The Weary Generations Read Free

times alone to the house, etc. etc. In the absence of solid evidence, however, what price mere rumour! No one, in the event, gave much thought to such gossip, except, in the dark and desolate corners of privacy, to lend some colour to dreary lives.
    Mirza Mohammad Beg was a hard-working man and had an interest inmetalwork. Besides agriculture, he also started a little workshop, where he was later to make all the tools used in working the land. He was not even forty years of age when bad luck befell him. After a brief illness, Mirza Mohammad Beg died, leaving behind wife and two sons. The eldest, Niaz Beg, grew to be a strong and handsome young man under the tutelage of Roshan Agha, living a comfortable life on the lands. He had inherited his father’s love of working with metal objects and spent much time in the workshop Mohammad Beg had built. His mother married him off to a good-looking girl from a Mughal family she had known from her old town of Rohtak. There was no issue until, fifteen years after the marriage was consummated, a son was born. It was said that the old woman, Mohammad Beg’s widow, was seized with such overwhelming joy at the birth of a grandson that she died on the spot. With the removal of his mother’s iron hand, Niaz Beg felt free to take a second wife, a girl from a lower class and much younger than himself.
    Mohammad Beg’s second son, Ayaz Beg, had the love of books. He went to a madrissa in a neighbouring village for some time, but did not like it. He stopped going to the madrissa and began spending most of his days wandering around or helping his older brother make tools in the workshop. After a few years, Ayaz Beg got bored with village life and ran away from home. He joined up with a group of travelling people roaming the vast country and ended up way out in Calcutta. There he joined the East Bengal Railways as a labourer in the yards. After a time, a sudden change came over Ayaz Beg. He started reading pamphlets and magazines of a technical nature, chiefly to do with the railway systems. All the boredom of life went out of his bones and with years of hard work and application, teaching himself to read English, he rose to be a mechanic and kept rising through the ranks thereafter. He did not return home.
    Then an incident occurred in the village which radically changed this family’s fortunes. On the charge of having committed a grossly illegal act, Niaz Beg was arrested and sentenced to twelve years of rigorous imprisonment. The authorities did not stop at that; they also confiscated most of the lands belonging to the two brothers in their joint names, leaving only enough for the two wives of Niaz Beg to get by. Ayaz Beg then came to the village for the first time since he had left it and took his brother’s young son with him to Calcutta, where he had by now risen, despite his lack of formal qualifications, to the very considerable position of engineer, educating himself besides in a wide range of general subjects, acquiring a rounded and sophisticated personality all the more remarkable for a man with his background. He never married. Now he had got something to do:to educate his nephew. He sent the boy to good English schools, giving him the best education available at his level.
    Roshan Pur has a central position in this story; for the first few days, however, our narrative takes us to Delhi, the capital city of the Indian Empire, where, the old Roshan Agha having died recently in his eighty-sixth year, the title was going to be transferred to his son, Nawab Ghulam Mohyyeddin Roshan Ali Khan, in an elaborate ceremony held at Roshan Mahal. These were also the days when the struggle for the political independence of India had begun to take shape.

CHAPTER 2
    T HE LARGE HOUSE, set back from the road, stood in vast grounds at the corner of Queen’s and Curzon roads. The two men, one elderly, the other young, got down from the behli a short distance from the main gate.