Cracking India (32 page)

A terrifying roar, like the warning of an alarm, throbs in his ears. He sits up on the charpoy, taking in the disorder in the hastily abandoned room. The other cot, heaped with his aunt's belongings, lies where it was. He can see the bedding roll abandoned in the courtyard. Clay dishes, mugs, chipped crockery, and hand fans lie on the floor with scattered bits of clothing. Where are his aunt and uncle? Why is he alone? And in the fearsome noise drawing nearer, he recognizes the rhythm of the Sikh and Hindu chants.

Ranna leapt from the cot and ran through the lanes of the deserted village. Except for the animals lowing and bleating and wandering ownerless on the slushy paths there was no one about. Why hadn't they taken him with them?

His heart thumping, Ranna climbed to the top of the mosque minaret. He saw the mob of Sikhs and Hindus in the fields scuttling forward from the horizon like giant ants. Roaring, waving swords, partly obscured by the veil of dust raised by their trampling feet, they approached the village.

Ranna flew down the steep steps. He ran in and out of the empty houses looking for a place to hide. The mob sounded close. He could hear the thud of their feet, make out the words of their chants. Ranna slipped through the door into a barn. It was almost entirely filled with straw. He dived into it.

He heard the Sikhs' triumphant war cries as they swarmed into the village. He heard the savage banging and kicking open of doors: and the quick confused exchange of shouts as the men
realized that the village was empty. They searched all the houses, moving systematically, looting whatever they could lay their hands on.

Ranna held his breath as the door to the barn opened.

“Oye! D'you think the Musslas are hiding here?” a coarse voice asked.

“We'll find out,” another voice said.

Ranna crouched in the hay. The men were climbing all over the straw, slashing it with long sweeps of their swords and piercing it with their spears.

Ranna almost cried out when he felt the first sharp prick. He felt steel tear into his flesh. As if recalling a dream, he heard an old woman say: He's lost too much blood. Let him die in peace.

Ranna did not lose consciousness again until the last man left the barn.

And while the old city in Lahore, crammed behind its dilapidated Mogul gates, burned, thirty miles away Amritsar also burned. No one noticed Ranna as he wandered in the burning city. No one cared. There were too many ugly and abandoned children like him scavenging in the looted houses and the rubble of burnt-out buildings.

His rags clinging to his wounds, straw sticking in his scalped skull, Ranna wandered through the lanes stealing chapatties and grain from houses strewn with dead bodies, rifling the corpses for anything he could use. He ate anything. Raw potatoes, uncooked grains, wheat flour, rotting peels and vegetables.

No one minded the semi-naked specter as he looked in doors with his knowing, wide-set peasant eyes as men copulated with wailing children—old and young women. He saw a naked woman, her light Kashmiri skin bruised with purple splotches and cuts, hanging head down from a ceiling fan. And looked on with a child's boundless acceptance and curiosity as jeering men set her long hair on fire. He saw babies, snatched from their mothers,
smashed against walls and their howling mothers brutally raped and killed.

Carefully steering away from the murderous Sikh mobs he arrived at the station on the outskirts of the city. It was cordoned off by barbed wire, and beyond the wire he recognized a huddle of Muslim refugees surrounded by Sikh and Hindu police. He stood before the barbed wire screaming,
“Amma! Amma
! Noni
chachi!
Noni
chachi!”

A Sikh sepoy, his hair tied neatly in a khaki turban, ambled up to the other side of the wire. “Oye! What're you making such a racket for? Scram!” he said, raising his hand in a threatening gesture.

Ranna stayed his ground. He could not bear to look at the Sikh. His stomach muscles felt like choked drains. But he stayed his ground:
“I was trembling from head to toe
,” he says.

“O me-kiya!
I say!” the sepoy shouted to his cronies standing by an opening in the wire. “This little motherfucker thinks his mother and aunt are in that group of Musslas.”

“Send him here,” someone shouted.

Ranna ran up to the men.

“Don't you know? Your mother married me yesterday,” said a fat-faced, fat-bellied Hindu, his hairy legs bulging beneath the shorts of his uniform. “And your
chachi
married Makhan Singh,” he said, indicating a tall young sepoy with a shake of his head.

“Let the poor bastard be,” Makhan Singh said. “Go on: run along.” Taking Ranna by his shoulder he gave him a shove.

The refugees in front watched the small figure hurtle towards them across the gravelly clearing. A middle-aged woman without a veil, her hair disheveled, moved forward holding out her arms.

The moment Ranna was close enough to see the compassion in her stranger's eyes, he fainted.

 

With the other Muslim refugees from Amritsar, Ranna was herded into a refugee camp at Badami Baug. He stayed in the camp, which is quite close to our Fire Temple, for two months, queuing for the doled-out chapatties, befriended by improvident
refugees, until chance—if the random queries of five million refugees seeking their kin in the chaos of mammoth camps all over West Punjab can be called anything but chance—reunited him with his Noni
chachi
and Iqbal
chacha.

Cousin's cook drops hints. He tells Cousin he suspects where Ayah is. Yes, he thinks she's in Lahore.

Then he clams up. And no matter how much Cousin threatens or cajoles him, doesn't add one illuminating word. I dare not question the cook. In front of me he clams up. And in private threatens Cousin he won't tell him anything if he blabs to me.

I roam the bazaars holding Himat Ali's wizened finger, Hamida's glutinous hand. I visit fairs and
melas
riding on Yousaf's shoulders, looking here and there. And when I ride on the handlebar of his bicycle, peering into tongas, buses, bullock-carts and trucks, I sometimes think I spot Ayah and exclaim! But it always turns out to be someone who only resembles Ayah.

Godmother is influential. Even Colonel Bharucha visits her. Neighbors of all faiths drop in to talk and to pay their respects. But Godmother seldom ventures out. She only visits if someone is very sick or in extreme need of her.

Or if she feels the call to donate blood.

The call nags her this stifling July morning. Godmother tucks a cologne-watered handkerchief into a little pocket in her sari-blouse, puts on her maroon velvet going-out slippers, pins her going-out beige silk sari to her hair and armed with a black umbrella sets off in a tonga to bequeath blood. I accompany her. Schools and tuitions are suspended for summer vacations and I am spending the week with her. Hamida and Adi spend most evenings with us. Mother visits occasionally and I feel distanced from her—as with a guest.

Godmother lies down on a hard hospital bench covered only
with a white sheet. A nurse bends her arm back and forth and rubs the crease in her arm with cotton wool that smells just like the muzzle did when Colonel Bharucha operated on my leg. The lady doctor approaches with a hideous injection syringe and, sick to my stomach, I turn my face away and squeeze Godmother's hand. Her answering grip remains steady.

When I look at her again, the blood-sucking needle withdrawn, she appears to have grown longer—as if the noble deed has added stature to her horizontal form. I am certain her blood will save many wounded lives.

 

Perspiring and half-dead from the heat, we return from the hospital. Mini Aunty hands Godmother a precious half-glass of iced water from a thermos and says she would also like to donate blood.

Godmother is firm with her middle-aged kid sister. “No,” she says, “you may kindly not donate your blood! I can't afford to have you go all faint and limp on me.”

Slavesister looks unutterably deprived. “All right,” she says, sagging against the kitchen door jamb. “Go to heaven all by yourself, then. Deny me even good deeds!”

Godmother is truly astonished.

“Is that what you believe?” she asks, staring at Slavesister slack-jawed and openmouthed; for once at a complete loss.

At last, shaking her head, Godmother rotates her thumb against her temple: “A screw loose somewhere,” she says, looking dazed. “What's to become of her, I don't know... In heaven or in hell!”

Over the years Godmother has established a network of espionage with a reach of which even she is not aware. It is in her nature to know things: to be aware of what's going on around her. The day-to-day commonplaces of our lives unravel to her undercurrents that are lost to less perceptive humans. No baby—not
even a kitten—is delivered within the sphere of her influence without her becoming instantly aware of its existence.

And this is the source of her immense power, this reservoir of random knowledge, and her knowledge of ancient lore and wisdom and herbal remedy. You cannot be near her without feeling her uncanny strength. People bring to her their joys and woes. Show her their sores and swollen joints. Distilling the right herbs, adroitly in-stilling the right word in the right ear, she secures wishes, smooths relationships, cures illnesses, battles wrongs, solaces grief and prevents mistakes. She has access to many ears. No one knows how many. And, when talking incessantly about my resurrected friend I relate to her the rigors of Ranna's experience, she achieves for him a minor miracle! Ranna is suddenly siphoned into the Convent of Jesus and Mary as a boarder.

It surprises me how easily Ranna has accepted his loss; and adjusted to his new environment. So... one gets used to anything ... If one must. The small bitternesses and grudges I tend to nurse make me feel ashamed of myself. Ranna's ready ability to forgive a past none of us could control keeps him whole.

The Convent is on the outskirts of Shahdara, about halfway between Imam Din's village and Lahore. Barricaded by tall brick walls the girls' school accepts boys up to a certain age. Getting a poor refugee child admitted to a Convent school is as difficult as transposing him to a prosperous continent, and as beneficial. Not only for him, it is said, but for seven succeeding generations of the Ranna progeny. Ranna visits us on the weekends he can get a cycle ride into Lahore.

Godmother can move mountains from the paths of those she befriends and erect mountainous barriers where she deems it necessary.

She is on to something. I can tell. When I catch her goos-goosing with Slavesister and they stop whispering abruptly, I know they are talking of Ayah. Slavesister behaves as if they are not hiding anything from me. But Godmother, to her credit, looks guilty as hell.