This Is Not That Dawn: Jhootha Sach (62 page)

The train pulled out about an hour after the attack. Both sides of the track were strewn with trunks, bundles and the bodies of dead people.

The train reached Ludhiana station. Soldiers with bayonets at the ready stood guard on the platform, and also beside the train tracks. A group of officers stood in the middle of the platform. Another order was given out:

‘Everyone should disembark within two minutes. There is a danger of attack ahead on this line. The train is being terminated here. No passengers may leave the station area. All passengers will be taken to the Muslim refugee camp for their protection.’

Some passengers got off with whatever was left of their luggage and bundles. The injured and their companions looked around in despair and bewilderment, undecided what to do. Puri could not see his trunk anywhere but there was no time to search for it. The Sikh too was in a fix. His luggage was too much for him to carry unaided.

Puri, his own bedding roll under an arm, went to one of the officers and said in English, ‘I’m Hindu. I don’t want to go to the Muslim refugee camp.’

The officer looked Puri over from head to toe, and rapping his cane against his trouser leg, asked, ‘Your name?’

‘Jaidev Puri.’

‘Khattri! Where do you want to go?’

‘I must get to Lahore.’

‘What’s your profession?’ the officer wanted to know.

‘Journalist.’

‘Journalist?’ The officer said with surprise. ‘Don’t you know about the situation in Lahore?’

‘I had to go to Nainital three weeks ago. My family is in Lahore. I must go back to search for them.’

‘Well, if you want to risk your life, it’s your problem. You may leave.’

‘There’s another thing,’ Puri said hesitantly. ‘There are wounded and some women in my compartment who might need help.’

‘It’s possible. We’ll check,’ and the officer turned his attention to something else.

Ludhiana was a completely unknown city for Puri. Both in heart and mind, after the experiences of the past eighteen hours, he felt so exhausted and distressed that he did not want to do anything or search any further. He filled himself up with water from a tap, and collapsed with fatigue in the first place he could find in the station waiting room. He lay there for over two hours. Would he be able to reach Lahore? he wondered. He would have to search for his family in all possible places. Refugees from Lahore and other areas must have come to this city also. He should inquire at the refugee camps.

The railway station and the passenger waiting room stank like a latrine. Outside and around the station, every place that could possibly provide shelter from the sun and rain, and serve as a nook to sleep in was packed with Hindu refugees from the west. Puri walked around until midnight, and on the next day also to various reception centres set up in schools and other public buildings. He could not find anything about his family. A rumour was going round that the government had barred the flow of refugees pouring in from the west by closing down the train service and the roads between Amritsar and Ludhiana. That route was being kept open for the caravans of refugees going towards Pakistan. The routes open for Hindus coming from the west were through the barrage over the Sutlej river and via the town of Ferozepur. Puri heard many horrible tales of atrocities committed on Hindus in Lahore and western Punjab. That night he spent again in the waiting room, using his rolled-up bedding as a pillow.

On the morning of the third day, Puri boarded a train going to Ferozepur. This train was hardly crowded. The Moga District station appeared deserted. Blood was splattered all over the platform, and bodies lay strewn. Men with machetes and spears in their hands roamed around boldly. A man with a Sten gun slung over his shoulder peered into all the compartments, asking, ‘Any chickens for sacrifice?’

The train took a long time to move out of Moga station. The engine blew its whistle several times indicating departure, but did not move. Puri had not eaten anything since the day before, and was famished. Through the
picket fence he could see chapattis being cooked on tandoors on a street beside the station. But he did not dare to go even that far. If the train left while he was gone, who knew when the next train would leave?

Several Jats, wearing turbans and lungis, marched into the station. They held two young women by their arms, and were dragging them along. One woman had no dupatta covering her head, and her chintz kurta was torn at the right shoulder, exposing the pale pink skin of a firm young breast. The woman seemed terrified and in a daze. The other young woman was also in no fit state to arrange the blue cotton dupatta around her shoulders. Two men had bundles wrapped in red embroidered dupattas tucked under their arms.

The men herded the young women into Puri’s compartment. In their hands they carried bloodstained spears and machetes. One was carrying a pistol. Tears streaked the faces of the women and they looked numb with fear. From their chintz shalwars with floral designs, the thick heavy silver ornaments around their necks and on their arms it was obvious that they came from a Muslim village. Their captors seemed to be quarrelling over something.

Puri was struck dumb by what he had seen, and it was some time before he could understand Punjabi spoken in an unfamiliar dialect. One man was cursing his companion in a loud voice, ‘That hot young chick was the one to have. Didn’t you see her tits? Damn it, just like a pair of fighting partridges with their beaks thrust out,’ he made a conical shape with his fingers, ‘and you idiot, damn you, you slit her throat!’

The object of this criticism looked at the others in the group for support before protesting, ‘Wah, what rubbish you talk! She bit my arm. Here, see.’ The man removed a rag tied round his wrist to reveal a bite mark, still oozing blood.

The accuser waved his hand in dismissal and said, ‘Shame on you, and you call yourself a man! You sister-loving fool, you were scared of a woman? It takes skill to break these motherfuckers! You sister-loving idiot, if you’d asked me, I’d have handled that fucker in such a way that she’d have begged for mercy!’

Puri turned his face away.

He was forced to turn his face back towards them when his arm was yanked, ‘Who are you? Pull down your pajama!’ A spear was pointed at his stomach.

Puri trembled with fear.

‘I’m a Hindu, a khattri.’ His hands pulled down his trousers without unbuttoning them, and raised his shirtfront.

The man questioning him and his companions all burst into loud guffaws. Puri felt ashamed in front of the kidnapped women sitting with their heads bent. He turned away and pulled up his trousers.

‘Where do you live? In Ferozepur town?’ He was asked again.

‘In Lahore,’ Puri replied.

‘Gave away your womenfolk to the Islamites, right?’

Puri had nothing to answer.

‘
Abey
, why don’t you answer?’

‘I was in Nainital. I’m going back to Lahore.’

‘Nainital? Where’s that? In what country?’

‘Beyond Delhi.’

‘Past Delhi? In Hindustan?’ They meant the United Provinces.

‘Yes.’

‘Going to Lahore? Isn’t he brave!’

‘He’s a babu,’ another man said.

The men stopped paying attention to Puri, and went back to talking with each other. They got off at the next station, taking the women along with them. Puri breathed more easily.

Other passengers in the compartment started to talk, ‘What’s going on in the world? Everyone has gone crazy. No one shows any decency or humanity any more. And where did all these weapons come from? Everyone seems to be carrying a pistol or a rifle.’

Puri felt angry, why hadn’t these people spoken up before? But he too had remained silent. When weapons were needed to fight the British, he was thinking, no weapons were to be found. Now not only does everyone seem to have one, but the weapons need not be hidden from the police!

Gave away your women to the Islamites! The man’s taunt gnawed at his mind. But what could he have said in reply?

All that he had read in the newspapers before leaving Nainital, and heard afterwards in Ludhiana from the refugees from west Punjab, about women being molested and raped and being paraded naked, all came back to him. His mind felt numb with despair. What had happened to human beings? Where did this lust to kill, maul and destroy come from? Poor Tara became a victim. What his mother must have faced, along with Usha, Toshi,
Pushpa, Ratan’s mother and the other women of the gali? He remembered the stories about Hindu women, like Padmini of Chittorgarh, who chose to burn themselves alive rather than face humiliation. Was killing herself the only way a woman could escape torture and humiliation? Were such barbaric acts by men natural and excusable? There are some men who oppose such barbarism… There are those willing to risk their lives to fight such cruelties… I wasn’t able do anything … Everybody is powerless in times like these.

The image of that firm, young breast peeping out of the woman’s torn kurta came back to his mind, with what the Jat had said about the attractive woman one of them had hacked to death. He was disturbed by the thought that a woman’s beauty was always reprehensible to her. For, a man’s desire was a dangerous thing. But what if a man did not desire her? … Because of his physical superiority, he could still strip her of everything, and drive her off and desert her, like an animal, to fend for herself in some jungle.

And because he desires her, a man is willing to sacrifice and risk everything, even his life, for the sake of a woman. Is this what is called love? It is a man’s part to bring his love to fruition. A woman is always at a man’s mercy. A man is considered uncivilized if he assaults a woman and possesses her even if she does not want him. And he is civilized when he pleads for her love… The memory of being with Kanak in his room at the Astoria flooded his mind.

Puri sat at the window, thinking and looking out. The day so far had been cloudy and muggy. A light drizzle had begun to fall. A few drops fell on his face. What if there was no train for Lahore from Ferozepur? he wondered. Lahore was fifty miles away. On foot…?

The train reached Ferozepur. The station here was even more crowded than at Ludhiana. There was such a rush to enter the compartment that he could only alight with difficulty. The same train would return to Ludhiana, he thought. He took the overbridge that crossed the tracks. Every train heading east was teeming with frenzied people. Passengers were crowded onto the sloping roofs of the carriages. They had tied their luggage and bundles to the ends of their turbans and dhotis and slung them across the roof, sitting in the middle. The rain had begun to fall harder, but that did not seem to bother them.

There was no one Puri knew or could contact in Ferozepur city or the cantonment. He was heading towards the station waiting room, bedroll
under his arm, when he heard an announcement, ‘Brothers and sisters who have not had the prasad, please come to the langar. No need to feel embarrassed or shy about it.’

Just beside the overbridge, chapattis cooked in a tandoor were stacked in a column on a tarpaulin, with a huge pot next to it. Puri’s hunger was reawakened. His steps turned automatically in that direction. Seeing him approach, a man poured a ladleful of thick daal over two chapattis, and handed them to Puri.

Puri accepted the chapattis. He knew it was a free public kitchen, intended for refugees, but he still took out a quarter-rupee coin and offered it to the man. The man pointed to a small box that had a padlock sealed with red wax, with a slot in the lid for depositing money. Puri slid the coin into it.

When he reached the waiting room, Puri looked everywhere and found that there were no vacant space large enough even to spread his thin bedroll. Scores of people had piled their belongings into small heaps, and were lying all around them. Puri tried to unroll his bedding over a strip of a space, but a man stopped him, ‘Can’t you see I’ve got women with me? Don’t you have a mother or sisters?’

Puri quietly moved away.

At another spot, he saw an empty space perhaps a foot in width, and asked the people on both sides to move their beds a few inches. They replied, ‘Not here. Go somewhere else.’

When Puri persisted, one man began to complain in a loud voice, ‘We’ve had to run, leaving everything behind. And now this man wants us to give up even these few inches of floor space where we’ve stopped for a few moments to rest.’

Others tried to intervene, ‘Bhai, all of us have had to flee the homes and lands of our ancestors, so why quarrel over a few feet of space? Who’s going to live here forever? We’re all together for a short time, just like boats on a river.’ In spite of such comments, the man Puri had asked for a couple of feet refused to move aside and give up the space he had taken for his family.

Another family had not been able to find enough space to spread out their beds for the night, and were sitting nearby. A man from that family said angrily, ‘Arey, this Sikandar here has declared it to be his kingdom.
No one can set foot in it. If he is so picky about the space he’s taken over, why did he give up his home for Muslims?’

Puri lay down in the foot-wide space, using his rolled-up bed as a pillow. What’s the world coming to? he reflected. ‘All that I’ve been through this afternoon and evening. Some people call out to you to give you food and others won’t even let you sit beside them. Cruel and kind… it takes all kinds to make a world.’

He got up at daybreak. A throng of women had collected outside the waiting room lavatory. The lavatories on the platform similarly had long lines. People carrying lotas full of water came towards the lavatories, but on seeing the queues stretching down the platform, went off towards the tracks away from the station, or crossed the fence and went into the surrounding fields. Puri too went into a field. If one looked towards the tracks receding into the distance or towards the fields, it appeared as if the landscape was dotted with sheep, with their heads down. On all sides, men and women, in their need to answer the calls of nature, squatted at short intervals with their heads lowered, ignoring others around them in the belief that no one could see them. The fresh coolness of the morning was made putrid by the presence of human waste.