Love across the Salt Desert by Keki Daruwalla

Author:Keki Daruwalla [N. Daruwalla, Keki]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184755268
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

Twelve

The Jahangir Syndrome

It was the first time in his forty odd years that he would be shifting house. Kunwar Tejbhan Singh was not sure if he had done the right thing in accepting this job in Lucknow. But then he had not been certain what shape events would take after 1947. When the administration changed, it was good to be in with the new order.

Despite his sola topee, he held his hand out in front to shade his eyes from the sun. He was sitting in his garden watching a truck loaded with his household bric-à-brac drive out. It was his ancestral house, one of those feudal havelis, high plinthed, with two-feet wide walls where mud had been used for mortar. The roof tiles were as bleached as the grass beneath, which was wearing its winter coat of tawn. Looking across the beds burgeoning with the first winter flowering and the lawn pocked with tufted weed, Tejbhan observed the crowd outside, a splash of dark gruel solidifying at the gate. Some garlands were also visible, thin stringy affairs with a dozen marigolds strung on a thread. Then he spotted him, a man with a frayed tobacco-coloured coat and white pyjamas, holding a stick. There was no mistaking him. It was Ram Din. Who could ever have thought that he would put in an appearance?

It was funny the way things never changed. Tejbhan’s zamindari, his feudal rights, had extended over fifty villages and Ram Din had been one of his ‘subjects’ who had sought justice at his door. He had doled out justice, hadn’t he, both as landlord and later as honorary magistrate? Justice of sorts, that is. The guilty had been punished. The lover of the blind man’s wife had been dealt with. The manner had been a little unorthodox, but so what? He had done his best by his lights. Or had he?

He had become an honorary magistrate the year the first Indian collector had come to Hardoi in 1945. A dinner thrown in honour of the collector, a couple of shoots arranged for him and he was rewarded. His credentials of course were impeccable, a good landowning family, an early education at Colvin Talukdar College rounded off later by a law degree at Allahabad. There was nothing very special to this job, he had thought at first. Even as a big landowner he had been called upon to arbitrate: cattle straying into someone’s fields, the return of stolen animals, small land disputes, bickerings between landlord and sharecropper. And one evening in the twilight days of his zamindari this Ram Din had stood in his veranda with a stick in his hand and that blind look on his face, the head a trifle askew. The man started rambling. He was fifty while his wife was younger, in her mid-thirties. And there was a goatherd called Beeru. ‘Rid me of him Kunwar Sahib, rid me of him.’

Kunwar Tejbhan Singh could not get the hang of the story easily. He dismissed him.

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