Train to Pakistan (11 page)

The subinspector did not acknowledge the greeting.

‘Will you ever give up being a badmash?’

‘King of pearls, you can say what you like, but this time I am innocent. I swear by the Guru I am innocent.’

Jugga remained seated on the floor. The subinspector stood leaning against the wall.

‘Where were you on the night of the dacoity?’

‘I had nothing to do with the dacoity,’ answered Jugga evasively.

‘Where were you on the night of the dacoity?’ repeated the subinspector.

Jugga looked down at the floor. ‘I had gone to my fields. It was my turn of water.’

The subinspector knew he was lying. ‘I can check up the
turn of water with the canal man. Did you inform the lambardar that you were going out of the village?’

Jugga only shuffled his feet and kept on looking at the floor.

‘Your mother said you had gone to drive away wild pigs.’

Jugga continued to shuffle his feet. After a long pause he said again, ‘I had nothing to do with the dacoity. I am innocent.’

‘Who were the dacoits?’

‘King of pearls, how should I know who the dacoits were? I was out of the village at the time, otherwise you think anyone would have dared to rob and kill in Mano Majra?’

‘Who were the dacoits?’ repeated the subinspector menacingly. ‘I know you know them. They certainly know you. They left a gift of glass bangles for you.’

Jugga did not reply.

‘You want to be whipped on your buttocks or have red chillies put up your rectum before you talk?’

Jugga winced. He knew what the subinspector meant. He had been through it—once. Hands and feet pinned under legs of charpais with half a dozen policemen sitting on them. Testicles twisted and squeezed till one became senseless with pain. Powdered red chillies thrust up the rectum by rough hands, and the sensation of having the tail on fire for several days. All this, and no food or water, or hot spicy food with a bowl of shimmering cool water put outside the cell just beyond one’s reach. The memory shook him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘For God’s sake, no.’ He flung himself on the floor and clasped the subinspector’s shoes with both his hands. ‘Please, O king of pearls.’ He was ashamed of himself, but he knew he could never endure such torture again. ‘I am innocent. By the name of the Guru, I had nothing to do with the dacoity.’

Seeing six foot four of muscle cringing at his feet gave the subinspector a feeling of elation. He had never known anyone to hold out against physical pain, not one. The pattern of torture
had to be carefully chosen. Some succumbed to hunger, others—of the Iqbal type—to the inconvenience of having to defecate in front of the policemen. Some to flies sitting on their faces smeared with treacle, with their hands tied behind them. Some to lack of sleep. In the end they all gave in.

‘I will give you two days to tell me the names of the dacoits,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, I will beat your behind till it looks like the tail of a ram.’

The subinspector freed his feet from Jugga’s hands and walked out. His visits had been a failure. He would have to change his tactics. It was frustrating to deal with two people so utterly different.

Kalyug

Early in September the time schedule in Mano Majra started going wrong. Trains became less punctual than ever before and many more started to run through at night. Some days it seemed as though the alarm clock had been set for the wrong hour. On others, it was as if no one had remembered to wind it. Imam Baksh waited for Meet Singh to make the first start. Meet Singh waited for the mullah’s call to prayer before getting up. People stayed in bed late without realizing that times had changed and the mail train might not run through at all. Children did not know when to be hungry, and clamoured for food all the time. In the evenings, everyone was indoors before sunset and in bed before the express came by—if it did come by. Goods trains had stopped running altogether, so there was no lullaby to lull them to sleep. Instead, ghost trains went past at odd hours between midnight and dawn, disturbing the dreams of Mano Majra.

This was not all that changed the life of the village. A unit of Sikh soldiers arrived and put up tents near the railway station. They built a six-foot-high square of sandbags about the base of the signal near the bridge, and mounted a machine gun in each face. Armed sentries began to patrol the platform and no villagers were allowed near the railings. All trains coming from Delhi stopped and changed their drivers and guards before
moving on to Pakistan. Those coming from Pakistan ran through with their engines screaming with release and relief.

One morning, a train from Pakistan halted at Mano Majra railway station. At first glance, it had the look of the trains in the days of peace. No one sat on the roof. No one clung between the bogies. No one was balanced on the footboards. But somehow it was different. There was something uneasy about it. It had a ghostly quality. As soon as it pulled up to the platform, the guard emerged from the tail end of the train and went into the stationmaster’s office. Then the two went to the soldiers’ tents and spoke to the officer in charge. The soldiers were called out and the villagers loitering about were ordered back to Mano Majra. One man was sent off on a motorcycle to Chundunnugger. An hour later, the subinspector with about fifty armed policemen turned up at the station. Immediately after them, Mr Hukum Chand drove up in his American car.

The arrival of the ghost train in broad daylight created a commotion in Mano Majra. People stood on their roofs to see what was happening at the station. All they could see was the black top of the train stretching from one end of the platform to the other. The station building and the railings blocked the rest of the train from view. Occasionally a soldier or a policeman came out of the station and then went back again.

In the afternoon, men gathered in little groups, discussing the train. The groups merged with each other under the peepul tree, and then everyone went into the gurdwara. Women, who had gone from door to door collecting and dropping bits of gossip, assembled in the headman’s house and waited for their menfolk to come home and tell them what they had learned about the train.

This was the pattern of things at Mano Majra when anything of consequence happened. The women went to the headman’s house, the men to the temple. There was no recognized leader
of the village. Banta Singh, the headman, was really only a collector of revenue—a lambardar. The post had been in his family for several generations. He did not own any more land than the others. Nor was he a head in any other way. He had no airs about him: he was a modest hard-working peasant like the rest of his fellow villagers. But since government officials and the police dealt with him, he had an official status. Nobody called him by his name. He was ‘O Lambardara’, as his father, his father’s father, and his father’s father’s father had been before him.

The only men who voiced their opinions at village meetings were Imam Baksh, the mullah of the mosque, and Bhai Meet Singh. Imam Baksh was a weaver, and weavers are traditionally the butts of jokes in the Punjab. They are considered effeminate and cowardly—a race of cuckolds whose women are always having liaisons with others. A series of tragedies in his family had made him an object of pity, and then of affection. The Punjabis love people they can pity. His wife and only son had died within a few days of each other. His eyes, which had never been very good, suddenly became worse and he could not work his looms any more. He was reduced to beggary, with a baby girl, Nooran, to look after. He began living in the mosque and teaching Muslim children the Quran. He wrote out verses from the Quran for the village folk to wear as charms or for the sick to swallow as medicine. Small offerings of flour, vegetables, food, and castoff clothes kept him and his daughter alive. He had an amazing fund of anecdotes and proverbs which the peasants loved to hear. His appearance commanded respect. He was a tall, lean man, bald save for a line of white hair which ran round the back of his head from ear to ear, and he had a neatly trimmed silky white beard that he occasionally dyed with henna to a deep orange-red. The cataract in his eyes gave them a misty philosophical look. Despite his sixty years, he held himself
erect. All this gave his bearing a dignity and an aura of righteousness. He was known to the villagers not as Imam Baksh or the mullah but a chacha, or ‘Uncle’.

Meet Singh inspired no such affection and respect. He was only a peasant who had taken to religion as an escape from work. He had a little land of his own which he had leased out, and this, with the offerings at the temple, gave him a comfortable living. He had no wife or children. He was not learned in the scriptures, nor had he any faculty for conversation. Even his appearance was against him. He was short, fat, and hairy. He was the same age as Imam Baksh, but his beard had none of the serenity of the other’s. It was black, with streaks of grey. And he was untidy. He wore his turban only when reading the scripture. Otherwise, he went about with his long hair tied in a loose knot held by a little wooden comb. Almost half of the hair was scattered on the nape of his neck. He seldom wore a shirt and his only garment—a pair of shorts—was always greasy with dirt. But Meet Singh was a man of peace. Envy had never poisoned his affection for Imam Baksh. He only felt that he owed it to his own community to say something when Imam Baksh made any suggestions. Their conversation always had an undercurrent of friendly rivalry.

The meeting in the gurdwara had a melancholic atmosphere. People had little to say, and those who did spoke slowly, like prophets.

Imam Baksh opened the discussion. ‘May Allah be merciful. We are living in bad times.’

A few people sighed solemnly, ‘Yes, bad days.’

Meet Singh added, ‘Yes, Chacha—this is Kalyug, the dark age.’

There was a long silence and people shuffled uneasily on their haunches. Some yawned, closing their mouths with loud invocations to God: ‘Ya Allah. Wah Guru, wah Guru.’

‘Lambardara,’ started Imam Baksh again, ‘you should know what is happening. Why has not the Deputy Sahib sent for you?’

‘How am I to know, Chacha? When he sends for me I will go. He is also at the station and no one is allowed near it.’

A young villager interjected in a loud cheery voice: ‘We are not going to die just yet. We will soon know what is going on. It is a train after all. It may be carrying government treasures or arms. So they guard it. Haven’t you heard, many have been looted?’

‘Shut up,’ rebuked his bearded father angrily. ‘Where there are elders, what need have you to talk?’

‘I only …’

‘That is all,’ said the father sternly. No one spoke for some time.

‘I have heard,’ said Imam Baksh, slowly combing his beard with his fingers, ‘that there have been many incidents with trains.’

The word ‘incident’ aroused an uneasy feeling in the audience. ‘Yes, lots of incidents have been heard of,’ Meet Singh agreed after a while.

‘We only ask for Allah’s mercy,’ said Imam Baksh, closing the subject he had himself opened.

Meet Singh, not meaning to be outdone in the invocation to God, added, ‘Wah Guru, wah Guru.’

They sat on in silence punctuated by yawns and murmurs of ‘Ya Allah’ and ‘Hey wah Guru’. Several people, on the outer fringe of the assembly, stretched themselves on the floor and went to sleep.

Suddenly a policeman appeared in the doorway of the gurdwara. The lambardar and three or four villagers stood up. People who were asleep were prodded into getting up. Those who had been dozing sat up in a daze, exclaiming, ‘What is it?
What’s up?’, then hurriedly wrapped their turbans round their heads.

‘Who is the lambardar of the village?’

Banta Singh walked up to the door. The policeman took him aside and whispered something. Then as Banta Singh turned back, he said loudly: ‘Quickly, within half an hour. There are two military trucks waiting on the station side. I will be there.’

The policeman walked away briskly.

The villagers crowded round Banta Singh. The possession of a secret had lent him an air of importance. His voice had a tone of authority.

‘Everyone get all the wood there is in his house and all the kerosene oil he can spare and bring these to the motor trucks on the station side. You will be paid.’

The villagers waited for him to tell them why. He ordered them off brusquely. ‘Are you deaf? Haven’t you heard? Or do you want the police to whip your buttocks before you move? Come along quickly.’

People dispersed into the village lanes whispering to each other. The lambardar went to his own house.

A few minutes later, villagers with bundles of wood and bottles of oil started assembling outside the village on the station side. Two large mud-green army trucks were parked alongside each other. A row of empty petrol cans stood against a mud wall. A Sikh soldier with a sten gun stood on guard. Another Sikh, an officer with his beard neatly rolled in a hair net, sat on the back of one of the trucks with his feet dangling. He watched the wood being stacked in the other truck and nodded his head in reply to the villagers’ greetings. The lambardar stood beside him, taking down the names of the villagers and the quantities they brought. After dumping their bundles of wood on the truck and emptying bottles of kerosene into the petrol cans, the
villagers collected in a little group at a respectful distance from the officer.