• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 11977 0

” Amina prayed silently, because the reccine and leathercloth business was doing well—through Major Zulfikar, who was now an aide at Military G.H.Q. in Delhi, Ahmed Sinai had landed a contract to supply leathercloth jackets and waterproof table coverings to the Army itself—and large stocks of the material on which their lives depended were stored in that warehouse. “But who would do such a thing?” Zohra wailed in harmony with her singing breasts, “What mad people are loose in the world these days?” … and that was how Amina heard, for the first time, the name which her husband had hidden from her, and which was, in those times, striking terror into many hearts. “It is Ravana,” said S. R Butt … but Ravana is the name of a many-headed demon; are demons, then, abroad in the land? “What rubbish is this?” Amina, speaking with her father’s hatred of superstition, demanded an answer; and Mr. Kemal provided it. “It is the name of a dastardly crew, Madam; a band of incendiary rogues. These are troubled days; troubled days.”

In the godown: roll upon roll of leathercloth; and the commodities dealt in by Mr. Kemal, rice tea lentils—he hoards them all over the country in vast quantities, as a form of protection against the many-headed many-mouthed rapacious monster that is the public, which, if given its heads, would force prices so low in a time of abundance that godfearing entrepreneurs would starve while the monster grew fat … “Economics is scarcity,” Mr. Kemal argues, “therefore my hoards not only keep prices at a decent level but underpin the very structure of the economy.”—And then there is, in the godown, Mr. Butt’s stockpile, boxed in cartons bearing the words AAG BRAND. I do not need to tell you that aag means fire. S. P. Butt was a manufacturer of matches.

“Our informations,” Mr. Kemal says, “reveal only the fact of a fire at the estate. The precise godown is not specified.”

“But why should it be ours?” Ahmed Sinai asks. “Why, since we still have time to pay?”

“Pay?” Amina interrupts. “Pay whom? Pay what? Husband, janum, life of mine, what is happening here?” … But “We must go,” S. P. Butt says, and Ahmed Sinai is leaving, crumpled night-pajamas and all, rushing clatter-footed out of the house with the thin one and the spineless one, leaving behind him uneaten khichri, wide-eyed women, muffled Lata, and hanging in the air the name of Ravana … “a gang of ne’er-do-wells, Madam; unscrupulous cut-throats and bounders to a man!”

And S. P. Butt’s last quavering words: “Damnfool Hindu firebugs, Begum Sahiba. But what can we Muslims do?”

What is known about the Ravana gang? That it posed as a fanatical anti-Muslim movement, which, in those days before the Partition riots, in those days when pigs’ heads could be left with impunity in the courtyards of Friday mosques, was nothing unusual. That it sent men out, at dead of night, to paint slogans on the walls of both old and new cities: NO PARTITION OR ELSE PERDITION! MUSLIMS ARE THE JEWS OF ASIA! and so forth. And that it burned down Muslim-owned factories, shops, godowns. But there’s more, and this is not commonly known: behind this façade of racial hatred, the Ravana gang was a brilliantly-conceived commercial enterprise. Anonymous phone calls, letters written with words cut out of newspapers were issued to Muslim businessmen, who were offered the choice between paying a single, once-only cash sum and having their world burned down. Interestingly, the gang proved itself to be ethical. There were no second demands. And they meant business: in the absence of gray bags full of pay-off money, fire would lick at shopfronts factories warehouses. Most people paid, preferring that to the risky alternative of trusting to the police. The police, in 1947, were not to be relied upon by Muslims. And it is said (though I can’t be sure of this) that when the blackmail letters arrived, they contained a list of “satisfied customers” who had paid up and stayed in business. The Ravana gang—like all professionals—gave references.

Two men in business suits, one in pajamas, ran through the narrow gullies