TFQM - APRIL 2012
them had died, and many had left seeking shelter, and safety elsewhere. Now the volume of dwellings remained the same, but the number of dwellers had been reduced drastically. Our father was perhaps the only significant man of some stature there. We were no force, but a mere bundle of souls, in case there was any assault. And we, the children, only amassed more fears. We had no Hindu neighbours. The Muslims and us, we lived adjacently without being identical. Father was in such distress, that he hardly slept by night. The echoes of his wooden slippers treading noisily on the rude floor penetrated the still curtains of the children’s sleep like the light of the hunter’s moon. As it is, peace and mistrust are strange bedfellows. And an unfamiliar mistrust had made its abode in Father’s mind. His life was mortgaged to his religious culture. In those days, we learned how they, the hunters of us deer-like escapees, were infused with passion like maenads. A fantastic magic of religious identity in politics made them a menace to the Hindus by and large. It seemed that we had died before our deaths. We had become cowards, as the definition goes. Even a youthful banana plant shaking its head in the wind in the stifling darkness outside filled us with panic. The shrill, intermittent chorus of Allah-hu-Akbar echoing in the dark cavities of the night congealed our blood with a strange fear. That chorus in an ideal atmosphere proclaims forth the greatness of God, but in that situation, it served only to intimidate the Hindus. The proclamation of God’s excellence seemed to charge our moribund hearts with a bottomless desolation.
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There was this aristocrat money-lender named Abani Khan. He was handsome and stodgy. We were fascinated by him simply because parched rice soaked in hot thickened milk made up his evening meal. And then there were the date-palm preserves that Abani Khan preserved for consumption throughout the year. In our motley surroundings, he was a sort of a rara avis, an exceptionally significant person. That same Abani Khan was stabbed to death during a boat journey. By the time his body was discovered, it had partially decomposed. Probably the assassins had been hired by some disgruntled debtor of his who did not want to be made to pay up their debts to the wealthy moneylender. In his death the debt was annulled, and though it was a gruesome murder, and the victim was an important man, the killer was never taken into custody. The incident terrorized the Hindus of the locality for they felt there was no one to assure them of security and protection. And this was, at that time, the land of East Pakistan. The Khans were almost a conglomerate family of several households. Some of the families had money as well as education. Some had money but no education. Some of the lesser relatives in the familyconglomerate had neither any money, nor any education to speak of. Those who belonged to the third category owing to their innate emptiness and arrogance were tyrannical in nature. They were used to receive habitual obedience from the masses. There was this incident that occurred in the local market in central Ramnagar; when it happened I do not remember now but it was long before the Partition happened. Some of those bankrupt Zamindars went rampant inside the market doing harm to property and produce. But they were never brought to book, though the people did not at all admire, or accept their hooliganism. It was probably this sort of high handedness that proclaimed and attested to the tyranny of the Hindu elite in stark terms. The Islamists organized the generally downtrodden Muslim classes without exception, into which the poor Hindu populace merged. The Central Market was shifted to a place where the Hindu high society did not hold sway. It was popularly named Natunbazar, or the new market. The Khans shunned the market but there was a group of the mischief making elite who did not give up their old ways. Random incidents like the one before perpetrated by the upper caste Hindus were often seen to occur. The Muslim League was making headway owing to the decadence of the Hindu upper crust and the unification of the Islamists. Kasem Ali had been appointed our teacher to initiate us in both the vernacular and English alphabets. Mother had already made us familiar with them. We used to practice writing letters and
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