Blood Brothers

1

PRAYAAG

MY GRANDFATHER DIED WHILE I WAS PLAYING ON HIS CHEST. That was my first stroke of luck. My elder aunt, dark, wise, hunched against her corner of the courtyard, promptly declared that his soul, seething with miracles, had passed into me. My younger aunt, widowed, and a flitting presence at home because she was often possessed by raving spirits, promptly agreed. The motion, having been moved and affirmed, became established family fact.

I was about a year old, fat and indeterminate of face in the manner of babies with enough to eat. My grandfather was fond of me, possibly because I was not yet old enough to ask for money. He was a miser. The thought of parting with cash wrought great misery upon his soul, now possibly transmigrated to me. He had his reasons. The most important one was that he nearly died of hunger when he was eleven.

Starvation is a slow fire that sucks life out in little bursts, leaving pockets of unlinked vacuum inside. Death comes when the points of emptiness suddenly coalesce; there is a silent implosion. The worst is in the beginning, when the body still has the energy to rebel and the mind enough hope to fear. When hope fades, fear evolves into a dazed weariness. You turn numb, and it no longer matters whether you are alive or dead. Dadu, our affectionate term for grandfather, had drifted into that zone when a short bald man in a vest and a sarong, known locally as a lungi, shook his lifeless shoulders and offered him a thick home-baked biscuit softened in tea.

The escape from death began three days earlier in the Bihar village where he was born, near the squalid town of Buxar. The great moment in Buxar’s history had come about a hundred years earlier, when the splendidly colourful soldiers of the East India Company, led by Major Hector Munro, defeated the joint forces of the Emperor Shah Alam of Delhi, Nawab Mir Qasim of Bengal and Nawab Shuja ud Daulah of Avadh on 16 August 1765. Till that point, the East India Company was known as the English Company. After Buxar, admirers renamed it Company Bahadur, or the Heroic Company. It was extraordinary how Indians became transformed when they switched sides: disciplined, unwavering under the command of the white man, and pathetic buffoons under the green and black-and-white standards of Muslim dynasties in decline. One old man could still do a wondrous imitation, learnt from his forefathers, of a Mughal champion who swung his heavy sword in thin air so vigorously before battle that he was utterly exhausted when actual fighting began. He was fortunate. He survived. But why cast aspersions on a mere braggart? Most of his compatriots preferred to disappear rather than die, after an initial, very brief surge of heroics. The white man passed into local legend: he stood his line against the charge, and left it only to go forward. The Muslims were high on bravado and short on bravery. They carried too much baggage around the waist: their bellies sagged with curry and sloth.

British rule was a welcome relief from gathering chaos. It took one lifespan for optimism to change to apprehension: British stability was soon interspersed with famine. The British were individually more honest than the Mughals, but collectively more greedy. Taxes were too high, and their middlemen, the class known as zamindars, took pleasure in adding insult to extortion. The peasant did not have the surplus to resist a drought, so drought degenerated into famine. Fighting hunger became a fulltime job. There was not much strength left to fight a government.

My grandfather lost his parents to a famine that started around 1870 and emptied his village within five years. Those who could, migrated. Some were shipped out by British merchants to plantations across the seven seas, in the West Indies or Mauritius or Fiji. They were not called slaves since slavery had been abolished by Britain. They were given another name: Indentured labour. It was a polite term invented for similiar conditions.

~

My grandfather was born a Hindu and named, rather grandly, Prayaag, after the confluence of the holy rivers, Ganga and Jamuna. The grandeur reflected his caste, for he was a Kshatriya, born of the arms of Brahma. His mother taught him his faith: the universe was once a dark vacuum, which the Eternal Creator injected with energy. From energy emerged light, and then water. Water flowed from the Lord’s body, and in it the Lord’s semen. That semen turned into a golden egg brighter than the sun, from which, after one year, emerged Brahma, the originator of mankind. With the power of his thought, Brahma divided himself into two, and opposites were born: earth and sky, and the four directions. He meditated and the I evolved, both the self and the senses. Brahma divided mankind into four castes to establish order: the Brahmin from his mouth, the Kshatriya from his arms, the Vaishyas from his thighs and the untouchable Sudras from his feet.

Famine had no caste. Funnily enough, famine was kinder to the Sudra than to the Brahmin, for the scum of the earth were familiar with hunger while the salt of the earth were not.

Prayaag had heard stories of the jute mills of Bengal from his father. The stories were told in driblets, as if to ease the pain as they watched their land slowly become sterile. They owned some four bighas; nothing substantial, but not worthless either. They once lived comfortably on an income of about seven rupees a month, and he fondly remembered one year when the family income crossed one hundred rupees. Drought had reduced that to two rupees a month if not less, and that wretch of a rent-collector had sunk so low that he demanded taxes even from castebrothers in a season of hunger.

Jute mills were the powerful engines of a new economy that swelled along the banks of the Hooghly, a tributary of the mighty Ganges that swung south and flowed through Calcutta on its way to the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. Prayaag had heard that a new mill, named after the Great Queen of London, Victoria, had opened in a place called Telinipara. He knew an important landmark. The nearest railway station was not in British territory, but in Chandernagore, the French outpost in the east, some thirty miles upstream from Calcutta.

After cremating his father, the last in the family to die, Prayaag climbed onto a train and slept on the floor of the compartment. The ticket collector left him alone. Sleep was Prayaag’s only nourishment. It was dark when he got off at Chandernagore. Determination took him to his destination. A long journey ended in a scrawl of mud roads beyond which lay the huge iron doors of the Victoria Jute Mill, a blur of green paint between thick walls.

He collapsed against a tin sheet. He was fortunate that the sheet was the door of a tea shop, and therefore opened at four in the morning, when a blast from the high chimney told workers to prepare for the first shift. He might or might not have survived till sunrise. The owner of the tea shop, Wali Mohammad, like the ticket collector, was not demonstrative, but retained a stony sympathy for the wrecks of famine. He gave Prayaag a couple of baked biscuits, tea and a mat to sleep on before his wife, Diljan Bibi, fed him a meal of rice and dal. Then he gave Prayaag work, washing dishes.

Later, perhaps much later, whispers suggested that a street dog had sat beside my grandfather as he lay unconscious that night, and then barked to wake up Wali Mohammad a bit earlier than usual. However, such stories are always told about those who succeed. But this much is true: there was always food at home for strays, and they romped through our lane like free children when grandfather was rich enough to build the first double-storied brick house in Telinipara, ten yards from that tea shop.

2

DREAMS

THE ASCENT FROM POVERTY IS THROUGH FIVE CLIFFS: FOOD, roof, marriage, wealth, esteem. On the first cliff, Prayaag kept his head up and eyes down. His high cheekbones framed glowing, deep eyes; he knew his stare could be disconcerting, and therefore disrespectful to elders.

Wali Mohammad’s kindness was sustained by business instinct. Prayaag was the solution to a dilemma. Famine in Bihar had brought job-seekers to Telinipara, and with it the prospect of more customers. He did not have much to offer: tea, home-made biscuits and, for those with a taste for luxury, boiled eggs. But food was a sensitive matter to many Hindus. Some upper castes treated Muslims as yavana, or outsiders, the term originally used for Alexander’s Greeks when they invaded a centre of Hindu civilization, Taxila, and later applied to Muslims. All outsiders were mleccha, unclean. Hindus might happily converse with a Muslim, work with him, conspire with him, but not eat with him. But they might eat if served by a Hindu Kshatriya boy.

Prayaag was uninterested in reasons for his good fortune. He had found shelter, and a life. He did not expect money. Wali Mohammad was childless, and his wife, Diljan Bibi, grew fond of this quiet, intense boy. She had nursed him when he was dying, and began to believe that Prayaag was Allah’s answer to her prayers for a son. She would occasionally slip him a few cowrie shells to buy carrots or a mango in an abundant season; on some weekends she gave him as much as an anna, a sixteenth of a rupee. Life became comfortably routine.

Victoria Jute Mill sat heavily on the western bank of the Hooghly, some thirty miles north of Calcutta, the political and industrial heart of the British Empire. On both sides of the river Scottish entrepreneurs were constructing massive factories to spin rich jute from Bengal’s fields into products like gunny bags. Victoria, the youngest child of Thomas Duff and Company (headquarters, Dundee), was protected by walls one foot thick and eight feet high on three sides, with the river marking the fourth boundary. The western gate opened towards a huge field, called the maidan, that separated Victoria from its sister, the Champdani Jute Mill.

Telinipara’s mud and thatch huts were spread randomly between the southern and eastern gates. Facilities were rudimentary. Water came from wells, and light from the sun. The jute mill continued production beyond sunset with the help of four-foot high gas-lit lamps that shed a heavy, white glow through the fluff of jute that floated like smog. Outside the factory, the darkness was occasionally disturbed by the flicker of a pallid wick placed in a dibiya, a small tin box filled with kerosene. The workers went to the further edge of the maidan, called the bhagar math, for their ablutions; and then to the river for a bath if they wanted to. Women needed the darkness.

In winter the sun set by five; in summer by six; by eight or nine the day was over. It resumed at four in the morning, with a blast from the factory’s siren, attached to a towering brick chimney, so that sound and smoke gushed out in atonal harmony. Prayaag generally woke up half an hour earlier to get the shop ready for the first customers. Workers sipped tea from small earthen cups, and sometimes slipped a thick biscuit into the top knot of their lungi, to eat later. Those privileged enough to get credit from Wali Mohammad chalked a white mark on a slate to confirm their purchase. Accounts were settled every Saturday, on payday. Occasionally disputes arose, but Wali Mohammad’s reputation for honesty was rock-solid. He would not serve a defaulter until accounts had been settled, and he could sit for hours outside a difficult debtor’s home moaning for his money.

Prayaag got his one break for laughter on Saturday evenings, when the weekly fair, or haat, gathered on the sprawling Victoria maidan. The open expanse and cool river breeze made this haat an epicentre for workers from half a dozen jute mill colonies on either side of the river: Shamnugur, Gondalpara, Angus, Titaghur, Champdani, Kankinara. Women gossiped around stalls full of ribbons and bangles. Men enjoyed the preening of wrestlers as they challenged known and unknown foes: the winner was assured a decent collection, enhanced by those in the audience who had made the right bet. Amateurs preferred handclasp competitions. Children screamed and played gilli-danda, with short sticks and a puck sharpened at both ends that was tapped into the air and then hit as far as possible. Fried food was the preferred delicacy: Narayan Teli’s pyaaju, an onion bhaji cooked in boiling mustard oil, would always sell out. Local medicine men, ayurveds and hakims, some knowledgeable, some quacks, displayed a range of strange powders and oils, and sometimes a whisper would wander through the fair that oil from the fat of a tiger had come to the market and could do your sex life some good. Acrobats walked the tightrope, and charmers made snakes rise to the music of a been, a short bulbous gourd whose sound was manipulated by fingers dancing on holes in the stem to produce a sweet, swaying wail.

Prayaag loved the storytellers. His favourite was Talat Mian, who laughed through his spiky beard at all his jokes just before he told them. He wore the same clothes whenever he came, which was not often. They were styled in the Lucknow fashion: the chau goshia, or the light, four-cornered cap; angarkha, the knee-length-shirt with a crescent necklet attached to a buttonhole towards the left of the neck, edged with lace at the hem; wide linen pyjamas and light, velvet shoes called khurd nau. The joke was that he put these shoes into a bag the moment he began to walk. The clothes, clearly hand-me-downs from an indulgent aristocrat, gave credibility to his claim that he lived in Matiyaburj (the Mud Fort), a riverside locality about four miles south of Calcutta, where the British had resettled the last of the Nawabs of Avadh, Wajid Ali Shah, after they stole his throne.

This happened, said Talat Mian, about a year before the Great Patriotic War of 1857, which frightened the British so badly that, more than twenty years later, they still quiver at the sight of any Indian with a moustache. His sigh was audible beyond the circle of listeners. But you should know why the British rule us. Because we are more loyal to them than we are to Indians. Our people have become servants and our kings have gone mad. Wajid Ali Shah, ignoble son of a noble dynasty, danced while his kingdom was lost! This man, who built Lucknow’s Qaiser Bagh, a marvel of its age, now feeds off the crumbs of the British table and lives in a house that once would not have been fit for his barber. Do you know that his barber, Azimullah, owned a house called Chau Lakhi because it was worth four lakhs of rupees? Do you? Do you?

No, of course they did not; and suppressed their disbelief with a giggle. The only barber they knew was Wahabuddin, who sat on his haunches, sharpened his razor on water and stone, shaved or snipped hair from any part of your body and was an expert in circumcision, for which the Muslims were truly grateful.

Let me tell you about Qaiser Bagh! continued Talat Mian, refusing to indicate whether he had merely heard about it or seen the glories of this palace himself. The flowers of its Chinese Garden were imported from Japan, and scattered among pools and pavilions with strange, curving roofs. It had a Mermaid Gate, and don’t tell me that there are no mermaids just because you do not see them in this wretched river of yours. Through Mermaid Gate you reached Hazrat Bagh, whose exotic flowers came from either a hidden valley of Kashmir or the famous Kewbagh of London. The roof of Chandi Wali Barah Dari was made of silver. The founder of this dynasty was Nawab Saadat Khan; but its greatest ruler, Shuja ud Daulah, was a true warrior of the faith who lived in the best Islamic tradition – in a simple, rented house! Allah rewarded such virtue, for he, with the help of the Afghans, saved the Mughal empire when he defeated the Marathas at Panipat in 1761. Alas, four years later, what Shuja had saved in the west, he lost in the east, when the British demolished him in Buxar.

Prayaag’s ears perked up when he learnt he had been born so close to history.

"The defeat of Shuja marked the birth of the British Empire. When Shuja died, the power of Muslims was buried with him. His successors were miserable pygmies who fought each other rather than Christian infidels. I have seen their portraits in Matiyaburj. Each one’s arse is as fat as his belly. Shuja was tall, erect and stern. His son Asaf ud Daulah was so fat he overflowed from his chair like an overfed baby elephant. As for Saadat Ali Khan – he was the first in the family to wear English boots, trousers and coats: shame!

"Shuja employed 22,000 messengers to bring him news: every seven days from Pune and every fifteen days from Kabul. That is how you rule a kingdom! Asaf employed 22,000 cooks and wastrels! They say there were 1,200 elephants in his son Wazir Khan’s marriage procession and his bejewelled coat cost Rs 20 lakhs! And Wazir was not even his own son, for Asaf was impotent despite a diet of the best aphrodisiacs made from Himalayan herbs. Imagine how much he would have spent if the bastard had been legitimate! But, as they say in Lucknow, Asaf spent many fortunes when alive, but his funeral cost only seventy rupees…

"The debauch Wajid Ali Shah betrayed his faith, betrayed his heritage, and his misery today is Allah’s justice. He would strut and swagger before his soldiers and insult them by calling them women or homosexual. He named one regiment Banka. You know what that means? Bent. Another was called Tircha, which is a sly term for a eunuch. Is that how you address brave soldiers?

The Holy Quran has said that a tyrant will be sent to destroy any Muslim king who forgets Allah. Changez Khan’s grandson Hulegu was sent by Allah to destroy the Arab rulers of Baghdad. The British were sent to destroy Nawab Wajid Ali Shah. Allah gave Wajid one last chance to redeem himself with martyrdom. During the Great Patriotic War sepoys in Calcutta sent word secretly to Wajid Ali Shah that they would revolt if he agreed to be their leader. But he preferred to be a beggar! And now enough for one day…

Talat Mian looked discreetly skyward while those who could threw small coins onto the cloth he had spread for his reward. It was impolite, by the standards of Lucknow culture, to look at money.

Prayaag did not have any money to give. Talat Mian would not have spoken any less if he had not been there, he rationalized. A story is wealth-neutral; like nature, it belongs to both the rich and poor.

~

If one obsession was fantasy, the second was magic.

He was entranced by magicians, wild men who lived on that strange precipice which was the home of both human beings and spirits. It was said that there were beneficial sorcerers and evil ones. As far as Prayaag was concerned, they were either charlatan, and entertained you, or genuine, and terrified you.

One afternoon, a fugitive with matted hair raked in ash and missing front teeth turned up at the fair. There had been havoc at the last village that gave him shelter: soon after his arrival, cattle died from a mysterious disease, accidents multiplied and women became barren. The villagers blamed his malevolent powers. A learned Brahmin was hired to spy on him, and he reported that the outsider used to chant the awesome Atharvana Veda: Om Sri Hsan Hgita Ramaya-namah! Sages had forbidden its recitation because the verse was so destructive that it could cause the death of kings and destroy the even tenor of social life. The Brahmin suggested a solution.

The key to any mantra is correct pronunciation. If you mispronounce a single syllable, the mantra turns ineffective. His advice was simple and effective. Break the bastard’s front teeth. The malign mendicant would never be able to chant any mantra correctly again, and the world would be safe. The villagers did so before they drove him out.

Prayaag was fascinated by his eyes, which seemed to be as big as a god’s and changed shape, strength and personality on some inner command. He went warily to the shed that the magician had made his home.

I come from the line of Solitary Brahmins, the magician said, his eyes rolling violently, as if they had no socket. "My ancestor was the illegitimate child of a Brahmin widow. He learnt, through his devotion, the secret of shrum, craum, hrim, hrum, hru and hu from Lord Shiva. Those who know the various combinations through which these words become incantations, have power over life and death. Some foolish Brahmins did not invite my ancestor to a wedding because he was illegitimate. He entered the wedding tent, and, using just two syllables, turned the food into toads. The terrified Brahmins begged for his forgiveness. He reversed the order of syllables and the toads turned into food again!"

He told stories of unseen worlds. I am in touch with spirits who live between the first and second skies, in the company of powerful djinns, where souls of the dead rest on the first stage of their journey to the beyond. From there, they are permitted to communicate with the living one last time, and return to visit the one person they have loved the most – before they travel beyond our reach.

He was indifferent to heat and cold, he said, to wind and rain, delicacy and disgust: milk and excrement tasted the same to him; neither destruction nor creation mattered anymore. Illusion was the only reality he enjoyed.

And so one monsoon evening, when the sky swarmed with fluffs of gray cloud and the sun changed into a dark flush in the west, the magician stood between two bamboo staves planted some ten feet apart, and boomed:

Jai Kali Calcuttewali

Tera wachan na jaaye khali!

Oh Kali of Calcutta

Let not your oath be barren!

In the deepening twilight a rope rose from between his feet like a thin, climbing snake, to the level of bamboo stalks, still and erect. From a basket behind the magician a child of perhaps four crawled out, then sprinted quickly up the immobile rope. The magician looked up at the boy, a blur in the dusk, and shouted: Are you there?!

Yes, master, replied the boy in a thin but audible squeak.

Then die! screamed the magician, and the boy seemed to explode against the fading light, and little parts of his body fell to the ground while the air was stained with dark patches of blood. Voices gasped in the crowd; fear and bewilderment turned to horror. The magician laughed like a maniac, in sustained roars that rolled in airborne waves, one after the other. Come back, boy! he screamed: his voice spread across the maidan, and became an invisible roof that had sucked up all sound from the earth. The world became still.

A gurgle interrupted the thrall.

From somewhere in the crowd the child came racing towards the magician, chuckling with joy. The magician picked up the boy triumphantly, placed him on his shoulders and began to dance slowly, happily, three steps forward and then three back, to some rhythm in his soul. Someone in the crowd twittered nervously and the spell was over.

Diljan Bibi was restless when Prayaag returned home that night. Why are you so late? she asked angrily. Prayaag bit his lip and his chin sank into his neck in shame. Why? Why? Why? Don’t you think I get worried?

It took a while for Prayaag to answer. Forgive me, Mai. He had used the endearment Mai for the first time since his mother died. She looked sternly at him. Don’t do it again as long as I am alive. Then she hugged him. You are my son. Don’t ever go away.

Prayaag wondered a great deal about the magician and his last performance. He knew it was a trick, and was unable to comprehend its power on his imagination, or his dread that it was an omen.

It was at the haat that Prayaag learnt, from the fear on faces and the hush on the tongue, that the Kali Dain, or Black Witch, had reached Champdani on the outskirts of Telinipara. Later, the government would write a monotonous report explaining that the cholera epidemic of January 1883 that took seventy lives in Champdani was due to filthy sanitation in unplanned, choking, unlit slums. The workers explained that cholera was the curse of the Black Witch who struck suddenly, quietly, arbitrarily and would not be appeased until she had supped on enough lives to sate her appetite.

Wali Mohammad had gone to Champdani to meet a newly arrived relative from Bihar. His mistake was to stay overnight. When Diljan Bibi heard that he had succumbed to cholera she began to moan softly, incessantly. They would not bring his body to Telinipara for fear of contamination. Prayaag ran all the way to the funeral. Wali Mohammad’s body, covered in a shroud, lay next to a freshly-dug grave. A handful of people had gathered for the last prayer: From Allah we come, to Allah we go. Prayaag did not understand this, nor had he ever given a thought to any form of prayer. At the grave of Wali Mohammad he lifted his hands up towards God, and broke down.

3

CONVERSION

I WANT A CHILD. THE SENTENCE DROPPED FROM DARKNESS AND probed Prayaag’s insecurity. He was sitting on the floor of their hut, eating his day-meal of rice, dal and a spicy potato mash called chokha, while his mother gently fanned off flies. Another child? How? Why? Didn’t she have faith in his ability to provide for her? He did not readily voice his dreams, for they might seem outlandish, but he was certain that while such an unlit, airless room might be acceptable for Wali Mohammad’s wife, it was not fit for his mother. But he needed time to make money. He felt confused, threatened. Did she want to marry again? Angrily, he asked, Am I not good enough to be your son?

Diljan Bibi began to laugh gently. Oh my darling boy, I mean I want you to give me a son. This room is too lonely; it needs a baby.

Prayaag flushed and did not know what to say.

It’s time you got married, she continued. You are too old already. You have crossed twenty and should have been married five years ago. How much time do you think I have left? Even if disease does not take me away, old age will. How many poor women cross forty…? That is why we marry early. If you start a home at twelve or thirteen at least you get a chance to see a grandchild for a few years.

Prayaag lowered his head further towards his plate; he had stopped eating. Whatever you say, Mai.

She beamed. My handsome young man! Now I must find a good girl for you from your caste.

Prayaag looked up. What do you mean from my caste? If I marry anyone, it will be from your caste, Mai.

My caste? What’s wrong with you? We are Muslims. How can a Hindu boy marry a Muslim girl?

Prayaag looked steadily at her, conscious that she should understand that this was a deliberate, considered decision. Mai, he said, you are my mother. Your religion is my religion.

Diljan Bibi stared back at her son, and in a moment her tears had reached lips that were smiling.

She sorted out options and made a decision. Her cousin Saira had three pretty daughters and nothing to eat. The eldest, Jamila, was twelve and had crossed her puberty. If all went well, she would be nursing a grandson in less than two years. They would have to rent another room, of course. She fantasized about spoiling the child. When she returned from her reverie she noticed that Prayaag was still motionless. You can continue eating, she said sharply, you will need your strength now!

After a pause she added, I have selected your bride.

Prayaag’s head dipped.

Her name is Jamila.

The head went further down.

She is pretty.

His nose touched his plate.

But of course you cannot marry for a few months after you become a Muslim.

He shot up. Why?

She laughed. You’ll know why after they have made you a Mussulman.

Such things could not be kept hidden. They had to be done properly.