Partitions: A Novel (2 page)

What happens next happens clumsily. They force themselves downward, pushing off the ceiling, and a few of the outriders shout and squeeze aside to let them through—to resist would be to risk being pushed off. The boys are small but wiry, full of frantic energy and hard boy bones. If the platform had been three feet longer, both might have landed with a few deep scrapes, but the platform vanishes just as they make it out. Keshav just makes it: forearms, stomach, and right cheek scraped, and a cut on his scalp. Shankar, though, falls just a second later. He clips the platform on his way down, and it flips him bodily. He hits the tracks, tumbles and skids a few feet, and comes to a stop in the train’s monstrous shadow. The sun flashes between the cars.

*   *   *

The instant they fall, I sense another fall, this one gentler, on the other side of the new border. Dr. Ibrahim Masud. He is tall and thin, his chest, in his slept-in white undershirt, no broader than a boy’s. Half his face is covered in shaving cream. The other half is freshly shaven, the razor drawn down the cheek, swished in the basin, tapped, brought up again.

I go back and see the way his fingers flared off the razor as it approached his skin. Thumb and forefinger took over for the delicate work. His earlobes dripped, and still drip, from the wake-up splashes that preceded the shave. Half his face finished, he sniffed the air, called the name Dara ji twice, and, hearing no answer from his servant, investigated. The rooms were hazy. (For Masud to notice smoke, it would have to fill the house; he tends not to sense his environment, his attention a flashlight, not a lamp.)
Something
, he thought,
must be burning in the street.
Trash was usually burned at dusk to disperse mosquitoes, or at dawn to warm hands. This hour, eight in the morning, was wrong. Two milk bottles, on the steps beside his shoes, had not been taken in. He wandered onto the stones barefoot, bewildered.

Hot wind, as though a furnace had swung open. Ash flecks flitted onto his raised wrist. He heard a crack and looked up.

Now, backing away from his house through its cast-iron front gate, he trips on his own feet. He hits the ground at the same instant my twins, hundreds of miles west of him, land on the tracks.

*   *   *

Get up, boys. Get up.

Car after car sways past Shankar, brisk now. Facelike masks see him and assume he is dead—a feature of the landscape, indifferent, plantlike. Keshav, bleeding, pushes himself off the platform to retrieve his brother. To many, the sight of the boys brings up a surge of relief and gratitude—this is the kind of horror they are escaping. Then the train is gone, its rocking soft in the distance. Daylight again, and the uproar on the platform.

I feel Shankar’s three broken ribs and the cut on Keshav’s head. I marvel that Shankar’s collarbone hasn’t broken where he hit the edge of the platform. They cannot feel my hands. How will they travel? I have foreseen their courses, but I never saw these details, never knew they would be in pain, Shankar stabbed by every breath, Keshav’s skin grated raw, no gauze, no plaster.

With Keshav’s help, Shankar gets up holding the side where he has broken his ribs. The pain is the worst he has felt since the time he sprained his ankle last year, but he is not crying. If he saw his mother, he would start; there would be someone to cry to. Right now he and Keshav are too scared. They hold each other, saying nothing as they look for a way back onto the platform. Keshav blinks and tastes his own blood. Shankar, seeing the cut on Keshav’s scalp and the hair wet over it, daubs his brother’s face with his sleeve. The pain doesn’t stop him. It is an older brother’s gesture, though he is actually only a minute older. An older brother’s gesture, or a father’s. The silk soaks dark.

*   *   *

Their faces are identical, but their bodies aren’t. Shankar grows into Keshav’s hand-me-downs. Other kids tease Keshav about stealing his brother’s food, even though Shankar has the bigger appetite.

It wasn’t always so. I remember when Shankar was too weak to suck. It was a cycle that started from his first hour. Weakness kept him from sucking, which made him weaker, which kept him from sucking. When his arm worked loose from the swaddling, it hung down. The skin of it slid loosely under the thumb, no baby fat to swell it taut. I could not bear to see the arm dangle like that. I would tuck it up like a broken part and fix the cloth. His palms, his lips, the skin around his lips, and the soles of his feet deepened in color as he cried. Blue, bluish purple, purple. His color returned to gray only after his mewl slackened into sleep.

I carried him a lot those first few weeks. The kohl Sonia used to rim his eyes made him look sicker. His brother slept, pink and blissful, after the breast or a bath and rubdown with coconut oil. Shankar was a minute older, but everything gave him a look of age. He had a full head of silken womb hair, while Keshav was baby bald, just fuzz. What little milk Shankar could get down, he didn’t keep down. His oval face hungered from the hour he was born and drew no succor from breath or breast. The shape of his face was another thing that made him look older, especially next to his brother’s, a perfect circle broken only by the bulges of his cheeks. I shook my head at the contrast of destinies. By week three, Keshav had put down roots in life and taken. Shankar fit on Sonia’s palm and upturned wrist. She held his sleep like a beggar showing the empty bowl.

*   *   *

My marriage to Sonia had contaminated me, in the opinion of my Brahmin family. So my children by that marriage were likewise impure. Because Sonia had no kin of her own, no one had been present for the birth. My mother had not come, or had been forbidden to come.

I still believed they would all soften, my father included. I half expected, whenever I answered the door, to see them as they had been before, before my contamination. After all, hadn’t my father incurred contamination, too, when young, by sailing overseas to the Royal College to study? And by seeing, in his office, patients of every caste and no caste at all, cupping their cracked heels to test the sprain, or kneading their abdomens to find the culprit organ? His choices had been controversial in his day, for the son of a Brahmin family as high and orthodox as his. My grandfather forgave him only because he was second-born. The elder son had memorized the slokas and become a pandit like his forefathers; everything was not lost. A pandit and a ceremony purified my father when he came back. At the train station—this train station—he arrived all those years ago, shoulders sloping asymmetrically, a light bag on the left, on the right a new trunk, filled entirely, it turned out, not with gifts from England but textbooks. He wore English pants beside the Vedic fire. Still, certain ideas of blood and caste had never left him. They were objective realities to him, like the height or weight of a person. I know because that is how I thought of it too, until Sonia.

*   *   *

No quantity of rice or Sanskrit could exculpate me. My betrayal was total, and my contamination was total, my sons’ as well. What my family would have thought a divine blessing in other circumstances—twin sons, like Shri Rama himself—now struck them as animal fertility, slum fertility. What caste but the lowest, they reasoned, would have originated my orphan wife? The churches thrived off the people Gandhi was calling “harijans.” Untouchables: everyone knew what they did to girl children they didn’t want—killed them, abandoned them, or sold them to the Christians, who were always in the market for souls.

My elder sister Damyanti visited us once that first hectic month, a shawl over her head and her bag tucked protectively under her arm. It must not have been easy for her to sneak out to us. We had moved to a poorer, that is, Muslim, part of town. The neighborhood’s very name, Nizam Chowk, had a harsh, foreign, faraway sound in our house. It could have been on the other side of a border. Yet she arrived to name my boys. For weeks, Damyanti had tasted names like the sweets a caterer lays out to court the bride’s parents. When she learned they were twins, the rules changed, and she tested rhyming names, alliterative names. The meanings, too, were important to her. She could not bear the frivolous Leena-Meena of her best friend’s twins. So she settled on naming my boys after Shiva and Vishnu, the destroyer and the sustainer: Shankar and Keshav.

The boys were napping when she arrived at our door, shook off her sandals, and started crying softly. I peeled back the blankets to show her. The showing didn’t last long enough, with the swaddling and the caps, for her to see the difference.

She couldn’t carry out a full naming ceremony with guests and a pandit, but she did take out a tin that had a single piece of my mother’s gajjar mithai. Sonia hovered in the kitchen, and my sister didn’t call her over. Eventually Sonia did come out with a tray and a glass of water, but Damyanti declined it. When Sonia was back in the kitchen, my sister looked at me and whispered,
But I am thirsty, Roshan bhaiyya
. I knew what she meant. I went into the kitchen and, without looking at Sonia, ladled a glass with my own Brahmin hands and brought it to Damyanti. I stood halfway between the two women, Sonia’s retiring shadow and Damyanti with her nose turned up, pouring the water into her mouth without letting her lips touch the rim. Between my own two lives. All this she did in my home, to my wife, with a perfect sense of justification—but when she told me the names she had chosen for my sons, I bit the sweet she held out to me and thanked her. Sonia, too, accepted them. This was how newborns were properly named, and I was grateful my twins’ names originated where they should have, with the father’s sister. It was as though she had salvaged something of their birthright and delivered it.

Keshav started crying and woke Shankar, who had cried longer and so fallen asleep later. Damyanti asked to hold them. She wanted to hold them at the same time. When she had them both in her arms, the first thing she said was, concernedly, looking down at Shankar, “Isn’t she
feeding
this one?”

Sonia sobbed, just once, from inside the kitchen. It did feel, in those early days, like her own failure. She had no one to tell her otherwise, not even me. I won’t pretend to having some kind of enlightenment back then. I never really understood how she felt—having become a mother without any example of motherhood to refer to, or any older woman’s counsel. I expected the know-how to come physiologically, with the milk to the breasts.

So when I took Shankar away from Damyanti, I did it to defend him, not Sonia. To own my firstborn son—not my wife—in proud, defiant love. Of Sonia I was still, in some deep part of myself, ashamed. But Shankar, I sensed, was the victim of some higher malice, and this malice was enough, it was all a creature could bear. I would protect him against every human addition to that malice because I had declared the suffering he was born to suffering enough. So I took him away and held him close, as though my sister had wounded him. Sonia, emboldened, took Keshav back. The boys were screaming now, our agitation contagious. Damyanti gathered her shawl about her, shut the empty tin and put it in her bag, and left. Her sandals clacked down the stairs and vanished over the dust.

*   *   *

Between my two boys, I could have guessed Shankar would get the broken ribs, the worse injury decided by a matter of inches. This is one more piece of bad luck for him I will never understand, no matter how much I read about karma.

It was all I could do, when he was a newborn, to throw my arm out in time and block the curtain rod that fell, without provocation, across his cradle. Later, when he started walking, the house had every corner and edge out for him like knives. I knew the difference because his brother had started walking two months before. I remember Shankar walking into a ball and chasing it, laughing every time it skipped away from him. A scorpion darted from behind our framed portrait of Bala Krishna, and I had to scoop Shankar off the ground.

Even after my sickness started, I was always on the lookout. His face had a strangely grown-up, serious, almost worried look. He sensed the same malice in the cosmos that I did. But when he laughed, I saw his mother’s eyes in my own face, eyes that narrowed and curved into darkly shining arches, and I knew the deal I had made with the Gods was being honored.

*   *   *

The razor drops from Masud’s hand. He has forgotten his half-mask of shaving cream and overnight stubble. He looks down. His foot is bleeding, the cut straight, oblique, shallow. The razor is close by his foot, in the dust. He lifts his foot and puts it down, not knowing what to do. A weak gesture as if to show someone the calamity. The flames that used treetops as a bridge onto his terrace. No one is there to see it with him. The other houses are empty; they had means, and they left in time.

Standing beside him, I stare at the smoke over his house. Shapes of smoke curl, hold, and release: a woman is underwater, her hair, undone, floating vertically; a man’s face turns aside and splits down the middle; two children embrace until parted by a wind. Blacker, thicker smoke rises and curls into itself. Everything is prefigured. Masud sees smoke. I see what I have foreseen.

It’s not that Masud doesn’t know what has happened to the Punjab. He owns a radio—not a good one, but the radio would have to break completely before it occurred to him to replace it. Even if he didn’t, there was no way not to hear, if nothing else then at the clinic. The BBC has been discussing the issue for some time. He knew this great event was coming, but he understood the new border only in the abstract, an understanding as simple as a mapmaker’s or an Englishman’s. A line demarcating jurisdictions, not identities. He cannot hear the radio’s static for what it is—the border’s cupful of acid, flung hissing into the soil.

Congress and the Muslim League had pounded their tables and made their speeches. Why should it alter his routine? His day has been unalterable for years now. His life takes place almost entirely inside the clinic. He gets in at nine in the morning and stays twelve, sometimes fourteen hours, even though he could leave earlier. His stammer and intense shyness keep him from easily navigating any interaction more complicated than question, examine, advise. The rare times he goes out to buy toothpaste or tea, he points with his middle finger, furrows his brow, nods or shakes his head in great, exaggerated rolls and jerks. He is pious, on the surface of it, but his prayers are merely one component of a larger, daily routine. The mind stays quite blank.