Partitions: A Novel (7 page)

He set the cup on the wall and started explaining the latest addition to the house, a marble porch with a new swing (Gujaratis loved their swings). His name was Ghulam Sikri, and he was in charge, he said. His muscular arms moved with his words, showing me how much had been done and how much was left to do. He even went into the price of marble. He spoke more openly than I had ever heard one of his kind speak before. The slurrings and contractions of poor men’s talk made it a little hard for me to follow. The others rose immediately from their work and nodded as he spoke. There was something more than respect here; there was warmth. They must have overheard my neighbors talking about my choice of wife and realized I had welcomed, for love, the same contempt they suffered for being born, the contempt that in some measure, as much as their faith, defined them. I was, in their opinion, not like my neighbors. In my own opinion, I confess, I still felt superior. I despised my neighbors for despising Sonia, but I felt no sudden kinship, for that reason, to every low-caste or Muslim day laborer who stank of lamb and slum.

Over the next weeks, though, I did warm to them. They told me their names, they told me the names of their villages. While I was away at work, they spoke to Sonia and redid our bathroom floor in what I am certain was Ramchand Parikh’s marble. They refused to accept any payment but roti prepared by Sonia’s hands. I, for my part, iodined their cuts, punched holes in crushed toenails to drain the blood, and gentled splinters out of hands rougher than brick. In return, they sawed and planed a cabinet for the upstairs room and whitewashed the balcony and sidewall, which water damage had blotched bluish gray the prior year.

The neighbors saw this unlikely friendship and decided I was totally lost. I enjoyed these mutual kindnesses with the workmen at first, but it soon felt like too much—as though I had fed stray puppies and now couldn’t be rid of their loyalty.

The whispers of distaste should have been enough, but it took shouting to make us leave that neighborhood for good. It happened shortly after Sonia told me she was pregnant. I overheard Ramchand Parikh arguing with his wife, Hema. They felt free to shout at each other because they did it in Gujarati and figured no one knew what they were saying. I knew enough Hindi to follow Gujarati. Hema was complaining about how tightfisted her husband was, how little money he let her spend. Ramchand pointed out all the things he was doing to the house—why wasn’t she satisfied? Mention of the renovation brought out a new grievance. What use was this house, she escalated, when Ramchand made her leave it all day and stay at her sister’s while the workers were here? Even at dusk, when they had the house back—the dust, the heaps of broken stone everywhere, there was nowhere to walk! Ramchand declared himself a strict husband, a husband who set rules and preserved the family honor—nothing like that Dr. Jaitly, who let his wife hang around Muslims all day while he was at work, and was going to end up raising some bricklayer’s bastard children.

*   *   *

Masud sits where he has been told. The policewallahs shuffle and deal the files out of file cabinets and scoot chairs and desks to separate sides of the room. Some of the pens do not have caps, so they take the caps off all the pens and distribute the caps and pens individually. Stamps are tested and classified by the dampness of their ink pads; this is to keep India from slipping Pakistan the soon-to-be-useless ones, or vice versa. Careful tallies are kept of everything in the office. Every half hour, they take a break and rip more pages out of ledgers. At around two in the afternoon by the wall clock, they nap in chairs. Forty-five minutes later, both sets of heels slide off the desk and clap the floor sharply, and both men cough awake and dig at their eyes. They leave the chowki for afternoon tea. Not a glance toward his corner.

At half past three, they go back to work. This time they have brought boxes. They shuffle the loose papers upright and tap them against the desks, neat rectangles to go in the boxes. Masud waits. The sunlight through the door has crept across the floor and stretched trapezoidal against the far wall. A fly tickles his knuckle. Another fly tastes the sweat off his shaven cheek, which has darkened imperceptibly since morning. He rubs his face in both hands. It will be night soon. The city will slide out its carving knives.

The tearing has started up again. He stands and makes an anguished noise. The division has begun and will not stop until the whole book, whatever book it may be, is torn apart and meaningless, missing half of itself. Outside the chowki, the city, in late light, has darkened. Terror’s intimate thumbs press his throat. His chest strains upward, trying to breathe. Cradling his doctor’s bag against his chest, he turns, looking up at this gang of buildings that has encircled him. He takes off running, for nowhere at all.

*   *   *

Now it is time for my boys to leave, too.

When a second train approaches, they backstep off the track. Circling through the steam, they walk along the car windows, careful to hold hands as they do it. Every jostle tightens their grip by reflex. I walk behind them. Their bald spots are on opposite sides. Keshav’s hair swirls clockwise, Shankar’s goes counterclockwise, a mirror image. They have stopped calling for her. Now they just peer through the horizontal bars and move on. Sometimes still-youthful widows—unmistakable, black hair, white sarees—give them hope. It is never her.

I am with them the whole time. No matter how far I range, and I range far, my attention is on them. Habit makes me sidestep solid bodies. Trailing my boys today, though, in a crowd this thick, I stride through shoulders and luggage, as effortlessly disruptive as trampling a flower-patch. The living men I trespass on stop their sentences partway, forget their thoughts, or find themselves turning to my twins. The feeling lasts a moment, and then they recover their own concerns—I have passed. The women, more permeable, respond physiologically: dizziness, a choking sensation, a flush. Bags and trunks don’t change, but if they contain oil of any kind, I flash-freeze it opaque.

After the train leaves, the boys descend to the rails again and watch the crowd. They spend hours like this. No words pass between them. Hand in hand, their communication is direct. My twins converse through pulse rates, Morse-code squeezes, variations in palm heat and moisture.

Late afternoon. My boys’ vigil is broken by the sound of screaming. The crowd on the platform panics. This is different from the nervous, shoving aggression that took over in the morning. This is the kind of stampede that has seen fire. Or a predator. Keshav and Shankar back away as the crowd pours over the platform. It’s as if a glassed-off sea has shattered through. Spry men leap onto the tracks and then receive their women. Sprained ankles yank the foot from the footfall as if the ground were on fire. Faster runners stick their hands between slower runners and widen their own way. Bodies erupt through bodies, the way smoke billows through smoke when a truck burns and the flame finds the fuel. My boys hug each other in this sudden thundercloud. Running risks stumbling, and stumbling means getting trampled. Standing still means someone is going to run into them and knock them to the ground. I kneel between the onrush and their small huddled bodies. I throw my arms out. But I am immaterial. I couldn’t even block the seven hours’ sunlight that has burned their cheeks and the backs of their necks.

What happened? I divide myself. Now I am on the platform. There, near the entryway. Abandoned luggage marks a kind of blast radius. At the center, three bodies. Their white clothes have been streaked a festival Holi red. The stabbing was hasty, maybe some boys seeing what it was like. I bend close to the ground and see the faces disfigured in the manner of temple statuary, the tip of the nose missing. Proof of kill: There is money on offer in Lahore, as there was in Rawalpindi. I get back to my twins and urge them, shouting noiselessly, to start moving. Shankar tugs Keshav’s hand and points down the track: east to India, and whatever waits along the way.

3

DISPERSAL

Simran is a good daughter. I can see her, just two days ago, a full steel bucket in her hand, arm straight down, other arm straight out to compensate. At the edge of the bathroom tiles, she starts tipping it, not too much. The water feels its way around the squares. She squats and starts sweeping with a bound twig sheaf. A sweep, a tap, another sweep, another tap. She herds the water toward the open hole, its rim a pale green calcine crust. From the lip of it she hooks a limp wad of her mother’s thinning hair and sticks it to the wall, to throw out later. Old scums loosen into one murk. Afterward, her footprints track the tiles dark.

Those prints lead to the kitchen, where she collects the dank, sour-milk-smelling cloth her mother uses to strain the yogurt. Her mother likes her to wash it separately, out back where she does the dishes. A bar of coarse soap streaks and flecks the cloth maroon. Bunched in her hands, the cloth foams, but not much because the water is limestone-hard. Then she spreads it out and holds it before her. Its whiteness fills her vision and mine. She imagines snow—she has been curious, since she was a girl, about snow. I think of the antarpat held between a bride and groom during a wedding ceremony.

I imagine a Hindu ceremony, because it’s the one I know—and because Sonia has wandered, again, into my mind. Staring at that white partition, I see what Sonia and I never had, married as we were to the drumming of a notary’s stamp. It’s something I never shared with her but can conjure more vividly, perhaps for that reason, than anything I have lived: Sonia with her nose pierced, heavy gold along the part in her hair; and the reds: sindoor, kumkum, saree, mouth. Intricate nets of brownish orange mehndi up her forearms, my name hidden somewhere in it, her posture straight under all that jewelry. Simran lowers the cloth. She cannot see my face on the other side, just as I cannot see Sonia’s.

Sonia … I am not looking there. I am
not
looking there.

I escape instead from Simran two days ago to Simran now. Climbing a tree reminded her of Jasbir, the way he would monkey into a high niche over her shouts and her mother’s, his first quickest step vertical on the flat bark as he pulled his body toward it, forcing purchase. The next branches could have been ladder rungs until he straddled his chosen splay and grinned. She has abandoned him, she thinks. She has abandoned her mother and her sisters. From her eyes, I can tell she has been crying over this and is only now coming up for air.

The wind blows her chest icy. It blows across the place where she is wet from having held Priya. Held and dropped her; so much blood, so instantaneously, so everywhere. She looks down and flushes. Her thin white kameez is plastered to her, and her cold nipples show up dark through the bloodstains. No dupatta to cover them. Two tiny moles fleck her smooth, wheat-colored bosom. She wishes, and wishes hard, that she could get rid of the body she just saved. The way her father thought of her body—living deadweight slowing escape, a liability and an ostentation, inviting attack—is how she thinks of her body now, too.

Maybe this is just one more way Simran is a good daughter, willing herself to do her father’s will. Her dominant concern, stashed in this tree, is how she might kill herself when she needs to. Periodically, her thinking drifts into fantasy—like living the rest of her life in this tree, brought berries by birds she would whistle to and train. The Mussulmaans would be so busy hunting Hindus and Sikhs on the ground, their torches would sweep and daggers slash well below her feet. Separated by a plane of glass, she might step onto it, watch them through it. And if their torchlit eyes flashed her way one night, she would widen her eyes, and they would think her an owl. Years would pass, her eating berries and keeping her mouth open overnight to get the same sprinkle of dew as the leaves, until finally, when everyone had gone quiet, she could go down and see if her village was still there and if anyone remembered a girl, oh, about this tall, named Simran.

Will the Mussulmaans come hunt in the mountains? They must know this is where the helpless ones would flee. The tenderer cuts of meat. They could find her at any time. She wants to come up with some way that will be quick and accessible in an emergency. How difficult, she thinks, how impossible it is to kill yourself in time, before the bad things happen to you! Besides a blade or a pistol, nothing works quickly enough. Even a blade would have to be used correctly—across the throat; she has heard of people dying with their throats slit. The throat would work. But would she be able to do it, if she had to? The body is so careful to protect its heart with ribs, everything vital inside a fortress. You can’t enter without setting off pain, and the pain weakening your arm.

Well then, I won’t be weak
, she decides.
I will do what Harpreet didn’t, if I have to. I won’t let a daughter of my father’s be turned into a Muslim.

I search her a little and realize that, at her age, this is the worst she can imagine them doing to her. Conversion: it baffles me at first, but she has no way of truly understanding what those men would want with her. She has always been a religious girl, every ardaas by heart, songs, tales of martyrs she would tell her sisters before bed, stories about the persecuted Gurus. Conversion, in her mind, is lifelong captivity in forgetfulness. Everything she is, down to her name, replaced. She can’t conceive how men can inflict worse than erasure. How the soul can suffer such a thing as defacement.

Every method she thinks of is imperfect, dangerous without being lethal. Killing is going on everywhere, but strip a body of metal and it is curiously powerless to harm itself decisively. She must leave this perch, if only to search the aftermath for a knife. Until then she would have to trust to God. She will stay close to cliffs, she thinks. Any ledge she can bolt for and throw herself off. Rivers might work, too, if fast enough. It’s an inversion of the logic that keeps cautious sailors in sight of shore. Once she has a blade of some kind, she reasons, she will be safe, she will have an escape even if she can’t run. The branches shake to either side as she braces where she climbed and eases herself onto the dim, sloped ground.