The children looked on, thrilled and enthralled. They especially enjoyed the sacrifice itself and later the spilling out of the grey-pink guts. Now they stared as the front quarters were set aside for the family, and the rest of the body chopped into sections across the ribs and placed on the scales on the verandah to be balanced. Rasheed’s father was in charge of the distribution.
The poor children — who got to eat meat very rarely — crowded forward to get their share. Some clustered around the scales and grabbed at the chunks of meat, others tried to but were pushed back; most of the girls sat quietly in one place, and eventually got served. Some of the women, including the wives of the chamars, appeared to be very shy and could hardly bring themselves to come forward to accept the meat. Eventually they carried it off in their hands, or on bits of cloth or paper, praising and thanking the Khan Sahib for his generosity or complaining about their share as they walked to the next house to receive their portion of its sacrifice.
14.24
The previous evening’s meal had been hurried because of the preparations for Bakr-Id; but today’s late afternoon meal was relaxed. The tastiest dish was one made from the liver, kidneys and tripe of the goat that had just been slaughtered. Then the charpoys were shifted under the neem tree beneath which the goat had earlier been quietly browsing.
Maan, Baba and his two sons, Qamar — the sarcastic schoolteacher from Salimpur — as well as Rasheed’s uncle, the Bear, were all present for lunch. The talk turned naturally to Rasheed. The Bear asked Maan how he was doing.
‘Actually, I haven’t seen him since I returned to Brahmpur,’ confessed Maan. ‘He has been so busy with his tuitions, I suppose, and I myself with one thing and another—’
It was a feeble excuse, but Maan had not neglected his friend by intention. It was just the way things happened to be in his life.
‘I did hear that he was involved in the student Socialist Party,’ said Maan. ‘With Rasheed, though, there’s no fear that he’ll neglect his studies.’ Maan did not mention Saeeda Bai’s remark about Rasheed.
Maan noticed that only the Bear seemed truly concerned about Rasheed. After a while, and long after the conversation had passed on to other matters, he said: ‘Everything he does he does too seriously. His hair will be white before he’s thirty unless someone teaches him to laugh.’
Everyone was constrained when talking about Rasheed. Maan felt this acutely; but since no one — not even Rasheed himself — had told him how he had disgraced himself, he could not understand it. When Rasheed had read Saeeda Bai’s letter to him, Maan, being denied an early return to Brahmpur, had been seized with such restlessness that he had very shortly afterwards set out on a trek. Perhaps it was his own preoccupation that had blinded him to the tension in the family of his friend.
14.25
Netaji planned to hold a party the next night — a feast of meat for which he had another goat handy — in honour of various people of importance in the subdivision: police and petty administration officials and so on. He was trying to persuade Qamar to get the headmaster of his school in Salimpur to come. Qamar not only flatly refused, but made no secret of his contempt for Netaji’s transparent attempts to ingratiate himself with the worthy and the influential. Throughout the afternoon Qamar found some way or other of needling Netaji. At one point he turned to Maan with newfound friendliness and said, ‘I suppose that when your father was here, he was unable to shake off our Netaji.’
‘Well,’ said Maan, resisting a smile, ‘Baba and he very kindly showed my father around Debaria.’
‘I thought it might be something like that,’ said Qamar. ‘He was having tea with me in Salimpur when he heard from a friend of mine, who had dropped in, that the great Mahesh Kapoor was visiting his own native village. Well, that was the end of tea with me. Netaji knows which cups of tea contain more sugar. He’s as smart as the flies on Baba’s sputum.’
Netaji, affecting to be above such crude taunts, and still hopeful that he might be able to bag the headmaster, refused to get outwardly annoyed, and Qamar retired, disappointed.
Not long after this late lunch Maan took a rickshaw to Salimpur in order to catch the train back to Baitar. He didn’t want to arrive after Firoz had left. Although it was easier for Firoz, given his profession, to get away from Brahmpur than it was for Imtiaz, he might well turn out to have some date in court or some urgent call from a senior for a conference that would cut short his visit.
An attractive young woman with hennaed feet was singing a song to herself in the local accent as the rickshaw passed her. Maan caught just a few lines as he turned around to get a glimpse of her unveiled face:
‘O, husband, you can go but get me something from the fair—
Vermilion to overfill the parting in my hair.
Bangles from Firozabad, jaggery to eat—
And sandals made by Praha for my henna-coloured feet.’
She gave Maan a glance that was at once amused and angry as he gazed at her without embarrassment, and the memory of her look kept him in good spirits all the way to Salimpur Station.
14.26
Nehru’s coup was not followed by wholesale subservience to his desires.
In Delhi, in Parliament, opposition by MPs from all sections of the House, including his own, forced him to abandon his attempt to pass the Hindu Code Bill. This legislation, very dear to the Prime Minister’s heart — and to that of his Law Minister, Dr Ambedkar — aimed to make the laws of marriage, divorce, inheritance and guardianship more rational and just, especially to women.
Nor were the more orthodox Hindu legislators by any means on the defensive in the Legislative Assembly at Brahmpur. L.N. Agarwal had sponsored a bill that would make Hindi the state language from the beginning of the new year, and the Muslim legislators were rising one by one to appeal to him and to the Chief Minister and to the House to protect the status of Urdu. Mahesh Kapoor, who had returned to Brahmpur from the countryside, took no active part in the debate, but Abdus Salaam, his former Parliamentary Secretary, did make a couple of brief interventions.
Begum Abida Khan, of course, was at her oratorical best:
Begum Abida Khan: It is all very well for the honourable Minister to take the name of Gandhiji when espousing the cause of Hindi. I have nothing against Hindi, but why does he not agree to protect the status of Urdu, the second language of this province, and the mother tongue of the Muslims? Does the honourable Minister imagine that the Father of the Nation, who was willing to give his life to protect the minority community, would countenance a bill like the present one which will cause our community and our culture and our very livelihood to die a lingering death? The sudden enforcement of Hindi in the Devanagari script has closed the doors of government service on the Muslims. They cannot compete with those whose language is Hindi. This has created a first-class economic crisis among the Muslims — many of whom depend on the services for their livelihood. All of a sudden they have to face the strange music of the P.P. Official Language Bill. It is a sin to take the name of Gandhiji in this context. I appeal to your humanity, you who have shot us and hunted us down in our houses, do not be the author of further miseries for us.