The Age of Shiva (8 page)

Biji answered the phone. She had never quite managed to get the hang of the receiver, and her voice rose and faded as she tried speaking into each end. Hema crowded in close to me—having dialed the number, she now felt entitled to listen in on the call.

“My daughter, my Meera,” Biji cried, bursting into tears once she recognized who was on the phone. I felt a weight in my chest as I heard her weep, but also a detachment, as if the physical distance between us had opened up an emotional separation as well. “The house is so empty now. All of a sudden I feel so old.” It was true, I realized with a twinge—Biji did sound strangely aged over the phone.

Paji was composed and formal. He wanted to know if the refrigerator had arrived, and how the radiogram played. The pressure cooker, he cautioned me, could be dangerous if the lid was not locked securely in place. He hoped Dev and his parents were in good health and asked me to convey his regards to them. In turn, I asked him to give my love to Sharmila. I was about to hang up when I remembered Hema standing next to me, all ears. “And don't worry about me,” I added. “They treat me really well—everyone's so caring here.”

By now, Mataji had confirmed what Hema had claimed—it was considered too inauspicious for me to visit my parents so soon after the marriage. “Settle in first, make this home your own, and then you can even go stay a few nights,” she said. When I broached the subject of having Biji come over instead, Mataji explained that in their family, the first such visit was only permitted on special festival days. “We'll have them come on Karva Chauth next month. Such a big day for you—the first time you'll be keeping a fast for Dev. Don't worry, it'll be here before you know it.”

She let me telephone them every four days. (How long would it take, I wondered, to use up the twenty thousand rupees from Paji and one rupee from Sharmila at this rate?) Hema always accompanied me, and told me how jealous her friends were getting about all the calls she'd been dialing. “In addition to a fridge and a radiogram and a pressure cooker, I'm going to ask Babuji to include a telephone in my dowry.”

A few times, when she insisted, I let Hema say hello to my parents. “I'm not sure exactly who that was, but she chatters a lot,” Paji commented.

One morning, Biji didn't come to the phone. Paji told me she'd been crying since morning over Roopa's move to the east coast. “Ravinder's posting came through to the naval base in Visakhapatnam. They're leaving this Sunday. I'll tell them you said goodbye.”

“Visakhapatnam!” Dev exclaimed when I told him. “But that's on the other side of the country.” He looked so crestfallen that I had to suppress the shiver of exhilaration I felt. “Poor Roopa,” he said, and slowly shook his head. “Look what you've done to yourself.”

I was never able to bring up Dev's Bombay suggestion to Paji on the phone. Initially, I dismissed the idea of asking for help as preposterous. Surely after everything he had spent for my dowry, Paji would simply laugh at the request. Not with warmth, either, I told Dev, but with rage. “What about the twenty thousand in cash Paji gave?” I asked. “That's supposed to be for us—surely it should be enough for a flat, even in Bombay?”

Dev evaded my queries about the money as long as he could. He finally disclosed that the family had asked to borrow it to keep aside for Hema's wedding. “You've seen yourself how these dowry matters work. Just think of it—Sandhya didn't even bring in anything. Could someone like Babuji ever afford a daughter's marriage on his salary alone?”

“You mean it's not just his own three daughters, but Hema as well, whom my father has to worry about marrying off?”

“It's not like that. Try to understand. It's not as if anyone's keeping the money for themselves. It's all one big cycle of give-and-take, that's all.”

“Yes, my father keeps giving and your family keeps taking.”

“Why don't you shut your mouth. This isn't your father's house, that you can go around spewing out whatever comes into your head.”

I went to bed that night alternately incredulous and appalled. Dev lay on the talai with his back to me, the odor of whiskey so strong in the air that I knew he had purposely got drunk. This was his way of sulking, but I did not care. How could he have let them take the money? I had a lot more reason to be angry with him.

But as I glared at his back, I started realizing his family was to blame. Given the choice, Dev would have surely preferred to use the money to move to a flat in Bombay. As long as we lived with them, it was unlikely he would be able to go against his family's wishes. Which made it even more imperative that we leave this house. An image of a train engine, majestically emerging through billows of steam, came to my mind.

The cash from my dowry was gone, of course—even Dev couldn't possibly believe it was a loan. Would we ever be able to afford our own place? It wasn't as if Dev was going to be making a lot of money anytime soon. Businesses and industry were growing so rapidly these days that for the first time since Independence, jobs were relatively easy to get. But they were mostly entry-level positions, without good prospects for advancement. The best Dev had been able to do with the B.A. in social studies he had received in July was a clerking job with Hindustan Petroleum. “If the country is supposed to be doing so well, how come they're paying you so little?” Babuji had complained.

The whistle blew, the guard raised the green flag, the Frontier Mail was preparing to slip away. There was only one way left to catch the train—follow Dev's suggestion and ask Paji for help. Since I couldn't telephone freely and wasn't allowed to visit in person, it would have to be through a letter. I would explain everything, be honest about where the money went, and tell Paji that although not entitled, I was still coming to him with my apron spread. He could let me know during his visit on Karva Chauth if he had found it in his heart to drop in more.

The sky opened up, the horizon came to focus once more, and along it, there was the Frontier Mail, whistling its way to Bombay again. Had I known the price I would have to pay for that train ride, I would have banished every trace of the letter I was already composing in my head.

T
HE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY, WHEN HEMA AND I GOT TO THE RATION
shop to make my allotted call, we found it closed. I was actually quite relieved to see this—ever since sending my letter to Paji, I had been dreading his response on the phone. “It's only seven,” Hema said, looking at the shutters drawn across the entire line of stalls. “I wonder what could be going on?”

As we were walking back, the silence rang in our ears—for the first time we noticed how deserted the street was. Nearing the bend that turned towards the colony, both of us instinctively broke into a run. As we approached our house, we began to hear muffled cries and smelled the acridity of smoke.

Mataji was standing outside the gate, waving frantically to us to hurry. “Where were you, roaming around like you were on a stroll? Don't you know there's a riot going on?” She slammed and bolted the door. “Half of Nizamuddin is up in flames around us and you pick this time to go out to use the phone.”

We stayed awake until late at night, listening to the sirens in the distance. Mrs. Ahmed relayed from across the wall between us that twenty-three people had died and the railway station had been destroyed, but Arya could find nothing on the radio. I had heard about riots occurring in poor, crowded localities far away from Darya Ganj, but never somewhere I was staying before.

The newspaper report the next day was disappointingly low-key. It stated that there had been an argument at a meat shop in the morning over mutton gone bad. By afternoon, a rumor had spread that the problem wasn't spoiled mutton, but beef disguised as mutton. People started saying that the butcher (a Muslim, like most others in the trade) had lured the brown and white cow that fed at the station garbage heap into the back of his shop and slaughtered it, then palmed off the meat as mutton to unsuspecting Hindu customers. He had fled for his life after being stabbed in the shoulder with his own boning knife, and his shop was torched along with four others (three of them Muslim, and one Hindu, by accident). The cow, however, was unharmed, the paper reassured its readers, and the rioters had dispersed peacefully once it had been sighted ambling near the post office dump later that evening. An editorial inside predicted that such communal incidents may soon become isolated anomalies. It pointed out that the tally of Delhi riots had steadily decreased every year since the Partition, ascribing this trend to an increase in jobs created by the government's five-year economic growth plans. The piece ended with a quotation from Nehru, an ideal, it said, which the nation would always hold indisputable:
“Let us be clear about it without a shadow of doubt…we stand till death for a secular state.”

“What's this country coming to?” Babuji asked aloud, as I finished reading him the article. I thought he was upset over the riot, but it turned out he was complaining instead that there weren't
enough
of them. “How can people have forgotten the Partition so easily, forgiven the Muslims so soon?”

Babuji took a puff from his hookah and started working on another knot in the charpoy turned upside down before him. Every morning, he came back for an hour, after checking on the signal token for the Punjab Mail. He liked me to read the newspaper aloud to him during this break, as he tightened the ropes of the charpoys. “You have to retie the knots every few days,” he would say as he pulled the ropes against the frame, “otherwise by morning, you'll be scraping the ground with your back.” In the beginning, I sat veiled in the gunghat of my sari like Sandhya did in his presence, and he was careful not to turn to me directly. But now I kept my face uncovered, and he spoke as unself-consciously to me as he would to a daughter.

Except Babuji was not my father, he couldn't possibly be more different from Paji. Although I had learnt to look past his gruffness, even developed an appreciation for his directness, there were times when his views left me appalled.

For instance, there was the day he solved the mystery of where Arya went at dawn. “It's a shakha, in that building behind the post office—it's one of the clubs run by the Hindu Rashtriya Manch. Arya works for them, you know—he's their Nizamuddin branch treasurer. He's been volunteering to lead the early morning exercises on the field for the new boys this year.”

I was startled by the matter-of-fact way Babuji mentioned this association. “Communalists, thugs, murderers,” was how my father usually described the HRM, in his frequent rants against the organization. Although Paji's choicest invective was reserved for the Muslim League, for spearheading the campaign to create a separate Pakistan, he had more than enough ire left to direct towards the other militaristic organizations that had joined in the Partition bloodbath. “They say they've reformed themselves, they've given up violence, they're only interested in promoting a sense of worth among young Hindu men. But you don't have to scratch very deep to expose the HRM's unquenchable thirst for Muslim blood.”

I felt myself echoing my father in my response to Babuji. “Weren't they one of the groups banned by the government for killing Gandhiji?” I asked.

“All lies,” Babuji barked, his head snapping up as if I had questioned his personal integrity. “Politics and lies, that's what. Nehru had to show the world he was doing something, to save face after such an embarrassing assassination. But the murder plot had nothing to do with the groups he accused—that's why he was forced to lift his ban the very next year.”

Babuji fixed me with a look so keen that I wished I still had the filter of my gunghat between us. “Let me ask you something, Bahu—since your family came to this country as refugees just like us. They keep trumpeting Gandhiji this and Gandhiji that, erecting statues of him everywhere, putting his face on stamps. But what did he do for the country anyway? This man whom we call the father of the nation. He got rid of the British, it's true, but at what cost? A million people dead, so many millions like us turned into refugees. Why? So that we could have Pakistan carved out of our own flesh and sitting on our head? What kind of father is this, who hacks off the arms of his nation and gives them away?”

I was stunned. This was such a vicious distortion of every fact I had ever been taught, that I felt tears spring up as if I had just been slapped. I wanted to scream at Babuji that Gandhiji was the last person who had wanted Partition, that he had resisted it to the very end. That he had even offered the prime ministership to Jinnah, the father of the Muslim nation, to keep the country intact. It was the British who could have prevented the carnage, but decided not to, and left the country to fend for itself. Pulling their troops out a full ten months earlier than announced, so that they wouldn't have to expend their own resources in stopping the bloodshed.

Somehow, that day, I managed to hold my tongue. I let Babuji rant on, reminding myself that as the bahu, it was not my place to correct, to be defiant. Now, I repeated the same mantra to myself, as Babuji complained that chasing just one Muslim butcher away wasn't sufficient. “They can say what they want about having enough jobs for everyone, but outrage doesn't die so easily. It just bides its time, lying in wait. Mark my words, there are rivers of blood to come—the day all these buried feelings emerge, ten times as strong.”

Babuji tightened the last of his ropes. “You probably think I'm very bigoted, don't you? That Muslims aren't doing anything to me, so why do I hate them?” He took a long inhalation from his hookah, and broke into a paroxysm of coughs. “See? There is a reason. This tobacco that the Mughals brought. The Muslims are going to kill me yet.”

He drew in another breath through the hose, then pushed aside the hookah. “Come sit with me then.” He turned the charpoy right side up and indicated I was to join him on it. “I'll tell you a story to change your mind.

“Have you ever been to Kasur, Bahu? Dev must have talked about it—it's where he was born after all. A cultured city, the size of a pomegranate, to the south of the giant watermelon that is Lahore. It's where the poet Bulleh Shah lived, where the best leather comes from. For thirteen years I worked there as a signalman, then an assistant stationmaster, until finally, in December of 1945, they made me stationmaster. It was not a very big station, but we got a fair number of trains from both Lahore and Firozpur. Once I was promoted, I thought this was it—a job, a family, a flat, good friends—I assumed I would spend the rest of my life quite happily there.

“Then the freedom movement started gaining force. All of a sudden, the Muslims, even friends and neighbors I'd known for years, started parroting what their leader Jinnah was claiming—that they couldn't live next to Hindus anymore. They demonstrated in the streets, sometimes rioted, to get attention for this new demand of a separate country. ‘We'll be slaves if we're a minority among Hindus,' they claimed, ‘we'll be discriminated against, we'll be killed.' It was as if an infection had raged through their community and eaten into all their brains.

“For a few days Kasur was calm, even while horrible things were happening in the rest of Punjab. We knew we wouldn't escape—we were much too close to the juicy watermelon that had already been hacked open above. Still, it was a shock when the gouged-out innards of Lahore finally rained down to splatter us. Arya had just brought my lunch to the station, I remember, when Hussein, the ticket seller rushed in and said it had started. We watched from behind the tiny ticket-room windows as the mob came down the road, burning all the Hindu businesses and stores.”

I was about to interject, but Babuji held up his hand. “I know what you'll say, Bahu—that Hindus targeted Muslims as well, that as many Muslims died as Hindus did. I can only tell you what I saw myself. They were quite methodical, these Muslims I witnessed in action that day—checking every address, leaving some stores intact, pouring kerosene through the windows of others. After they were done, they didn't seem quite satisfied with their accomplishments. They stood around in the street, gazing at the fires, like children loitering about wondering what to do next in their play hour. Then someone said, ‘Soraaj, the moneylender, where is he? He's always squeezing money out of Muslims, let's teach him a lesson.' They looked around, but Soraaj had fled long before they had lit his stall, so instead they caught Bajrang Singh, his watch boy, and set his shirt on fire.

“Somehow, Bajrang was able to rip his shirt off, so then, laughing, they prodded him with their torches until his pajama was lit. He managed to get that off as well, and stood there naked, so they set aflame his turban, because there was nothing else left to burn. You would think that a turban would be the easiest garment to remove, but for some reason—shock, perhaps, or maybe devoutness—Bajrang didn't. Instead, his body uncovered, his head streaking smoke and flame, he ran towards the station.”

Babuji locked his gaze with mine. “I'll never forget his face as he banged at the doors we had shuttered, never forget the smell of his burning hair. Had we pulled Bajrang in, perhaps we could have saved him. Stations, we knew, were always spared—they would be too useful after Partition to be needlessly destroyed. But even the Muslims in our group were terrified of the mob. Only Arya, who had played with Bajrang when they were both children, struggled to go outside—it was all we could do to restrain him. We watched together as two of the men sauntered up to Bajrang and, his head still smoldering, dragged him away.”

Babuji stopped, to reach for the hookah and take a deep draw through the hose. The smoke made a gurgling sound as it bubbled through the water bulb.

“The day Gandhi capitulated to the demands of the Muslims and agreed to a partition, there were fires all over the city again. Nobody knew whether Kasur would end up in India or Pakistan—the British wouldn't announce that until the very end. People said that it didn't really matter—why not wait and see how things worked out after the violence—understandable, they claimed—died down? After all, Hindus had been reasonably prosperous under Muslim rule during the time of the Mughals, and surely this would be the same. ‘Why leave your job behind, why not stay at least to sell your flat?' But by now, I had seen too many throats slit, too many bodies set aflame. That evening, I used my stationmaster's quota to book tickets for my family and myself. We took the train to Delhi the very next day. Which was just as well—within a week, most of the Hindus and Sikhs foolish enough to remain were floating in the canal, their heads separated from their necks. The city founded eons ago in the bosom of Hindustan by Loh, the son of Ram, was gone. Pakistan was the country to which both Lahore and its pomegranate fell.

“Even though we lost everything, we were so much luckier than most. We escaped before the death trains started, before the compartments stuffed with massacred refugees started rolling in. And look at Sandhya's family—they were able to make it out only by joining the throngs who made the crossing on foot. It cost them one of their children—dead on the third day—just one of the hundreds of bodies people cremated along the way or buried in unmarked graves.”

Babuji took another inhalation from the hookah. “Do you know who came to our rescue in Delhi, Bahu? Not your Gandhiji or the Congress Party—it was the HRM. I had heard of them back in Kasur—one of the groups the Hindus had formed for self-protection, and yes, retaliation. They were known for their nightly raids against Muslim targets—revenge, you understand, for the attacks against Hindus by day. Arya had wanted to join in the days the trouble first started brewing, but I hadn't allowed him. In the refugee camps, however, the HRM made it clear that their goals were peaceful, that they were there just to assist as fellow Hindus. There must have been a dozen volunteers in our section alone—helping people get settled, distributing chappatis and bedding, making sure we had water and medicine. Once we left, Arya wanted to go back and help new refugees by becoming a volunteer himself. This time, I was only too happy to give him my blessing to sign up with the HRM.