Free Half a Rupee: Stories by Gulzar Page B

protect Hindustan or shall I go and fight the thakur who has usurped her two-finger-width worth of land? Look, Sahibji … the entire border is open … the enemy can march over at any time. The government has produced bloody nuclear bombs … but what has it done for us … now even matches are one rupee a box.’
    He tried to puff on his beedi but it had gone out on him. He plucked a dried twig from the weave of his charpoy and poked it through the tiny opening in the lantern’s housing. The dried twig immediately fared up. He relit his beedi on the faming twig. He had hardly taken two or three puffs before the beedi once again died on him.
    Gopi had pulled out his lighter to light his cigarette. He looked at Gopi and laughed, ‘Only if I had a lighter of my own … life then would be such fun … now you cannot light a beedi with a nuclear bomb, can you? Over!’

The Rams
    Suchitgarh is a small hamlet on this side, in Hindustan. Sialkot is a big town on that side—in Pakistan.
    Captain Shaheen was a handsome army man in New York. He ran a restaurant named Kashmir. His office was styled like a glorified bunker: the roof replete with artificial leaves sticking out of plastic nets, a number of army caps hung on one wall, military boots carelessly placed upon the floor, a military uniform hung on a clothes hook.
    Amjad Islam had invited me over to the restaurant for lunch—and Vakil Ansari escorted me to the place. He was from that side, but he kept inviting all the Urdu poets and writers from this side to his place and in this way indulged his love for the language.
    Vakil Ansari had celebrated
Jashn-e-Gopichand Narang
all over the country. He owned a hotel and that was his means of livelihood. Sardar Jafri from this side andAhmad Faraz from the other side often stayed as his guests in his house. His favourite phrase was: ‘Life’s become as commonplace as partridges and quails.’ Or another variant of the same: ‘Life has reduced us to partridges and quails.’ It was a very original phrase, one that I had not come across before—neither on this side nor on the other.
    While inviting me over to Captain Shaheen’s restaurant, Amjad bhai had said, ‘If you want to dine on Eastern cuisine, then you will not find a better place than Shaheen’s in the whole of New York.’ Amjad bhai was very cautious with the words he picked—he did not call it Indian or Pakistani cuisine. For that matter he did not even refer to it as Punjabi cuisine. He called it ‘Eastern’. And he went out of the way to avoid the word Kashmir. But Captain Shaheen was your typical large-hearted army man and he laughed off Amjad bhai’s cautionary approach. ‘Aji … both sides stake their claims on Kashmir—and that’s the reason why this restaurant of mine is flourishing,’ he said.
    Something had upset him in the army and in a sulk he had resigned his commission. ‘If I had stayed for just one more month I would have retired as a Major,’ he said, ‘but somehow, I like the sound of Captain Shaheen better.’
    He had participated in the 1971 Indo–Pak war. ‘All the action took place on the eastern front, in Bengal. We only had a few skirmishes in Punjab,’ he said. He was embroiled in action in one of the battles in the Sialkot sector.
    I asked him, ‘What is that emotion that makes a soldier out of a man?’
    He had grown a thin beard and was in the habit of twirling his moustache as he spoke. ‘O ji, that’s just a grandiloquent feeling. It is all about the splendour of the uniform and the charm of the army beret, and the status that it adds to a man’s prestige. I don’t think that men become soldiers to die and kill for the country.’ He then burst into laughter, ‘Our feud is no war. The wars between Hindustan and Pakistan! Come off it. They keep fighting like schoolchildren—twist this one’s arm, break that one’s knee, spill some ink over this one’s shirt, drive the nib of the pen into that one’s side.