Two Short Novels (3 page)

But surely she wasn’t eaten by the worms
. . . .
No, no, not his mother
. . .
though why not?

He jerked his body and compressed his lips tight so that he shouldn’t moan, shouldn’t even sigh, and he took the fingers of his right hand to his left to feel the pulse, though he didn’t listen to the verdict, only mechanically registering the pumping of the blood.

Far off from this dawn, remote, half forgotten, ages before now, before the high school and college, there was a queer impatience, in the feel of early mornings, the fear of being late at school, the violent motion in the belly even as he had gulped hot tea and swallowed mouthfuls of fried parathas
dipped in mutton gravy. Thank God, one was rid of that, though it had taken him a long time, for he was seldom ill even though he had prayed in secret to be ill
. . . .
As he had hurried on his way to school, the dizzy vision of the Master’s perpendicular rod had blotted out
space and time, while the clothes stuck to the flesh in the clammy heat and perspiration of
summer mornings. His grandmother had no sense of time and did not start cooking his meal until she had said her prayers and swept the rooms of the house from the top storey to the ground floor. He had begged his father to buy him a watch, one of those nice shiny watches with a chain which he could carry in the pocket of his waistcoat to school, as all the other boys had watches and wouldn’t show them to him except from a distance, affecting to be superior Sahibs like Mercado Sahib, the Headmaster. But his father had said that he ought to get up by the muezzin’s call at dawn and say prayers every morning. And then this additional trouble had been added to his difficulties as a kind of reward for his attempt to be happy and fashionable. For, as the fat mullah in the mosque at the end of the narrow lane, in which the flies buzzed over the children’s yellow excretions in the drain, sounded the muezzin’s call, he had to shake himself out of the bed lest his father might beat him for disobeying. And, although he did not know how to say the prayers, he had to run to the mosque to do the
wuzu
, wash himself, join the congregation and follow it in the various postures: sit, stand, kneel, rub his forehead on the ground and murmur the verses in Arabic which the mullah had taught him by rote during the special lessons he gave him in the evenings, in return for the rich meals, the new turban, the shirt, the shalwar, the shawl, the shoes and other ‘presents’ which he received for looking after the spiritual welfare of the Chaudhri’s son. ‘God gives man gifts to obtain his own ends.’ He muttered the proverb ironically.

What was the use of all those prayers, he had never been able to discover in his life. He had never been able to learn Arabic well enough to understand the Koran, though he had repeated the Suras
from the first page to the last hundreds of times. What was the use of cleaning and purifying oneself, for instance, if the clothes one wore when saying prayers were soiled by all the dirt of the streets and the sweat of the body at night. And though he had never told anyone, while he was saying prayers on a constipated belly he had involuntarily discharged a stinking wind which had fairly resounded back from the walls of the mosque to his own ears, so that it had made him burst out with an embarrassed laugh, though the elders in the congregation who were themselves used to letting loose wind had carried on with their prayers, only turning their eyes a little. He had been afraid that God must have heard it, but then he had reassured himself that since he discharged wind because of the exercise involved in kneeling, bending, standing, sitting and kneeling again, which was the prescribed method of saying prayers, surely God would forgive him for his sin. ‘Thus is the word of thy Lord verified against those who commit abomination!’ What a fool he had been to grieve over the wrath of that impotent oracle of blind vision, ‘the merciful and the compassionate God, to whom all praise belongs, who is the Lord of all worlds, the ruler of the Day of Judgement, whom all humanity serves and whom it asks for aid and to whom the fat mullah calls out in deafening cries every morning, noon, afternoon, evening and night!’

‘In the face of the falsehood and lure of the world, I could laugh,’ he said to himself.

And yet he felt cheated to be fading away imprisoned in this room with his allotted hours and days, how many he did not know, being conscious only of his heart beating, pounding at his chest in the silence of the morning, mingling with the hum of a long-drawn wail, far off like the din of his soul in strife, and near, as near as where the cock crowed on the roof of someone’s house in the gulley.

The illness seemed to have deafened his ears as if the burnt-up tissue in his body had risen in the haze and clogged that sense, but otherwise he felt lighter, more transparent. He applied his ears and listened attentively, his gaze fluttering as though he were looking for something which he had lost in this room or was trying to remember something which he had forgotten.

‘
Allah-ho-Akbar
,’ came the voice of the mullah.

‘
Dur, dur
,
dog,’ Nur murmured rising out of his resignation, angered by the groans of a dry as dust formalist fed by the food of charity.

‘Call the faithful to prayer, call them to prayer, you dog. I hate you and I hate your God. I hate you all! To incur your wrath I spit on your face and I spit on the face of your God!’ And he was about to raise himself from his pillow to give his words the confirmation of the act when a choking cough seized him and he was caught in the paroxysms of an agony that seemed as if it would be his last.

‘Nur, Nur, my child, what is it my son? What is it, my darling son?’ his grandmother called, coming down the stairs.

She had the lines of her seventy-odd years written on her face and hobbled miserably, shaking her head as if she were drunk.

He coughed and the effort seemed to stir each fibre of his being, the scourge of that uncertainty which had possessed him for months.

His grandmother bent her twisted, wrinkled face, straining to touch his forehead with her lips, but unable to do so as the salt tide of tears dimmed her sight. Her hands shook convulsively with the effort of bending.

‘What is it, my child? What is it, my son? May I be your sacrifice!’ she soothed with pouting lips.

‘Nothing, grandmother, nothing is the matter,’ he said gasping for breath as if he had lost a heartbeat. ‘I am all right, I am all right. You go and rest.’

‘Do have some of the tea I have made for you, my son,’ she said, ‘do have a sip
. . .
I will open the windows — the sun is shining outside.’ But as he had closed his eyes and paled for a moment, she opened her mouth, frightened and looked at him dazedly.

‘
Achha, achha
,’ he sighed impatiently lest she should fuss. ‘But don’t open the windows. You go and rest.’

She hobbled by the side of the bed and relaxed. Then with indifferent fingers she pulled the quilt, which he had thrown away on one side during the night, over his legs. Glancing around to see whether everything was in order she scanned his face casually, as if she had come to accept the deathlessness of his sick body, and she lingered by the bedside.

He felt oppressed by her presence as if she had disturbed him and brought on his spasm of coughing.

‘It isn’t that I am a child anymore, grandma,’ he said. ‘I will be all right, you go and rest.’

‘You are still a child to me, my son,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you will be all right? There is your tea. I have put it on the shelf. Now are you sure? I will see to the meal then. I will go.’ And looking around and under the bed, she lifted the chamber and said again: ‘
Achha
, I will go. But call me if you need anything
. . .
’

As the image of her hobbling, bent form receded, he pitied and hated her. She was his father’s mother. And always he had pitied and hated her. The pride of his love for his dead mother had never overcome the barrier of the wrong she had done him in allowing his father to marry again. And since she had aged too he had never been able to overcome her ugliness; and the weight of her doting affection had only increased the barrier.

In the prolonged weariness of five bedridden months the ebb and flow of his hope in life had infused in him a strange tenderness for everyone and he had loved her for her devotion. She was old and stupid and stumbling, but there was something so pitiable about her that he had let her take the place of his mother. And yet the bitterness of her calm acceptance of his father’s brutality persisted, the bitterness of those howls which he had uttered when his father beat him and the tears he had shed, tears of shame and chagrin when he had been made to accept the humiliation of orders from his stepmother, of the suffering they had all tried to extract from him.

‘They all tried to oppress me, they have broken and crushed me and left me destroyed, and now they make a fuss of me and fetch me medicines and run here and there trying to save my life, the hypocrites!’ he muttered under his breath, and looked away at the books that lay by the bottles of medicine on the narrow shelf, crowded by the odds and ends of his stepmother, her looking glass, and her assortment of glass bangles.

As he turned over he felt the weakness of his lungs go silently to his head, and he lay still in a sleepy inertia through which the bundles of dirty clothes that hung like festoons from the coloured pegs on the walls, the stacks of cheaply painted trunks and the sacks of sugar over which the rats had pissed in stinking green patterns, seemed to become unbearably depressing. The whitewashed walls blackened by the soot of slow hearthfires in the gulley seemed to be crowding in on him and the feeling that he could never get up and escape from the sordid reality of his home into the world of tall mirrors and gilded chairs and mahogany tables depicted at the Mahna Singh Theatre, made him hopeless.

A fresh twitching of the lungs frightened him. He closed his eyes and tried not to move even the fraction of an inch, obsessed by the superstitious awe which the Doctor’s orders not to excite himself in anyway had spread over him.

And, for a moment, he lay resigned and apathetic like a corpse which does not care about the soil it is laid on, though his eyelids pressed heavily and his nerves quivered as if his inside had become more acutely sensitive to the fear and sorrow that had crushed him through the last months.

He felt a hard knot of saliva settling in the passage of his throat.

He stirred his throat and half opening his eyes, spat into the spittoon. He closed his
eyes, afraid to see the dark-red-white flame trailing down from his mouth. He fell back exhausted. It was terrible to be so weak. He sought to rest again, closing his eyes in the warmth through which swirled the noise of sparrows twittering in the lane. He lent himself to the soothing warmth of the pillows beneath his head and accepted his helplessness.

‘What was I thinking before Grandma came?’ he asked himself. But there was no answer from the depths of his body which now seemed stretched in
a repose morbidly expectant. His
heavy heart beat out a refrain; ‘I must get well, I must get well,’ as if
it were still drugged with its obstinate belief in existence. And there was a quickening at the back of his head.

In the dim light of the half-sleep which came over him, beyond the massed clouds of darkness, he was walking by the thick, muddy, sewage stream overflowing with slime, that ran in
the shadow of the town’s red brick wall and into which people emptied rats, live snakes, dead dogs and cats . . . . There was the foul reek of dung and urine from the trolley train which ran from the houses of the sweepers through the town wall past the gate of Lohgarh to the vast
valley near the Bhagtanwallah Gate, where the refuse was burnt . . . .
He had often wanted to become an engine driver so that he could drive the little engine of this train
. . . .
But the vision of the black-skinned, white-clad Master with a primly cut, scraggy beard had remained. The Master stood in the classroom, by the shoemakers’ houses, the corners of his eyes shot red with rage as if he were made of some unearthly clay, and he, Nur, had entered late. In one fearful moment he had trembled merely to see the fresh cane which lay on the table; he had known that the accusation in the Master’s eyes was coloured by revenge rather than by the anger at his lateness: the Master had asked him to bring him
a basket of sweets from his father’s shop and when he had begged his father to give him the gift
to offer to the Master, the Chaudhri had refused,
saying, ‘I don’t keep a shop for the purpose of charity, it is hard enough for me to make a living and pay your school fees.’ And, of course, he had never dared to tell this to the Master . . . . The dread of the greedy dog, as he stood there, grimly seeped into his bones. And when the demon actually lifted the cane, he began to shriek in agony, whereupon the Master shouted to him, ‘Be quiet or I will give you one stripe more for everyone after which you howl!’ And as he howled and cried, ‘Oh spare me, oh spare me, Masterji
,’
long before the sweep of every blow from the cane shimmered before his terror-stricken eyes, the ghost of the devil had worked himself up to an even grimmer rage so that his words tumbled over each other as he numbered the blows, while he begged, prayed, supplicated to the cruel tyrant, drifting further and further and shouting the more, though he knew that his protest would increase the sum of his punishment . . .

In a corner of the room he sat alternately hating his mother, who stood in the chamber of horrors, in the oblivion of her hell raging with fire and water, for not coming to his rescue, and loving her as she stood with tears of despair in her eyes and arms outstretched, appealing to the angel Gabriel to help her son. ‘Oh mother, don’t be silly; don’t whine like a pauper,’ he said as he nursed his smarting limbs, unable to lift his eyes for shame, as the tears welled in them against his will. ‘We have some prestige. The Chaudhri is respected by the whole bazaar and I shall ask him to report to the Head Master . . . .’ But if the Chaudhri saw the Head Master the Munshi would become far more revengeful . . . . Already he had made a slip at spelling and the Master was putting pencils between his fingers and pressing them hard, hard, harder, and Nur could see himself writhing and shrieking and crying as he rolled on the floor to release his cracking bones from the Master’s grasp . . .

The torment flushed his face above the dream which strayed vaguely back from the school compound to the cement tank in which the devout at the mosque washed their feet in muddy water . . .