He was inconsolable. His face swollen with tears, and his throat hoarse with wailing, he flailed his chest with his huge fists, but death, swift, premature and grotesquely unfair, had to be accepted.
A year later a clansman who worked in the plains persuaded Qasim to travel down to Jullundur. He secured him a position as watchman at an English bank.
Chapter 2
Three years passed, and in the chaotic summer of 1947 there was serious political unrest in the North Indian plains. Savage rioting erupted and many minority groups felt insecure. One by one the hill-country tribesmen fled Jullundur. For a time Qasim, loath to return to his life in the mountains where he would be under pressure to remarry, stayed on. He did not want to expose himself again to the bonds of love.
Hysteria mounted when the fertile, hot lands of the Punjab were suddenly ripped into two territories—Hindu and Muslim, India and Pakistan. Until the last moment no one was sure how the land would be divided. Lahore, which everyone expected to go to India because so many wealthy Hindus lived in it, went instead to Pakistan. Jullundur, a Sikh stronghold, was allocated to India. Now that it was decided they would leave, the British were in a hurry to wind up. Furniture, artifacts, and merchandise had to be shipped, antiques, curios, and jewelry acquired and transported. Preoccupied with misgiving and the arrangements attendant on relocating themselves in their native land, by the agony of separation from regiments, Imperial trappings and servants, the rulers of the Empire were entirely too busy to bother overmuch with how India was divided. It was only one of the thousand and one chores they faced.
The earth is not easy to carve up. India required a deft and sensitive surgeon, but the British, steeped in domestic preoccupation, hastily and carelessly butchered it. They were not deliberately mischievous—only cruelly negligent! A million Indians died. The earth sealed its clumsy new boundaries in blood as town by town, farm by farm, the border was defined. Trains carrying refugees sped through the darkness of night—Hindus going one way and Muslims the other. They left at odd hours to try to dodge mobs bent on their destruction. Yet trains were ambushed and looted and their fleeing occupants slaughtered.
Near Lahore, men—mostly Sikhs—squat on either side of the rail-tracks, waiting. Their white singlets reflect the moon palely. These Sikhs are lean and towering, with muscles like flat mango seeds and heads topped by scraggy buns of hair, loose tendrils mingling with their coarse beards. They are silent, listening, glancing at the luminous dials of wristwatches.
They have raised a barricade of logs across the tracks, and the steel rails swerve slightly where the lines disappear in blackness. On either side, ploughed stretches of earth spread black wings to the horizon.
At first the men, bunched in loose groups, welcome the diversion when a voice rises:
“I saw them myself—huge cauldrons of boiling oil and babies tossed into them!”
Then losing interest in what they have heard so often, their faces turn away. By now these tales arouse only an embarrassed resentment. They are meant to stir their nobler passions, but the thought of loot undermines that resolve.
An old Sikh stands up. He wears a loose white muslin shirt, which makes him look bigger in the moonlight. They know him to be the sole survivor of a large family in the Montgomery district. They whisper, “It is Moola Singh, cousin of Bishan Singh.”
Seething with hatred, his hurt still raw, Moola Singh resents their apathy. From the depths of his anguish, his voice betraying tears, he shrieks: “Vengeance, my brothers, vengeance!” He swallows hard. “I thought we would stay by our land, by our stock, by our Mussalman neighbors. No one can touch us, I thought. The riots will pass us by. But a mob attacked our village—Oh, the screams of the women, I can hear them still . . . I had a twenty-year-old brother, tall and strong as a mountain, a match for any five of them. This is what they did: they tied one of his legs to one jeep, the other to another jeep—and then they drove the jeeps apart . . .”
Moola Singh stands quite still. The men look away despite the dark. Their indignation flares into rage.
“God give our arms strength,” one of them shouts, and in a sudden movement, knives glimmer. Their cry, “Bole so Nihal, Sat siri Akal,” swells into the ferocious chant: “Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!” The old Sikh sinks to his knees.
Chapter 3
Sikander cut his way frantically through the ripe wheat as he ran towards the mud walls of his hut. His wife Zohra, standing in the courtyard, watched him. In the heat-hazed dawn neat squares of rippling wheat stretched towards the horizon and—riding on sudden swells of the breeze—came the distant chants of “Hari Hari Mahadev!” “Bole so Nihal. Sat siri Akal!” and an occasional, piercing, “Ya Alieeee!” An ugly bloated ebb and flow of noise engulfed everything. The corn, the earth, the air, and the sky seemed full of threat.
The child saw her father’s brown legs flash towards them through the green stalks. Something in his movement checked Munni’s usual delighted greeting. She clung to her mother’s sari.
Sikander, panting, reached the open yard. He shouted, “A train is leaving at four o’clock from Ludhiana. We must make it.”
Zohra turned her face away, sick with fright and the realization of loss. The moment she had vaguely dreaded hit her like a physical blow.
The angry chants, fragmented by the distance, urged them into action.
“Hurry, for God’s sake,” panted Sikander.
Zohra dragged out their tin trunks and bedrolls. Listlessly she wrapped odds and ends into clumsy cloth bundles. The calf and two goats were tethered, ready for departure.
Sikander ran round to the back and, trotting abreast of the horse, brought their two-wheeled rehra to the spread of luggage. “We can’t take all this!” he cried. “A trunk apiece, that’s all. Hide the jewelry somewhere on your body. Come on, hurry up.” He bustled Zohra out of her stunned apathy. Munni was lifted into the cart. Sikander hauled in the calf and goats while Zohra fetched the sleeping baby boy from inside. They drove through the fields on to a dirt road.
The train at Ludhiana station already swarmed with Muslims who had boarded it at earlier stops. Panic-stricken families were abandoning their animals and possessions in an attempt to get on. Zohra glanced back at their mound of luggage now scattered and indistinguishable among the mounting litter of tin trunks and bundles. Their goats had already run off. She pressed closer to Sikander, roughly yanking Munni by the hand. The baby, secure on her hip, looked about him with interest.
Carrying the calf, protecting it with his arms, Sikander forced a way for his family. Inches from the train they were suddenly pushed back by a swell in the crowd. Sikander dropped the calf. Lunging desperately, he at last got a grip on an open window. Quickly he clambered on to the roof of a compartment. Zohra held up the baby. Someone took him and passed him to his father. Lifting Munni, arms outstretched, Zohra too was hoisted up by friendly hands.
“Abba, the calf! There it is!” cried Munni, pointing it out. It tottered below them on spindly, unsteady legs, its face raised, mute and trusting.
“Get the calf, Abba. Don’t leave it, she’s a baby, she’ll die!”
“Shush,” her mother scolded. “We haven’t room for ourselves and you want to take that beast!”
“Abba, don’t leave the calf . . . I want my calf,” Munni wailed, and Zohra, overwrought and on the verge of tears herself, raged, “Shut up, or I’ll slap you.”
“Don’t be angry with the child,” said Sikander, holding his daughter close.
A few paces from them, jammed between two men, a boy sat cradling a newborn calf. Munni dug her face into her father’s shirt. She wept inconsolably.
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