‘I immediately unleashed an avalanche of questions. How did he reach here? How did he get wounded? How long had he been lying on the footpath? Should I inform the hospital close by?
‘He didn’t have the strength to answer. When I had finished all my questions, all he could do was utter these words: “My time has come — it is God’s will.”’
‘I didn’t know what was God’s will but I knew what was clearly unacceptable to me: that I a Muslim should be standing in an all-Muslim neighbourhood to watch a man die — a man I knew to be a Hindu — knowing fully well that whoever had attacked him must have been a Muslim and I who stood beside him as he lay at Death’s door was also a Muslim. I am not a coward but at that moment I was more scared than any coward I know. I was terrified that I would be caught with a dying man, and even if I were not charged I would, at the very least, be arrested and interrogated. I thought of taking him to the hospital, but I hesitated: what if he were to falsely implicate me, just in order to take revenge on whoever had so grievously injured him? After all, Sahay knew he was dying; what did he have to lose? I was about to go — you might as well say I was about to flee — when Sahay called my name. I stopped. I didn’t want to stay, yet I stopped. I looked at him as though I was saying: hurry up and die; I have to go.
‘Doubling up with pain, he unbuttoned his bloodied shirt and put his hand inside. The effort exhausted him and he could do no more. He said to me, “Look under my vest. You will find some jewellery and twelve hundred rupees … They belong to Sultana … I had left them with a friend for safekeeping … I had gone to get them back … I wanted to send them to Sultana because … as you know … every day it is getting more and more unsafe … Take them … Give them to Sultana … Tell her to leave … immediately … and you … you look after yourself.”’
Mumtaz finished his story and lapsed into silence. I began to imagine that his voice and Sahay’s voice — that had last been heard on a footpath beside the J. J. Hospital — were becoming one just like the sea and the sky were meeting in a hazy embrace on the distant horizon.
The ship blew its whistle and Mumtaz said, ‘I went to meet Sultana. I gave her the money and the jewels and watched her eyes fill up with tears.’
We said our farewells and got off the ship. Mumtaz stood on the deck, waving his right hand. I said to Jugal, ‘Don’t you get the feeling that Mumtaz is beckoning the spirit of Sahay, asking him to accompany him?’
Jugal said, ‘I wish I was Sahay’s spirit.’
THE CANDLE’S TEARS
Planted in the grubby niche in the peeling wall, the candle had cried all night long.
Wax had fallen on the damp floor, scattering like milky frozen droplets. Little Lajo had been crying for a pearl necklace. Her mother strung the candle’s waxen tears on a string and made a necklace for her. Lajo placed the string of wax pearls around her neck gleefully and went out, clapping her hands with joy.
Night fell. A fresh candle was lit in the grime-encrusted niche. Its one-eyed light took in the room’s darkness and for an instant flickered brightly with surprise. But after some time, as it grew used to its grim surroundings, it began to look all round with a steady unblinking gaze.
Little Lajo lay fast asleep on a cot, fighting with her friend Bindu in her dreams, telling her vehemently that she would not marry off her doll to Bindu’s boy-doll because he was terribly ugly.
Lajo’s mother stood at the window, looking yearningly at the mud splattered on the silent and dimly lit street. Across the road, hanging from an iron pole, a lantern dozed like a sleepy watchman in the cold December night. Directly in front of her, on the stoop of a closed restaurant, embers from a half-dead fire, flared fitfully like wilful children, and fell in little, unexpected showers. The clock tower struck twelve in a sleepy haze; the last note shivered briefly in the December night, then pulled the blanket of silence over itself and went to sleep. The sweet song of sleep sighed in Lajo’s mother’s ears but by then her nerves had already relayed another message to her brain.
Like a chilly blast of air, the sound of tinkling bells reached her ears. To hear the sound fully well, she concentrated with all her will power.
In the stillness of the night, the bells sounded like the last bit of breath left rattling in a dying man’s throat. Lajo’s mother sat down with satisfaction. Soon, the tired neighing of a horse rent the silent night and a tonga came and stood beside the lantern. Its coachman got off, patted his horse and looked towards the window. The blinds on the window were rolled up and he could see the shadowy figure inside.
The coachman wrapped his coarse blanket snugly around himself and put his hand in his pocket. He had three and a half rupees, of which he kept aside a rupee and four annas for himself and the rest he hid beneath the cushion on the tonga’s front seat. Then he moved towards the stairs going up to the brothel.
Lajo’s mother, Chando Sunyari, got up to open the door.
The coachman, Madho, came in, bolted the door and clasped Chando Sunyari to his bosom.
‘God knows how much I love you! Had I met you in my youth, my horse and cart would have been sold off long ago,’ and with that he placed one rupee in her hand.
Chando Sunyari asked, ‘Is that all?’
‘Here, take this too,’ and he placed a silver anna in her other hand. ‘I swear on your life, this is all I have.’
The horse stood neighing softly in the cold night. And the lantern atop its pole dozed on, as before.
Madho lay on the iron cot, dead to the world. Beside him Chando Sunyari lay with her eyes wide open, looking at the drops of molten wax as they fell on the damp floor and froze into small milky balls. Suddenly, like a woman possessed, she flew out of her bed and went to sit beside Lajo’s bed. Drops of wax trembled on Lajo’s chest. To Chando Sunyari’s bleary eyes it seemed as though her Lajo’s childhood crouched, hidden among those drops of frozen tears. She raised a trembling hand and plucked the wax beads from Lajo’s throat.
The thread slipped from the nearly-empty puddle of molten wax in the niche and fell to the floor, where it promptly went to sleep in its stony embrace. Now, the room became not just quiet but dark too.
THE MAKER OF MARTYRS
I am a native of Gujarat, Kathiawad to be precise. And a Bania by caste. I was at a loose end last year during the tanta of Partition. Forgive me for using the word tanta, though there is nothing wrong in using this word. Urdu must get words from other languages, even if it is Gujarati.