Two Short Novels by Mulk Raj Anand Page A

uncontrolled tremors, as though the taut muscles were relaxing, and accepting the choice he had made.
    Neither he nor his people had provoked this onslaught. And yet they were being punished. But to the poet in him, this seemed always to be so, Allah notwithstanding.
    The situation had arisen all in three days, in which every Kashmiri would be tested. Those who believed in God would accept their fate as though it was the trial on judgement day. But those who hoped for a new morning for Kashmir would have to fight because only through survival would there be a chance to metamorphose the thoughts, opinions and beliefs of the young from the past servility. In such a strange situation, he told himself, the only thing to do was to go on, like a sleepwalker, to transcend the occasion, as though inspired.
    Lest his naive resolve seems too heroic to himself, he relaxed the stance of his head from the rigid inclination to the left and looked on to the right.
    The rice fields of Pattan were showing up now, tiers of lush gr een, yellowed here and there by the setting sun where paddy was ripe for cutting. The world of nature engulfed his ardent young poet’s spirit. His fondness for the lush vegetation and flowers of Kashmir had always been the nostalgia of a man living with poor arid souls, the heightening produced by the lovely gardens and falling waters as an escape from his own burning heart. And soon the big village itself stood before him with its wooden houses. He knew it to be as shaky and ramshackle and decaying as Baramula, and dirty, with garbage dumps and smelly little rivulets of drains in the gulleys, but it looked, at this distance, like the picturesque villages of Switzerland, such as the nuns had shown him at school in their photograph albums. The groups of chenar trees on the outskirts, looked purple and gold and turquoise in the departing light.
    Now he could see a few dim figures crouching by the putrid pond, seemingly women fetching water.
    And soon a shepherd was leading his goats and sheep with uplifted stick by the willows on the right hand side of the road.
    But the rows of the straggling roadside shops, on the half a mile or so before Pattan; were closed, and the congeries of Kashmiris, who usually sat huddled in their cloaks smoking the common hookah, were absent.
    This general emptiness betokened the spreading fear of the Almighty, or perhaps, worse still, the actual occupation by the raiders.
    A drowsy mongrel dog woke up from under the boards of a wayside stall and yelped at the motorcycle.
    He slowed down the engine, which backfired noisily and made the dog run abreast of the machine and bark more viciously. This seemed like the proverbial warning from hell — as it sent shivers through his weakening legs.
    He decided to pull up by Mahmdoo’s cookshop, which stood about a hundred yards outside Pattan. If anyone could give him the news, it was Mahmdoo.
    But the noise of the motorcycle may create panic. He shut off the engine and free-wheeled along.
    The dog snarled away, back to its shelter.

    The door of Mahmdoo’s cookshop was closed. But from the chinks in the rough wooden boards, Maqbool could see a cotton wick earthen saucer lamp lighting the gloom.
    ‘Mahmdoo,’ he whispered.
    There was no response. Only the flickering light glowed.
    ‘Oh Mahmdoo, Hatto! It is me — Maqbool Sherwani!’
    With his eyes more accustomed to the gloom, as they rivetted into the interior through the chinks, he could now see the huge platform above the earthen oven on which Mahmdoo usually sat, baking hot bread, or stirring the various meats in the cauldrons, or brewing salt tea from the brass samovar .
    Obviously, Mahmdoo had not been cooking.
    Maqbool surmised that the shrewd cookshop-keeper had accounted discretion the better part of valour, for the place where food was to be had would be one of the first to be visited by the hungry invaders. At least that had been so in the half of Baramula which the raiders had