Two Short Novels by Mulk Raj Anand

within him, ‘perhaps, I fancy the leaves were much more green because the autumn is a sad season in our land.’
    ‘Or perhaps it is the sunset . . . ’
    ‘Also death — the death of those whom the invaders had murdered! And fear for oneself!’
    And he became conscious of his increasingly morbid preoccupation with the poet’s lament, which was forming on his tongue without becoming fluid, the lament about the possibility of his own death.
    As the rutted, straight tarmac road dissolved under the wheels of his ‘Triumph’, he had another fateful echo augury in his mind from the days of his childhood in the convent school, the Biblical phrase: ‘How sweet for our souls to be borne to the skies, our journey done, our journey done . . . ’
    But he felt afraid of the potency of the phrase if it should apply to himself. He looked away.
    The wintry sky on this late afternoon, the red sun tinting the snowy clouds above the mountains, and the chill mist covering the shallows and the swamps of the threatened valley, all seemed to bring the shadows nearer. The front was only ten or twelve miles away and yet it was as quiet as in the peaceful village in the middle of the valley.
    ‘ La hol billah !’ he mumbled the cautionary phrase to calm himself.
    He recalled that he had gone through so many emotions during the last three days: the feeling of weakness during the flight from his little home town after the Pakistani raiders had occupied it, the fear that he might not get to Srinagar, the elation of being in that odd room with the others in Amira Kadal, the shock of finding out that those who had begun this sudden invasion, with loot as soon as they arrived in the villages, were the so called ‘Muslim brethren’, the utter frustration of the confusion which prevailed in the city, then the mixed exaltation and fear of being chosen to go back to Baramula to rally the people, and, underneath it all, the complete innocence about what would happen to him if the tribesmen were already there. But there was, below the surface, a feeling he did not wish to acknowledge, the sense of chivalry: against tribalism — the genuine human response of pity.
    And now, this was more boring than ever, this ride back home, because he could not even think in the state of emotional stress, did not know his destination, or the way to get there if the road was blocked.
    The noise of the machine dispelled his confusion, even as it sent the sparrows in the poplars scattering into the chenars in the fields by the road. Only the sights and sounds of the evening landscape filled his senses: bleak, dreary uncultivated fields with the stubbles of the last harvest, the melancholy willows leaning over small pools, the pine forests on the slopes of the mountain, weighted down by dark, ominous clouds on the right above Gulmarg, and the peaks of the mountain ranges standing steel grey in the distance.
    There was not a soul stirring on the landscape on either side of him . . .
    Instinctively, he jerked his head up, against fear, as though to rise above the natural humility of his being before reality.
    And he decided in his private colloquy that he must go on, once he had decided to go. Things were badly mixed up. But he must go right ahead and not be craven and panicky and confused any more. He was going to Baramula, perhaps to certain death. But the head of the volunteer corps had said to him: ‘Maqbool Sherwani — we are in peril! We must do everything we can to avert the disaster! We must save our people! We must stand by them and each other . . . . We must resist the butchery with our bare hands.’ Apart from other things, it was the horror of the butchery which had moved him, and his advance into danger became a kind of protest against occupation of Baramula by the raiders.
    Somewhere between the impact of these words and his own uneasiness, lay the fear; somewhere, under his skin, in the nerves above the tendons and the sinews of his body, there were