Free Half a Rupee: Stories by Gulzar Page A

Salman?’
    ‘Let me finish … I will tell you. When the desert begins to heat up it really seems as if it is getting angry at you … as if it is trying to say “why are you trying to step on my bed”… pick your feet up, go away. The desert is so vast and I am so puny. I took off my shirt and tied it around my head. A while later I heard the strains of a song. Somebody was singing
maand.
Not very far away. I could make out the song—
Padharo mere desh
—but I could not see anybody. I untied my shirt and began to wave it. God knows how he spotted me or from where because when my eyes fell on him he was on the top of the dune under which I was standing. He was sitting astride a camel; he hollered at me, “
Kotha piyu inchay, Sai
?”
    ‘I don’t know how to say it, man, but in that frame of mind, to hear him speak Sindhi it felt as if I was in mymother’s arms, as if Mother herself had come to pick me up. He asked me again, “Where are you coming from?” I said, “Pochina.” He pulled me up on the back of his camel and spurred the animal into a run.’
    ‘Where did you two go then? Sindh?’ I asked.
    ‘No, only up to Miyan Jalaadh, a village behind Pochina. That is where Salman lives.’
    ‘But which side is he from? This side or the other side?’
    Gopi told me that Salman was a fugitive from the other side: a murderer on the run. He had killed an admirer of the woman he loved and had run across the border and sought refuge in Miyan Jalaadh. A woman took him in and gave him shelter. He stayed with her for three years and then married her. Now he had two strapping kids with her.
    ‘He never went back to the other side?’
    ‘He does, sometimes, to meet his beloved. The same girl. Now even she is married and all. She, too, has two kids.’
    Gopi paused awhile and then resumed his tale, ‘When I told him that I too am from the other side, he got all fired up and said, “Come, I will take you to your village.” I felt so much like saying yes. I asked him, “Now? In the night?” He looked at me and harrumphed, “O, Sai … I may forget the way but my camel will not. Once she starts running she will only stop at her door.”
    ‘“Whose?” I asked.
    ‘But it was his wife who answered, “The woman’s, who else’s? He’s got a woman there too. Across the border.”
    ‘I looked at her and asked, “And you don’t feel bad about it?”
    ‘“I have been telling him, bring her over too … the two of us will learn to live together.”’
    What a wonderful border ours was. When we read about it in our newspapers it seems nothing less than an incendiary line drawn of fire, spewing fire and spouting blood.
    The next day, the hero of our film, Banneyji, said to me, ‘Yaar, rum won’t do. Can’t you arrange for some whiskey … even Indian whiskey will do.’
    We had heard that Indian whiskey got smuggled across the border near a village not far from Pochina. Whiskey got ferried from the Indian side and silver from the Pakistani side. The police from both sides met every month in the village to work out the logistics. A lot of things got ironed out in such meetings: how many sheep strayed from this side, how many camels got caught on the other side, etc.—these meetings took everything into account. The two sides sorted out everything amicably between themselves. On some evenings the Indian side even threw a party in honour of the guests from across the border, opened a few bottles of good whiskey, roasted a few skewers of lamb.
    That evening Gopi and I were sitting on one such border outpost, next to Havildar Bujharat Singh. He had just finished giving his advice on how to break in a camel over his wireless radio. He had even ordered for our whiskey bottles over the wireless. Now he was talking to us about the letter that his wife had written him.
    ‘She is a complete idiot, Sahibji … she has gone mad … she writes anything she feels like. Now you tell me Sahibji … what should I do? Shall I