Prologue

The jarring cry that pierced through the silent, inky night woke up many dead secrets. Kabir was preparing to go to sleep as he spread the old, rumpled mattress on his charpoy. He craned his neck towards the sound and suddenly stiffened.

 The cry had reawakened a past that he had begun to forget... he lifted the brass lantern that was hanging by a hook on the wall a little above his bed. Its glass chimney cocooned an oil wick that flickered faintly through the collage of greasy fingerprints. He went outside; the lantern swayed from side to side, making creaking sounds as if defying the cold wind that dared to lap up its warmth. He raised it to his eye level and looked down the hill as far as his sight could stretch. Some eighty steps down, he caught a faint speck of light. Mahua was still awake....

The river beside her hut flowed quietly, following its deep green serpentine course.

The wail had repeated itself after five years. Last time Noor was born, unwelcome and hated. But what was this?

 Such cries undoubtedly suggested the arrival of a new life or death. Questions exploded in the dark, but the answer was strangely vacuumed. The doubts invited only unacceptable conclusions. It couldn’t be the arrival of life, and Kabir shuddered to think otherwise....

1

The Archives of Betrayal

Circa 1900

In 1600 AD, a trading company called The English East India Company had come to India intending to carry out profitable trade, but in the garb of trade and exports, they had dubiously become the political masters of the country. Consequently, India became a British colony in the 18^th century. The East India Company needed regular income to sustain its reign in India, pay its officials and meet its trade expenses. They had insidiously accumulated an army and trained it to acquire more and more princely states in India. The discovery that the revenue generated by the agriculturally lucrative Indian soil was to be their source of income led to the introduction of policies with surreptitious motives.

The East India Company recognised the Indian kings and Taluqdars as Zamindars who were to collect and pay revenue to the Company rigidly on the due date, even if the crop had failed for some reason. Failing to do so meant auctioning off the land, and the farmer was left with nothing. It was felt that this would ensure a regular flow of revenue into the Company’s coffers. But the British had deviously fixed such an index of revenue rates that the zamindars found it difficult to pay the taxes.

In the northeast province of Punjab, some eighty kilometres from Lahore, in the district of Gujranwala (now in Pakistan), was a small village called Ghakkar Mandi. The village was inhabited mainly by the Gujjars, a Jat clan who had founded the city of Gujranwala, with an added majority of Sikhs and Muslims.

A flourishing village known for its wheat, rice, sugarcane and watermelons, not to mention the wrestlers and bodybuilders, Ghakkar Mandi had also begun to crumble under unpredictable British policies. Over the years, Seth Jamnadas and his family had acquired the status of village patriarchs amongst the locals. Jamnadas was a tall, stout man in his fifties whose reputation for being a virtuous and benevolent patriarch preceded him. However, he, too, was struggling to sustain the villagers’ faith against the unpredictable policies of the British that they had begun to find extremely oppressive. Always dressed in crisp white kurtas and salwars and a pugdi that stated his position and honour in the village, he portrayed an authority that the British resented and the villagers regarded as a shield against their unfair policies. Jamnadas and his two younger brothers, Kasturi and Devidas, were the wealthiest landowners in the whole district. Apart from the large farms that yielded lush produce of wheat and rice, the family also owned fruit orchards. Their wives patronised local schools and the small cottage industries in the village. The village women had acquired a rather formidable skill of carpet weaving and basket making. Their merchandise was gaining popularity throughout the country and was spoken of by the British as well. The British officials stationed in Gujranwala ordered customised designs as per their liking. The ethnic carpets and rugs, if exported, could have fetched hundreds of rupees. Instead, they were submissively bundled off in favour of the unwelcome demands of the officials for no more than a diminutive sum. The absolute authority of the British permitted no contention, and Jamnadas and his craftsmen had no option but to relent to their fate. It was not that Jamnadas was oblivious to this injustice, but he was also well aware that this was not the biggest problem at hand.

Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of India, had devised a novel plan to extract more revenue from Ghakkar Mandi and the surrounding farmlands. He had decided to auction the right to collect land revenue to the highest bidder. The moneylenders, who used every scruple to exploit the peasants to the fullest, were ready to bid gladly. Unfortunately, zamindars like Jamnadas, who had protected the village for generations, could not bid as they couldn’t quote such unrealistic figures. His conscience not being so porous, he had stood up against the unfair policies. But finally, after having lost to the other local zamindars, a fair share of the Seths’ land was relinquished to the unforgiving and unrelenting demands of the British treasury.

Moreover, to add to the misery of the farmers in Ghakkar Mandi, the British dictated orders to grow indigo and cotton for export instead of grains. At the onset of the Industrial Revolution in England, the textile mills in Manchester and Lancashire were solely dependent on indigo from India. But the indigo growing system was intensely oppressive. The moneylenders, who were the new power forces in the villages, were mere pawns in the hands of the British. They forced Jamnadas and his brothers to sign a contract. Jamnadas’s brothers Kasturi and Devidas gladly agreed, much to Jamnadas’s despair. Despite repeated warnings by Jamnadas not to invest in any misleading settlement with the moneylenders, the younger brothers went ahead and got cash advances to produce indigo. To make matters worse, the brothers started questioning the authority of Jamnadas, who had to unwillingly divide the ancestral property and give them their share to produce indigo and also to split the profit with the moneylender to settle the loans.

The profit share they got for their produce from these moneylenders was much lower than the market rate. As a result, they had to borrow money again, and thus, the vicious cycle of borrowing never ended for Jamnadas and his brothers.

The younger brothers, who were initially tempted by the loans, soon realised how harsh the system was. They had to borrow repeatedly to meet their needs and could never free themselves from feeling bonded.

Jamnadas had admonished them against cultivating indigo and cotton on their fertile land, which in turn had exhausted the soil rapidly and rendered it unfertile for further cultivation. The metamorphosis was as unnatural as it was heartbreaking. The endless white blanket of cotton puffs in their fields seemed eerily like a corpse, but that was what had become of their land. Moreover, the local weavers could only dream of milky white puffs, which never made their way to their spindles anymore. Thus, carpet weaving and rug designing that thrived on cotton also perished. This left Jamnadas with no means and no escape whatsoever, but yet another locked factory.