging them out as a sprinkling of Hindus, darting about at the fringes, their faces vaguely familiar, pointed out and identified the Mussulmans by name. He felt a blow cleave the back of his head and the warm flow of blood. Ranna fell just inside the door on a tangled pile of unrecognizable bodies. Someone fell on him, drenching him in blood.

Every time his eyes open the world appears to them to be floating in blood. From the direction of the mosque come the intolerable shrieks and wails of women. It seems to him that a woman is sobbing just outside their courtyard: great anguished sobs—and at intervals she screams: “You'll kill me!
Hai Allah
... Y'all will kill me!”

Ranna wants to tell her, “Don't be afraid to die ... It will hurt less than the sting of a bee.” But he is hurting so much ... Why isn't he dead? Where are the bees? Once he thought he saw his eleven-year-old sister, Khatija, run stark naked into their courtyard: her long hair disheveled, her boyish body bruised, her lips cut and swollen and a bloody scab where her front teeth were missing.

Later in the evening he awoke to silence. At once he became fully conscious. He wiggled backwards over the bodies and slipping free of the weight on top of him felt himself sink knee-deep into a viscous fluid. The bodies blocking the entrance had turned the room into a pool of blood.

Keeping to the shadows cast by the mud walls, stepping over the mangled bodies of people he knew, Ranna made his way to the
chaudhry's
house. It was dark inside. There was a nauseating stench of kerosene mixed with the smell of spilt curry. He let his eyes get accustomed to the dimness. Carefully he explored the rooms
cluttered with smashed clay pots, broken charpoys, spilled grain and chapatties. He had not realized how hungry he was until he saw the pile of stale bread. He crammed the chapatties into his mouth.

His heart gave a lurch. A woman was sleeping on a charpoy. He reached for her and his hand grasped her clammy inert flesh. He realized with a shock she was dead. He walked round the cot to examine her face. It was the
chaudhry's
older wife. He discovered three more bodies. In the dim light he turned them over and peered into their faces searching for his mother.

When he emerged from the house it was getting dark. Moving warily, avoiding contact with the bodies he kept stumbling upon, he went to the mosque.

For the first time he heard voices. The whispers of women comforting each other—of women softly weeping. His heart pounding in his chest he crept to one side of the arching mosque entrance. He heard a man groan, then a series of animal-like grunts.

He froze near the body of the mullah. How soon he had become accustomed to thinking of people he had known all his life as bodies. He felt on such easy terms with death. The old mullah's face was serene in death, his beard pale against the brick plinth. The figures in the covered portion at the rear of the mosque were a dark blur. He was sure he had heard Chidda's voice. He began inching forward, prepared to dash across the yard to where the women were, when a man yawned and sighed, “
Wah Guru!”

“Wah Guru! Wah Guru!”
responded three or four male voices, sounding drowsy and replete. Ranna realized that the men in the mosque were Sikhs. A wave of rage and loathing swept his small body. He knew it was wrong of the Sikhs to be in the mosque with the village women. He could not explain why: except that he still slept in his parents' room.

“Stop whimpering, you bitch, or I'll bugger you again!” a man said irritably.

Other men laughed. There was much movement. Stifled exclamations and moans. A woman screamed, and swore in Punjabi.
There was a loud cracking noise and the rattle of breath from the lungs. Then a moment of horrible stillness.

Ranna fled into the moonless night. Skidding on the slick wet clay, stumbling into the irrigation ditches demarcating the fields, he ran in the direction of his Uncle Iqbal and his Noni
chachi's
village. He didn't stop until deep inside a thicket of sugarcane he stumbled on a slightly elevated slab of drier ground. The clay felt soft and caressing against his exhausted body. It was a safe place to rest. The moment Ranna felt secure his head hurt and he fainted.

Ranna lay unconscious in the cane field all morning. Intermittent showers washed much of the blood and dust off his limbs. Around noon two men walked into the cane field, and at the first rustle of the dried leaves Ranna became fully conscious.

Sliding on his butt to the lower ground, crouching amidst the pricking tangle of stalks and dried leaves, Ranna followed the passage of the men with his ears. They trampled through the field, selecting and cutting the sugarcane with their
kirpans,
talking in Punjabi. Ranna picked up an expression that warned him that they were Sikhs. Half-buried in the slush he scarcely breathed as one of the men came so close to him that he saw the blue check on his lungi and the flash of a white singlet. There was a crackling rustle as the man squatted to defecate.

Half an hour later when the men left, Ranna moved cautiously towards the edge of the field. A cluster of about sixty Sikhs in lungis and singlets, their carelessly knotted hair snaking down their backs, stood talking in a fallow field to his right. At some distance, in another field of young green shoots, Sikhs and Hindus were gathered in a much larger bunch. Ranna sensed their presence behind him in the fields he couldn't see. There must be thousands of them, he thought. Shifting to a safe spot he searched the distance for the green dome of his village mosque. He had traveled too far to spot it. But he knew where his village lay and guessed from the coiling smoke that his village was on fire.

Much later, when it was time for the evening meal, the fields cleared. He could not make out a single human form for miles. As
he ran again towards his aunt's village the red sun, as if engorged with blood, sank into the horizon.

All night he moved, scuttling along the mounds of earth protecting the waterways, running in shallow channels, burrowing like a small animal through the standing crop. When he stopped to catch his breath, he saw the glow from burning villages measuring the night distances out for him.

Ranna arrived at his aunt's village just after dawn. He watched it from afar, confused by the activity taking place around five or six huge lorries parked in the rutted lanes. Soldiers, holding guns with bayonets sticking out of them, were directing the villagers. The villagers were shouting and running to and fro, carrying on their heads charpoys heaped with their belongings. Some were herding their calves and goats towards the trucks. Others were dumping their household effects in the middle of the lanes in their scramble to climb into the lorries.

There were no Sikhs about. The village was not under attack. Perhaps the army trucks were there to evacuate the villagers and take them to Pakistan.

Ranna hurtled down the lanes, weaving through the burdened and distraught villagers and straying cattle, into his aunt's hut. He saw her right away, heaping her pots and pans on a cot. A fat roll of winter bedding tied with a string lay to one side. He screamed: “Noni
chachi!
It's me!”

“For a minute
I
thought: Who is this filthy little beggar?”
Noni
chachi
says, when she relates her part in the story.
“I said: Ranna
?
Ranna? Is
that you? What're you doing here!”

The moment he caught the light of recognition and concern in her eyes, the pain in his head exploded and he crumpled at her feet unconscious.

“It
is
funny,”
Ranna says.
“As long as I had to look out for myself I was all right. As soon as I felt safe I fainted.
”

Her hands trembling, his
chachi
washed the wound on his head with a wet rag. Clots of congealed blood came away and floated in the pan in which she rinsed the cloth.
“I did not dare remove the thick scabs that had formed over the wound,” she says. “I thought I'd see his
brain!”
The slashing blade had scalped him from the rise in the back of his head to the top, exposing a wound the size of a large bald patch on a man. She wondered how he had lived; found his way to their village. She was sure he would die in a few moments. Ranna's
chacha
Iqbal, and other members of the house gathered about him. An old woman, the village
dai
, checked his pulse and his breath and, covering him with a white cloth, said: “Let him die in peace!”