Greatest Short Stories (14 page)

14

A Kashmir Idyll
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It was about ten years ago, during a brief visit to Kashmir, that the incident I am going to relate took place. But neither time nor space has blurred the deep impression it made on me then, and it has haunted me for many days, so that I must needs put it down.

There were originally four of us in the party including myself, the three others being a tall, imposing Sikh gentleman, both tailor-made and God-made; a sensitive young poet, a Kashmiri whose family had emigrated to the plains and made good as Kashmiris always do when once they have left the land where, though nature is kind and generous, man has for centuries most foully and cruelly oppressed man; and a hill boy who cooked for us.

We had loaded our luggage on a tonga and walked the three hundred and seventy-five miles on the road from Jammu across the Himalayas in slow stages, by the beds of the silent Ravi and the surging Chenab. On the peak of the Banihal we had held conversation with the wind that comes from the Kashmir valley, bearing a load of loveliness and pain, the golden exhalation of the saffron and the white sights of a people who toil unrewarded.

We had descended to the natural spring of Ver Nag from which a few drops of water trickle into a stream that becomes the River Jhelum at Islamabad, where it divides the whole valley into two halves and flows into Lake Wullar and then cuts its way through two hundred miles of mountains into the plains.

From Ver Nag, a village of dark and labyrinthine streets full of small mud huts, the multicoloured flowers on whose roofs give no hint of the misery which dwells within, we had traversed the main valley by a dusty road bordered by cubist poplars and cypresses.

We had made our headquarters in a houseboat at Srinagar. Then, taking the advice of a tourist’s guide book which the government of His Highness the Maharaja of Kashmir had designed specifically for the use of English visitors, though a few Indians also took advantage of it if they had a smattering of the wonderful, official language, we had decided to undertake short trips to the remote valleys and the unspoiled outlying ranges of the Himalayas within the borders of Kashmir.

We visited the Sonamarg valley where the scarlet eyes of the morning are blinded by the glare of the snow that lies perpetually on the mountain peaks, leading through the Zogila Pass to Chotta Tibet, and where the sleep of the night is continually disturbed by the growling of the angry Indus rushing through glaciers and across high rocks and boulders on its tortuous passage across the Punjab.

We pushed by a difficult track across a crumbling mountain to the cave of Amaranth, where the dripping of water from melting crystals form a snow image of the shape of a phallus, which the superstitious go to worship in thousands at a particular time of the year, believing it to be the penis of the Great God Shiva.

We went to Gulmarg, the valley of wild roses; to Lilanmarg, where the lilies of the field grow for miles and miles, angelic and melancholy. We ascended to Aparwat, the high peak above Gulmarg, on top of which is a crystal-clear pool that echoes back the faintest whisper.

We saw Gangarbal and Hari Parbat, the Shalimar and the Nishat; we went everywhere, devouring the beauty of Kashmir ’s landscapes, trudging along its byways, loitering among its stars, squandering whole days and weeks in search of exquisite moments.

And then there was nothing left to do except to sail among the waterways of the valley, to seek new harbours for our houseboat in the Dal lake and in the shadow of the various gardens, wherever the caprice of our idle wills directed the heart-shaped oars of our boatmen.

A cousin of the poet of our company, a nobleman and courtier of His Highness the Maharaja, who had sought us out in an obscure corner of the Dal, and showered the blessings of fruit and meat and drink upon us with a generosity that betokened his eminence and his affluence, offered us the hospitality of an island he possessed near by.

Though greatful for his kindness, we had been finding the gentleman’s hospitality rather embarrassing, because it involved us in a friendship with the great man which we could not spontaneously accept. For His Grace was rather a silly young man with the manners of a lout and a high blood pressure in his too opulent flesh, so we excused ourselves by saying that we were intending soon to complete our tour of the valley by going in our kitchenboat to the Wullar. But it was not so easy for us to escape from the tentacles that he spread around us by that slick and sure turn of phrase that had so obviously carried him to his high position at Court. He suggested that if we didn’t accept his hospitality he would like to accept our hospitality and accompany us to the Wullar ‘In your kitchenboat for a change, because,’ he said, ‘I am tired of this grand style in which I have to live, and would like to be one of you.’

We were so bounden to the Nawab Zaffar Ullah, as the worthy was called, for the many favours he had heaped on us that we naturally could not refuse him, even though he became more patronizing and added that not only would he like to come with us, but two of his most intimate friends would like to accompany us also, and that he would like to supply provisions and order extra boatman for our service on the way.

We were in for it, and we accepted all his offers because it would have been more strenuous to find excuses than to let ourselves become completely ineffectual pawns in his high hands. And accompanied by him and his friends (a surely little judge of the High Court of Kashmir, and a most superficial young trader in hides and skins), we started one evening.

The shades of night were falling and we floated through the heaven and the earth in a dream as yet slightly disturbed by the Nawab and his companions.

The river flowed, and our boat flowed with it, without much help from our boatman, his wife, his sister, or his little daughter.

But we had hardly retired to the silent places of our heart when dinner was announced.

The Nawab had brought a sumptuous meal prepared by this servants all ready to be served — rice coloured and scented with saffron curried fowls perfumed with musk, and there were goblets of champagne, bottled in 1889.

Having compromised us into accepting his delicious food, it was only natural that the Nawab should deem it fit to amuse us with the gifts of his speech. He told a few dirty stories and then launched into a discourse of which the ribaldry was so highly spiced with a deliberate obscenity that whoever felt nauseated or not, I, at least, who have never been overrighteous, turned aside, thought of the pride of my emotions, made my words the stars and surrendered myself to the bosom of the night.

When we awoke at dawn, our boat had unbarred the floodgates and glided into a veritable ocean of light. For, as far as I could see, for miles and miles, the azure waters of the Wuller spread around us, fluttering a vast expanse mercury within the borders of the fiery sun-scorched hills.

The Nawab sought to entertain us with a song. But his voice was cracked and only his two friends sat appreciatively acclaiming his genius, while we wandered off to different points of the boat, helping with the cooking, dressing or lazily contemplating the wizardry by which nature had written a poem of broken glass, crumbling earth and blue-red fire.

‘For, truly, the Wullar is a magnificent spectacle under the red sky at morning.

I gazed upon the placid plain of water spellbound, enchanted. I lent myself to the whispers of the rippling breeze that was awakening the sleepy lotuses: tempted by an unbearable desire to be one with it, I plunged headlong into its midst and bathed in it to my heart’s desire. Then I sat, sedulously noticing the blandishments of the elements from the shadow of a company under which the Nawab and his friends played cut-throat bridge.

By ten o’clock we had crossed the lake to Bandipur, a dull, insignificant little village on the take to Gilgit, the last strong-hold of British Indian power before the earth ventures out into the deserts of Central Asia, uncharted except by shepherds till the Soviets brought steel plough of prosperity there.

The Nawab here ordered the Tehsildar to bring him tea, chickens, five dozen eggs and some fruit for our delectation. And he took us about to the dirty houses of the village to show us off, or rather to show himself off, to the poor inhabitants of the township.

Our boatman came running and said that we should hurry because he wanted to row us across the middle of the lake before noon, as a squall generally arose in the Wullar every day at noon, and it was likely to upset the boat if the vessel hadn’t already crossed the danger zone before midday.

The Nawab abused him in Kashmiri, a language in which curses seem more potent than prayers.

We pressed the boatman’s point, and since. His Grace could not swear at us, he said he would get a man on
begar
(forced labour) to help the boatman and his family to row across the lake more quickly, and he tarried.

The boatman came again after half an hour and found us all waiting impatiently for the Nawab’s return from a visit to the lavatory: His Grace had suddenly thought it fit to have a hair cut and a Turkish bath in a hamam, and he didn’t care what happened to us. When he did merge from his ablutions, and heard not only the insistent appeals of the boatman, but our urgent recommendations, he, as a mark of his favour, clemency, or whatever you may call it, forthwith stopped a young man of the village who was walking along the cobbled high street and ordered him to proceed to our boat and help to row it to Srinagar.

‘But Srinagar is fifty miles away, Sire’, said the young man, ‘And my mother has died, I am on the way to attend her funeral.’

‘Swine, dare you refuse?’ snarled the Nawab. ‘You are a liar!’

‘No, Nawab Sahib said the man, joining his hands. ‘You are like God in mercy and goodness. Please forgive me. I am footsore and weary after a twenty mile march in the mountains where I went to fetch my uncle’s donkey. And now my mother has died and I must see the Mullah about securing a place for her burial.’

‘Run, run towards the boat’, bawled the Nawab, or, I’ll have you flogged by the Thanedar. Do you not know that this is the kingdom of which I am a nobleman? And you can’t refuse to do
begar
.’

‘But Sarkar…’ murmured the young Kashmiri, his lips trembling with the burden of a protest which could not deliver itself in the Nawab’s face, which glistened not only with the aura of light that the barbar’s massage had produced but with the anger which the man’s disobedience has called forth.

‘Go, to the boat, son of an ass’, shouted the Nawab and raised his hand.

At the mere suggestion of the Nawab’s threat to strike, the young man began to cry, a cry which seemed childish and ridiculous in so grown-up a person, particularly because there were no tears in his large, brown, wide-awake eyes. And he moaned: ‘Oh, my mother! Oh, my mother’, mechanically, in a voice which seemed to express more the cowardice of the Kashmiri which has been bred by the oppression of one brutal conqueror after another, than his very own real hurt.

But the Nawab was too thick-skinned to see the hurt in the man’s soul. He looked at the big eyes weeping without tears. and heard the shrill crescendo of his cry, and began to laugh.

‘Let us leave him, Nawab Sahib’, we said, “We will give the boatman a hand and row across the lake to safety if we hurry.’

‘Wait, wait’, the Nawab said’, as he caught hold of the man by his left ear and, laughing, dragged him towards the boat.

The
begari
, who had begun to cry at the mere suggestion of a threat, howled the heavens down at the actual impact of the Nawab’s hand on his body, while the Nawab, who had only laughed derisively at first, now chuckled with a hoarse laughter which flushed his cheeks.

The man extricated his ear from the Nawab’s grasp as we were about five yards from the boat, and, perhaps because he thought he had annoyed His Grace by so overt an act of disobedience, he knelt down at his feet and, still sweeping and moaning, joined his hands and began to draw lines on the earth with his nose as a sort of penance for his sin.

At this the Nawab burst into redoubled laughter, so that his face, his body itself, seemed to swell to gigantic proportions and tower above us all.

‘Look!’ he said, flourishing his hands histrionically without interrupting his laughter.

But the situation which had been tense enough before had become very awkward now as the man grovelled in the dust and rolled about, weeping, walling, whining and moaning and sobbing hysterically with the most abject humility.

‘Don’t you weep, don’t you moan, fool!’ said the Nawab, screwing his eyes which were full of the tears of laughter, and he turned to the boatman, saying: ‘Lift the clown there and put him on the boat.’

The boatman obeyed the commands of the Nawab, and His Grace having stepped up to the deck behind the
begari
, we solemnly boarded the vessel.

The
begari
has now presumably half decided to do the work, as, crying his hollow cry and moaning his weird moan, he spat on his hands and took up the oar.

The Nawab, who cast the shadow of his menacing presence on the man, was more amused than ever, and he laughed hysterically, writhing and rumbling so that his two friends caught him in their grasp and laid him to rest under the canopy. He sought to shake them off with the weight of his belly and with the wide flourishing of his hands and the reverberating groans of his speech which came from his round red cheeks, muffled with continuous laughter.

The boat began to move, and as the heartshaped oars tore the water aside, the
begari
ceased to cry and grieve with the same suddenness with which he had begun.

‘Look!’ the Nawab bellowed, his hysterical laughing fit ending in a jerky cough which convulsed him as a spark of lighting shakes a cloud with thunder. ‘Look!’ he spluttered and pointed towards the
begari
.

But the balls of his eyes rolled suddenly; his face flushed ghastly red and livid; his throat, twisting like a hemp rope, gave vent to gasping, whistling noise, and his hand fell limp by his side.