The Sleeping Dictionary (67 page)

“Yes, but . . .” Shombhu paused. “Didi, is it possible for my brother to bring his family here?”

“Of course—but how will he know it’s all right to come?”

“I’m sure he’s already trying to reach the White Town,” Shombhu said. “Everyone who knows of a safe place is trying to reach it. And don’t worry for us, madam. We will not go outside to fight. We will help Ishan and everyone who comes.”

“Thank you, Dada.” The word for older brother slipped from my mouth. He looked as surprised as I was, but I covered his hands with mine before leaving the kitchen. I was not saying good-bye, just making a silent promise I’d see him again.

In the hallway, I saw the driver’s cap that Ishan had set down on the little rosewood table where we kept the day’s newspapers and post. Next to his cap was the Red Cross van’s key. I picked it up. The van wasn’t much longer coming than the ambulance.

Did I dare? If I reached College Street, I could bring back the Sens to stay until it was all over. I remembered what Simon had said about Christians not being at risk. The danger wouldn’t exist if nobody thought I was Hindu or Muslim. I had changed my identity so many times. This would be simple.

Squeezing the key in my palm, I went into my room and put on a freshly starched white sari bearing the Red Cross patch. In the bathroom, I washed my face, making sure the kumkum mark typical of Hindus was gone from my forehead. Around my neck I hung the silver crucifix necklace that was a gift from the orphanage staff.

In the hallway, I left a short note for Simon about going to the Sens to bring them here safely, just in case he reached home before I returned. And then, before any of the servants might catch sight of me, I slipped downstairs and out to the driveway.

The Red Cross van started easily, and I slipped into first gear.

CHAPTER

46

I now fear nothing—neither myself, nor anybody else.

I have passed through fire. What was inflammable has been burnt to ashes; what is left is deathless.

—Rabindranath Tagore,
The Home and the World
, 1919

I
drove north on Chowringhee: the usual route, only with no traffic this morning. At the Park Street intersection, flames shot from the windows of a Muslim kebab restaurant where I’d had many good dinners with Simon. A nearby Hindu-owned auction shop had already been burned to black. Christian households and businesses had painted their doors with crosses proclaiming their faith; these doors stood untouched. I thought of Kabita, still angry with me but safe inside Saint Joseph’s Convent. She would never know it, but being locked up with the nuns in Chandernagore might have saved her life.

Going through Wellesley Street, I saw a tank with soldiers and raised my hand to them as I passed. Then I was in Bentinck Street, with more looted and burned buildings. Here, I saw the first corpses
lying in the gutters and hanging from lampposts. The most gruesome sight was a man who’d been tied up to a tram system’s electric control panel. Electricity must have jolted him repeatedly toward his painful death. Once this place had been called the City of Palaces; now it was Hades. It was as if Calcutta was besieged with the demons Thakurma often talked about in her historical stories. But this was real. I remembered Simon’s plea for me to stay in, but not to go to College Street could mean leaving the Sens to die. A mournful voice inside me whispered,
If they aren’t already slaughtered.
I told the voice to shut up.

In the side streets, men ran in packs from one house to another with cleavers and swords and lathis in hand. Most wore the ragged clothes of the poor, but others were in clean white kurtas and wore the white caps of the Congress Party, the erstwhile followers of nonviolence. Some had red tika marks on the forehead, meaning they were Hindus who had recently worshipped.

As I continued north, I found a fire burning in the road’s center, just as Ishan had described. I veered left into a side street knowing it would just take a few turns to get back onto Chowringhee. But the street I turned into was filled with Hindus and Muslims battling each other with knives and tire irons and sticks. At the sight of my van, shouting erupted among them. A Red Cross van. They wanted it.

If I stopped the van, I would be lost. In terror, I stepped hard on the gas and shot forward so fast that I was thrown back in my seat. There was nowhere clear to pass, so I drove straight toward the mob, rather than let them surround me as Ishan had described happening earlier. The strategy worked; the men scattered except for a vicious-looking fellow who ran straight toward the driver’s side door. I turned sharply, and the impact of the car pushing into him made him fly in the air and across the bonnet. Then he fell to the side as I roared down the next street, burned out already and now empty.

Another left turn, and I was back to the relative calm of shattered, looted Chowringhee. I was shaking, for I could not forget the man’s shocked eyes as he faced me through the windshield. And I’d felt a
bumping under the tires that I knew was his body and maybe someone else’s too. Everywhere I looked I saw deceased: some of them women, judging from the ruined lengths of saris. And I’d seen a woman running among the rioters with a lathi in hand; she was as bloodthirsty as the rest.

Finally I entered College Street. Burned trams leaned drunkenly off the College Street track and the bookstalls were in flames or smoldering. All the stories and histories and poems inside their wooden walls were gone; the words so carefully set down for posterity meant nothing against mass violence. It was better that Tagore had passed away in peace five years earlier; these events would have been more than he could bear.

I maneuvered into the Sens’ small street and parked in front of the business next door, Khan Typewriters, which was neither looted nor burned. Dutta Publishers, on the other side of the Sens, had its door kicked in. The windows were smashed at Chowdhury Teas, and I imagined the shop’s valuables had been taken. On this street, it appeared that only Hindus had been attacked.

The metal grille was locked across the Sens’ front door and window. This must have protected them from the fate suffered by their Hindu neighbors who hadn’t had one. I thought it did not seem as if anybody had gained entrance. I walked around to the small window where I’d once called for admittance and saw a wooden board was nailed over it. Not much safety at all, I thought, as I called for someone to open the door to me. Either they weren’t answering, or they’d already gone. They weren’t dead;
no,
I said to myself,
they couldn’t be.

I had traveled through so much, and now I could not reach them! The impossibility of the situation made me want to scream, but I knew not to call attention to myself. As a few thick raindrops began falling, I looked up and recognized the Sens’ flat roofline. And this gave me an idea.

If I could reach their roof, I might gain entrance through the roof’s trapdoor and down the little staircase that went into their house. But
to reach the bookbindery’s roof, I would need passage through another nearby house onto its roof. I did not know of any neighbors except the Nazims, who had come for tea once while I was there.

I ran down the street and knocked at the Nazims’ door. A curtain shifted as someone from inside peered out.

“I am a friend trying to help the Sens. Will you let me in to explain?” I faced the window as I spoke, but the curtain dropped back in place. I waited a while longer, but nobody opened the door.

Belatedly, I realized that I should not remain so visible. I walked off, thinking of another way I could reach the Sens’ roof and finally got it: Dutta Publishing. The door was gone, so I could walk straight in and presumably get to the top, if the upstairs was not locked.

Wary that looters might still be inside, I tiptoed into the building. To my relief, it was quiet and empty. I took the stairway but stopped short at the first floor. Two men were sprawled across the floor; they had been eviscerated. So much blood had flowed that it stained the floor and books that had fallen around them. The sight was frightening; I put a hand on the wall to steady myself because I felt faint. When I’d collected myself, I stepped over their bodies and continued up.

The trapdoor in the low ceiling at the end of the stairs was simple to unlatch. Then I was up on the flat roof, and it was a short walk along the row of houses to the roof I recognized from Mrs. Sen’s red-bordered saris still hanging on the washing line. Red like the blood that smeared the edge of my sari as I’d walked over the corpses in Dutta Publishing.

The trapdoor into the Sen house was locked. Using the notched edge of the van key, I struck at the hinge until it broke. The trapdoor fell open, but in the next instant I faced the long, slim barrel of a rifle. I almost fell backward, I was so terrified.

“Don’t move!” Supriya shouted and clicked the trigger into position.

“It’s only me. Kamala!”

Abruptly the gun lowered. I saw that Supriya was dressed in her INA khaki uniform, jacket to jodhpurs. Her eyes were red and her face was drawn.

“Did the British let you keep the gun?” I asked. She could have shot me so easily; this knowledge made me shake.

“Of course not!” Supriya snapped. “It was borrowed from the Strength Brigade years ago. Come inside. Everyone’s safe.”

On the second floor, Mrs. Sen was peering around the corner of a doorway, holding a squirming Nishan against her wide body.

“Why did you come?” Mrs. Sen’s hair was half down, and her face was wet with tears. “The goondas will certainly come back and finish us.”

“Mashima, don’t worry,” I said, putting my arms around her. “I brought the Red Cross van. We will drive like the wind back to Middleton Street. I know the safe way.”

“Your driver—what faith is he?” Mrs. Sen whispered. “Some of the rickshaw and taxi drivers are driving people straight to those who will kill them!”

“I am driving you myself. Have you organized your valuables?”

“We each have a suitcase, but—” Mrs. Sen broke off. “You are driving? You?”

“Women drive in the army, Ma,” Supriya chided while showing me into her room where a small line of suitcases stood. She shot me a grin and said, “I’m so glad you have a way out of this place for us.”

Sounding injured, Mrs. Sen told me, “We asked the Nazims to hide us, but they said they could not. After all these years of knowing each other—sharing food, and our daughters helping their children with studies.”

“Everyone is trying to save his own skin,” I said sadly. “Where is Masho?”

“He is gathering the most important books,” Supriya said. “I asked him to keep watch but he said after the books are together. Oh, what now?” Supriya had turned away from me and was staring through a
slat in the shutter covering her bedroom window. A group of about ten young men had surrounded the Red Cross van.

“Oh, no.” My heart began to thud as I watched them try to get in through the driver’s door. Finding it locked, they smashed the side window to pull out all the medicines. Walking around the van’s outside, one man methodically removed the mirrors while another worked on the tires. How stupid I felt for parking the van where it could be seen. I had let down the Sens, and we would die together: not for the freedom of India, but as victims of our countrymen.

As quickly as the van had been emptied, the men backed away from it. A teenage boy was tilting a can over it. Petrol. He threw a match.

“No,” I cried into Supriya’s shoulder as the van burst into flames. And to my horror, I saw men using it like a kind of fire pit, taking broken pieces of furniture, setting them alight, and then running back to throw this lit tinder into certain houses.

“Oh, we must help the Duttas!” Supriya cried.

“They’re already dead,” I told her. “I came up through their building, and I saw them.”

“Ramesh-uncle and Chetan. Oh, God!” Now Supriya pressed an arm across her face.

“Dutta Publishing is where we should go,” I said, pulling her arm down so she could see the emotion on my face. “Their killing and looting is completed, so nobody will think to go back inside or to burn them out. And I left their roof door unlatched.”

Supriya pressed her lips together, looking uncertain. “If we leave our place, it will surely be looted. Baba and I decided I should defend us with the rifle. I only have a few bullets, but I am a good shot.”

But there were so many men on the street, she could not possibly defend against every one of them. I made my case and got her to agree to let me bring the valuables up to the roof.

Nishan was glad to get out of his mother’s grasp to help with this project. I left him working and went to find Mr. Sen, who was inside the office.

He shook a finger at me and said, “You should not have come, Kamala. If you saw the way those goondas just exploded a Red Cross van, you would understand the risk.”

I could not admit that I’d been the one who’d been thoughtless enough to leave the van in front. Instead, I said that we were bringing valuables to the roof, and asked if there was anything I could carry from his office.