Partitions: A Novel (8 page)

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I know her sense of futility. I want hands the way her hands want a blade. Hands would equip me well enough for the violence I wish. Because the man I want to protect my boys from is skinny enough, I could break him with half my former substance, thirty kilos would do it. (I cast no great shadows when I lived.) I see his gaunt frame and it puts me in mind of a hungry jackal, and I suspect that’s what he was in his past life or will be in his next. His name is Saif Nasir, and he is trailing my boys along the track, and has been for some time, ever since the tracks crossed Curzon Road and the boys stopped to stare at some bent bicycles and splintered carts.

The men—Saif had not been among them; he was the sort who watched—had shouldered their way into the traffic waiting for the train to pass, identified their targets, and grouped them on the side of the road. The people not selected—who still had one foot on their bicycle pedals, one foot on the road—held their poses, stiff, as if hounds were sniffing them. The crossing bars rose. The traffic started moving. The bodies fell. Saif trotted in later and found a ring. He checked the teeth but found no fillings; for striking gold, he carried a carpenter’s chisel.

He has been listening.

Keshav: “What do we do once we get to the next station?”

Shankar: “We ask the stationmaster there.”

“Even if she did get off, how would he know?”

“She would go to him for help.”

“What if he doesn’t know?”

“Then we go to the next station.”

It isn’t hard for him to reconstruct what happened. The boys are silent for a spell, and then they talk about Delhi, how Delhi will end up being their best chance—everyone who goes to India has to get their name written down in Delhi, right? If all the stations turn up nothing, they can ask at the “big office.” That’s the phrase they hold on to, the one they heard from Sonia earlier in the morning. We are going to Delhi, she had told them, to register at the big office and live in India. The big office—in the boys’ minds, an immense building with khaki-uniformed chowkidars and gardens and fountains, where all things are recorded and addressed in permanent English; the place from which the adult world derives its order and to which it reports. Delhi: they have an image of broad paved streets and cars and safety. They have not even seen a picture of it. All they have seen is their mother referring to Delhi as hope and endpoint. They cannot know that the first thousandsome tents are being set up at Purana Qila. Crowds, like the ones they have watched all afternoon, wait to leave for Pakistan.

Saif whistles. It sounds somehow deft, agile, cunning to me, though there is nothing unusual about the sound. That whistle gives me the closest thing to sensation I have felt in years, a bristling, like hairs rising on the nape of my consciousness.

He whistles again. The twins, who are still holding hands, turn to him. Two long strides and he is beside the tracks, approaching.

“There you are,” he says. “Do you know your mother has been looking for you? Good thing she sent me out; she was worried you had left the station.…”

*   *   *

Soon they are following him. It is an unfamiliar part of town and nearly night. By the third turn, they wouldn’t have been able to get back to the tracks even if they broke away. Not that they want to break away; nor that the tracks offer anything more than an uninterrupted line between two fixed points in a broken, shifting country. He seems to know they are his now, and he walks ahead of them, casually, unafraid at the onset of dark. At one point he takes out his chisel and walks it along the bars of an abandoned bungalow’s iron gate. Tap, tap, tap, he doesn’t care who hears. His fearlessness, and the way he strides ahead, makes them shuffle to keep up. By staying close to him, they keep inside his radius of calmness, direction, certainty, and it draws them like a fire in the universal cold.

He starts whistling again and stops. “The house is just over here. She’s waiting to start dinner, you know.”

The house has a stone walk around the side, eucalyptus trees, and one pair of woman’s sandals—not a pair they recognize as Sonia’s—arranged, carefully parallel, beside the steps. The air smells of unfamiliar spices even at this remove. A single light burns within. Saif taps on the gate and flips the latch with the tip of his chisel. The boys step across the threshold. Dark shapes scatter off the terrace of the house, bats or small birds, no telling. Saif whistles.

There is the sound of a plate being set down. The light inside the house shakes and angles. Shankar takes a step forward, thinking it must be their mother. Keshav opens his mouth and loosens his hold on Shankar’s hand, getting ready to shout recognition and run to her. Shankar takes back his foot and shifts closer to Keshav, who closes his mouth. The widow Shanaaz carries her oil lantern to the threshold. She likes to eat beside this intimate light, as she did when a girl—for everything else, bulbs and lamps will do. The twins see a small, benevolent face, lit by the lantern she raises to see them.

“See what I brought,” Saif says.

She doesn’t answer him. Instead she walks the lantern closer and explores the boys’ cuts, her face flickering, with the flame in the glass, through expressions of pain. Her face is unusually young and round, the hair thick though gray.

Keshav doesn’t cringe from the soft hand that cups his face. The compassion, the grandmotherly tenderness, paralyzes him. “Where is our mother?” he asks.

“She’s coming,” says the widow Shanaaz, and moves on to Shankar. His smaller face and body move her even more deeply. She looks to Saif, who is getting impatient, looking up at the night sky. Now, he knows, is when things will be getting started; the police must have leaked the list of neighborhoods already. He needs to get hold of Qasim, and soon.…

“How did this happen to them?” she asks. She turns back to Keshav, lantern brought close enough to the cut on his head that he can feel its heat. “Poor children, you must be in so much pain! And look how brave you are, not a tear.”

“Lightly damaged. That is how I found them, Shanaaz bibi. Nothing that will leave a scar.”

Her voice, when she is dealing with Saif, takes on a haggling hardness, at odds with how she speaks to my twins. “What will I do with two?”

“Shanaaz bibi, they are Hindu boys, clever Hindu boys. In two years, they will manage your money for you. You know how they are—wherever they go, the house fills up with gold. In ten years, I will come visit you in a new haveli, and then we’ll talk.” He can tell she isn’t persuaded, so he looks at the boys. “Boy, what did your father do for a living?”

Keshav answers him.

Saif smiles at how well the gamble of posing the question has worked. His teeth show crooked, stained. The two front ones chipped sharp. “Did you hear that? A doctor.”

The widow Shanaaz covers her mouth. “Your father wasn’t Dr. Munshi, was he? The one who had his clinic near the old fort?”

Shankar shakes his head. Keshav declares, still more boldly, “Our father was Dr. Roshan Jaitly.”

Hearing my name in his voice dizzies me. This is the first time either son of mine has said my whole name out loud. I was gone before I could sound it out and have them repeat it. Sonia must have taught them.

“And your names?”

“Keshav.”

She nods and murmurs “Qasif,” as if she were repeating what he said. “And yours?”

Shankar doesn’t answer, worried, nervous about relinquishing his name.

“My brother’s name is Shankar.”

The name is not as easy to revise to her liking. She pauses and strokes Shankar’s cheek.

“How many years apart are you?”

“We’re twins.” Keshav sounds almost angry. “Can’t you see?”

Saif Nasir laughs. The widow does not turn to him. “When did you boys eat last?”

“Shanaaz bibi, it is getting late. Take them both for now. There are places that will take the one you don’t want. I’ll come back tomorrow morning. But before I go…”

She turns sharply and puts her finger to her lips. “I’m bringing it, I’m bringing it.” Through the doorway, they see her lantern throw and stretch shadows, which jag across the wall and settle upright when she sets it flat. There is the scrape of a chest or safe pulled out from under a bed. I know Saif’s mind. He is speculating how easy it would be to bludgeon the widow and take what is in her little trove as soon as she tugs the lock and slides it up and around and off.… All his. Qasim would do it, maybe, with the city wild as it is. Not in more orderly times and not in daylight. Saif prefers a transaction, prefers earning his money—either off a silly widow who wants a boy to spoil, or out of the mouths and pockets of the dead.

She counts him out the money, even though she counted it once inside already. Her bad eyes squint at each note tilted to the lamplight. The boys watch, not understanding, in spite of what they have overheard. Saif holds his hand out patiently for each note, pockets them, and skips past the boys, rubbing Shankar’s head. The gate’s catch lowers behind them. The widow waves them in.

*   *   *

Nightfall. Simran listens to the darkness. How noisy the hot night is, insects clicking, shirring. But no shout, no crack, no crush of leaf. The only hint of her a burble in her stomach, and the realization, after she holds her breath to listen more closely, how loudly she has been breathing. The milk had left a line of white where it touched her upper lip, still partly there in spite of her sleeve, but the afternoon sweat diluted and washed it away. That trace of tainted milk and her own salt are the closest thing to food or drink she has had all day.

Now that she is alone and in darkness, she sees, undistracted by earth and sky, what it is she has done. To have set off like this—where? To have detached herself. It’s a kind of suicide. Leaving her family, she has left the caravan. Crowded city or empty desert were the same to a woman who had no family. That should have been the end, back there in the hot closed room, sleepy with morphine and scarcely registering the gunshot. Hadn’t her father been merciful to drug them? The delay caused by that extra step had meant a risk to himself, what with the mobs so close. Only Simran had suspected, resisted, fled. And what would she have done if Priya had been with her? She has no way to feed herself; how would she have fed her little sister? Better to have ended there, her body useless to the crowd that kicked in the door. Slipping away as she has done, staying wide-eyed between dusk and dawn instead of sleeping between Jasbir and Priya, Simran fears she has outlived her own death.

She heads, almost by instinct, back to the starting point that should have been her end. Something slimy gives way under her foot, mud or dung, no telling. She keeps the moon to her left and ducks, weakly, the snapback of branches her hand pushes blindly away. The first unexpected one slashes her cleanly across her right eye, but the lid closes in time. A sting across the forehead, a smart of the eye. Her hand cups that eyelid for some time. The terrain flattens. She stumbles more often than before, but eventually she finds her village lying in the moonlight, mute. A small cluster of dwellings, including her family’s, still stands. A mosque. But the gurdwara’s roof and one fallen wall fill the space where she used to worship. The Granth Sahib, somewhere under the rubble, makes no sound. Around their windows, where the fire spilled, the three remaining walls bear black stains. They make the windows look like punched eyes.

In the room, the bodies have been laid in a row and covered with white sheets. The men did this before they fled, with the drum sounding down the street and no time left. Priya has been moved here from the outer room. This is how the beast found the bodies. The little the family owned is missing or broken, but only in the other rooms. In this room, nothing was touched. Seeing it, the beast was cowed. It had turned away of its own.

One sheet covers three bodies, another covers two. She knows this by the number of dark spots on each. Her mother was covered last, it seems, the sheet askew, tousled in places, her dusty feet showing. Simran straightens the sheet. She lays her own body next to her mother’s. She will fit. The sheet, pulled past her forehead, cools her all over. The cloth on her back, after a second’s delay, soaks through with blood, but it doesn’t bother her. The floor itself is claiming her, absorbing her, fixing her in place. She sleeps the night as still and soundless as the others.

*   *   *

The twins have known nothing but kindness from women, and the widow reminds them of Haleema bibi, the midwife who had helped Sonia deliver and had never forgotten the family. After our move, she visited the house once or twice a year, bringing sweets, bouncing balls (identical in color, so the boys wouldn’t fight), the occasional kite. Her last visit had been in February; that March, she had coughed blood one night under a brown shawl. Come dawn, the muezzin could not wake her.

So when the widow soaps their scrapes, the boys let her. How can I resent the care she gives them? Her love has designs on them, her love wants to rename and reinvent them, yet her tenderness is no less real. The boys are puzzled but grateful. The only way she would treat them so kindly is if their mother told her to; she must really know their mother, or she must be a friend of Haleema bibi’s. “
Aati hai, aati hai
”—she’s coming, she’s coming—is all the widow repeats when they ask her, so they keep checking the empty rooms and the empty street. Meanwhile the widow has them strip down, and their small chests flutter and fall, ribs visible, gooseflesh accentuated by the shadowy light. Shankar’s side has a purplish black stain that has spread to his armpit and around some way to his back. Her tongue clicks, and he buckles aside at her touch. Her touch is gentle, her singing steady, quiet, narcotic. Stacks of boys’ shirts, freshly ironed, lie on the bed nearby. Keshav’s is tight on him, but not Shankar’s; Shankar is more the son she imagined when she purchased them. The shirts are years old. The smell of mothballs smarts on the air.

She sees Shankar eyeing his kameez, so she promises to mend, wash, and press their clothes tomorrow—and the washerwoman wouldn’t touch such fine silk, never. The widow will soak and wring the clothes by hand to make sure the color doesn’t bleed. Were they hungry? Keshav says he doesn’t want to start eating until their mother gets here.