Two Short Novels (13 page)

He had barely turned when he knew it was far away now.

Rahti’s bicycle was the kind of vehicle which would do the trick.

And without much thought of whether Rahti would permit him to use her cycle, he began to walk back.

As he proceeded back towards the convent, absorbed in the sheer physical efforts, there was a slight disturbance among the leaves of a chenar tree. He jumped but soon heard a bird singing and realised that it was a lark which had upset him.

‘Should I ask Rahti’s permission to take her cycle away or should I not?’ he mumbled to himself in order to avoid being jumpy and to fill the vacancy in his mind, which was in danger of being occupied by instinctive dreads. But he did not resolve the question, though he went on repeating it like a wordless incantation.

Fatah, who was on guard at the door of the courtyard, again ran shouting loudly: ‘Save me, Save me!’

Maqbool ran after him, caught him and shook him, saying: ‘Hatto, it is me, Maqbool!’

Fatah looked at Maqbool terror-stricken, but remained silent as though mesmerised.

Maqbool left him and got to the verandah. He found the ladies bicycle standing by the door, and he just announced: ‘Rahti aunt, I am taking your bicycle away!’ And he rode away without waiting for an answer.

Afterwards, he felt guilty that she might need it to go to the town to fetch something for Salaama. But knowing that the town was in the grip of those who had sacked the convent, he surmised that the machine was useless to her.

Once he was astride the bicycle, he seemed to feel more free. The distance from the convent to his own lane was about a mile by the detour on the outskirt of the town, half of it through the fairly safe grove of chenar trees and the other half across the footpath where the town houses ended in swamps, the pools and the puddles.

A lean dog yelped away from above the debris of fallen leaves in the grove, and, again, he was startled out of his wits. But the dog seemed more frightened of him as he ran shrieking away.

Further up, a flock of ducks whirred over the chenar trees. He looked up and saw that their wings were touched with the silver of the risen sun above the giant hills. An involuntary sigh escaped his lips at the realisation of the total misery into which this land of the poet’s dreams and visions had been suddenly plunged by the invasion. And he began to hum the words of the old Kashmiri poet Majoor:

‘O Kashmir, my beloved motherland,

When the morning of a new life

Dawns upon the world

Its first ray will touch your own

High and beautiful forehead!’

At the end of the grave, on a small platform by the deserted tomb of a Pir, he saw half a dozen men, raiders by the look of them, kneeling in the attitude of Sajdah prayer, their eyes closed, their faces turned towards the West.

Would they break off from their prayers to challenge him?

His heart beat fast. His face went pale. And his eyes were full of mist.

All the six men got up with hands folded before them and did not look this side or that, but persevered in their prayer.

He was safe.

It was a miracle that none of them had been walking about or sitting down, preparing for prayer. And the irony of it struck him, as he reached past the tomb, to the cover of some fishermen’s huts, that these brutal men could be devoutly praying, though only the previous night, perhaps they had been looting and murdering. Or this bunch might be the more decent among the invaders! Or perhaps they were just simple, fanatical barbarians, who really believed in the holy war, in which, they had been told, they were engaged here, and their prayers were merely automatic gestures, repeated without any understanding of the meaning of the Arabic words. This question of whether there was a God or not, had always oppressed him. The death of innocents had proved that there was no God, except that Allah might just now be looking after him.

The benefit of doubt could be given to God, because there were three small fishing boats tied to pegs by the riverside, and the stream was not too wide, as also utter silence prevailed on the road.

The chance of a safe passage across the river started a nausea in his stomach. The bile came into his mouth.

Strange that when a man resolved to do something, the remnants of weakness hidden in the body reacted against him.

He spat out the bile.

Then quickly he put the bicycle into the smallest of the boats, going back to untie the rope from the wooden peg.

‘The oars! The oars! Where were the oars?’

His heart sank when he knew that the fishermen seldom left their oars behind.

Grimly, he accepted the fact that he would have to drift down, steering the boat with his hand, and hope that, before the end of the mile where the town began, he would have crossed the hundred yards or so to the other side.

The current was swift and panic seized him.

Desperately, he lowered the cycle into the river at the end of the boat and began to steer with its hulk. The wheels were like sieves, but the middle part seemed to work, tilting the boat ever so slightly in the opposite direction.

Seeing the distance that separated him from the objective, he nearly wanted to pray. But the current was strong and gave no promise that his indifferent oar would succeed. So no gratitude was due to anyone.

Resourcefully, he lowered his torso and joined his arm to the chain wheel.

This was more effective. He persisted.

The swift current helped him, though the boat was only three fourths of the way by the time it had floated down nearly half a mile.

There was nothing to do, but to lie down, keep the nearly frozen arm adjusted to the broadest part of the bicycle and steer clear of the danger.

Time seemed to become endless.

And yet a furlong before the foot-bridge his boat entered a small swampy rivulet which gave him cover. Also, there was a garbage heap across which he could climb out, with his bicycle.

As he crossed the garbage heap the bile rose in his mouth again, this time with the stink of the refuse as well as the tension inside him.

He contemplated the slithery slopes of the mound of rubbish with a deliberate will to accept them. Perhaps, it is necessary, as Islam taught, to go through the sewer before one could come clean. And he was doing so literally now. That would be the inner core of the poem, if he lived to write one. Also he must not forget even a single aspect of the squalor, now, as he had always done in his attraction towards love poetry. Like Jigar he had wanted to escape from asafoetida of his home town, the decay and the hopelessness. Perhaps, all the arid souls around him, his poor father, his mother, would appreciate the high pitch of his words now after what they had seen. And they would awaken rather than accept their fates.

He was through to the unpaved road. He quickly got astride the bicycle.

Just at this moment, he seemed to himself most lucid, as though his awareness had become, through the dangers that faced him, an all enveloping, comprehensive intelligence, percolating to his senses and putting them on a plane where he had a permanent and tender understanding of the causes of the decay.

The sun beat faster and faster behind his back, though the draught which blew from the murky little lanes was chilling.

The prolonged stretch of a big puddle, under the shadow of the wooden houses, just before his lane, forced him to alight from his cycle.

As he free-wheeled the machine, he saw Juma, Qadri and Saleem Bux, the three brothers who worked in Muratib’s carpet factory, looking at him from the cavernous room which they occupied on the ground floor by the vegetable field of Ala Din, the eccentric gardener. Before he could warn them, they shouted their greetings with the warm enthusiasm of complete innocence.

‘Ah Maqbool! Where have you been? They are everywhere
. . .
have they also got to Srinagar?’

Maqbool shushed them and nearly slipped over the edges of mud which he was negotiating. But it was of no avail. The fear crazed females of the household came out, and began to smile and shout greetings:
‘
Salam alaikum!
’

‘
Wa alaykum as-salam!
’ Maqbool answered softly and raised his hand to silence them.

‘They looted the carpet factory, Maqbool. And then set it on fire!’ the old mother of Juma, Qadri and Saleem Bux shouted. ‘The sons of Eblis! They even came here! But I gave them a bit of my mind and they went away!’

‘Mother,’ he said coming up to the platform on which they all stood. ‘We have to be patient.’

‘Patience!’ the old woman shrieked. ‘They have burnt the factory from which came our living, and you ask us to be patient! What has happened to you all?’

‘Mother! Mother!’ her sons cautioned her ‘Maqbool —’

‘You are all cowards!’ the old woman shouted with such force that the hens on the garbage by her doorsteps fluttered away.

‘I will go and see Muratib Ali,’ said Maqbool. ‘Do you think he will be at home?’

‘What can he do, that do-nothing!’ the old woman said cynically. ‘He just sat at home and allowed the factory to be looted!’

‘Mother, don’t make such a noise!’ Juma said again. ‘The Pakistanis wanted carpets for their homes!’

‘Fool, don’t you see,’ the old woman said cocking her left eye, ‘that my voice will keep those beasts away till Maqbool can get home.’

Maqbool’s face puckered into a smile as he walked away towards Muratib Ali’s big house in the main street, at the end of the lane.

There was the old unruly drumming under his chest as Maqbool reached the sitting room of Syed Muratib Ali’s house. The young factory owner was smoking the
hookah
as he sat in an English armchair, and he looked up at Maqbool with a quizzical expression, which was part pleasure, part horror. For a moment neither of them said anything, as the visitor was breathless, while the host was dazed at the sudden arrival of this nationalist partisan. Then Muratib Ali said: ‘Why have you come back? To put your head in the noose?’

Maqbool did not answer, but sat down on a wicker chair opposite him, still out of breath.

‘Things are terrible! You must fly from here!’

‘I saw a sentry at the head of the lane. So I had to slip past him, pretending to be on business. And then I ran upstairs
. . .
’

‘You seem to bear your life on the palm of your hands with a strange bravado!’ Muratib said. ‘Suppose the sentry had challenged you!’

‘One has to take chances,’ said Maqbool laconically.

‘But do you realise, Maqbool brother!’ Muratib began in a mildly admonishing tone.

‘Our leaders have sent me,’ Maqbool cut in, knowing that only the magic word ‘leaders’ would justify his behaviour here in the eyes of Muratib, as it had done to Mahmdoo, though there was the danger that his friend might suspect some vanity in his association of the exalted with his mission. He realised that he did feel vain from the connection, but it would be stupid if Muratib found this in him.