Two Short Novels (20 page)

‘I value my sister’s honour more than my life!’ Maqbool answered. ‘So please do not abuse me like that.’

‘Insolent swine!’ shouted Ahmed Shah. ‘You are persisting in your treachery and don’t realise that a word from Mr. Khurshid Anwar — and Zaman Khan will finish you off!
. . .
Recant your treacherous stand or I shall have no option but to ask the court to pronounce judgement on you!
. . .
’

The enormity of the prosecutor’s abuse suffocated him. He inhaled a deep breath, swallowed some saliva, drank his anger and remained silent.

‘Speak and ask forgiveness from Khurshid Sahib!’ Ahmed Shah roared.

Maqbool believed in the spacious immensity of his own choice and, though realising that there was no way of communicating a point of view which was the opposite of his judges, he nevertheless ought to tell them of his heart’s felt truth.

‘Truth has no voice,’ he began by chewing the words in the bitter froth in his mouth to himself, so that his lips did not open and no voice could be heard. ‘Only lies flourish for a while
. . .
I have no face. I have no speech. I cannot move you
. . .
This land, which gave birth to me, this land which is like a poem to me — how shall I explain my love for it to you? From out of its valleys there has risen for centuries the anguish of torture
. . .
And we were trying to emerge from the oppression to liberate our mother, because we know her each aching caress
. . .
And you have come and fouled her and wounded her! How could any of us stand by and not protest against your cruelty
. . .
All invaders behave like that. And I can understand and forgive the mercenaries. But I cannot forgive your treachery — Ahmed Shah. Do you not feel the human response of pity for the weak?’

Ahmed Shah rushed up towards him after contemplating his tight-mouthed presence for a prolonged moment, kicked him furiously, so that Maqbool fell back again.

‘I demand immediate death for him. He is a self-confessed rebel! And he is unrepentant!’

‘The thief accusing the sheriff!’ Khurshid Anwar mumbled with a half guilty tone in his voice, because he had, in spite of himself, been moved by Maqbool’s silence. Then he assumed the theatrical manner of the judge and said: ‘If a prisoner cannot defend himself, then there is only one thing for it — ’

He got up with a certain deliberation which showed that he felt unequal to the task of pronouncing the sentence.

‘Zaman Khan, put him up there and shoot him!’ said Ahmed Shah rushing towards the tall warder. ‘What do you say, Khurshid Sahib? You have to give the final words!
. . .
’

Khurshid Anwar nodded, but said: ‘I must ask the sanction of the higher authorities before carrying on the sentence
. . .
Zaman Khan, keep him in custody for the night in the same cell
. . .
’

Zaman Khan leant over and tapped Maqbool on the shoulders, asking him to get up.

Maqbool obeyed the behest and stood vacuously, unable to think or feel, though his heart had begun to throb again out of the instinctive love of dear life. The sense of hearing himself, a puppet among the puppet shapes of his tormentors, crept into him, with a sense of the futility of the whole thing. Automatically, he moved towards the cell of the stables where Zaman Khan led him.

Restored to the darkness of the cell, Maqbool was partially relieved, though, in another part of his being, he wished that they had ended his agony by executing him there and then, after the summary trial, rather than consign him to this suspense again. And yet, somewhere in a corner, there lurked the hope of a reprieve.

His nerves were worn out by the violence of the interrogation and he felt tired and lay down on the bed.

With the nightfall outside, the gloom of the room increased and, though his eyes got used to the dark, he could not see much.

He tried to sleep, but waves of delirium ran through him, making his violent heart drum against his will; and there was an ache at the back of his head and on his temples. He wanted to reach out among the flashing stars before his shut eyes for the reasons of this disturbance. But his mind seemed to have been emptied out of all content, because a numbness spread from inside him, enveloping him and making him part of the inert darkness around him. It was as if he had been suddenly paralysed and left listless and cold like a frozen jelly. And a peculiar chilliness seemed to be growing within him till he felt exhausted and half dead. The sheer physical fatigue had got the better of him.

As he felt like a carcass, he turned over on his side, hoping that the change of position would enable him to sleep. But the weight of the nullity in him became suspended over his body in a kind of hopelessness, which was due both to ennui and to the dim sense of coming disaster. He sighed and then smacked his lips and tried to shake off the morbid depression which lay inertly on his limbs.

There was the sound of distant rumbling of guns, a heavy zoom which lasted quite a few minutes.

He wondered if his oppressors had finished the trial quickly, because there was a heavy battle going on and they wanted to be on guard. Had the Indian army come and the heavy zoom emanated from their guns? Elated at this thought, he then thought it would be a miracle to expect that he would benefit from it, in this obscure cell in the stables of the tonga drivers of Baramula. No one would come looking for him here. And yet, perhaps, his parents might apprise them of what had happened, and they might come. His sister would certainly insist on their searching for him. And he felt a quiver of tenderness go through him at the prospect of being found and liberated
. . .

The guns ceased to bark, however, and the forebodings that had possessed him earlier became so powerful and black that the spark of hope was extinguished.

There was nothing for it, but to turn upside down and descend into the pit of darkness, for perchance, sleep might come into his eyes
. . .

The ghastliness of the nightmare was increased by the fact that in his half sleep Maqbool could also feel the dark walls of the cell to be eloquent. He was carrying his own head on the palm of his left hand, while he had a sword in the right. The familiar shapes of
his mother and sister stood weeping among the crowd in the gallery . . . . Exhausted, by the panic of his flight before the pursuing police, he was, however, still brandishing his sword. Before him now was a well from which emerged the alabaster effigy of a woman with bullet holes in the belly and on the lovely neck. The image fell, with a ringing, as of a hundred bells, and there was a splash, and the secret hidden forms emerged from a graveyard and brushed past him. And great lidless eyes roved widely searching into his eyes. He flew with all the power in his limbs from these ogling eyes. And, in a second, he had travelled through many spheres in the courtyard of a mosque in which crosses stood broken over the little mounds of graves. As he was wondering how crosses could have come to be fixed on the graves in a mosque, he became conscious of the presence of some raiders on the plinth of the mosque, shrieking,
‘
Allah ho Akbar
!’
and calling upon him, Maqbool, to surrender. Among them was the face of Khurshid Anwar, who was shouting in Punjabi, while Ahmed Shah appeared from behind the crowd and lifted him and fixed him against the sky, before a giant with a big white beard who looked like God. All the ambitions and his peculiar determinations seem to slither down from his body and fall away, as though as he was already dead, the pale ghost of himself — about to be put into a grave . . . . But, before he could be exalted to the presence of the Omnipotent judge, or consigned to a grave, he felt that he was suspended in mid-air and —

Opening his eyes in the dark, dripping with sweat, he sensed the zooming of deafening artillery and machine gun fire.

He was sure that there was a battle raging in Baramula itself. He waited for the firing to stop. There was a brief lull. But the zooming of the big guns began again.

He tried to remember bits of his nightmare, but could only see the great bearded image of the Omnipotent judge.

He inhaled a deep breath. Filming into his brain, over the glistening tissues of the light in his eyes, he could see more snippets of his dream, wafting about. Waves of fear coursed through him
. . .

For five minutes, he lay embroiled in the vapourous atmosphere of his dim apprehensions. Then he heard the door being thrust open.

He sat up in a panic.

Zaman Khan and the two sentries were on him.

He felt the tight throated protest of his dream arise towards his larynx, and his mouth opened, but no sound came out.

The soldiers lifted him and dragged him out.

He looked at them with a terrible curiosity, almost as though he was imploring them to tell him what they meant to do to him. But he could not see their faces clearly and his gaze became fixed in a deathly stare in front of him
. . .

The tall Pathan Zaman Khan walked ahead of Maqbool, while the other two warders followed behind him.

Strange and amorphous were his sensations now, bordering upon the hope that, perchance, the orders had come for him to be released, and the apprehension of the final shooting. There could be no other solution awaiting him, since they had dragged him out, in the middle of the night. His heart was pounding against his will
. . .

He heard Zaman Khan say in a loud whisper: ‘He is here, sir.’

And Maqbool saw the contours of Ahmed Shah, standing in the courtyard, mobile and seemingly agitated.

A hot anger surged up in him at this man’s persistence in seeing him tortured, and he wanted to shout at him for all his falseness. But the noise of the bombardment drowned his fury, even as it made the lawyer more nervy.

‘Quick, Zaman Khan!’ Ahmed Shah shouted.

‘Traitor!’ began Ahmed Shah facing Maqbool. ‘Lift your eyes high to Allah! Your end has come!
. . .
’ And then, turning to Zaman Khan, he continued: ‘I shall count one, two, three — at three the warders must shoot!’

Zaman Khan communicated the order to his men. And, adjusting himself to his full height, with his hands on his hips, he looked in the direction of Ahmed Shah.

Maqbool suppressed a sigh at the end of which the despairing cry ‘mother’ formed itself, and got swallowed up in the dryness of
his throat. He stared at the deranged round face of Ahmed Shah, wondering why he had never been able to gauge the meanness, and hatred in this warped man. He closed his eyes and tried to conjure up the image of his sister in his mind, but her figure failed to arise.

Ahmed Shah shouted the dread numbers.

Zaman Khan repeated the orders.

At the utterance of three, two shots rang out.

There was only a blur before Maqbool’s eyes, then flashes of light, followed by waves of darkness. And his body collapsed in a heap — the blood shooting up as from a fountain.

For a moment Ahmed Shah’s eyes blinked. Then he dug his feet solidly into the earth and ordered Zaman Khan:

‘Lift his corpse and tie it to the pole behind him. And write the word
“
Kafir
”
on his shirt with his own blood. The whole population of Baramula should know that treachery is punishable only with death.’

The glint in his eyes was liquid under the red pupils. And Zaman Khan seemed mesmerised by his orders, as he began to do faithfully what he had been told.

As Ahmed Shah’s inflated body moved, his shrunken soul quivered involuntarily to see the flashes of artillery fire over Baramula. He wanted to mumble a prayer from the Koran, but words would not come to his mouth. In a panic, he shouted, as though to fill his craven soul with confidence:

‘
Allah ho Akbar
!’