This Is Not That Dawn: Jhootha Sach (17 page)

Since he had taken an hour’s leave, Puri could not get out of his office before 5 p.m. The flow of traffic along Railway Road was normal. He walked through Chowk Matti and Papar Mandi up to Machchi Hatta on his way home, and saw huddles of agitated and frightened people at several places. He also heard people talking of clashes at Mochi Gate behind Pari Mahal.

As he entered the gali, he saw a group of women bending over something in front of Ghasita Ram’s house. Someone was crying in pain. Kartaro and Rampyari were weeping and the faces of others were streaked with tears. The women made way for Puri. Dauloo mama lay on the floor covered in blood. His old kurta, tinted with all the colours thrown at him at the time of Holi, was now smeared only with red. A makeshift, blood-soaked bandage was tied to his abdomen. Near him lay containers and tumblers filled with water.

Ratan’s mother said to Puri, ‘Son, take mama quickly to the hospital!’

Chaitu, Pushpa’s servantboy, had been sent to look for a tonga. Peeto had summoned her father and brother from their shop. Khushal Singh too had run off towards Shahalami to get a tonga. Bir Singh had gone to telephone Dr Prabhu Dayal at his hospital, Puri at his office and Ratan at the railway goods clearing agency. As it happened, Puri reached the gali ahead of the other two.

The women said: About half an hour before, Dauloo came into the gali from the direction of Mochi Gate, howling ‘They’ve killed me! The Muslims have killed me!’ and fell to the ground. The women first screamed and ran off to their houses. Then they cautiously came out and tried to stop the flow of blood by placing dry and wet rags over Dauloo’s wound. But the blood continued to flow, and Dauloo’s groans became weaker.

Puri placed his hand on Dauloo’s sweat-soaked forehead and called, ‘Mama… Dauloo mama!’

Dauloo opened his eyes. ‘Water… water,’ he whispered amid his groans.

Rampyari, the wife of Bajaj Dewanchand, sat huddled over him. She put a tumbler of water to his lips.

Puri again called, ‘Mama… Dauloo mama!’ His eyes had filled with tears.

‘Child…’ Dauloo replied weakly. He looked at Puri with tears streaming from his eyes and cried, ‘I’m going to die.’

Puri tuned to Rampyari impatiently, ‘Where’s Chaitu? Should I go for a tonga?’

‘Ratan’s here,’ the women said and moved aside.

‘Mama… what happened?’ Ratan crouched over him.

‘Child…’ Dauloo opened his eyes again and cried, ‘I’m going to die.’ He put his arm around Ratan’s neck.

Tears flowed from Ratan’s eyes.

The tonga arrived.

Khushal Singh helped Ratan and Puri carry Dauloo to the tonga. All three went to hospital with the bleeding man. As they left, the children of the gali were weeping, and the women were wiping away tears.

The hospital’s emergency ward was filled with wounded, sitting and lying on beds and on the floor, groaning with pain and crying for help. There was bustle and urgency everywhere. The doctors were busy talking with police officers. The compounders and male nurses were muttering in frustration, ‘Sixty-three have been brought since this morning. Why do they bring the dead here? The hospital gets involved in police investigations.’

Ratan and Puri would talk to one person, and then plead with another. Nobody paid any attention. An old Muslim with a henna-dyed beard and tears in his eyes, waved a sheaf of currency notes at everyone in sight, begging them to attend to his young son. He did not know how to offer a bribe. All he got in return were rebukes.

Dr Prabhu Dayal arrived after about an hour. At his request, Dr Yunus, the doctor on emergency duty, examined Dauloo. Dauloo was immediately taken to the operating theatre. He was already unconscious. It took only a small dose of anaesthetic to put him to sleep. His wound was examined. It was deep and serious. Dr Yunus began to put in stitches.

A nurse was holding Dauloo’s wrist to feel his pulse. She said, ‘He’s sinking.’

He was immediately given an injection. The doctor said, ‘He will have to be given a blood transfusion.’

Puri and Ratan offered to give their blood for Dauloo. When they were told that only blood sterilized by the hospital could be used, Ratan paid twenty-four rupees, the price of eight ounces of blood.

Out of consideration for Dr Prabhu Dayal, Ratan and Puri were allowed to stay at Dauloo’s bedside until he regained consciousness, but Dauloo did not come out of his coma. Ratan wanted to take his body back to the gali for proper last rites.

Dr Yunus explained to Puri the legal implication of their case. According to the law, the hospital was obliged to report the death of someone suffering from a stab wound. The corpse would then be handed over to the police. Unless the civil surgeon or one of his deputies performed the autopsy to verify the cause of death, the police could not hand over the body for the last rites. There were already eleven corpses in the morgue. It was necessary to declare that the body could not be identified. Otherwise the people of the gali would be harassed in the investigation. Dauloo’s body was left at the hospital.

As Puri and Ratan came out of the hospital, the news of the approaching curfew was being announced on a loudspeaker. Someone at the hospital gate told them that several cases of arson had been reported from the Delhi Gate and Chowk Matti areas, in the wake of ferocious riots.

All the shops were closed in Shahalami bazaar. When Puri and Ratan reached their gali they found many people waiting outside their houses for news of Dauloo. Ratan burst into tears when he saw them. The news spread quickly. Men came and sat on the chabutaras. Women stood in doorways or at windows. Rampyari, Jeeva and Kartaro began to cry aloud. Almost every woman was wiping her teary eyes with her aanchal.

The Woman-of-the-Well was sitting in her doorway, her back against the open door. She said, ‘Dewanchand’s father had hired the poor man as his servant. He was quite a strapping lad then. Used to carry bales of cloth for them and milk their buffalo. He was a good man. Scrupulously honest and decent. Never said a bad word to anyone. Which boy or girl from the gali has not played in his lap.’

Dewanchand said, ‘I used to study then at Pandhe’s school. Hadn’t begun
to look after the shop yet. Father had given him a room for free, and I never asked him for any rent either. The poor soul was from somewhere near Vaishno Devi in Jammu. I owe him one hundred and fifty rupees. If you all say so, that sum can be donated to some temple or to a cow shelter or wherever you all decide.’

All the young men and women and children of the gali had grown up with Dauloo mama around. Only the Woman-of-the-Well, Masterji and Govindram called him by his name; the rest addressed him as mama. He would hoist the children onto his shoulder and amuse them by making funny noises. Whenever a baby was born to someone in the gali, they would congratulate him and tell him that he now had another niece or nephew.

Dauloo would smile showing his toothless gums, and say with pride, ‘You’re telling me? You’ve all shitted and peed on me!’

Ever since Puri was very young, he remembered Dauloo selling things from his tin box in the galis of the neighbourhood. The box held many titbits for children: pieces of pateesa sweet, peppermint and other candies, sour mango leather and dried tamarind in their season, and churan, the tart mix of pulverized spices. The women of the gali, Meladei and Basant Kaur more than others, were constantly accusing Dauloo mama of giving their kids mango leather and dried tamarind on the sly to make friends with them. They would complain: ‘What a way to show your affection, mama! We’re fed up with having to treat them for sore throats.’

Meladei’s son Ratan, her second son Vijay and daughter Dammo had sweet voices and were particularly attached to Dauloo. He would teach them folk songs from the hills sung in his own language. If Usha and Hari imitated the singing, Masterji would shout at Dauloo for teaching children nonsensical songs.

Children living in the galis of Machchi Hatta, Kanjar Phalan, Vachchovali and Rang Mahal and also in the galis around Mochi Gate knew that Dauloo jabbered angrily if anyone said ‘banana’ in front of him. Children would begin to chant ‘banana, banana’ on seeing him, and Dauloo would curse them in his own particular way. The first part of the curse would be audible, and the rest would be lost in angry gasps and the breath escaping from his toothless mouth. The neighbourhood children often played a game. On seeing Dauloo approach with his box, they would ask their mothers for a paisa or two. They would show him the money from a distance, and ask with a serious expression, ‘Mama, I want to buy something.’

Dauloo would reply, ‘Come here, child! Come here, baby!’

The children would come closer and ask, ‘Mama, you have bananas?’

Dauloo would begin to curse them and beat the ground with a stick to scare them off.

The children would scamper off laughing in every direction. Dauloo would chase some for a distance when another child would come up from behind and shout, ‘Mama, banana!’ After playing this trick a couple of times, they would buy stuff worth a paisa or two.

As in the previous years, that year too the coloured water prepared for the celebration of the Holi festival were thrown at him before anyone else, turning his kurta into a collage of red, blue, green and yellow. The words ‘stupid’ or ‘ass’ carved into potato halves were first stamped as a joke on Dauloo’s back. And now, he was also the first victim of the bloodbath in the neighbourhood.

Remembering him, Masterji said, ‘He felt no greed or jealousy. He treated everyone with love. That’s the true way to worship God.’

The gali people unanimously decided to claim Dauloo’s body from the hospital, and to cremate it with all due rites.

Puri climbed the stairs to his house. Tara and Usha were both sitting close to the light, studying for their exams. Hari too was sitting on the ground on a mat and writing in an exercise book before him on a low desk. Their mother sat with Munni in her lap, mending the hem of the baby’s frock.

When Puri came in, mother said to her daughter in a tear-filled voice, ‘Usha, serve food to your brother. Munni will begin to cry if I get up.’

Usha usually did not do anything unless asked repeatedly, but Dauloo’s death had softened her too. She placed her open book on the mat and got up to serve the food without a word. Everyone was sad. The whole gali was quiet in mourning.

As he changed his clothes, Puri thought: When someone dies, you express your feelings of loss and grief to their relatives. The feeling of grief at the death of Dauloo mama was not for show. It was everyone’s personal grief. He had not belonged to anyone, but to everyone.

As the curfew ended at 5 o’clock in the morning of 5 March, the newspapers were delivered late. The front pages carried the news of the League’s failure to form a ministry. There was also news about the formation of the Anti-Pakistan League by the Hindus, the Sikhs and the Congress Party to oppose the demand for a League ministry and for Pakistan. Master Tara
Singh had been unanimously appointed ‘the dictator’ of the new league. There were also reports about widespread riots in Rawalpindi, and of the success of the police in controlling the situation there, about firing on the meeting of Hindu–Sikh students in Lahore, about the incidents of rioting and arson in Chowk Matti, and also about sporadic knife attacks in Mazang and near Delhi Gate.

The Chowk Matti incident was described in the Hindu newspapers as an attack on a peaceful march of Hindus passing through a Muslim mohalla. The Muslim papers reported it to be an unprovoked attack by Hindu mobs on Muslims. There were eighteen murders and over a hundred were wounded in Lahore in one day.

The gali people were pleased that the League ministry could not be formed. The spectre of Pakistan was on everyone’s mind, and anger against the League and the Muslims for the events of the previous day was brewing. They sat together, read the newspapers, expressed their views and discussed the events as usual. But Puri did not say a word to anyone.

Karam Chand Kashish was the director–editor of
Pairokaar
, and Banarasidas Sondhi its managing editor. They both had other, more important work to do than write for the paper. The three assistant editors, Bhagat Ram, Indranath and K.K. Chaddha, took turns writing editorials and commentaries. Puri was a sub-editor, but he was often given the responsibility of writing an editorial. The rest of the editorial staff worked in the newsroom, translated news into Urdu and edited copy. Before the copy was given to the calligraphers, Kashish and Banarasidas would sometimes glance at the editorials, commentaries and the lead articles; they were sent to the litho presses even if they could not read them beforehand.

Bhagat Ram had a bad cold, his eyes were red and watery. He had wrapped hot, freshly roasted chickpeas (that Sewa Ram had brought him from the bazaar) in a handkerchief, and was inhaling the vapours and putting the poultice to his forehead to relieve the congestion and be able to work. He had taken several days off in the past month on the occasion of the birth of a new child, and then because of the infant’s sickly condition. The assistant and the sub-editor usually shared the workload, but it was Bhagat Ram’s turn to write the editorial on 5 March and he did not have the courage to ask Banarasidas for another leave from the office. He looked pleadingly at Puri, ‘Puri, my friend, you can see my condition. Why don’t
you write today’s editorial? I’ll do it when it’s your turn. Write something on Comrade Kapoor’s appeal for peace between the communities. What do you think?’

Puri thought for a few moments. He would not be able to join the funeral procession for Dauloo, but he would have a better opportunity to express his feelings for him.

When Puri left his office at 5 o’clock, he thought that Ratan, Mewa Ram, Bir Singh and others must have left with the bier for the Ram ka Bagh cremation ground. Perhaps they were back by now. He was often tired after finishing work. He had a vocation for writing, and had thought that writing for a newspaper would be easy and not a burden, but the previous year’s experience had taught him that it was another matter to write according to one’s imagination, inspiration and inclination. But to write on a given subject with a certain perspective and within a limited number of words was frustrating rather than heartening. However, today he had written and expressed what he felt in his heart, and that made him feel fulfilled.