Partitions: A Novel (12 page)

*   *   *

Masud is boiling two scalpels and a probe on a stranger’s noon cookfire. He had lanced his sixth abscess of the morning and asked the use of this pot and water as recompense. Abscesses are everywhere in the kafila. Every grit ripens a pearl of pus. Most are in the feet or legs from splinters, stray nails, thorns, scraping scrub. The only exceptions are the dog bites. And, of course, the human bites. Masud knows from medical school which bite is worse, which mouth fouler. The women always say it’s a dog, as if there were any mistaking it. As if a dog would get that high, as if a dog would choose the place where the dip under the collarbone gives way to the breast’s softness.

He has also braced a tibial fracture using sticks and a saree. He wasn’t happy with his work, though. The skin had been broken. Had he been generous enough with the disinfectant? He had one dark glass bottle of iodine tincture in his bag, and its cap never failed to stain his fingers. A handful of bunched saree had muffled the open bottle, which he inverted quickly, righted, and capped, eager to conserve the solution, which colored the saree purplish brown. He had dabbed the skin, he hadn’t really sterilized it. What if it got infected? What if the infection went to bone?

His instruments click and dance with the bubbles. Fifteen minutes would be the proper duration, but the water will boil down before then. And the water he asked for is precious to the family that let him have it. Already he has lanced a father’s abscess and a son’s, in succession, with only two flat wipes of the blade in between. Angular slashes of pink infected milkiness mark his sleeve, the forearm held up like a painter’s palette.

The family is staring at him. A gentleman heron perfectly still against a background of shuffling migration. They don’t realize how necessary this boiling is to what Masud wants to do. To them, it’s just water wasted at hot high noon, and a longer delay on the roadside. He has treated their son, though, and they wish to pay him somehow. They figured he asked because he wanted to drink; he had jabbed his thumb at his upturned open mouth, after all, and nodded wildly when they said
paani
. They never expected him to tear pages from his little book and resuscitate their dying cookfire, then set the pot on the hook and drop his instruments into the water. Or to smile so broadly when he saw, at last, the first tiny bubble.

Not that he isn’t thirsty. His tongue feels swollen and his throat hurts, making it harder than usual to talk. Even the children need him to clear his throat and repeat things. Around the adults, if the child is somnolent or unconscious and cannot translate for him, he is all signs and nods. Masud hasn’t had a sip of water for over a day now, and he doesn’t plan to. At some point, he knows, the thirst will madden him, have him on his hands and knees lapping at heat-shimmer, but he doesn’t trust the water. Even at home, he always boiled his twice before drinking it, like a traveler.

The mother watches as he hemostats the pot and tips his shining hot scalpels into his bag. The bag is nonsterile on the inside, but he has lined it with the most rarely thumbed pages of his pharmacopoeia. She reaches into a bundle and pulls out two rotis, dry to the point that they snap when she folds them. Food he trusts more than water. Masud accepts her gift and joins his hands around them. “Allah keep you,” she says, one hand on her son’s feverish forehead. The other she raises to block the sun, which is directly behind Masud and follows him as he walks away.

*   *   *

The sun is not his only follower. I can see them keeping their distance, for now, but they have learned of him and whisper about him. The children. One, two, four, sixteen of them. As if his presence coaxes them out of hiding. The first boy he found on the roadside limps and watches him. He is an orphan, owning nothing but his rags and the big scythe-slash on his tiny thigh. He got it when his family took refuge with six others in a rice mill. The door became daylight, and the shouting outside became the shouting inside. He lay very still while it bled, the blood warm as a bedwetting. When he sat up, he was the only one who had been playing dead; he knew because he checked everyone else. His wound has been treated and dressed—under Masud’s gauze, Masud’s evenly spaced stitches. Other children gather, watching the old man curiously. They watch him slow down beside bodies wrecked in ditches. They watch him cup the heel and test an ankle or peel cloth from sticky, opened flesh. If there is nothing left to do, he closes the eyes. He struggles when there is no child he can talk to or talk through—marbles suddenly fill his mouth, and there’s a pause and intake of breath before he starts again. The orphans have been there all along. It’s only now that they choose to be seen. Any two communicate as wordlessly as twins.

One more follower. A thinly ribbed stray dog, brown with white patches and some patches of no fur at all. She hurries beside Masud, smelling somehow the brittle rotis, which are for all their staleness warm from the journey-long exposure. Her milk has swollen between her legs and swings with the trot, but no whelps trail her. A high-pitched note comes out of her throat, like the creaking of a cart.

“I hardly have enough for myself,” says Masud, easily. The dog cuts across to his other side and keeps pace. He takes a bite and chews to show her. “There’s nothing for you here. Haat!” The admonition is halfhearted. She can sense it; she has known the real thing. So she stops and lowers her nose to something imaginary on the ground, her interest seemingly diverted, and sure enough, he stops, too. “I hardly have enough for myself.” A roti slaps the dust before her, and she gets to work without looking up, snapping up and sideways to maneuver it into place, as if it were meat.

*   *   *

The boys witness some things without entirely letting them in. Street, street corner, another street. Images emerge out of nothing, warp across the surfaces of their eyes, and return to nothing. The relationships of things are skewed. The one image that lodges in Keshav’s mind is the image of a young woman, four buildings away, stepping off a roof. She doesn’t throw herself down, and she isn’t pushed. It’s deliberate, onto the ledge as onto the first step of a staircase, the next step the step off. As if she were a tightrope walker with the tightrope missing. Her falling is finished before he can point to it. The crowd of men beneath surges away from her landing, then closes back in on it. They remind me of still water reacting to a single raindrop.

The boys are so scared they don’t even realize it when they pass through their own part of town. Three streets over is the place they’ve grown up, but nothing is familiar. In any case, our flat is about to change ownership; a lock cutter has just clamped the lock Sonia left on it. The door jerks twice, and now there’s the sound of the bolt sliding. It opens inward. I stand in the doorway, the host. A man enters. I let him pass through me—just so he can feel a chill, a foreboding as he takes this place over. He looks around and waves to the open door. Two women follow, and five children. The man goes out to bring up the bags. The children find the bin with the toys and start laying them on the floor. One of the women takes down my picture, along with the marigold garland Sonia strung around it—trash now, the picture and the flowers alike. The children have found Shankar’s little damru and the stuffed monkey Keshav used to swing by the tail and launch at an imaginary Lanka. The other woman sees the trunk open on my cot, holds up one of the shirts, and looks back at her sons. This trove of clothes will fit the younger one. She sits on the cot and starts weeping gratefully into the cloth. Meanwhile the man has brought up the fourth and last bundle. He goes into the kitchen, where the russet pot still contains water and the steel cup sits inverted on the lid. He ladles himself a glass and drinks. His wives and children join him. He pours them each their draft of water until he has to tilt the pot to get the last. They have traveled a long distance. They, too, have given up a home, as I give up this one. They are all thirsty. The man inverts the earthen pot in both hands and shakes it over his open mouth.

*   *   *

It falls to Saif to unload the equipment. A casual order from Ayub to him sets up the hierarchy. Once Saif climbs in back, where Aisha sits in her bedding and picks at her eye, there’s no changing it, no matter how vigorously he pulls himself up by the hanging chain. He is third.

Ropes, rags, two axes, a long flat knife. The corner of the truck is empty now. Saif scoots off the truck bed, overburdened, with one of the ropes trailing. He tries to tuck it back into its coil. Ayub draws it out, lets the loosened coil drop entirely, then loops it swiftly under and over, under and over his shoulder, impatient, fixing Saif’s problem. They take what they want directly out of his arms and leave him with a frayed rope and the shorter ax. Aisha watches, and Saif doesn’t like how this has happened in front of the woman. He can sense Qasim shifting, too. Qasim and Ayub walk side by side, and when Saif quicksteps ahead and places himself beside Qasim, he feels remote from the center. He is reduced to eavesdropping on their strategy. Outright snatches are best saved for night, Ayub is saying—these are all things he has heard from practiced traffickers, but his voice sounds like that of experience. Even a night raid has blood in it, he warns, because families sleep close together, and some father or uncle, posted guard, may need his throat cut first. During the daytime, you look for the ones on the roadside, who refuse to leave their dead husbands behind and sit there beating their chests. And there are always a few girls who have cut themselves from the herd, who slide away to tuck up their cholis and squat. No matter how dangerous the privacy, good girls, once they’re at a bleeding age, just will not piss in front of their pappajis. “You’ll see, they go in pairs,” Ayub promises. “For safety.”

The talk stops. Ayub has brought them to a sugarcane field. Stiff stalks part and close over them. From the kafila, their approach has the look of a wind. Not that anyone is looking at anything but the next footfall and the next. Close enough to hear axles creak, the three men crouch and watch. It is the long, patient contemplation of predators. Qasim and Saif wait for a signal, but the knife turns endlessly in Ayub’s hand. His forearm muscles match his grinding jaw. Half an hour. Saif’s hand recoils from his own hot neck. He senses the inaccessible sweetness all around him, locked in the cane, sugar locked away in splinter staves. Thirst. They exit the field the way they came. The place where they come out has changed, shifted like a shore. Ayub takes them one way, then, when nothing is familiar, the other. Finally they reach the truck, where Aisha has been sleeping the whole time, one knee in the air, one arm over her eyes, the same fly undetected now on her elbow, now on the round of her ring finger, now on her lip. Her fingers curl inward passively, like the legs of a dead spider. Their voices make these fingers twitch to life. She sits up. Sure enough, they have come back towing no one. She is happy with the assignment so far. She could tell they were amateurs, and not just Saif.

A quick tear and chew of rotis. Soon they are out again. More than one family in the nearby kafila are using the late afternoon light to stop and eat. I linger over two sisters a quarter kilometer east. It happens exactly as Ayub conjectured it might, two girls going off a short distance, behind some scrub. A father and two brothers in earshot, but not looking directly their way. Two girls; Saif can tell immediately how it will happen, Ayub and Qasim coming away with their prizes, conquerors, and Saif, the third, doing at best some tying. He can imagine Ayub picking a knot loose and retying it correctly. So he puts his hand on Qasim’s shoulder and points at his own chest,
me, I am going to do this
, then twists one of the rags into a taut gag. Ayub glances over, impressed at Saif’s eagerness to spring, and, briefly, Saif senses himself dominant. Not second-in-command. The leader. That thought, by itself, strengthens him; he calls, as his prey, the taller, elder one. The sisters look around. Saif’s is the first to lower herself. Without a cue to Ayub, Saif darts out of hiding.

The stretch snaps the overstrap of his left sandal. It flaps wildly, and his foot is bare by the second step. He stumbles, but he gets to the girl, tackles her clumsily and with his whole body. His focus is on her mouth and throat, shoving the rag with one hand, squeezing the throat with the other. Her teeth nick his knuckles. The rag has blood on it, but it isn’t all his. He squirms atop her, increasingly panicky, far more sweat on his forehead and back than the exertion deserves. The rope comes alive in his hands and thrashes. Qasim brings his own rope and helps with the wrists. When Saif looks up, Ayub has the other sister over his shoulder, unconscious, long hair hanging past his waist. Neatly packaged. He checks in the direction of the girls’ family, but even as he does so, he grins to watch Saif struggle. I sense both things at once, the apprehension and the amusement. Finally, after watching things a while, Ayub swings the younger sister forward so the older one can see, and holds his blade parallel to the hair. It is enough.

Saif has to run her to the truck. He yanks her along by the hand. Qasim smirks at the sight of Saif and the girl like that, hand in hand. Saif changes his grip to her skinned elbow, which, though it leaves a red spot on his palm, looks more brutal, more proper. It’s not the only place where she stained him; her urine splashed him at that first tackle, and he is still bewildered by how much. The cloth is stuck to his stomach, just as wet there as it is on his back from sweat. The urine of near dehydration, hers. I recognize it. Sharp in the nostrils, the color of yellow gold.

When they get to the truck, Aisha raises the veil of hair over the unconscious one and clicks her tongue disapprovingly. “These look like sisters.”

Ayub is interested in Aisha’s opinions and advice, young though she is. She has seen how other, more practiced men do this. “What’s wrong with that?”

Aisha shrugs. “That makes it hard.”

Ayub needs to hear no more. He pulls the rag out of the elder sister’s mouth. Thumb and index finger spread her lips. “This one’s missing a tooth.”