Abu Fahl and Zaghloul covered their faces and prayed.
Later Kulfi went up to Alu, and in front of the whole ship she hissed: Why didn’t you do anything?
In answer he held up his hands and they all saw that his thumbs had gone rigid and the skin had begun to sag on them like the fuzz on fallen apricots.
Kulfi spat on the deck, and held his hand up for everyone to see. Look, she said, you’re looking at the most useless thing in the world — a weaver without thumbs.
She pulled his hand back and slapped his face with it. Hold them up in front of you, she said. They’ll remind you that you can never do anything again. All you’ve got left now are your eyes.
This is how it had happened.
Dr Mishra brought up the matter first, giving Mrs Verma an initial tactical advantage.
Verma, he said, addressing himself to her thin faded husband, as he always did when he wanted to say something important to her. Do you have any ideas for this celebration they’re planning at the hospital?
Startled, Mrs Verma almost spilt the dal she was ladling into Mrs Mishra’s plate (for Mrs Mishra would have nothing to do with the meat curry; vegetarianism was the only issue on which she had ever dared to go against her husband’s declared wishes).
Not that Mrs Verma was surprised: a couple of their Algerian colleagues had already dropped a few hints to her about a get-together. She had expected it, for at about the same time last year they had organized a small celebration to mark the second anniversary of their arrival in El Oued. Since they were to leave in a few months she had taken it for granted that they would do something of the same kind this year; on a larger scale, if anything. But she had taken great care not to mention the matter in Dr Mishra’s hearing. She knew it was going to be a long battle, and she had no intention of hampering herself by choosing her ground first. And now Dr Mishra had conceded her the advantage.
Her husband, following his instructions, said nothing. Instead, Mrs Verma, choosing her words carefully, said: Well, Mishra-sahb, why don’t you tell us what you have in mind?
She knew perfectly well of course: what he had in mind was a repeat of last year.
Last year all the doctors, nurses, and even a few patients, had gathered in a large room in the hospital. First, a couple of their Algerian colleagues had said a few nice things. Then Dr Mishra, with the help of an interpreter, had made a speech.
He began by talking matter-of-factly about how happy he and all the other Indian doctors were to have had this chance to live and work in Algeria for a while — and to earn plenty of money, he added in an undertone (that raised a laugh). He commented on the good sense of the Algerian government in compulsorily repatriating half their salaries to India in foreign exchange. It showed, he said, a genuine understanding of the needs of developing nations (tactfully he said nothing about how the French doctors in Algeria were paid much more than they were, simply for being French). But, then, he went on, it was only to be expected, for they had all seen for themselves how, almost alone among the oil-producing nations, Algeria had forsworn ostentation and concentrated on bettering the lot of the common people; how, in such marked contrast to some neighbouring countries he could name, in Algeria one sensed everywhere an energetic purposiveness, a belief in the future.
But it was only after that, when he began to talk about the Algerian revolution, that he spoke with real emotion. He talked of how he had followed every event in the course of the revolutionary movement in the fifties and sixties; of his great admiration for Ben Bella (causing more than a little embarrassed foot-shuffling in the audience). With a softly confiding wonder that seemed very strange in a man usually so trenchantly cynical, he told them how moving it had been to work in a country that had literally risen from ashes; how it still staggered him to think that this very country had survived one of the most savage wars of this century; that it had lived through the whole wretched catalogue of technology-taught horrors — concentration camps, organized genocide and all the rest — that had been inflicted upon it by the French. It was nothing less, he said, than a testimony to the strength of the human spirit that a people who, of their meagre sixteen millions, had lost one whole million, had yet gone on to face the future without bitterness.
As a socialist, he ended, his voice breaking, it had filled him with pride to work in such a nation.
His emotion was very real. He had meant every word he said, and his audience was moved, despite the falterings of the translator. For months afterwards everybody they met talked about Dr Mishra’s speech.
It was not that she objected to what he said, for of course it was all true. But, still, at the end of his speech she had had to stifle a laugh.
Maithili Sharan Mishra a socialist! Even while he was saying it, she had heard old Hem Narain Mathur’s voice in her ear, telling her how bright young Murali Charan Mishra had come back to Lucknow in the thirties with a degree from the London School of Economics in his pocket, the Indian Masses on his lips, and a Scottish pipe in his mouth. That was the kind of socialist he was.
His son, too, for all Lucknow had known that young Maithili Sharan’s one ambition was to follow his father into politics. Only, by then, old Murali Charan knew better, and even though his decades of fancy footwork in various legislatures had earned him more money than people could even begin to guess at he had ultimately forced his son into the safe certainties of the medical profession.
It was not that Mrs Verma was self-righteous politically; her father had talked to her too often about the ugliness of socialist in-fighting. But certainly, if anyone had a right to point his finger at Murali Charan Mishra, it was old Hem Narain Mathur. For he was a real socialist, as true as the new-ploughed earth, and he had died in unsung obscurity while Murali Charan Mishra was still fattening himself on ministerships. It was a debt which had to be paid some day.
In 1933, a few confused months after he left Presidency College, Hem Narain Mathur gave up a fine job with a tea company and plunged into Bihar’s villages with Swami Sahajanand and the reactivated Kisan Sabha movement. Often it was a forlorn and lonely life: in the villages he battled vainly to explain his theories, the glories of science, and his vision of the future (which he only half-understood himself); and back at the innumerable party conferences and congresses he battled no less vainly to explain to Murali Charan Mishra and the party theoreticians that people were not atoms to be dealt with in formulae.
And while he was away, organizing that movement or this, at some conference or the other, the party was always splitting and splintering. At the centre of it all was Murali Charan Mishra, his pipe hidden under his various man-of-the-people disguises, reading out his evolving theses — first, on the Uneven Development of the Economy; then on Progressive Bourgeois Nationalism; and finally on the need for a Guiding Hand at certain stages of history, and the absolute necessity for an immediate tactical alliance with the classes and parties in power.