The Weary Generations by Abdullah Hussein

Author:Abdullah Hussein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
Published: 2014-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

NAIM TOOK SOME while before he could settle down to a routine of living – for the first time – as an independent man in the village. Then came a shift in his circumstances so swift and sweeping that it altered the course of his life.

He had consolidated his father’s, his own and almost ten acres of good fertile grace-and-favour land given by Roshan Agha to Ayaz Beg to mark his visit to the village after a long self-exile. Ayaz Beg, after burying his brother, never returned to the village again. Naim had twenty-six acres of land under him, two-thirds of which he gave to the muzaras on a half-share basis and the rest he kept for cultivation under his own supervision, providing the bullocks, the ploughs, the seed and anything else needed for the job, the tillers being his servants who took a share of the crop and whatever little money they needed according to custom. These sharecroppers and farm labourers in general had milch cattle, the produce of which they sold or bartered to supplement their income. Naim had built himself two brick rooms on his land outside the village and in these he now lived, looked after by a servant who fetched his meals, cooked by his mother three times a day. Sometimes he felt deeply his loneliness and the need for a friend, but he found that the ability to form friendships was lost to him, a wall-like curtain having dropped between him and the world. He still mixed with the villagers, often going to sit with them in the panchayat yard, a place for the common folk to come and go, using it for assemblies or just to exchange chat as they pleased. Being the owner of land and men in his own right and a hero on top, aside from having the advantage of an education, Naim was consulted by everyone about their problems, from small everyday matters to big affairs, and asked to give decisions that were accepted by all. He had attained a position in the village that was far higher than that of the munshi, the previous headman, who was only a servant and owned neither land nor men. Naim also went to his father’s house regularly twice a week to sit with his mother and stepmother, to listen, mostly in silence, to their needs for food and clothing and to their woes, happy in the knowledge that the two women had now learned to live peaceably together.

Once a month, he went to visit his uncle Ayaz Beg, who had taken early retirement and lived in the old house in Delhi. It was on one of these occasions, as he sat at the table after the midday meal in his uncle’s house, that Ayaz Beg handed him a thick, richly embossed card. The card, an invitation to the walima party of Pervez’s marriage – the nikah ceremony of which was to have taken place two days previously at a family function – was addressed to ‘Naim Ahmad Khan’.

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