Mangru growled, ‘Qasim, don’t touch them. If you do, you’ll regret it. I have told you that they are women of my family.’
Mangru’s eyes were blazing. His expression frightened them a little and after threatening him, they moved ahead. But the moment they stepped out of Mangru’s vicinity, one of them challenged him, ‘Let’s see where you will take them.’
Mangru ignored them. He lengthened his stride a little as we do in the solitude of the evening when we pass a graveyard. At every step, we suspect that we might hear some sound, that someone may come and face us, that something wearing a shroud may rise from beneath the ground and stand in front of us.
Gaura said, ‘Scoundrels, both of them.’
Mangru answered, ‘Why do you think I said that this place was not suitable for women like you?’
Suddenly, an Englishman riding a horse came from the right and said to Mangru, ‘Well, jamadar, these women will stay in my bungalow. There is no woman there.’
Mangru pushed the women behind him and shielding them said, ‘Sahib, these women are from my family.’
‘Really! You liar! There’s no woman in my house and you are taking two. I won’t let this happen. (Pointing towards Gaura.) Bring her to my house.’
Trembling from head to toe, Mangru said, ‘That is not possible.’ But the sahib had ridden ahead without hearing him. He had given an order and it was the jamadar’s job to obey it.
They faced no further obstacles on the way to the residential area. There were mud dwellings for the labourers. Men and women were sitting on the doorsteps of their houses. All of them stared at the two women and laughed, gesturing to each other. Gaura saw that there was neither any respect for age, nor a sense of shame in anybody’s eyes. An uncouth woman, holding a chillum in her hands, said to her neighbour, ‘Four nights of moonlight, and then the darkness of a waning moon. The dark days follow too soon.’
The other one, plaiting her hair, said, ‘Why not, after all, they are fresh, young ones.’7
Mangru sat at the door the whole day like a farmer guarding his pea fields. Both the women were sitting in the small room cursing their fate. They were now familiar with the conditions prevailing here. They had been hungry and thirsty but seeing how things were in that place, hunger and thirst had disappeared.
At around ten in the night, a guard came and asked Mangru to come with him as the agent was calling him.
Mangru said from where he sat, ‘Listen, Nabbi, you are also from my country. If the need arises, you will help me, won’t you? Go and tell the sahib that Mangru has gone somewhere; at most he can fine me.’
Nabbi: ‘No, bhaiya, he is very angry and drunk; if he hits me, well, I’m not so strong.’
Mangru: ‘All right, go and tell him I am not coming.’
Nabbi: ‘What is it to me? I’ll go and tell him but it won’t be good for you.’
Mangru, after thinking for a while, picked up his stick and began walking with Nabbi towards the sahib’s bungalow. It was the same sahib whom Mangru and the two women had met earlier. Mangru knew that it would not be possible to survive there even for a minute after falling out with the sahib. He went and stood in front of him. The sahib scolded him and asked, ‘Where is that woman? Why have you kept her in your house?’
‘Sahib, she is my wife.’
‘All right, who is the other one?’
‘She is my sister, sahib!’
‘I don’t care. You will have to bring one of them.’
Mangru fell at his feet and narrated his entire story in tears. But the sahib wasn’t moved at all. In the end, Mangru said, ‘Sahib, she is not like other women. If she comes here, she will kill herself.’
The sahib laughed, ‘Oh! It is not so easy to kill yourself!’
Nabbi said, ‘Mangru, why do you complain when it is your turn? Didn’t you force your way into our homes! Even now whenever you get a chance you go there! Why are you crying now?’
The agent remarked, ‘Oh, he is a scoundrel. You bring her immediately; otherwise I will thrash you with a whip.’
Mangru pleaded, ‘Sahib, beat me as much as you want, but don’t ask me to do something that I can’t do as long as I live!’
The agent threatened, ‘I will give you a hundred lashes.’
‘Sahib, give me a thousand lashes but don’t look at the women of my family.’
The agent was dead drunk. He took his whip out and began lashing Mangru with it. Mangru endured ten or twelve lashes with patience, then started groaning. The skin on his body was lacerated and when the whip fell on his flesh, a cry of pain would escape him however much he tried to suppress it and so far he had been given only fifteen lashes out of a hundred.
It was ten o’clock at night. There was silence all around and in that quiet darkness, Mangru’s pitiful wailing hovered in the sky like a bird. The clusters of trees appeared to be statues of despair, silently weeping. This stonyhearted, lustful, roguish, conscienceless jamadar was now willing to give up his life to protect the honour of an unknown woman only because she was his wife’s companion. He could bear falling in the eyes of the whole world but he wanted undivided command over his wife’s devotion. Even an iota of deficiency in this was intolerable for him.
What did his life matter compared with this divine love? The Brahmin woman had fallen asleep on the floor, but Gaura was waiting for her husband. She had not been able to speak to him yet. She needed a lot of time to narrate and listen to all the travails of the last seven years and when could
