Partitions: A Novel Read online

  Upstairs, a tall steel cabinet’s linens and towels have been scooped onto the floor and kicked about—no other quick way to vandalize towels. A crowbar threads the handles, paint scraped bright from the rough force-through. Inside that cabinet, a muffled voice.

  “33 Firoza Bagh,” it sobs. “33 Firoza Bagh, just past the Ganesh temple … please let me out.”

  The address is Masud’s own. He recognizes, after a moment, the voice of Gul Singh, his errand runner and gatekeeper. He draws out the crowbar. Gul Singh has been stuffed into the bottom shelf, half his size; his body, once it writhes onto the floor, seems to expand. “I’ll tell you, my brothers, I’ll tell you where…” His face turns up to see Masud through eyes nearly swollen shut. He stops speaking and hangs his head.

  Masud kneels. Gul Singh raises his head.

  “I didn’t tell them, Doctor sahib. I swear.”

  He is telling the truth. The proof colors his cheek and eyes black-purple. Locked in the cabinet, he grew scared they would set fire to the clinic—so he gave up the address, but after they left. He is ashamed nonetheless, and Masud cannot bring him to his feet.

  “You have to go,” moans Gul Singh. “This city isn’t safe for you.”

  Masud gestures at the room. “This? This?”

  Gul Singh explains how it is the same all over the city, every Muslim storefront a blown-in cavity of ash, flanked by intact Hindu or Sikh shops. Small photographs of Sikh women mutilated in Rawalpindi pass from hand to hand. Their naked backs or foreheads have been scrawled upon like the walls of a demolished gurdwara: Aslam Khan ki biwi. “Wife” of Aslam Khan. The group that came through looking for the rich Mussulmaan doctor spared Gul Singh because of his kes and kara, but loyal silence earned him fists to the face. He knew two of the boys—Sukhdev Kang’s sons, though they didn’t admit to knowing him. They are pious sons of a pious father, and, for all his personal loyalty to Dr. Masud, there is a part of Gul Singh, too, that believes what is happening is necessary. Some killing must be done. It is a form of communication, the only kind that can cross the partitions between this country and its neighbor, between this world and the next. Their enemies must hear the deaths and know fear; their dead must hear the deaths and know rest. This Mussulmaan, this one, is a good man, thinks Gul Singh—this one. With his arms around the doctor sahib’s bony knees, he begs him to leave the city.

  Outside, Masud’s bicycle is being tilted upright by three children. One gets on the ledge behind the pedaller, but the smallest child needs to sit in the basket. Masud’s black doctor’s bag, after being shaken out curiously, is tossed on the road. The children do not think of this as stealing. They figure whoever fell off the bicycle there has long since been dragged away.

  The city isn’t safe for any Mussulmaan, Gul Singh is pleading, much less a rich doctor. Hadn’t they come this morning especially for him? He must leave—but not on the trains. Gul has been hearing about it since last night; there are plans for the westbound trains. Gifts to Pakistan.

  Masud bites his lip, looks around, and nods. Part of him wants to start putting everything back where it was, sweep up the glass, fold the towels, boil the scalpels clean. A broken window cuts his gaze as his gaze goes through it. It shows him the once-familiar street changed, the city itself changed, the country. He must go. He has nowhere to go. He must go.

  2

  DEPARTURES

  Keshav locks his ankles and bare palms around the platform’s corner pillar. He looks up. A sparrow has stashed straw under the awning. It sweeps in from nothingness, hops twice, comments, hops again. It watches the mayhem of adults below and, tilting its bird neck, the scoot and effort of this child. Hand over hand, then the knees come up. He slides back down. The silk of his shirt snags the eczematous paint. His palms smell sour. Shankar gets his shoulder under his brother’s rear and stands, pushing him higher. He lets go of his own snapped ribs so he can hold his brother in place with both hands.

  “Do you see her?”

  “I’m looking, bhaiyya.”

  “Go higher, so she can see you.”

  Sweat stings a line down Keshav’s scraped cheek, dividing blood and blood. He nods and gets nowhere. His wrists cord, his tiny arms shake as if in frustration. I could have lifted him onto my shoulders, secured his knees, and let him see over everybody. They were just getting old enough for me to do that when I fell ill.

  Keshav is barely above the level of the waves. He is looking among them for a single wave. The waters themselves are starting to roil. The people outside the station have crushed onto the platform. A man scuffles onto the empty tracks, arms out. He trips on the rails, falls, leaps to his feet. Throwing his arm forward, he shouts something, then runs toward the platform and climbs back into the crowd. Immediately the crowd starts stirring violently there; the first fight of several has begun.

  The stationmaster, his back against his office door, blows a whistle several times, like a police officer. Sensing the riot coming, and fearful now that he has drawn attention to himself, he lets the whistle drop onto the dome of his belly and slides into his office. Keshav can see him through the window as he drags his desk and file cabinets to block the door. The shutters slam shut, but the weather-warped wood no longer fits as it was first planed. Four rough yanks force them flush before the iron hooks align with their hookholes.

  Keshav squints over the crowd like a lookout in a crow’s nest. The ocean, though made of people, is lonely.

  * * *

  Looking down the platform for his mother, Keshav is facing north; Masud, in his clinic, looking through the broken window, north as well. My attention, too, turns north, over the Jhelum and Chenab. These aren’t the only rivers I pass. I see rivers of people as well. The first kafila gives me pause. I hover and take in the wooden carts, the shrunken oxen, occasional human bodies ditched on the side like abandoned vehicles—the soul recognizing a surer, instantaneous escape, and taking it.

  I could bring my face close enough to every face here that if I breathed they would feel it, all of them, as a breeze. Maybe the thousands of dead are doing this now, just before they leave for good—blowing once on every forehead and vanishing.

  The wind would make a good gift, as this season is the hottest in decades. Not that I feel temperatures anymore. I infer the heat from the shirts, soaked transparent and later stained yellow, of farmers used to heat but not heat like this. That and how often I see them wipe their sleeves across their foreheads. Punjab is a dry pan left on the flame. The first drops of rain, if they come, may well pop and hiss.

  It is a temptation, I admit, to spread my attention up and down each kafila I overfly. The temptation I feel is not as intense, though, as the one I felt five years ago, bedbound, under my shawls. The living think of that moment as a slackening, the limbs going weak, a sleep that is to sleep what sleep is to waking. To my surprise, the moment came as a surge of energy. I felt powerful enough to divide myself infinitely, which is what most people do, of course. Afterward, there’s no gathering them. So I am careful to hold myself together. I keep my thumb over the nozzle of that energy. I slip it aside to soar north and quickly slide it back again. I arrive.

  * * *

  Only God’s houses are brick in this village. A yellow flag marks the gurdwara, a cluster of shoes and sandals the mosque. The other houses, the color of earth, slope out of the earth. Electricity has reached here—a cord lies black against a wall and vanishes through a window as small as a ship’s porthole.

  She is one of five children. Four daughters and a precious son. The son is youngest. Her parents had a child every two years until they had a son. After the son, they could stop, the name preserved and the blood safe. I am here to see her because I have traced her from her future back to this spot.

  In those three crowded rooms, her father’s elder brother and his two grown sons have taken refuge. Where their wives are they do not say. Squatting, elbows on their knees, they spread on the earthen floor stories like bloodsoaked rags. The mother
and daughters must crowd into the bedroom; they are locked there, along with the boy, who is only six and not yet old enough to want to be with the men. He is happier here, covering his eyes with his mother’s dupatta, ignoring the nervous murmurs of his sisters.

  She is in that room, with the others. She maintains the reserve befitting the eldest daughter. She is barely fifteen. Simran. How solemn she looks, as if she senses everything to come. Her little brother, Jasbir, tires of his mother’s dupatta and rests his head in her lap. Simran rubs his velvety ear between her thumb and forefinger, the way he likes. I watch her fingers, rhythmic, gentle, and strangely delicate for one who does so much washing, milking, husking. Her movements remind me of the regular, meditative way a mala circulates through holy fingers. One of her younger sisters sneaks over to the door to try to listen. Simran glances at her mother, who clicks her tongue and gestures the girl back. Her mother is just as curious, and so is Simran, about what the men are saying, but still she calls her back. It’s not that she wants her children to stay calm, or to let her children stay children this half hour longer. Rather fear, almost superstitious, makes her keep her children close to her. Not hearing their taya’s stories, she feels, will protect them. To hear the horror will bring it into being.

  The men whisper too softly to be heard anyway, even in that small house. Their women, they are saying, without tears, without guilt, are safe. A pistol lies in one of the grown son’s palms. It is wrapped in bright purple cloth. He drops the ends of the cloth and holds the gun flat on his palm. The women have been smuggled to a place where they cannot be touched. Two nights ago, every door in the village had started shaking, as though a train were coming through at full speed. There hadn’t been much time. There is not much time now. Does he have morphine in the house? Not to keep them quiet, his women are strong, just as theirs were, and they would not try to run away.

  Simran’s father puts his hands over his eyes and shakes his head. I do not know what he does not want to see: the sight of his brother telling him what must be done, or the vision of him doing it. Or the vision of what will happen to his wife and children if he doesn’t. Of the three, this last is the one he cannot bear.

  The Mussulmaans, says his brother, came with scythes the shape of the crescent on their new flag, shovels stolen off farms on the way in, butcher knives until then used only for halal killing. Clubs with nails sticking out of them, shovels edged with dried blood. Lathis of varying lengths and woods. Hammers, both the curved end and the flat. One even swung an Englishman’s walking stick.

  “And Jasbir?”

  “He’ll slow us down.”

  “You never know when we’ll have to run, Chacha. What will you do? Carry him?”

  “There are Mussulmaans who would love to have a boy. Save him.”

  “How can I do this?”

  “How we did it. Harpreet will help.”

  “He did the work back home.”

  “After this, I am joining up. We have our own armies, across the border. I will go to Amritsar, pray there for strength, and join.”

  “What do we do first?”

  “Do you have any morphine?”

  “Some. For her tooth, last year.” Simran’s father has never, except after making love, said his wife’s name, not directly, not in reference to her. “There’s not much left of it.”

  “Is it a powder?”

  “No.” He raises thumb and forefinger. “A bottle. A little bottle.”

  “That’s better.”

  “Will it be enough?”

  Harpreet nods. “They are small girls.”

  Harpreet’s younger brother, who has been holding the pistol, sets it before his knees and brings the folds across it reverently, as though covering the Granth. More whispers.

  I go back to Simran, still rubbing her brother’s ear. It makes him drowsy. So I am with her when the latch grates across. It chills her to discover that the door was secured from without. The door opens. Her father stands in the doorway, gazing at this group huddled at the other end of the room. His brother, he realizes, is right. It must be done; it is the only way to protect them. If annihilation were all, they might as well risk flight. But the women and the boy risked something worse. To live in their shacks: his girls their wives, daily servitude, nightly violence, in a few years not even remembering their true nature. Coming to smell as they smell, eat as they eat. Bearing Muslim sons who would grow up never knowing their grandfather was a Sikh steely as his kangan and proud. Conversion. To bow to their holy city, kiss their book, recite their prayers. Die now, and they would die Sikhs, intact, pure in the eyes of the ten Gurus. Dying a Sikh, for being a Sikh—this must be the women’s glory. For the men, there would be valor in the streets yet and blood on the kirpan. But neither he nor his, he decides, will live as anything else. Better annihilation than long life giving some slum Mussulmaan pleasure and service and sons. So when her mother whispers, “What did they say?,” his voice is calm.

  “Heat us up some milk.”

  Her mother visibly relaxes, this domestic request somehow proof that the threat either has passed or never was. “What do you want in it?”

  “Cardamom. And make enough for all of us.”

  “Should we come out?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Is it true? Are the mobs close?”

  Her father looks first over his shoulder, then back at his daughters. The swell of pride and defiance, just moments earlier, has petered out. His hands go over his chest and start kneading each other. “The milk,” he says.

  Jasbir sits up. “Let them come. They’ll see what we Sikh boys can do.”

  Her mother says, “Simran, go.”

  Simran rises and hurries past her father. Her taya and her cousin do not look at her. One looks at the ground, the other at a small dark-blue bottle in his hand. Harpreet doesn’t look at her, either, but his eyes are closed. He is sitting cross-legged on the floor, something wrapped in purple cloth in front of him, not a book. His lips move in a prayer to which he gives no voice.

  * * *

  Thirty-six miles east of the railway station, the train my boys have jumped off will hiss to a stop. Ravine to one side, empty farm to the other. A solitary boy, not more than fourteen, fuzz across his top lip, green-eyed, is going to lower the colorful flag he has been waving. It is a stick with a girl’s choli nailed to it. Little sewn-in hexagons of mirror, bright pink and orange paisley, the kind of thing young village girls wear. He will step off the tracks, drop the stick with the choli, and pick up an ax. The train will be a half hour from any station, east or west. Twenty minutes from the border.

  This signal and this spot were arranged at the station in Pakistan, while Sonia and my boys were still in the crowd. Six bearded men had boarded into the front car. They had no weapons. They had come to talk.

  The driver, a Hindu named Chandan Singh, will see the signal and will pray. He will tug his earlobes and crank the lever to scrape this train to a halt. In his defense, he had refused to do it for money, or at least for the money they offered. They had to say his address to him and tell him how many children he had and how old. After that, they refused him any money at all. As if by requiring the threat, he had lost the privilege of being bought fairly. Right now, as his train rushes toward the far convergence of the rails, and Keshav is shouting the word Ma over six hundred heads, Chandan regrets that he did not agree right away. At least there would have been money. The lost opportunity makes him flush under his beard. That will change, of course, when he is actually faced with the killing. Or rather with the sound of the killing—he will look forward the whole time, his hands still on the levers, focused on the track ahead. He will not see the men stride out of the ravine bearing axes and farm tools like itinerant workers. Or how unhurried they are. Well after dark, a stick will rap the side of his car, the way bus passengers tap the side of the bus to say they have gotten off. Chandan will shift the levers, this one forward, this one back, and he will coast his cargo across t
he border, never speeding beyond the lightest, softest rock and click.

  It will be midnight by the time the train makes it into the station, every compartment closed and locked, door and window. At Amritsar, the platform will sense something wrong about the train well before it stops. People will start pressing back from the tracks while the train is still a dot of light no bigger than a star. The platform will stay quiet as the train inches into place. The absence of anyone on the roof, maybe, or the emptiness of the windows. The stationmaster will part the crowd and throw wide a compartment door. The first gush will reach his feet. He will skip back, and leave his sandals in place, soaked, the bottom step still dripping.

  * * *

  A clamor of pots pulls my attention back in time to the present. Simran has been clumsy, and she is never clumsy. Her father walks over to check. Kerosene odor, milk placid in the pot, the flame adjusted to a blue corona. The cups have been drying on a rack. Still wet. One end of her dupatta lies on her palm, the other covers her small fist. She turns each cup twice around her fist and sets it down. Most of the drops are on the outside. Her father circles back.

  “Six,” he says, intervening before she dries any for the men. Each cup is a death, in his mind, and he does not want any more prepared.

  She lines up five cups beside the stove.

  “One more.”

  She looks up. “I’m not thirsty.”

  “You’ll drink.”

  This is enough, the words, and the agitation that has overtaken his hands and feet: her father paces, he makes and unmakes a fist with his left hand, checking the flame and the milk. The right hand he holds in a fist over his heart, as if taking a vow to protect something. Simran wonders at that. She doesn’t know that the hand has the vial in it. Her younger cousin had gone out and now comes back through the door. He stops when he sees her. Harpreet breaks his meditation. The men drift to the door and get the news. Simran’s father breaks away abruptly and points at Simran.