Summary
It is a Saturday afternoon and Cousin is visiting along with Mrs. Bankwalla, Mrs. Singh, and the schoolteacher Maggie Phailbus. The adults are all sitting on the veranda talking. Lenny notices how adult conversations “fade into silence” when the children pass. These days there is much “hushed talk” and secrets.
The boys and girls form two teams and play kick-the-can in the garden. At a certain point, Cousin discovers a strange black box in the bedroom of Lenny’s parents. The children think it might be a small coffin, perhaps for a thin man or animal. It is locked and heavy. They are unable to solve the mystery and one day the box disappears.
The parents have to force-feed the kids because they are taking Gandhi as an example and fasting. Gandhi was fasting in this period because there was a slaughter of Muslims in Bihar and he wanted to keep it from spreading to Bengal. The children fast as Gandhi does, but their parents are panicked.
Lenny compares her “life of a spoilt little brat with pretensions to diet” to the life of Imam Din’s great-grandson Ranna in a Muslim village forty miles east of Lahore where he plays in fields and dung. Imam Din decides to visit and agrees to bring Lenny. It’s been a year since he last visited Pir Pindo and he is worried about his relatives. While Imam Din and Lenny are in Pir Pindo, the festival of Baisakhi occurs. This is a day celebrating the founding of the Sikh religion and the wheat harvest. They go with a procession of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs to Dera Tek Singh where there are people performing a dance called the Ghadka, swords, drums, folk singers, rides, and food stalls. The children stuff themselves with treats and ride on merry-go-rounds. Yet Ranna notices something odd about the festival this year. There are a number of strangers with cold, harsh faces, and one Sikh boy who was a friend of his now ignores Ranna. Dost Mohammad takes the children to visit Jagjeet Singh. He is the granthi of the village, a Sikh religious figure who reads their Holy Book. Dost Mohammed asks the granthi who the visitors are with their blue turbans and long kirpans (Sikh swords). He says that they are Akalis (meaning “The Immortals”), part of a sect formed by Maharaja Ranjeet Singh a century earlier when he conquered Punjab. They have come from the Sikh Golden Temple at Amritsar. There are rumors that they want to send the Muslims away from East Punjab and divide it by religion. If there is to be a Pakistan, they do not want to live side by side with Muslims. The granthi tells his visitors to go back to Pir Pindo before it gets dark. He seems worried for them. At night, the group listens to the radio and hears both the Congress and the Muslim League say that the peasants should not believe rumors and must remain in their villages.
A few days later, Lenny and Imam Din are back in Lahore. There are accounts of Muslim villagers being attacked elsewhere. Some say that it is Akali propaganda designed to force Muslims to flee. But where can they go? Lenny describes how hard it is for people to abandon their land, their ancestors’ graves, and their families.
One day soon after, an army truck arrives at Lenny’s house carrying a family of villagers. They are distant relatives of Imam Din from Pir Pindo. These military trucks came to their village at night and told Muslims who want to go to Pakistan to get in the truck. The villagers ask if Pakistan had even been established, but the soldiers don’t give them a clear answer. They say they are just telling them what they have been told to say. Some of the poorer villagers who do not own land decide to leave.
Analysis
This chapter continues to illustrate the tensions affecting Lahore and the countryside. There is a clear difference between the relationships between Muslims and Sikhs during Lenny and Imam Din’s previous visit to Pir Pindo compared to this one. Besides the unfriendliness, there is the presence of the armed Akalis during the wheat harvest festival. Though the Sikh granthi is still friendly with Imam Din and the other Muslim villagers, he is clearly anxious about what will happen: “The tone of the granthi’s voice, the sadness, and the resignation in it, turned the heaviness in Ranna’s heart into the first stab of fear.” Whereas the previous chapter showed how fear and social divisions manifested in the city, this chapter shows how it functions in the countryside. As narrator, Lenny again foreshadows how both the city and the country will change, though at different speeds. Speaking of the hostility and coldness she, Imam Din, and Ranna experienced, she says: “Even in retrospect, these isolated impressions didn’t add up to a reliable warning. Pir Pindo was too deep in the hinterland of the Punjab, where distances are measured in footsteps and at the speed of bullock-carts, for larger politics to penetrate.”
This chapter also shows the deep connection between peasants and their land. When the soldiers come to evacuate Muslim villagers, the chaudhry and the rest of the community ask important questions: “Do you expect us to walk away with our hands and feet? What use will they serve us without our lands? Can you evacuate our land?” Of course, land cannot be evacuated as people can. These questions work to reveal how violent and difficult it is to separate people from the land they have grown up on and from which they earn their livelihoods.
