A Suitable Boy(284)

The lean old patwari greeted Rasheed politely, with a tired smile. He had heard of Rasheed’s social rounds of the village, and felt pleased to have merited a separate visit. Shading his eyes against the sun with his hand, he asked him how his studies were going and how long he planned to stay in the village. And he offered Rasheed some sherbet. It was some time before the patwari realized that the visit was not entirely social, but this did not displease him. His government salary was low, and it was widely accepted that he needed to augment it informally. He expected that Rasheed wished to see how his family’s holdings stood. He had no doubt been sent by his grandfather to check the status of their lands. And he was going to be pleased by what he saw.

The patwari went inside to bring out three ledgers, a few field-books, and two large cloth maps, about three feet by five, which covered all the land in the village. He lovingly unrolled one of them upon the wooden seating platform in his small courtyard. He stroked a corner of it gently with the side of his hand. He also fetched his spectacles, which he now placed carefully on his nose.

‘Well, Khan Sahib,’ he said to Rasheed, ‘in a year or two these books, which I have tended as carefully as a garden, will pass into other hands. If the government has its way it will rotate us from village to village every three years. Our lives will not be worth living. And how can some outsider understand the life of the village, its history, the reality of things? Just settling down will take him at least three years.’

Rasheed made sympathetic sounds. He had put down his glass of sherbet and was trying to locate Kachheru’s field on the map, which was of fine silk, slightly yellowed.

‘And the people of this village have always been very good to this sinful man,’ continued the patwari, with a slightly more energetic laugh. ‘Ghee, grain, milk, wood… even a few rupees now and then – the Khan Sahib’s family has been particularly munificent… What are you looking for?’

‘Our chamar Kachheru’s field.’

The patwari’s finger went unerringly to the spot, and came to rest in the air half an inch above it.

‘But don’t worry, Khan Sahib, it has all been taken care of,’ he said.

Rasheed looked at him questioningly.

The patwari was a little surprised that his competence or industry was being called into doubt. He wordlessly rolled up the silken map and unfurled the map of cruder cloth. This, his working map, which he took with him on his recording rounds, was slightly mud-stained, and displayed a denser patchwork of fields, covered with names and numbers and notations of various kinds in black and in red, all in Urdu. For a while he gazed at it, then went to the ledgers and the cracked and battered field-books, opened a few of them to the appropriate pages, consulted them alternately a few times, and with a serious and slightly injured look, nodded at Rasheed. ‘See for yourself,’ he said.

Rasheed looked at the columns and entries and measurements, landholding numbers and plot numbers and serial numbers, records of land type and land condition and land use; but, as the patwari well suspected, he could make nothing out of the esoteric jumble.

‘But –’

‘Khan Sahib,’ said the mollified patwari, turning his palms upwards in a gesture of openness. ‘It would appear from my records that the person who has been cultivating that field and those around it for the last several years has been yourself.’

‘What?’ cried Rasheed, staring first at the patwari’s smiling face, and then at the entry at which his finger was now pointing; again it rested a little above the surface of the page, like the body of a water-insect.

‘Name of cultivator as given in khatauni register: Abdur Rasheed Khan,’ read out the patwari.

‘How long has this been the case?’ asked Rasheed with difficulty, his mind racing almost too fast for his tongue. He looked painfully agitated and distressed.

Even now the patwari, who was not by any means a stupid man, suspected nothing. He said simply: ‘Ever since the land reform legislation became a possible threat, and your esteemed grandfather and father expressed their concern about eventualities, your servant has been diligently safeguarding your family’s interests. The lands of the family have been nominally subdivided among the various members, and all of you are down in my records as owner-cultivators. It is the safest way. Large individual landholdings look too suspicious. Of course, you have been away in Brahmpur studying, and these small matters are not of interest to a scholar of history –’

‘They are,’ said Rasheed grimly. ‘How much of our land is let out to tenants?’ he asked. '