‘You were placed to guard that route. You were not intended to come over the ridge and hunt in some other place that you decided was more promising. One of us might have been killed. It might have been you.’
The man said nothing. He knew that what he and his companion had just done was inexcusable. He looked at his companion, who shrugged.
Suddenly, Maan felt a wave of disappointment wash over him. He turned away with a shake of the head, and walked back to where his rifle and water bottle were standing. Sandeep and the others had gathered beneath a tree and were discussing the beat. Sandeep was using his sola topi to fan his face. He still looked shaken.
‘The real problem,’ said someone, ‘is that wood there. It’s too close to the exit. Otherwise we could get about ten more marksmen and spread them in a very wide arc — there — and there, say—’
‘Well, at any rate,’ said someone else, ‘they’ve had a bad shock. We’ll flush this ravine out again next week. Only two wolves — I’d hoped that there’d be more of them here today.’ He pulled a biscuit out of his pocket and munched it.
‘Oh, so you think they’ll be here next week awaiting your pleasure?’
‘We set out too late,’ said yet another. ‘Early morning’s the best time.’
Maan stood apart from them, struggling with a rush of overwhelming feelings — unbearably tense and unbearably slack at the same time.
He took a drink from his water bottle and looked at the rifle from which he had not fired a single shot. He felt exhausted, frustrated, and betrayed by events. He would not join in their pointless post-mortem. And indeed a post-mortem was — in a literal sense — unjustified.
10.6
But later that afternoon Maan heard some good news. One of Sandeep’s visitors mentioned that a reliable colleague of his had told him that the Nawab Sahib and his two sons had passed through Rudhia and gone to Baitar with the intention of staying at the Fort for a few days.
Maan’s heart leapt up. The lustreless images of his father’s farm vanished from his mind. They were replaced by thoughts both of a proper hunt (with horses) on the Baitar Estate and — even more delightfully — of news from Firoz about Saeeda Bai. Ah, thought Maan, the pleasures of the chase! He got his few things together, borrowed a couple of novels from Sandeep — to make his exile in Debaria more bearable — went off to the station, and caught the first possible train along the slow and halting branch line to Baitar.
I wonder if Firoz delivered it personally, he said to himself. He must have! And I shall find out what she said to him when she read his letter — my letter, rather — and discovered that Dagh Sahib, driven desperate by his absence from her and his own inability to communicate, had used the Nawabzada himself as translator, scribe and emissary. And what did she make of my reference to Dagh’s lines:
It is you who wrong me, and then you who ask:
Dear Sir, please tell me, how do you fare today?
He got off at Baitar Station and hired a rickshaw to the Fort. Since he was dressed in crushed clothes (yet further crumpled from the hot and crowded train journey) and was unshaven, the rickshaw-wallah looked at him and his bag and asked:
‘Meeting someone there?’
‘Yes,’ said Maan, who did not consider his question an impertinence. ‘The Nawab Sahib.’
The rickshaw-wallah laughed at Maan’s sense of humour. ‘Very good, very good,’ he said.
After a while he asked:
‘What do you think of our town of Baitar?’
Maan said, hardly thinking of his words: ‘It’s a nice town. Looks like a nice town.’
The rickshaw-wallah said: ‘It was a nice town — before the cinema hall was built. Now what with the dancing girls and singing girls on the screen and all that loving and wiggling and so on’—he swerved to avoid a pothole in the road—‘it’s become an even nicer town.’
The rickshaw-wallah went on: ‘Nice from the point of view of decency, nice from the point of view of villainy. Baitar, Baitar, Baitar, Baitar.’ He puffed out the words in rhythm to his pedal strokes. ‘That — that building with the green signboard — is the hospital, as good as the district hospital in Rudhia. It was established by the present Nawab’s father or grandfather. And that is Lal Kothi, which was used as a hunting lodge by the Nawab Sahib’s great-grandfather — but is now surrounded by the town. And that’—for, as they rounded a built-up corner of the road they all at once came within sight of a massive, pale yellow building towering on its small hill above a muddle of whitewashed houses—‘that is Baitar Fort itself.’
It was a vast and impressive building, and Maan looked at it admiringly.
‘But Panditji wants to take it away and give it to the poor people,’ said the rickshaw-wallah, ‘once zamindari is abolished.’
Needless to say, Pandit Nehru — in distant Delhi, with a few other matters to think of — had no such plan. Nor did the Purva Pradesh Zamindari Abolition Bill — now only a presidential signature away from becoming an act — plan to take over forts or residences or even the self-managed land of the zamindars. But Maan let it go.
‘What do you stand to gain from all this?’ he asked the rickshaw-wallah.
‘I? Nothing! Nothing at all, nothing at all. Not here, anyway. Now if I could get a room, that would be fine. If I could get two, that would be even better; I would rent one out to some other poor fool and live off the sweat of his efforts. Otherwise I will continue to pedal my rickshaw during the day and sleep on it at night.’
‘But what do you do during the monsoon?’ asked Maan.
‘Oh, I find some shelter somewhere — Allah provides, Allah provides, and He will provide as He has always done.’
‘Is the Nawab Sahib popular in these parts?’ asked Maan.
‘Popular? He’s the sun and moon put together!’ said the rickshaw-wallah. ‘And so are the young Nawabzadas, especially Chhoté Sahib. Everyone likes his temperament. And what handsome figures of men. You should see them when they are together: truly a sight to behold. The old Nawab Sahib with one son on either hand. Like the Viceroy and his officers.’
‘But if they are so well liked, why do people want to take over their estates?’
‘Why not?’ said the rickshaw-wallah. ‘People want to get land wherever they can. In my village, where my wife and family live, we have worked our land for many years — since my father’s uncle’s time. But we still have to pay rent to the Nawab Sahib — to his bloodsucker of a munshi. Why should we pay rent? Tell me. We have watered it with our sweat for fifty years, it should be our land, we should own it.’
When they got to the huge, wooden, brass-studded gate in the wall of Baitar Fort, the rickshaw-wallah asked him for twice the normal fare. Maan argued for a minute, since the amount asked was clearly unreasonable; then, feeling bad for the rickshaw-wallah, he took out what he had asked for — plus another four annas — from his kurta pocket and gave it to him.
The rickshaw-wallah went off, well satisfied with his judgement that Maan was slightly crazy. Perhaps he had really imagined he was going to meet the Nawab Sahib. Poor chap, poor chap.
10.7
The porter at the gate took a similar view of things and told Maan to clear off. He had described Maan to the munshi, and the munshi had issued the instructions.