‘I will not allow you to return to Salimpur tonight,’ Baba told Mahesh Kapoor flatly after they had completed the circuit. ‘You will eat with us and sleep here. Your son spent a month here, you will have to spend a day.’
Mahesh Kapoor knew when he had met superior force, and consented with good grace.
17.9
AFTER dinner, Baba took Maan aside. There was no privacy in the village itself, especially when such a tremendous event as the visit of a Minister was taking place. Baba got a torch and told Maan to put on something warm. They walked towards the school, talking along the way. Baba told Maan in brief about the incident of the patwari, how the family had got together to warn Rasheed, how he had refused to listen, how he had encouraged some of the chamars and other tenants to take matters up with revenue authorities higher than the patwari, and how his plans had backfired. Anyone who had dared to stray from the path of obedience had been thrown off his land. Rasheed, Baba said, had made troublemakers of some of their most faithful chamars, and he had shown no qualms about instigating this betrayal. The family had had no choice but to cut him off.
‘Even Kachheru – do you remember him?’ said Baba. ‘The man who pumped the water for your bath –’
Alas, Maan remembered all too well now what at Bakr-Id had eluded him, the identity of the man whom Baba had shoved aside on the way to the Idgah.
‘It’s not easy to find permanent people,’ continued Baba sadly. ‘The young people find ploughing difficult. Mud, effort, sun. But the older ones have done it since childhood.’
They had by now reached the great tank near the school. On the other side of the water was a small cemetery for the dead of the two villages. The whitewashed tombs stood out at night. Baba said nothing more for a while, and nor did Maan.
Remembering what Rasheed had once said about how generation succeeds generation in working mischief, Maan now murmured to himself with a bitter smile: ‘The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.’
Baba looked at him and frowned. ‘I don’t understand English,’ he said quietly. ‘We here are simple people. We do not have any great learning. But Rasheed treats us as if we are ignorant to the core. He writes us letters, threatening us and boasting of his own humanism. Everything has gone – logic, respect, decency; but his pride and his sense of self, lunatically, remain. When I read his letters I weep.’ He looked towards the school. ‘He had a classmate who became a dacoit. Even he treats his family with more respect.’
After a while he continued, looking past the school towards Sagal. ‘He says that we are deluded, that our god is money, that wealth and land is all we are interested in. That sick man whom he visited with you, Rasheed used to tell us we should help him, should support his legal rights, should make him start a court case against his brothers. Such madness, such unrealistic notions – to interfere in the family matters of others and bring about needless strife. Imagine what would have happened if we had taken his advice. The man is dead now but the feud between the villages would have gone on for ever.’
Maan said nothing; it was as if his mind was blocked. He hardly even registered the news of this death. His thoughts were still with that work-worn man who with such calm and cheerfulness used to pump water for his bath. Strange to think that even his paltry earnings had been undone by – by what? Perhaps by Maan’s own father. The two knew nothing of each other as individuals, but Kachheru was the saddest case of the evil practised under the act, and Mahesh Kapoor was almost directly responsible for his utter devastation, his reduction to the forsaken status of a landless labourer. Linked though they were in ‘this sense of the former’s guilt and the latter’s despair, if they were to pass each other in the street, thought Maan, neither would know the other.
No doubt the effect of the act would be substantially good, but that would be of no help to Kachheru. Nor, Maan realized, with a seriousness unusual in him, could he do anything about it. To intercede with Baba would be impossible, and to take it up with his father an unthinkable betrayal of trust. To have helped the old woman at the Fort – that was entirely another thing.
And Rasheed? Censorious, pitiable, worn out, torn between family shame and family pride, forced to choose between loyalty and justice, between trust and pity, what must he have been through? Was he too not a victim of the tragedy of the countryside, of the country itself? Maan tried to imagine the pressure and suffering he must have undergone.
But Baba was saying, as if he had read Maan’s thoughts: ‘You know, the boy is very disturbed. I don’t like to think of it. He has almost no friends in the city as far as we can tell, no one to talk to except those communists. Why don’t you talk to him and make him see sense? We don’t know how it has happened that he has become so strange, so incoherent. Someone said that he got hit on the head during a demonstration. Then we found out that that was not so. But perhaps, as his uncle says, the immediate cause is not important. Sooner or later, what does not bend will snap.’