Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

  Many of the carts were driven by very young boys, sitting on the very edge of their carts and smoking like men, allowing themselves to be bounced up and down a little more than was necessary, and handling the reins with something like dash: the labor still new and exciting, a proof of manhood. On a dreadful stretch of stony, half-made road we saw a narrow-backed boy of about ten pushing hard at a little handcart behind the horse cart of his father. The boy was having trouble. He leaned to one side of the cart and then to the other, making the handcart tack from side to side on the stony road.

  I asked Rana, “What will happen to that boy?”

  Rana said, “His future is lost.”

  After two hours of the shortcut—always villages, always jams—Rana said we would come back by the other road.

  At last we came to the little town that served the village. And then a while later to the village itself. Brick-walled plots; gutters on either side of the road; many pools for waste. Rana showed a building which he said was the girls’ school, but we didn’t stop. We drove on to the uncle’s house.

  He was waiting for us, and when we entered the outer courtyard where he received people we saw him. He was a fine-faced, slender man all in white except for the black shoes—white turban, white dhoti and koortah: country clothes—and with a well-trimmed white beard.

  The small house was at the end of the courtyard: a dirt-floored verandah with brick columns supporting the roof, and a wide dirt-floored room with concrete walls and wooden doors. There was a reed mat on the dust of the dirt floor in the verandah, and a string bed in the inner room. A ceiling fan hung from the timber ceiling; the crossbeams on which the ceiling rested looked like iron rails. A new bed frame, as yet unstrung, stood on its end against one wall. Big nails on a wall for clothes; two wall niches, one above the other.

  Two extra string beds were brought in for us by men who suddenly appeared. A string chair was brought in for Rana. A cousin in a dhoti and singlet, and with a towel over his bare shoulder, came in then and offered salted lassi, buttermilk. This serving cousin was much smaller than Rana or the uncle in white.

  A young boy, carefully dressed in a khaki-colored shalwar-kameez and black sandals, switched on the fan. It was too cool for the fan. We turned it off. The boy who had turned the fan on was another cousin. He was mentally defective. Rana told the story. When the boy was about a month old another cousin had accidentally dropped a block of ice on him; the boy had been like that ever since. And perhaps the ice had come from that ice factory Rana had mentioned.

  The boy had a booming voice he couldn’t control. He was full of attention for the visitors, and when he attempted to talk in his booming voice he became the center of attention, with Rana looking tenderly at him, and the uncle looking at him.

  Other people began to come, to pay their respects to Rana. The patwari, the man who kept the village land records, came on his motorbike. He was dressed formally, in an olive-gray shalwar-kameez suit. He was in his own way an important official; his position and duties had been defined in Mogul times. The taxes a landowner paid depended on the patwari’s records. But he wasn’t properly introduced, and he said nothing at all; he just stayed in the room.

  A high brick wall divided the outer courtyard, where visitors could be received, from the inner courtyard of the family house, where they couldn’t go. A little girl in a flowered green long dress peeped round the wall, as if to find out whether visitors had really come, as she might have been told. When she saw us she pulled back as if frightened. A neem tree grew on the other side of that wall, and smoke rose from a fire of some sort in the inner courtyard.

  A loudspeaker voice came nearer and nearer down the main village road. The loudspeaker was on a van selling blankets for winter.

  Our driver, the garment-maker, was stretched out on one of the string beds, absolutely at ease now after the hard drive. It was as though he knew the village, knew Rana’s uncle, the house, the bed itself. He talked to Rana about his garment business and his dream of exporting. Then, through Rana, he talked to me: he thought I could help, spread the word about him. His Urdu was spattered with unexpected English words: “designs,” “latest designs,” “fashion design,” “total design,” “models.”

  The loudspeaker could be heard returning. No words now, only film music.

  A hookah was brought in. The worked brass bowl, sharply flattened out at the bottom, rested on small legs.

  Among all these cousins anxious to attend and serve, Rana was indeed like a prince. He did not let his relations down. His manners were perfect. He was a stage or two higher than they were, or perhaps four or five stages higher.

  A cousin brought a gun and cartridges, and offered shooting. Rana explained what the cousin had in mind. There was “jungle” nearby, “jungle” here, as elsewhere in the subcontinent, meaning not thick tropical forest, but a simpler kind of wilderness. The gun and the cartridges were like fine artifacts in the bare, dirt-floored room, a touch of luxury, like the hookah, something for the visitors. But they were also a tribute to Rana’s uncle. He farmed two hundred acres, all in sugarcane, and four hundred people worked for him. He meant by that, Rana said, that those people were available for him; he could use them as he needed them.

  Cocks began to crow outside, though it was past midday, and there was the chatter of children. A little boy in a black suit, already dusty, came and stood in the doorway.

  Our lunch was now ready. The middle string bed was manhandled and placed end up against the wall. From the house in the inner courtyard brightly colored cushions and two proper chairs were brought out, and a low table with a patterned Formica top. When the man or boy lifted the table into the room, the simple wooden frame of the table showed below the pretty Formica top, and some of the big new nails that had been driven clean through both the Formica top and the wooden frame. And suddenly there were lots of extra hands, lots of people doing things. A tablecloth or spread—a yellow floral spray on a dark red ground—was set on the Formica table; they tried to flatten it out, but the ridges and dips of the folds remained. Rana said, “Hand-stitched.” And when the china and tray were brought out, more and more hands appearing as they were needed, Rana said, “These things are being brought out for us.” As though he didn’t want the courtesy of his family to be unnoticed or to be taken for granted.

  Whole fried eggs, each in a china saucer, a plate of mango pickle; a basket of whole-wheat parathas wrapped in cloth to keep them warm; milky tea, already sugared, in a china pot. The parathas were done in village-made ghee or clarified butter; the wheat, though ground in a mill somewhere else, was from the fields around us.

  Rana said, “You might want to wash your hands.”

  We did that outside, standing near the brick wall. One cousin poured water from a jug for us. Only the visitors ate. The others sat or attended on us. The more important among our hosts sat. One man simply stood holding the water jug.

  The food was as good as it looked. We washed our hands again. And then it was time to go to the fields, to do the shooting that had been promised us. Another gun had appeared, as well cared for as the first.

  The brick house next door, blank-walled, with a door from the lane, was the house of a relation of Rana’s. Opposite was the smaller mud house of laborers. It was more open, and two or three people were lying on string beds in the shade. Once these people would have been the landlords’ workers; now they were self-employed.

  In the lane the dust was thick. The gutters, on both sides, were green with the flow from buffalo or cow pens. In one yard a woman was cleaning a drain with her hands; the muck lay thick and green on her hands up to the wrist.

  The fields began just outside the village. From time to time we saw, from far away, small groups of women, three or four in a group, coming from the fields towards the village. They looked festive in the distance, like part of a wedding procession. Their clothes were red and yellow, and the baskets on their heads were covered with bright red cloths: they might ha
ve been baskets of flowers or ceremonial offerings. Near to, the women were small, thin, sunburnt: no connection, it seemed, between them and the colors they wore. Sometimes they hid the lower part of their face with their headcover. Not part of a wedding procession; they were only laborers coming back from the fields. Bright colors were worn by unmarried women, Rana said; married women wore duller colors.

  We saw a new brick house a little way ahead, in the middle of the fields. This was a school. One of Rana’s uncles had given the land. But there was no teacher for this school or for the other three schools in the village, including the school for girls that Rana had pointed out when we had arrived. No male teacher wanted to come to the village, Rana said, because of the “environment.” Village life had pleasures only for people who belonged there; it held nothing for outsiders. And women didn’t want to come and teach in the village because they were frightened of being kidnapped by the big landlords; though, as I had seen, Rana said, the landlords of this village, who were his relations, were good and kind. And the school building, when we came closer to it, turned out to be less than a shell. It had no roof and no walls at the back.

  We walked on the bunds or low walls between the sunken fields. Occasionally we jumped across little ditches. It was early November, cool, with a slight breeze. The fields were varied: nearly ripe sugarcane, tall but not yet ready for cutting; fields of young maize. Wheat fields had been harvested. Cotton fields from a distance looked like fields of white and pink roses, with the pink of the cotton flowers and the white of the cotton. Some fields still had their stubble; others had been ploughed and flooded. How long would they stay flooded? Rana asked someone of the party, and the answer was that the field would be flooded for three or four days, and then the water from the irrigation channel would be turned off. Rana asked, “How is the irrigation done in England?” And if this flat part of the Punjab was all that you knew it would have been hard to imagine a country where agriculture depended only on rain.

  We were now far from the village. Yet the fields were never absolutely empty. There were laborers going home. Tiny donkeys, half hidden by their great wide loads of grass, were sure-footed on the trampled-and-dried bunds. Sometimes mongrel dogs stood a field or two away and watched us. They were not at ease, and the whistles of our party made them nervous. They feared the cruelties associated with those whistles; they kept their distance.

  Once we passed what looked like a small village: a cluster of mud or brick dwellings with dung cakes on the walls. It wasn’t a village, Rana said. It was the house and outbuildings and pens of one branch of the family. They had quarreled with the main branch of the family; they preferred now not to “talk,” and they lived here by themselves. A two-stroke engine chattered away in the verandah: a machine chopping up grass for the animals. Rana said, “The modern world.” And, in spite of the family quarrel, he waved at the man and boy looking after the chopping machine.

  I had thought we were walking to the “jungle” for the shooting. But at a certain stage Rana sent two of our party to a sugarcane field, and they began to cut canes. We left them doing that, and we walked on. Rana pointed to a house below trees some distance away and said we were going there. There was a grinding mill there. We would grind the canes and have fresh cane juice.

  We walked on and on, always seeing people. Once we saw a whole family, five or six people, squatting in a field and cutting tall grass. A small barebacked boy was among the grass-cutters; he was about five, and, child-like, he stood up in the tall grass to see us. The rest of the family kept their heads down, cutting.

  I said to Rana, “Do they really need the labor of the little boy?”

  Rana said, “It is hard to cut grass.”

  We were now near the house and the trees Rana had pointed to. We left the bund and struck across a bare field, wet in the depressions, but elsewhere caking and cracked. The dogs of the house began to bark. But they didn’t show themselves, and it was some time before I saw them among the buffalos.

  The cane-grinding machine was on a slight rise and near a shade tree. A small pile of bleached, sun-dried cane husk showed that someone else had been there perhaps a week or so before. Irrigation water made a pond and separated us from the house with the buffalos and the dogs and the shade trees; dung cakes were drying on the top of the outer mud wall.

  The two cane-cutters came up, the master cutter holding the knife, the assistant carrying the long cut canes on his shoulder. A string bed was brought over from the house. We, the visitors, were made to sit on it in the thin, scattered shade of the tree and watch the others get the grinding machine ready. One of the men with the guns spotted a gray, yellow-tinted bird on a tree about forty or fifty feet away. The bird was on the very end of a branch, as though it wanted to look at us and what we were doing. The man took aim; a dreadful bang; but the bird flew away unharmed; and no further shot was fired. The guns were forgotten. All energy went now into preparing the cane juice.

  The grinding machine was cleaned with water from the pond. The long peeled bough that was to push the grinder was found; one end was fitted into the slot for it. This bough could also have rested as a yoke on the necks of two bullocks, and the bullocks would then have moved in a small circle and turned the grinder. But now some of the men of our party were to do the pushing; while two others were to sit at the grinder and feed in the cut canes. Someone from the house came to help, and the grinding began. It was a joke for the party: three men pushing the yoke as though they were bullocks, with the two men feeding in the canes ducking low, even while they squatted, every time the yoke made a circle.

  At last a whole jugful of the juice was ready. It was gray, warm, with no pronounced flavor; possibly a deeper flavor would come after a while. Rana drank a tumblerful, a cousin standing with the cane-juice jug as he had stood with the same jug, when it held water, while we were having lunch. The garment-maker drank. Then the others drank.

  Our entertainment was over. There was no shooting. We began to make our way back. In the cities of the subcontinent cane juice could be had from stalls with simple hand-turned grinders. For a version of that everyday pleasure, for the sake of drinking fresh cane juice in the fields, a whole train of people had put themselves at Rana’s service; and perhaps some part of the pleasure lay in the ceremony, the crowd, the memory of old times. I asked Rana whether he had gone shooting with his father when they came to the village when he was a child. He said no; he had been too young. His pleasures in the village had been the pleasures of looking. He would go into the fields on his own and look.

  He was in white jama or loose trousers and brown-gold long coat. The style was princely. It appeared more so in the fields. In my own eyes he had been growing in elegance and graciousness. He had no land now, but the people served him willingly still. It was service like that over many years that had given him the idea and pride that he was a Rajput.

  It was possible to understand what he had said about the twin personalities he had in the city. The Lahore lawyer in the black suit and black tie felt the law as a daily humiliation; he had expected, in his grand profession, a higher form of the courtesies of his village. The man who was divided in this way was impatient at everything that didn’t work in his country. He always said “in my country”; he never said “in Pakistan.” In his moodiness he had become part of a great underground rage that few of the politicians yet understood.

  From far away we could hear the loudspeakers in the village. They were not selling blankets now. They were the loudspeakers of the mosque, and the preacher was speaking, Rana said, of the virtues that could come to people living simple lives, such as the people of the village; though for the children of the village, as Rana might have said, the future was something already lost.

  As we entered the village a boy in ocher-colored clothes was throwing earth at a tethered donkey, and the tormented animal was kicking back.

  Rana went to the inner courtyard of his uncle’s house to say good-bye to the women of his un
cle’s family. We had seen nothing of them, apart from the girl in the green dress right at the beginning, who had peeped from a safe oblique distance at the strangers, and had scooted.

  Towards Lahore and the two sides of his personality we then went. We went by the other road, not the shortcut. There were as many villages on this road as on the shortcut. But there was an asphalted strip. It was wide enough for only one vehicle, and that made for delays. But it was the easier way. Rana had said it would take an hour and a half. It took two.

  4

  GUERRILLA

  IN 1945, at the end of the war, when Shahbaz’s father was demobbed from the British Indian army, he thought he would settle in England. This was the kind of thing that some Indian princes did before the war; their money and their titles gave them a kind of exotic dignity, even if India was a colony. It was perhaps in Shahbaz’s father’s mind that the coming independence of India and Pakistan would give an equivalent dignity to a Muslim settler in England. Other Muslims from the subcontinent thought so, too; they distrusted independence for various reasons, and saw residence in England, a land of law, as a way out.

  So, though Shahbaz was born in the year after independence, he hadn’t grown up without colonial and racial stress. He had gone to both primary school and public school in England, and he had suffered especially at the public school. He was the only Asian, the only Muslim, the only one who didn’t eat pork and go to the chapel. It didn’t help when his father became insolvent. For three terms Shahbaz’s fees couldn’t be paid, and it seemed at one time that he would be asked to leave. That didn’t happen, but it made Shahbaz feel separated from his friends.