Читать книгу The Pakistani Bride - Bapsi Sidhwa - Страница 10

Chapter 4

Qasim has no conception of the city the train is rolling towards. Swaying with the motion of the train, his life in transition, his future uncertain, he absently scans the shadowy flat landscape.

Another forty-five minutes and they will cross the border. The engine is taking a bend. Momentarily the smoke in front drifts to one side and Qasim has a glimpse of the tracks ahead.

It is enough. His wary mountain instincts warn him. In a flash he turns to the old man shouting, “Jump!” Terrified by the tribal’s erratic behavior, the old man leans back, but Qasim slides off the roof.

Rolling neatly down the gritty embankment, he scuttles towards the deep shade of a clump of trees. Night engulfs him.

As the center carriage moves past him he sees the train buck. Only now does the engine driver realize there is something farther down the track. A roar rises from the mass of jolted refugees. The train’s single headlight flashes on. It spotlights the barricade of logs and some unaligned rails. White singlets flicker in and out of the glare. The train brakes heavily and the engine crashes into the logs. People are flung from their scant hold on footboards, roofs, and buffers. Women and children pour from the crammed compartments.

Now the mob runs towards the train with lighted flares. Qasim sees the men clearly. They are Sikh. Tall, crazed men wave swords. A cry: “Bole so Nihal,” and the answering roar, “Sat siri Akal!” Torches unevenly light the scene and Qasim watches the massacre as in a cinema. An eerie clamor rises. Sounds of firing explode above agonized shrieks.

A man moves into Qasim’s range. He is shouting, “Run, Zohra! Run into the dark.” Qasim can just hear him above the clamor. He is a young, broad-shouldered man, and the peasant lungi wrapped around his legs causes him to stumble.

Sikander pushed Zohra and the children off the train and yelled, “Run. Hide in the dark.” He watched from on top. Zohra was pushing her way through the swirling bodies. She was almost beyond the range of his vision when he saw an arm clutch at her. The sea of faces swayed beneath him. Pinpointing her position he leapt, clasping his knife. He half slid, half fell down the embankment and sprang up. A Sikh, hair streaming, lashed a bloody sword. Another slowly waved a child stuck at the end of his spear like a banner. Crazed with fury Sikander plunged his knife into the Sikh’s ribs. He stumbled over soft flesh and the mud slushy and slippery with blood. “Zohra! Munni!” he screamed, barely conscious of his own futile voice.

Forcing his way forward, he is suddenly without his lungi and his long, surprisingly scrawny legs trample the live body of a child. He is moving towards a young woman. The flap of her burkha is over her head. A Sikh, sweat gleaming on his naked torso, is holding one breast. She is screaming. Butting a passage with his head, Sikander pushes past the woman and stabs her tormentor. Again and again he plunges his knife into the man’s back. Frantically waving her arms, the woman is swept away.

“Run into the dark, Zohra! Run!” he screams. A white singlet flashes before him. Sikander crumples to the ground, astonished by the blood gushing from his stomach. A woman tramples over him. He tries to ward off the suffocating forest of legs with his arms. More and more legs trample him, until mercifully he feels no pain.

Qasim sees figures flee the glare like disintegrating wisps of smoke. He sits still, in the undergrowth, biding his time. Although he is horrified by the slaughter he feels no compulsion to sacrifice his own life. These are people from the plains—not his people.

The carnage is subsiding. Already they are herding and dragging the young women away. The dying and the dead are being looted of their bloodied ornaments and weapons. An eerie silence settles on the stench of blood.

Qasim, as far as he knew, was alone. He moved swiftly, in shadows, aware that he had to cross the border before daylight.

He had barely started when suddenly a short form hurtled out of the dark at him. He stopped, his heart pounding. That same instant he realized it was a child, a little girl.

Clinging to his legs, she sobbed, “Abba, Abba, my Abba!” For a moment Qasim lost his wits. The child was the size of his own little Zaitoon lost so long ago. Her sobs sounded an eerie, forlorn echo from his past. Then, brutally untangling her stubborn grasp, he plunged ahead.

The child stumbled after him, screaming with terror.

Fearing the danger from that noise, Qasim waited for the child to catch up. He slid his hand beneath his vest and triggered a switch. A long thin blade jumped open in his hand. His fingers were groping for the nape of her neck when the girl pressed herself to him for protection.

Qasim gasped. Was it a trick of the light? Quietly, with one hand, he closed the knife. She looked up and in the mold of her tear-stained features, he caught an uncanny flash of resemblance to his daughter thrashing in the agony of her last frenzy.

Kneeling before her, he sheltered the small face in his hands.

The girl stared at him. “You aren’t my Abba,” she said in accusing surprise.

Qasim drew her to him. “What is your name?”

“Munni.”

“Just Munni? Aren’t all little girls called Munni?”

“Just Munni.”

“You must have another name . . . Do you know your father’s name?”

“My father’s name was Sikander.”

Her use of the past tense startled him. It showed a courage and a forbearance that met the exacting standard of his own proud tribe.

“I had a little girl once. Her name was Zaitoon. You are so like her . . .”

She leaned against him, trembling, and he, close to his heart, felt her wondrously warm and fragile. A great tenderness swept over him, and recognizing how that fateful night had thrown them together, he said, “Munni, you are like the smooth, dark olive, the zaitoon, that grows near our hills . . . The name suits you . . . I shall call you Zaitoon.”

A simple man from a primitive, warring tribe, his impulses were as direct and concentrated as pinpoints of heat. No subtle concessions to reason or consequence tempered his fierce capacity to love or hate, to lavish loyalty or pity. Each emotion arose spontaneously and without complication, and was reinforced by racial tradition, tribal honor and superstition. Generations had carried it that way in his volatile Kohistani blood.

Cradling the girl in his arms, he hurried towards Lahore.