She turned her face away in disgust. ‘No, don’t bring him in front of me … he has offended me grievously.’ Once again her throat caught. Sitting on the marble step, her elbow touching the cold stone floor, she tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress the pain that seemed to well up from deep inside her.
By now, I was out of my mind with worry. A robust young woman was crying in front of me and I could do nothing to stop her. Once when I had driven that same old Asghar’s car, I had blown the horn to miss a dog in front of me. The horn had got stuck and its sound had become a never-ending scream. No matter how hard I tried, the horn wouldn’t stop screaming. People turned to stare and I had kept sitting, helplessly.
Thank God, there was no one else on the roof except Sharda and me. But my helplessness at that moment was greater than at the time of the incident of the horn. A woman sat crying in front of me, a woman who had been hurt very badly.
Had it been any other woman, I would have done my duty and gone away, but Sharda was the daughter of an acquaintance and I had known her since she was a baby.
She was a very nice girl, somewhat less pretty than her three younger sisters but certainly more intelligent.
She was good at reading and sewing. And last year when we had heard that she had lost her husband barely eleven months after her marriage, we had been much saddened. The grief of losing her husband must have been intense, but this pain, caused by my immoral friend, was of a totally different sort, one that I could see was causing her such distress.
I tried once again to quieten her. I sat on the marble step beside her and said, ‘Sharda devi, it isn’t seemly to go on crying like this. Go down and try to forget whatever it is that has happened. That wretch was drunk, or else, believe me, he is not such a wicked fellow. God knows what happens to him once he is drunk!’
Sharda’s tears did not stop.
I had an inkling of what Asghar must have done, for men usually have only one approach — through the body — but I wanted to hear from Sharda’s own mouth the exact nature of bestiality that Asghar had perpetrated on her. And so, I spoke to her sympathetically, ‘I don’t know exactly what discourtesy he has shown you, but I can attempt a guess. Why had you come up here?’
Sharda spoke in a quavering voice, ‘I was sleeping in the room downstairs … two women started talking about me.’
And her voice got muffled in her throat.
I asked, ‘What were they saying about you?’
Sharda rested her face against the cool marble slab and began to cry loudly. I softly patted her broad shoulders. ‘Hush, Sharda … quiet … shhh.’
In between large tearful hiccups, she choked, ‘They were saying … that … why has that widow been called here?’ And as she said the word “widow”, she thrust one corner of her tear-drenched dupatta in her mouth. ‘I heard these words and left the room to come up to the roof … and ….’
Her words made me sad. How cruel women can be, especially older women! Regardless of whether someone’s wounds are fresh or old, how gleefully they scrape them! I took Sharda’s hand in mine and pressed it with the deepest, most heartfelt sympathy. ‘One should never pay any heed to such things.’
She began to bawl like a baby. ‘That is precisely what I had told myself … then I fell asleep on the terrace … Your friend came and pulled at my dupatta … he opened the buttons of my kurta and…’
The buttons of her kurta were still undone.
‘Let it be, Sharda. Forget whatever happened.’ I plucked the handkerchief from my pocket and began to wipe her tears.
A corner of her wet dupatta was still in her mouth; she had clenched it tighter between her teeth. I pulled it out of her mouth. She wrapped its wet corner around her fingers and asked despairingly, ‘Your friend molested me because I am a widow, isn’t it? He must have thought who’s there to protest this woman?’
‘No, Sharda, no,’ and I pulled her head to rest against my shoulder. ‘Forget whatever he thought, or what he did, and quieten down now.’
I wanted to sing her a lullaby and put her to sleep.
I had wiped her eyes a minute ago, but they glistened with fresh tears. Once again, I pulled out a corner of the dupatta that she had once again put in her mouth, and wiped her tears. Then, softly, I kissed both her eyes.
‘Enough! Don’t cry any more now.’
Sharda nudged her head against my breast. I patted her cheek gently, ‘Enough, enough, enough.’
Sometime later when I came down, Sharda stood on the marble steps with her mulmul dupatta swaying in the balmy breeze of a late March morning. Asghar’s misbehaviour entirely forgotten, she felt light as a feather. The shock and pain in her heart had been replaced by pleasure and excitement.
SAHAY
Don’t say one lakh Hindus and one lakh Muslims have died; say two lakh human beings have died. As a matter of fact, it isn’t such a tragedy that two lakh people have died. The real tragedy is that those who killed and those who got killed failed to move from one account to another. After killing one lakh Hindus, the Muslims must have thought that Hinduism is dead. But the Hindu religion is alive and shall always remain. Similarly, after killing one lakh Muslims, the Hindus must have been jubilant, believing that they have wiped off Islam. But the truth is before all of you — you know there isn’t so much as a scratch upon Islam. Only fools believe that they can hunt down religions with guns. Religion, faith, belief, conscience — they live in our soul, not in our bodies. They can never be destroyed with knives and swords and guns.
That day Mumtaz was filled with a strange fervour. The three of us had gone to see him off at the ship. He was leaving us — no one knew for how long — and going away to Pakistan, to a country that none of us knew anything about.
The three of us were Hindus. We had relatives in west Punjab who had borne loss of lives and property. And perhaps that was why Mumtaz was leaving us today. Jugal had received a letter from Lahore saying he had lost his uncle in the riots. The news had devastated him. One day, in the middle of an ordinary conversation, Jugal had said to Mumtaz, ‘You know, I have been wondering what I would do if we have riots in our neighbourhood.’
Mumtaz had asked, ‘What will you do?’
Jugal had answered with complete seriousness, ‘I have been thinking, you know, that I just might kill you.’
Mumtaz had heard this and become completely silent; his silence had lasted almost eight days till he abruptly broke the news to us that he was leaving for Karachi by the 3.45 steamer. The three of us did not probe the reasons for his sudden departure. Jugal was acutely aware that his statement — ‘I have been thinking, y’know, that I just might kill you’ — might be the reason. And perhaps that was why he was the quietest of the lot. However, strangely enough, Mumtaz had become uncharacteristically talkative, almost garrulous a few hours before his departure.
He had been drinking since morning. He finished his packing in a carefree manner as though he was off on a pleasure trip, chattered non- stop and laughed at his own jokes. If someone were to see him in that state they would think he was thrilled to be leaving Bombay. But the three of us knew he was trying to fool us — and himself — by hiding his true feelings.
I tried several times to ask him why he had suddenly decided to leave. I made signs to Jugal, urging him to introduce the subject. But Mumtaz didn’t give us the slightest opportunity to do so.
Jugal downed three or four pegs, becoming quieter than ever till he finally went to the other room to lie down. Brijmohan and I stayed with Mumtaz while he went about settling his accounts. He chattered and laughed as he paid the doctor’s bills and retrieved his clothes from the laundry. But when he bought a paan from Govind’s corner shop, his eyes welled up. He put a hand on Brijmohan’s shoulder as he turned away and said, ‘Remember, Brij, ten years ago when times were lean, Govind had loaned us one rupee.’