Page 78 - Train to Pakistan

relaxed and just pleasantly tired. The sweeper started lighting lamps in the
rooms. He put one on the table beside Hukum Chand’s bed. A moth fluttered

round the chimney and flew up in spirals to the ceiling. The geckos darted across
from the wall. The moth hit the ceiling well out of the geckos’ reach and
spiralled back to the lamp. The lizards watched with their shining black eyes.

The moth flew up again and down again. Hukum Chand knew that if it alighted
on the ceiling for a second, one of the geckos would get it fluttering between its
little crocodile jaws. Perhaps that was its destiny. It was everyone’s destiny.

Whether it was in hospitals, trains, or in the jaws of reptiles, it was all the same.
One could even die in bed alone and no one would discover until the stench
spread all round and maggots moved in and out of the sockets of the eyes and

geckos ran over the face with their slimy clammy bellies. Hukum Chand wiped
his face with his hands. How could one escape one’s own mind! He gulped the
rest of the whisky and poured himself another.

Death had always been an obsession with Hukum Chand. As a child, he had
seen his aunt die after the birth of a dead child. Her whole system had been

poisoned. For days she had had hallucinations and had waved her arms about
frantically to ward off the spirit of death which stood at the foot of her bed. She
had died shrieking with terror, staring and pointing at the wall. The scene had
never left Hukum Chand’s mind. Later in his youth, he had fought the fear of

death by spending many hours at a cremation ground near the university. He had
watched young and old brought on crude bamboo stretchers, lamented for, and

then burned. Visits to the cremation ground left him with a sense of tranquillity.
He had got over the immediate terror of death, but the idea of ultimate
dissolution was always present in his mind. It made him kind, charitable and
tolerant. It even made him cheerful in adversity. He had taken the loss of his

children with phlegmatic resignation. He had borne with an illiterate,
unattractive wife, without complaint. It all came from his belief that the only

absolute truth was death. The rest—love, ambition, pride, values of all kinds—
was to be taken with a pinch of salt. He did so with a clear conscience. Although
he accepted gifts and obliged friends when they got into trouble, he was not

corrupt. He occasionally joined in parties, arranged for singing and dancing—
and sometimes sex—but he was not immoral. What did it really matter in the
end? That was the core of Hukum Chand’s philosophy of life, and he lived well.

But a trainload of dead was too much for even Hukum Chand’s fatalism. He
could not square a massacre with a philosophical belief in the inevitability of