Train To Pakistan, page 15
At last the lambardar went out to see for himself. Yes, the river had risen. Two days of rain could not have caused it; it must have poured in the mountains after the melting of the snows. Sluice gates of canals had probably been closed to prevent the flood from bursting their banks; so there was no outlet except the river. The friendly sluggish stream of grey had become a menacing and tumultuous spread of muddy brown. The piers of the bridge were all that remained solid and contemptuously defiant of the river. Their pointed edges clove through the sheet of water and let it vent its impotent rage in a swirl of eddies and whirlpools. Rain beat upon the surface, pockmarking it all over. The Sutlej was a terrifying sight.
By evening, Mano Majra had forgotten about its Muslims and Malli’s misdeeds. The river had become the main topic of conversation. Once more women stood on the rooftops looking to the west. Men started going in turns to the embankment to report on the situation.
Before sunset the lambardar went up again to see the river. It had risen more since his visit in the afternoon. Some of the clusters of pampas which had been above the water level were now partly submerged. Their stalks had gone limp and their sodden snow-white plumes floated on the water. He had never known the Sutlej to rise so high in so short a time. Mano Majra was still a long way off and the mud dam looked solid and safe. Nevertheless he arranged for a watch to be kept all through the night. Four parties of three men each were to take turns and be on the embankment from sunset to sunrise and report every hour. The rest were to stay in their houses.
The lambardar’s decision was a quilt under which the village slept snug and safe. The lambardar himself had little sleep. Soon after midnight the three men on watch came back talking loudly, in a high state of excitement. They could not tell in the grey muffled moonlight whether the river had risen more, but they had heard human voices calling for help. The cries came from over the water. They may have been from the other side or from the river itself. The lambardar went out with them. He took his chromium-plated flashlight.
The four men stood on the embankment and surveyed the Sutlej, which looked like a sheet of black. The white beam of the lambardar’s torch scanned the surface of the river. They could see nothing but the swirling water. They held their breath and listened, but they could hear nothing except the noise of the rain falling on the water. Each time the lambardar asked if they were sure that what they had heard were human voices and not jackals, they felt more and more uncertain and had to ask each other: ‘It was clear, wasn’t it, Karnaila?’
‘Oh yes. It was clear enough. “Hai, hai”—like someone in pain.’
The four men sat under a tree, huddled around a hurricane lamp. The gunny sacks they used as raincoats were soaking wet; so were all their clothes. An hour later there was a break in the clouds. The rain slowed down to a drizzle and then stopped. The moon broke through the clouds just above the western horizon. Its reflection on the river made a broad path of shimmering tinfoil running from the opposite bank to the men under the tree. On this shining patch of moonlight even little ripples of water could be seen distinctly.
A black oval object hit the bridge pier and was swept by the stream towards the Mano Majra embankment. It looked like a big drum with sticks on its sides. It moved forward, backward and sideways until the current caught it again and brought it into the silvery path not far from where the men were sitting. It was a dead cow with its belly bloated like a massive barrel and its legs stiffly stretched upward. Then followed some blocks of thatch straw and bundles of clothing.
‘It looks as if some village has been swept away by the flood,’ said the lambardar.
‘Quiet! Listen,’ said one of the villagers in a whisper. The faint sound of a moan was wafted across the waters.
‘Did you hear?’
‘Quiet!’
They held their breath and listened.
No, it could not have been human. There was a rumbling sound. They listened again. Of course, it was a rumble; it was a train. Its puffing became clearer and clearer. Then they saw the outlines of the engine and the train itself. It had no lights. There was not even a headlight on the engine. Sparks flew out of the engine funnel like fireworks. As the train came over the bridge, cormorants flew silently down the river and terns flew up with shrill cries. The train came to a halt at Mano Majra station. It was from Pakistan.
‘There are no lights on the train.’
‘The engine did not whistle.’
‘It is like a ghost.’
‘In the name of the Lord do not talk like this,’ said the lambardar. ‘It may be a goods train. It must have been the siren you heard. These new American engines wail like someone being murdered.’
‘No, Lambardara, we heard the sound more than an hour ago; and again the same one before the train came on,’ replied one of the villagers.
‘You cannot hear it any more. The train is not making any noise now.’
From across the railway line, where some days earlier over a thousand dead bodies had been burned, a jackal sent up a long plaintive howl. A pack joined him. The men shuddered.
‘Must have been the jackals. They sound like women crying when somebody dies,’ said the lambardar.
‘No, no,’ protested the other. ‘No, it was a human voice as clear as you are talking to me now.’
They sat and listened and watched strange indistinguishable forms floating on the floodwaters. The moon went down. After a brief period of darkness the eastern horizon turned grey. Long lines of bats flew across noiselessly. Crows began to caw in their sleep. The shrill cry of a koel came bursting through a clump of trees and all the world was awake.
The clouds had rolled away to the north. Slowly the sun came up and flooded the rain-soaked plain with a dazzling orange brilliance; everything glistened in the sunlight. The river had risen further. Its turbid water carried carts with the bloated carcasses of bulls still yoked to them. Horses rolled from side to side as if they were scratching their backs. There were also men and women with their clothes clinging to their bodies; little children sleeping on their bellies with their arms clutching the water and their tiny buttocks dipping in and out. The sky was soon full of kites and vultures. They flew down and landed on the floating carcasses. They pecked till the corpses themselves rolled over and shooed them off with hands which rose stiffly into the air and splashed back into the water.
‘Some villages must have been flooded at night,’ said the lambardar gravely.
‘Who yokes bulls to carts at night?’ asked one of his companions.
‘Yes, that is true. Why should the bullocks be yoked?’
More human forms could be seen coming through the arches of the bridge. They rebounded off the piers, paused, pirouetted at the whirlpools, and then came bouncing down the river. The men moved up towards the bridge to see some corpses which had drifted near the bank.
They stood and stared.
‘Lambardara, they were not drowned. They were murdered.’
An old peasant with a grey beard lay flat on the water. His arms were stretched out as if he had been crucified. His mouth was wide open and showed his toothless gums, his eyes were covered with film, his hair floated about his head like a halo. He had a deep wound on his neck which slanted down from the side to the chest. A child’s head butted into the old man’s armpit. There was a hole in its back. There were many others coming down the river like logs hewn on the mountains and cast into streams to be carried down to the plains. A few passed through the middle of the arches and sped onward faster. Others bumped into the piers and turned over to show their wounds till the current turned them over again. Some were without limbs, some had their bellies torn open, many women’s breasts were slashed. They floated down the sunlit river, bobbing up and down. Overhead hung the kites and vultures.
The lambardar and the villagers drew the ends of their turbans across their faces. ‘The Guru have mercy on us,’ someone whispered. ‘There has been a massacre somewhere. We must inform the police.’
‘Police?’ a small man said bitterly. ‘What will they do? Write a first information report?’
Sick and with heavy hearts, the party turned back to Mano Majra. They did not know what to say to people when they got back. The river had risen further? Some villages had been flooded? There had been a massacre somewhere upstream? There were hundreds of corpses floating on the Sutlej? Or, just keep quiet?
When they came back to the village nobody was about to hear what they had to say. They were all on the rooftops looking at the station. After several days a train had drawn up at Mano Majra in the daytime. Since the engine faced eastward, it must have come from Pakistan. This time too the place was full of soldiers and policemen and the station had been cordoned off. The news of the corpses on the river was shouted from the housetops. People told each other about the mutilation of women and children. Nobody wanted to know who the dead people were nor wanted to go to the river to find out. There was a new interest at the station, with promise of worse horrors than the last one.
There was no doubt in anyone’s mind what the train contained. They were sure that the soldiers would come for oil and wood. They had no more oil to spare and the wood they had left was too damp to burn. But the soldiers did not come. Instead, a bulldozer arrived from somewhere. It began dragging its lower jaw into the ground just outside the station on the Mano Majra side. It went along, eating up the earth, chewing it, casting it aside. It did this for several hours, until there was a rectangular trench almost fifty yards long with mounds of earth on either side. Then it paused for a break. The soldiers and policemen who had been idly watching the bulldozer at work were called to order and marched back to the platform. They came back in twos carrying canvas stretchers. They tipped the stretchers into the pit and went back to the train for more. This went on all day till sunset. Then the bulldozer woke up again. It opened its jaws and ate up the earth it had thrown out before and vomited it into the trench till it was level with the ground. The place looked like the scar of a healed-up wound. Two soldiers were left to guard the grave from the depredations of jackals and badgers.
That evening, the entire village turned up for the evening prayers at the gurdwara. This had never happened before, except on Gurus’ birthdays or on the New Year’s Day in April. The only regular visitors to the temple were old men and women. Others came to have their children named, for baptisms, weddings and funerals. Attendance at prayers had been steadily going up since the murder of the moneylender; people did not want to be alone. Since the Muslims had gone, their deserted houses with doors swinging wide open had acquired an eerie, haunted look. Villagers walked past them quickly without turning their heads. The one place of refuge to which people could go without much explanation was the gurdwara. Men came pretending that they would be needed; women just to be with them, and they brought the children. The main hall where the scripture was kept and the two rooms on the side were jammed with refugees and villagers. Their shoes were neatly arranged in rows on the other side of the threshold.
Meet Singh read the evening prayer by the light of the hurricane lamp. One of the men stood behind him waving a fly whisk. When the prayer was over, the congregation sang a hymn while Meet Singh folded the Granth in gaudy silk scarfs and laid it to rest for the night. The worshippers stood up and folded their hands. Meet Singh took his place in front. He repeated the names of the ten Gurus, the Sikh martyrs and the Sikh shrines and invoked their blessing; the crowd shouted their amens with loud ‘Wah Gurus’ at the end of each supplication. They went down on their knees, rubbed their foreheads on the ground, and the ceremony was over. Meet Singh came and joined the men.
It was a solemn assembly. Only the children played. They chased each other around the room, laughing and arguing. The adults scolded the children. One by one, the children returned to their mothers’ laps and fell asleep. Then the men and women also stretched themselves on the floor in the different parts of the room.
The day’s events were not likely to be forgotten in sleep. Many could not sleep at all. Others slept fitfully and woke up with startled cries if a neighbour’s leg or arm so much as touched them. Even the ones who snored with apparent abandon, dreamed and relived the scenes of the day. They heard the sound of motor vehicles, the lowing of cattle and people crying. They sobbed in their sleep and their beards were moist with their tears.
When the sound of a motor horn was heard once more, those who were awake but drowsy thought they were dreaming. Those that were dreaming thought they were hearing it in their dreams. In their dreams they even said ‘Yes, yes’ to the voice which kept asking ‘Are you all dead?’
The late night visitor was a jeep like the one in which the army officers had come in the morning. It seemed to know its way about the village. It went from door to door with a voice inquiring, ‘Is there anyone there?’ Only the dogs barked in reply. Then it came to the temple and the engine was switched off. Two men walked into the courtyard and shouted again: ‘Is there anyone here or are you all dead?’
Everyone got up. Some children began to cry. Meet Singh turned up the wick of his hurricane lantern. He and the lambardar went out to meet the visitors.
The men saw the commotion they had created. They ignored the lambardar and Meet Singh and walked up to the threshold of the large room. One looked in at the bewildered crowd and asked:
‘Are you all dead?’
‘Any one of you alive?’ added the other.
The lambardar answered angrily, ‘No one is dead in this village. What do you want?’
Before the men could answer two of their companions joined them. All were Sikhs. They wore khaki uniforms and had rifles slung on their shoulders.
‘This village looks quite dead,’ repeated one of the strangers, loudly addressing his own companions.
‘The Guru has been merciful to this village. No one has died here,’ answered Meet Singh with quiet dignity.
‘Well, if the village is not dead, then it should be. It should be drowned in a palmful of water. It consists of eunuchs,’ said the visitor fiercely with a flourish of his hand.
The strangers took off their shoes and came inside the large hall. The lambardar and Meet Singh followed them. Men sat up and tied their turbans. Women put their children in their laps and tried to rock them to sleep again.
One of the group, who appeared to be the leader, motioned the others to sit down. Everyone sat down. The leader had an aggressive bossy manner. He was a boy in his teens with a little beard which was glued to his chin with brilliantine. He was small in size, slight of build and altogether somewhat effeminate; a glossy red ribbon showed under the acute angle of his bright blue turban. His khaki army shirt hung loosely from his round drooping shoulders. He wore a black leather Sam Browne: the strap across his narrow chest charged with bullets and the broad belt clamped about his still narrower waist. On one side it had a holster with the butt of a revolver protruding; on the other side there was a dagger. He looked as if his mother had dressed him up as an American cowboy.
The boy caressed the holster of his revolver and ran his fingers over the silver noses of the bullets. He looked around him with complete confidence.
‘Is this a Sikh village?’ he asked insolently. It was obvious to the villagers that he was an educated city-dweller. Such men always assumed a superior air when talking to peasants. They had no regard for age or status.
‘Yes, sir,’ answered the lambardar. ‘It has always been a Sikh village. We had Muslim tenants but they have gone.’
‘What sort of Sikhs are you?’ asked the boy, glowering menacingly. He elaborated his question: ‘Potent or impotent?’
No one knew what to say. No one protested that this was not the sort of language one used in a gurdwara with women and children sitting by.
‘Do you know how many trainloads of dead Sikhs and Hindus have come over? Do you know of the massacres in Rawalpindi and Multan, Gujranwala and Sheikhupura? What are you doing about it? You just eat and sleep and you call yourselves Sikhs—the brave Sikhs! The martial class!’ he added, raising both his arms to emphasize his sarcasm. He surveyed his audience with the bright eyes daring anyone to contradict him. People looked down somewhat ashamed of themselves.
‘What can we do, Sardarji?’ questioned the lambardar. ‘If our government goes to war against Pakistan, we will fight. What can we do sitting in Mano Majra?’
‘Government!’ sneered the boy contemptuously. ‘You expect the government to do anything? A government consisting of cowardly bania moneylenders! Do the Mussalmans in Pakistan apply for permission from their government when they rape your sisters? Do they apply for permission when they stop trains and kill everyone, old, young, women and children? You want the government to do something! That is great! Shabash! Brave!’ He gave the holster on his side a jaunty smack.
‘But, Sardar Sahib,’ said the lambardar falteringly, ‘do tell us what we can do.’
‘That is better,’ answered the lad. ‘Now we can talk. Listen and listen very carefully.’ He paused, looked around and started again. He spoke slowly, emphasizing each sentence by stabbing the air with his forefinger. ‘For each Hindu or Sikh they kill, kill two Mussulmans. For each woman they abduct or rape, abduct two. For each home they loot, loot two. For each trainload of dead they send over, send two across. For each road convoy that is attacked, attack two. That will stop the killing on the other side. It will teach them that we also play this game of killing and looting.’
He stopped to gauge the effect he had created. People listened to him with rapt open-mouthed attention. Only Meet Singh did not took up; he cleared his throat but stopped.
‘Well, brother, why do you keep quiet?’ asked the lad, throwing a challenge.
‘I was going to say,’ said Meet Singh haltingly, ‘I was going to say,’ he repeated, ‘what have the Muslims here done to us for us to kill them in revenge for what Muslims in Pakistan are doing. Only people who have committed crimes should be punished.’
