Greatest Short Stories (12 page)

“Uncle,” answered Tarachand, B.A. , “I have not sold you or the village, or myself, I am with you. And I think it is a crime that we should be moved to the barren deserts of Chandigarh, where dust storms blow from morning to night, and where no one is buying houses, even of the thickest walls, because nothing can keep away the dust! These engineers are trying to do our wheat farming in offices with typewriters. All theory and no go…”

“Then, learned one,” said old Viroo, “sit down and forthwith write to the Sarkar to remove this construction, which is blasting away our hills and let us live in peace.

“To be sure,” added Ram Jawaya.

“Han, han,” confirmed Jarnel Singh and Karnel Singh.

‘And though Babu Tarachand, B.A., had been tempted by the prospects of going to Chandigarh, where he might be able to bring influence to bear to secure a job in some office, after all, he sat down and did the bidding of the elders and wrote a petition to the Sarkar, protesting against the plan to submerge the village of Kamli in the artificial lake of Mangal Sagar.

‘For sometime they all waited for the answer of the Sarkar. As you know brother, at the best of times, our Sarkar bungles with the papers. Perhaps there are too many of those things, called files. But none of the clerks or officers of the Sarkar seem to take responsibility. They always pass on the applications, with their opinions, on to someone else, who might lose the papers, or may have too much to do to look at them. And so applications are seldom answered or forwarded higher up. So there was some delay in the arrival of an answer to the petition of the elders of Kamli from the Sarkar.

‘And, in the meanwhile, as the construction of the dam proceeded, and the earthworks loomed as high as the nearby hills, Ram Jawaya, who had acquired twenty acres of land, in spite of the prohibition against mere money-lenders possessing the soil, went to pray to the goddess Kamli, one night accompanied by his wife, Dharmi. He put a silver rupee and a coconut before the shrine of red stone, and prayed that the goddess might make herself manifest and destroy the dam and save the village named after her. And though the goddess did not appear, Dharmi took it upon herself to go, at dead of night evading the big lamps, and did magic near the site of the constructions, by putting an earthen saucer lamp on the cross-roads with a little rice and sugar around it in the sign of the swastika. She breathed some secret prayers and returned home in the dark. This was the ceremonial of bygone ages masquerading as the worship of the Gods!

‘The next morning the work on the construction proceeded exactly as it had done before the magic was done on the cross-road.

‘Ram Jawaya, whom his wife had told of her magic, ground his teeth in bitterness at the frustration of his wife’s design. As Dharmi had taken the wife of old Viroo, named Kala, into confidence, and Kala had told her husband Viroo, the old landlord swore foul abuse against the giant iron cranes, calling them the inventions of the devils!

‘The middle peasants, lamel Singh and Karnel Singh, too, had been thinking of some direct action for ending the darn, which they knew would ultimately submerge their lands in the water and force them, a second time, to go and settle somewhere else.

‘Sardar Karnel Singh said to Sardar lamel Singh: “Brother, I know of an acid, which can be put into a little bottle, which itself can be thrown on the head of the engineer, which will finish this evil construction”

‘And though Sardar Jarnel Singh nodded his head affirmatively, he had grave doubts, whether the plan of his brother could end the mischief, which was more than the engineer at the darn. Still, he did not dissuade Karnel Singh from thinking what he had said.

‘And Karnel Singh, being a man who believed in deeds rather than words, stole up one evening, to the house of the chief engineer, Sharma, while this worthy was having his food, completely unaware of his danger. The ex-sepoy threw the bottle of acid on the head of the engineer and ran away with his tail between his legs.

‘The bottle did not burst and, fortunately, the engineer’s face was saved from disfigurement.

‘This incident led the police to make certain enquiries in the village of Kamli, and Sardar Karnel Singh was hand-cuffed and taken before the Magistrate, who put him out of touch with his companions by consigning him to the Ambala District Jail.

‘There is an old saying in our country that a man may spoil another, just so far as it may serve his ends, but when he is spoiled by others he, despoiled, spoils yet again. So long as evil’s fruit is not matured, the fool fancies: now is the hour, now is the chance.

‘And so the elders, Viroo, Ram Jawaya, Jarnel Singh and Tarachand, B.A., sat in council and decided that the conviction of Karnel Singh must be avenged. They decided to ask all the villagers, who worked on the dam site to withdraw from work. And they exhorted their young sons, Prakash, the scion of the landlord; Dharam Dev, the offspring of Ram Jawaya; and Darshan Singh and Sudarshan Singh, sons of Karnel Singh, never to go with the mechanic Bharat Ram on his phutt-phutti which kept the whole village awake at night and which was itself a symbol of the evils of time.

‘The peasants in the village, who had been earning good money with their labour on the dam, were in a quandary; if they stopped working on the construction they would lose the money, but if they did not heed the advice of the elders, the goddess Kamli might come and destroy them. So they went to mechanic Bharat Ram, who was foreman-in-charge of one of the cranes.

‘I know why you have come,’ said mechanic Bharat Ram. ‘I have made my choice and will go on working here until the dam is complete. If you wish for the good life, then pay no heed to those oldies and carry on with your labour, put aside a little money, and breathe the air of new times. Otherwise, you can go back to work on the estate of Ram Jawaya, to whom you have already mortgaged your souls and your bodies..’

‘Whereupon the labourers decided to continue their work on the dam.’

‘The headman Viroo, the goldsmith Ram Jawaya, Sardar Jamel and Babu Tarachand, B.A., were highly incensed at this act of disobedience on the part of the serfs. They assembled before the image of Kamli and solemnly declared, in her name, that, henceforth, they would not share ‘Hooka and water’ with these rebellious village-folk.’

‘About that time, came the order of the Sarkar that the petition of the elders of Kamli has been rejected and that all the villagers would get compensation immediately for being deprived of their houses, and that they would be given fertile lands to plough after the next harvest and before the water of the artificial lake of Mangal Sagar should begin to flow and submerge the village of Kamli.

‘And the Sarkar was as good as its word. And there arrived the Tehsildar of Mangal to distribute one lakh of rupees to the villagers, the bulk of it going to the five elders and the rest to the small peasants.

‘Never had the elders of this village, far less the small peasants, seen so much cash. Their eyes opened wide at the vision of the silver, and they put their thumb impression on to the papers and received the compensations — Seth Ram Jawaya and Babu Tarachand B.A., signing their names in the Hindi and Angrezi letters respectively.

‘But do you think, when their tumbledown houses had been paid for they would give up the ill-feelings they harboured against the dam? To such men as these, the sight of greater harvests alone on other lands, might have vouchsafed some consolation. As they could not see the corn waving in the breeze before their eyes, near Chandigarh, they remained dead at heart.

‘A few days after they had put the cash in their boxes, and secured these boxes with strong locks, they went to the temple of Kamli to thank her for the victory she had secured for them, and they begged her again for the boon, that the dam, which might deprive them of their lands, might be destroyed by her if only she would assume the from of a stroke of lightning.

‘And then they waited for the miracle to happen.

‘The sun shone. There were no clouds. So there was no lightning. And the work of the dam now proceeded faster than ever, because the Sarkar declared that the water must flow by the end of April.

‘As the elders could not damage anything more than the track which led from the village of Kamli to Mangal with their footsteps, the younger folk began to intervene on their behalf.

‘It seems that Prakash had asked to borrow the phutt-Phutti of mechanic Bharat Ram. Since the landlord’s son had not learnt to ride the machine properly, mechanic Bharat Ram did not oblige. And this gave Prakash the necessary cue for action.

‘Prakash proposed to the weak-chinned son of goldsmith Ram Jawaya, and to Darshan Singh and Sudarshan Singh, sons of Karnel Singh, that they should waylay mechanic Bharat Ram halfway from the village to the dam site, beat him up and deprive him of his phutt-phutti. Dharam Dev was not so eager to take part in this ambush, but Darshan Singh and Sudarshan Singh, whose father was still in jail for throwing the acid bottle on chief engineer, Sharma, were more than ready to revenge themselves on the mechanic, who surveyed the world from the top of the crane and was, in their opinion, now so stuck up that he hardly ever joined them in their pastime of poaching for the green mangoes in the villages around.

‘The boys all went out, under the light of the stars, on the excuse of doing jungle-pani, and lay in waiting for mechanic Bharat Ram to go on to his early morning shift at Mangal. They heard the phutt-phutti starting off from the village and got into position behind the bushes, from where they could pounce on their victim.

‘But as mechanic Bharat Ram came, tearing across the tract he sped past them long before they could rush out of the bushes. All that they could do was to shout abuse after him and eat the dust that the phutt phutti had started on.

‘They went back to the village and decided to tell the labourers, who were due to go on their morning shift, that mechanic Bharat Ram has told them the day was a holiday at the dam site and no work would be done. It was certain that if the labourers did not go to work, their pay would be blocked, and then these people could be incited against mechanic Bharat Ram, on whose information the labourers would have stayed away.

In this plan, the boys succeeded. So solemnly did they talk to the labourers that the men believed it was a holiday and stayed away from the shifts.

‘But, on the next day, they found that they had been deceived and, knowing that their pay would be cut for absenting themselves, they asked mechanic Bharat Ram why he had spread a baseless rumour that there was a holiday on the previous day.

‘Mechanic Bharat Ram was a man of few words and merely said that he did not know anything about such a rumour. And the labourers thought, from his parsimonious speech, that he had, indeed, bluffed them all.

‘The vicious boys, and some of the elders of the village, played upon the suspicions of the labourers and roused them into a slow and simmering indignation against mechanic Bharat Ram. And, when, at the end of the month, their wages for one day were actually cut, the labourers were incited by Prakash to go and smash up the motor cycle of mechanic Bharat Ram, which stood under the shadow of the crane from the cabin on the top.

‘The watchmen of the dam arrested the culprits, but mechanic Bharat Ram persuaded him to let them off.

‘There are many kinds of people in the world, brother, but, mainly two types of characters, because there are two main ways of thinking and feeling: Some people look at everything only from the outside, and the others only from within. But, while most of the villagers were addicted to the crude lumps of experience, mechanic Bharat Ram saw all round fully and got the whole view. And he believed that the change in men’s hearts was more important then the conversion of their heads from the negative gesture to the gesture of affirmation.

‘Only, the inner change is hard to achieve. And not even his gesture in having the men released from the clutches of the police affected all those villagers easily. Instead, they only became more enraged, thinking that mechanic Bharat Ram was trying to be a magnanimous Lat Sahib, as the elders said.

‘And, they persuaded the elders to cut him and his old mother, Siddhi, from ‘hookah and water ’ from the village brotherhood.

‘And the women folk of the village joined together and invoked the spirit of the goddess Kamli in the temple and declared, on behalf of the goddess, that old Siddhi would die.

‘The giant machines on the Mangal Dam worked steadily, however, and it was announced that there were only ten days left before the space, on which the village of Kamli stood, would be filled up with waters of Mangal Sagar and the dam would begin to work.

‘And; this time, not only the Tehsildar of Mangal, but the Head of the District, Dipty commissioner, also came, to persuade the villagers to quit their houses and go in the lorries which had been brought for this purpose, bag and baggage, to the new houses and lands that they had been allotted near Chandigarh. The Dipty Commissioner made a speech, using, for the first time in his life the Punjabi tongue, and though the villagers laughed out aloud at his accent, they were also somewhat moved by his appeal in the name of the Prime Minister. He said that they should allow the interest of the whole of India to prevail over their own and not cling to their plots in the hamlet of Kamli.

‘But the sudden silence of the elders showed that they were not convinced. Only Sardar Jamel Singh said:

“If you be so concerned about our welfare, then why do you hold my brother Karnel Singh in jail?”

‘The head of the district answered immediately:

“If that be your only grievance, I shall order Karnel Singh to be released tomorrow and the remaining part of his sentence will be forgotten.”

‘And, thinking that he had played his trump card and that the villagers of Kamli had been won over, he returned to the rest-house of Mangal and sat down in his basket chair to drink his peg of whiskey in peace.

‘On the next day, when Karnel Singh was set free, there was much rejoicing in the village, and everyone thought that now the elders would call the whole Panchayat together and persuade the villagers to leave in the lorries which were waiting under the banyan tree.