Authors: Altaf Tyrewala
The Mahant refuses lunch and damn near hurts himself in his scramble to mount his seat.
I sit next to father at the foot of the Mahant’s chair—my new position since turning seventeen—and look down at my dhoti, as usual.
The Mahant raises his hands. The crowd becomes quiet.
‘Eunuchs!’ the Mahant screeches, half-leaping off his chair, sending his saffron robes pell-mell. His angry finger sweeps over the hushed crowd. ‘Moustaches and dhotis. If you have wives also, so what? Eunuchs! All! Eunuchs! You are
all eunuchs!’
The Mahant claps his hands. His spittle descends on father and me like a foul mist. I am astonished by the god-man’s vulgar clarity. Gone are the tales of scorpion gods and nebulous universes. For the first time there is no mistaking the Mahant’s discourse.
He is talking to me!
‘Your safes. Keep them open. Your women’s legs. Keep them parted. Right now, lambs and goats. The outsiders are sharpening knives on animals. One day, it will be your necks. Your women. Your money. Hai-hai, sixers! Who is not eunuch here? By their beards, grab the outsiders. Out. Throw them out. Which man will do it? Throw out the outsiders from your house, your village, your country. Hindustan for Hindus! Hindustan for Hindus! Understand, donkey eunuchs? Not for outsiders, our Hindustan! Who? Who will correct history, who will avenge the past and drive the outsiders out…?’
I am standing at the back of the crowd, enjoying the drama. All of a sudden Babua, who is sitting beside his father at the foot of the Mahant’s chair, jumps up and says, ‘I will do it, Mahant. I am not a eunuch! I will drive out the outsiders!’
The Mahant thumps Babua on the shoulder. ‘Here is a man! Go! Throw them out!’
Babua tightens his dhoti. Then he touches the Mahant’s feet, bows to his father, and descends the steps of their porch. He stands before the crowd and looks us over like a policeman trying to decide who is guilty.
I disguise my laugh with a cough. Such fun! Just like cinema!
Babua approaches the squatting villagers. They move their legs and lean to the right and left to let the youth through.
The Mahant raises his hands and shouts at the sky. ‘Go forth, oh son of Hindustan for Hindus! By their beards, grab them. Yours it is—Hindustan. From the outsiders reclaim it!’
Babua doesn’t walk; he prowls. With every step, his back straightens and his chest inflates like a dolly being pumped through its nozzle.
Oye. Too funny. ‘Uhhoo, uhhoo!’ I cover my mouth and cough with uncontrollable mirth.
The people standing around look at me distractedly. Babua notices the faces turning in my direction. The seated villagers, noting Babua’s frozen stare, swivel their heads. I look around.
Babua, and everyone else, is looking at me.
What the fuck!
Babua comes and stands before me. ‘Hello, Babua,’ I say, nodding respectfully, biting my tongue to stop the laughter. He is a whole head shorter.
‘Hindustan for Hindus!’ Babua shrieks into my face. He grabs my beard. It feels like needles poking out from inside my jaw.
‘Abbey! Let go!’ I shout, and catch Babua’s hand.
‘Hindustan for Hindus!’ he shrieks again.
The pain blackens my sight. I flail weakly in Babua’s grip as he drags me by my beard to the Mahant.
Yaar. The Sikh got screwed.
When Babua dragged Zail Singh to the front, the Mahant took one look and hopped upon his chair. ‘You eunuch! Donkey! Leave it! Leave his beard!’
Babua hung on in puzzlement. Zail Singh lifted his hand with considerable effort and boxed Babua’s ear. Babua fell to the right; Zail Singh collapsed to the left, massaging his jaw and moaning in pain, ‘Maadar da phaataa, saala, todi ma di aankh!’
Perched on the chair, the Mahant began clapping like mad. ‘You eunuch! Sixer! Go attack real outsiders!’
Babua stood up rubbing his head. He argued petulantly, ‘This Zail Singh is not from our village. He has beard. He is outsider. He is!’
The Mahant hollered, ‘Sixer! He is Sikh. Not outsider! Sikh is Hindu!’
Zail Singh heaved and got to his feet. ‘Oye, I’m not Hindu,
I’m Sikh, not Hindu, and I’m going back to Karnala right now.’ He walked away, muttering, muttering.
Babua scanned the crowd with growing shame. He turned to the Mahant. ‘Tell me, Mahant, who you want me to throw out? Who is the outsider? You tell me, I will throw him out right now in front of you. I am not eunuch!’ Then he screamed desperately, ‘Hindustan for Hindus!’
The Mahant didn’t answer; he placed his hands on his head and looked down in resignation. Someone at the back started giggling. The laughter spread like plague. Villagers were falling over each other for support. Babua ran into his house, inflamed with hate for an outsider he didn’t even know.
Over subsequent days, the people of Barauli reenacted the fiasco repeatedly. Someone would impersonate the Mahant, another would ask to play Babua, and several would vie for Zail Singh’s role. Over several replays, hyperbole morphed the original event into something else entirely: after a lewd dispute over pubic hair, an incensed Zail Singh would thrash a stone-blind Babua and chase away a high-strung Mahant.
Not all the villagers ran to watch and cheer these performances.
There were a few who merely chuckled with indulgence at these impromptu skits and continued with their tasks. The sudden reticence of these few went unobserved. No one
noticed that their businesses were opening late and closing early. That the stocks in their shops and workshops weren’t being replenished. That the men amongst these few went on mysterious trips with their wives and children, carrying trunks and cartons, and that these men returned next day empty-handed and alone. The withdrawal of these few was like the invisible dwindling of an invalid. When they were all finally gone, no one in the village even noticed.
And then it was too late. A month later, the Mahant reappeared with eighty men. They poked the air above their heads with tridents. The motley crew kicked up dust and startled birds with roars of ‘Hindustan for Hindus! Out with outsiders!’
Seeing that the Mahant was responsible for this early-morning ruckus, the villagers calmed down and squatted outside their homes. They looked forward to another juicy farce and one more vain witchhunt for an outsider who just didn’t exist here, in this village, where everyone knew everyone.
The Mahant and his men broke into seven cottages. They forced up the shutters to five workshops and two shops. Bare walls and cupboards were all they found.
The mob rushed to the west of the village. Without removing their shoes, they barged into a structure where people once prayed.
‘Empty. All of it. Fled. All of them,’ the Mahant spat at his disappointed eighty.
Babua had come rushing, enthused with anger toward an outsider he would finally discover.
Hanging around the edge of the Mahant’s herd, Babua was now doubly unsure why the outsiders were who they were.
I get off the train at Namnagar and trudge to my great-grandfather’s house two streets from the station. Who am I? Where have I come from? Why am I in Namnagar, carting my life’s possessions like a refugee?
I don’t have time to explain.
I knock on the light blue, flaking door. Shazia-dadi, my septuagenarian spinster grand-aunt, opens the door and encircles me in arms gnarled like branches. ‘Suleiman, I haven’t seen you in two years. How you’ve grown!’ she cackles.
‘No one grows at twenty-seven,’ I say.
I drop my four bags and dart around the house looking for him. ‘Where is he?’ (I have no name for great-grandpa.)
‘Abbu’s sleeping,’ Shazia-dadi says.
‘At one in the afternoon?’
‘Abbu’s ninety-six. He can sleep forever,’ Shazia-dadi remarks with awe.
‘Wake him,’ I say, and begin walking in and out of rooms
to find him. Shazia-dadi follows me around like a chick, cheeping her protestations. I raise my voice: ‘Tell me! Where is he?’
Flaunting a wet, gummy smile, she points to a room I had just inspected. ‘Heeheehee. You missed Abbu. He’s in there.’
I rush back in. Great-grandpa has shrunk. Not only in length and breadth; his width is under attack. He is lying on his back, flat as the mattress. I go up to his bed below a curtained window and shake his bony arm. Dadi pats her cheek to warn me of the slap I will receive for this insolence. Is she still afraid of her father? This withering husk of a thing?
I stoop to his ear and whisper in a voice made hoarse by thirst and dust, ‘Come on, wake up. I have to ask you something.’ It is vile to do this to a man this ancient, but had my father, a carpenter, been alive, he would have been rougher.
Great-grandpa flutters his eyelids. I prop him up on a pillow and give him water.
‘Remember your son Allaudin?’ I ask.
Great-grandpa stops sipping and raises his head in distress. ‘Allaudin, my peace of heart! Why Allah didn’t take me instead!’
‘Okay, okay. You remember Allaudin’s son, Nizar?’ I ask.
He stops sipping again. ‘Nizar, my grandson, how I miss him! Why Allah didn’t take me instead!’
I snatch the glass from his hands. ‘I am Nizar’s son. My
name is Suleiman. Do you remember?’
Facts tear through great-grandpa’s senility. His eyes dilate with recognition. ‘Suleiman, poor orphan, both parents dead. But don’t worry, I am still here, your great-grandfather.’ He strains forward and taps my hand. Shazia-dadi pats my shoulder. The ambitious kindness of feeble kin. I am nearly tempted to skip what I have come for. But it has to be done.
Softening my tone, I proceed carefully. ‘Do you know what has happened?’ I lean closer to great-grandpa. ‘They drove out all Muslims from Barauli, my village. The Mahant said we are outsiders. We have abandoned our houses and shops and some have fled to Mumbai, some to Hyderabad.’
Great-grandpa says in his scratchy voice, ‘Suleiman, you live here with us. You are a carpenter, no? You can begin afresh in Namnagar.’
‘No,’ I hiss like a boa, ‘I am not a carpenter. My father was a carpenter. I am a tailor, and I too am going to Mumbai to live like other refugees…’
Great-grandpa’s jaw drops with exhaustion.
I continue with a colossal pretence of calm, ‘But before I go, I must understand. I must know so I can endure. Only you can tell me because
you, you
severed us from who we
were, you
turned us into outsiders to be driven out of villages…’
(Shazia-dadi pokes my shoulder. But today nothing is going to stop me.)
‘So, now tell me,’ I say. ‘Why? Why did you convert?’
(Shazia-dadi yelps.)
‘Haanh? What came over you? What mischief made you become a bloody Muslim?’
Suleiman’s question knocks the wind out of me.
When I reopen my eyes hours later, it is night. The bulb in my room burns weaker than ever. In an irrelevant hamlet like Namnagar, even our electricity seems to lack confidence. Except for a circle of light to the left of my bed, the room is dark. Suleiman and my daughter Shazia are talking in the adjoining room. I am gladdened to hear the accompanying clatter of silverware. That even today, at my age, my children eat what I provide is an excellent compliment.
Be it taxes, obligations, or misery, I have never evaded anything. When I passed out on hearing Suleiman’s question, I wasn’t taking refuge in sleep. I was revisiting the past. I have picked out the necessary facts and reasons from its huge storeroom and am ready to answer my great-grandson’s question:
Why did I become a Muslim?
But, before I answer, I too have a question to ask Suleiman:
How does it matter?
If he isn’t silenced by my counter-query, I will doze off again. I will sleep till my great-grandson tires of waiting and goes away. Regardless of my reply, Suleiman will remain a Muslim and must survive the trials of these times. Asking a ninety-six-year-old man why he did what he did seventy years ago isn’t a solution to anything. What will Suleiman do with my answer? Sing it in trains? And what if even that doesn’t work? Will he then change his name to Suresh, shave his beard, and stop going to the mosque? It is futile. And so I will sleep.
I used to think old people sleep to rest. It was so till about six years ago. Sometime during my ninetieth year, my sores and fevers ceased to torment me. They are still there, I’m sure; the doctor visits every week to fuss over them. But now, when I moan during the medico’s poking and prodding or when I grunt as Shazia attempts to feed and clean me, it isn’t pain I am bewailing. All I want to do is sleep. If you can call it that. Unlike the coma of youth, when yesterday, today and tomorrow cross-bred to spin visions of infinite hues and moods, my sleep is dreamless. I used to think old people relive memories in tedious detail. That may be true of the moment of death. I, for one, can conjure and dismiss my yesterdays like so many measly genies. In my sleep I go nowhere, regret nothing, and miss no one, like sitting in an empty darkened theater staring at a blank screen.
Morning must be approaching. When I open my eyes
again, the room seems brighter than before. Why doesn’t Shazia turn off the bulb? She knows we can’t afford to burn power without reason.
Suleiman is sitting next to me, on my bed, watching over me like a vulture. He sees me stirring and jumps at the opportunity. ‘Tell me, please! Why? Why did you convert? Why did you become a Muslim?’
I do everything it takes to smile, but my lips don’t obey. I close my eyes again, to shut out the glare of Suleiman’s stare.
He seems old enough to have questioned—if youngsters still do it—life. To have contemplated his own existence and the existence of an Almighty. Or maybe not. Men like my great-grandson, born into a pervasive monolith of a faith, have little reason to be inquisitive or anxious. When a holy book provides answers before you have questioned, and your day is neatly partitioned into five prayer sessions before you are born, you would have to be a fool, or an innately disruptive person, to nurse doubt. Oh, but the nobility of questioning customs, suspecting idols and searching for years! And the thrill of finding your answers in a holy book! And the comfort in having your previously formless days neatly partitioned into five sections! Suleiman will never know such delight and I pity him for it.