As I said we’ve had a poor monsoon. In the first week of June I heard the monsoon bird calling. Rain should have followed within a few days. There is news of heavy downpours in other parts of India. The Bombay and Calcutta streets are under water, and floods are devastating Assam. But not a drop in Delhi through June and July. A few miserable showers in August. The bloody songbird of the clouds, the meghapapeeha, hasn’t been heard of for the last three months. ‘There will be famine,’ prophesies Bhagmati tucking into her fifth Langda, ‘people will die of hunger in the streets of Delhi.’ Then she adds philosophically, ‘No matter. People are always dying in this wretched city. If it is not hunger, then it is by cholera, plague, small-pox, murder, suicide. Or old age.’

The Dispossessed

What brought us to New Delhi can be briefly recounted. We lived in a hamlet in the midst of a vast desert. On our east ran the river Jhelum; in the north was a line of barren hills which yielded nothing except rock salt. The rest was sand dunes as far as the eye could see. Hadali had about two hundred families of which at least a hundred-and-sixty were Mussalman and the remaining Hindu or Sikh. Mussalmans owned the deserts and strings of camels. They grew a few blades of wheat and some vegetables near their wells or gathered dates from date-palm trees that grew in the waste. They sent their sons to the army or the police. These sons sent home their earnings, and when they retired, came back to settle in Hadali. We Hindus and Sikhs were tradesmen and money-lenders. We lent money to the Mussalmans. And when they did not return our money with the interest we made them pay it off by serving us. We bought rock salt from the Range and had these fellows take it on their camels to distant cities like Lahore, Amritsar, Ludhiana and Jalandhar. We sold the salt and brought back tea, sugar, spices and silks to sell in our desert villages.

We Hindus and Sikhs lived in brick-built houses and had buffaloes in our courtyards. The Mussalmans lived in mud-huts and looked after our cattle in exchange for a pot of milk a day. We looked down upon them because they were poor. They looked down upon us because we were few and not as big-built as they. Even their women were taller and stronger than our men. they could pull up large full buckets from the well as if they were thimbles. They could carry four pitchers full of water, two on the head and one under each armpit without the leastbother. And their men were over six feet tall and made as of whipcord. We were scared of them.

I will tell you of the incident which compelled us to leave Hadali. It took place sometime in the last week of August 1947.