Partitions: A Novel Read online

“Pour it out and go back in the room.” She doesn’t move quickly enough. “Pour it out!”

  The lukewarm milk splashes over the sides of the cups. His jitter is close to panic now and contagious. Two of the cups, silver, have tiny letters engraved just under the rims. They are name day cups, given to honor a new child, full name and birth date. Once-bright cups, saved in a chest for some years, they have finally, for want of money to buy new ones, fallen into daily circulation. The letters are uneven, done by an untrained silversmith’s hand that used the point like a pen. Simran sees her own cup. She has seen it so often, in the after-dinner pile and in her siblings’ hands, she has ceased to think of it as hers. By the time it came out of the chest, she had been too old to claim it or demand it. But now, for the first time in years, she notices her name, and she thinks, just for a moment, of her birth. Of herself as a newborn in this very house, her father’s beard black and her mother just two years older than Simran is now.

  “Leave them there.”

  She rises off her knees, her legs seemingly unaware of her weight, a movement whole and graceful. She stands as tall as her father. Then she is back in the room, her mother and sisters and brother sitting. She keeps standing after the door closes and the latch grates into place again.

  “Milk? This early in the morning?” Her mother searches Simran’s profile. “And a morning like this?”

  “It’s for us.”

  Her mother says nothing more. Simran steps back until she touches the wall and slides to the ground.

  * * *

  Keshav’s arms ease around the pillar, and Shankar steps away as his brother lowers himself.

  “I can’t see her.”

  Shankar looks in the direction the train disappeared. I can see him wondering if they have made a mistake. He turns back to the crowd. Surges and calm seem to overtake it independently of any event on the tracks or platform. Keshav shouts for their mother, and Shankar joins him, call and call and no answer, their search party stalled at the edge of this Dandaka forest of legs. Shankar leaves off before Keshav, who redoubles his effort, hands to either side of his mouth. Their voices are small. No one hears, not even the people immediately in front of them. Some are arguing, some are covering their mouths. Some are shaking their heads. I see Shankar has an idea.

  “Keshav!”

  “Ma!”

  He tugs his brother’s blood-wet sleeve. “Keshav. Let’s go down there. She’ll see us.”

  They hold hands and scoot off the platform at the spot where Shankar had just fallen. Shankar is excited enough by his idea that he forgets, for a while, about his chest. I focus on those hands, small hand around an even smaller one. I wish I could make a chain of three and lead them out of this. They keep walking until they are on the tracks, facing the center of the platform. They show themselves. Shankar’s idea is to set his brother and himself apart, make them visible, give their mother the best chance of finding them. Or if she asks around whether anyone had seen two boys, this old, wearing this, there is a good chance someone will nod and point to the tracks. The problem is that no one is looking. I search their minds. Not one spike of pity. Glances brush the tracks but don’t snag. Such beautiful little twins, bloodied, in torn and dusty silk, but they are background. Keshav gets the balls of his feet onto a rail and tiptoes, all the height he can get, and he starts up his shouting, as unheard as he is unseen. Boy shoulders thrown back, chin in the air, Ma! His eyes clench shut with each shout because he has lost hope in his eyes finding her. All his hope is in his voice. Shankar stares down the tracks and wonders, again, if she was on the train all along. Did they see her get off the train? Hadn’t she gotten on the steps before she let them pull themselves aboard? The panic of separation gives way to a falling feeling, dizziness, a flush up the sides of his face. They are alone.

  * * *

  Gul Singh stares down the empty street. He tugs his beard.

  Masud is collecting the contents of his doctor’s bag. The bag itself he found upside down. He rushed to it as to a fallen child. It is leather, purchased years ago in London. He slaps the surface of scuff. “How will you get there without your cycle, Doctor sahib?” Masud doesn’t answer. On both knees, he reaches for each instrument, inspects it, and cleans it as best he can before placing it in the bag kept open at his side. A probe and lancet slide pale dust stripes on his pant leg. A pediatric blood pressure cuff and the soft bulb to inflate it. Two clamps, one with long curved prongs and one with short straight ones. A 1944 pharmacopoeia, pages swollen crackly from two monsoons ago when he left it by an open window. His implements all go back in the bag, and they will all come with him on his journey. They will provide for him and help him provide. The stethoscope is the same one that listened to Shankar’s chest. It picked up the muted dub and faint, steady whoosh that first told Masud what was wrong. Once he told me what to listen for, I couldn’t ignore it. Sometimes, on quiet nights, I would seal my ear to Shankar’s chest and listen for myself. So close, I would think. Just an inch in, but unreachable.

  His bag assembled and clicked shut, Masud stands. Gul Singh has moved, unaware of himself, off the street and inside the broken gate of the clinic. Masud can read the worry even from his profile, how his gaze follows his imagination down the street. Masud tries to say something, but the words catch. Startled into the present, Gul Singh looks to him, but Masud puts his hand palm out and rolls his head, eyes closed, in a way that means stay.

  “No, Doctor sahib, you can’t go alone. Not as far as the police station. Once you get there, everything will be all right, they will put you in a car and drive you away. The policewallahs know you, they know you can pay.” He grabs the lathi he keeps propped beside his gatekeeper’s chair. In spite of the ransacking, it is still upright, overlooked, neither snapped nor stolen. Gul Singh never used it much except to rap the occasional cow from the flowers he had planted just inside the clinic gate. Masud shakes his head again and touches the lathi, which drifts back to the wall. Because of his trouble with words, Masud can sense the meaning in the way that lathi gives under his hand. No matter what Gul Singh says next, he wants to be persuaded not to come along. “You need me to protect you, Sahib. Haven’t I guarded this gate sixteen years now? I will get you to the police station. It’s too many blocks away, Sahib.”

  Masud points at Gul Singh, then cups his hand on an imaginary head. “Your children,” he says. “Go make sure.”

  A few more exchanges, Gul Singh refusing, Masud insisting—until finally, relieved, Gul Singh asks, “You know where the station is, right? Straight.” He points. “Straight.”

  Masud nods and points the same way.

  “I will clean everything up, Sahib. I will get the glass and the mirrors replaced while you are gone. I will take care of everything. As soon as you return, you will start seeing patients. It will be like before.” He is already outside the gate. Unexpectedly, he joins his palms and lowers his head, the way he has done whenever Masud has handed him his wages. Then he turns and rounds the corner and is gone.

  Masud waits a while with his arms down, black bag at his side, rail-thin in the English-style pants tight against his cranelike stick-legs. A last look at his ruined clinic, then he sets off into the emptiness.

  * * *

  In a strange reversal, Simran’s father comes in holding the tray. For the first time, he is serving them. It looks odd to Simran, almost laughable, to see him doing this. He sets the tray on the floor and looks at Simran’s mother, who nods. She understands what is happening. When she sees that nod, Simran, too, understands. Her sisters follow their mother’s lead and reach for cups. Simran takes two, one for her, one for Jasbir. By no coincidence she gets her name day cup. Jasbir starts drinking right away. Simran holds hers. Her youngest sister makes a face. “Drink,” her father says. Harpreet checks through the doorway and disappears again, top-heavy shoulders and the stone-hard knot of the turban. “Drink,” her mother repeats, and she raises the cup a little but aborts and holds it in front of her
, lips pursed white, nauseous maybe. She says a prayer and tries again, and this time she drinks it all in hurried gulps. Her throat bobs.

  Simran is watching. She is certain now, and her heartbeat announces it, so strong I feel it through the air. I feel it inside myself. It is almost like being alive. Simran puts her mouth to the rim and tilts the cup. My hand shoots out, scared for her. She isn’t supposed to drink. I hurry closer and look over her shoulder. The milk laps warmly at her upper lip. She hasn’t opened her mouth. Her father is watching them; she is watching him, too, over the cup. When the others bring theirs down, she does hers. He is satisfied.

  After the door has shut them in again, the cups are set, empty, on the tray. Simran holds hers close and rises.

  “Simran?” The drug has not taken effect yet, and her mother straightens; she has been slumped until now with the passivity of prey. “What are you doing? Come away from that window right now. You can’t let the street see in here. All these girls—those mians will be drawn to us like wolves.”

  Simran taps the wooden shutter’s hook out of its eyehole and shoves. Smoke smell and furnace heat mix with the room’s locked-in sweat smell. Her forehead expects a touch of breeze but gets none. Inside hot equals outside hot. Decorative iron blocks off any escape through the window, and besides, she is too big to fit through it. At best, she might have pushed Jasbir to safety—and to the danger safety meant. With a secretiveness new to her, she tilts herself to obstruct her mother’s view and pours out the milk. A channel darkens the wall.

  “Priya,” she hears her mother say behind her, “sit back down and wait!”

  Her youngest sister has hurried over and holds up her almost full cup. “I wasn’t thirsty either, didi,” she whispers.

  Simran grabs the cup in one hand and Priya’s arm in the other. She flings the drugged milk through the window, unabashed now. The cast-iron work and half-open shutter drip. Her mother leans heavily and makes a grab for Priya, but Simran jerks her aside. The children are speechless, even Jasbir. Simran takes three rushed steps to the door. Her sister shuffles after, her arm extended. Simran’s mother shouts in alarm. The door shudders once as Harpreet yanks it close to loosen the slide of the latch from its hole. He doesn’t expect her and Priya so close, and the gun is at his side. Simran ducks to Priya’s height and charges past Harpreet at waist level. Her cousin’s hip bone clips her collarbone about where Shankar hit his in the fall from the train—but this works to her advantage, as it jolts Harpreet aside. Priya slips through behind her. Screams from inside the room, and screams, too, from Priya, who doesn’t understand she is being saved—she holds her hand out to their father when he reaches for her. Simran pulls at Priya and sees her father’s hand wrap around the small wrist. She gathers her sister in her arms. The gun goes off. Her sister’s body jerks in her arms. Startled, Simran drops her. Her mother is in the doorway, wailing. Harpreet, distracted, looks her way. For a moment, everyone in that small house is still. Simran alone is running—dream-running, her legs never moving fast enough. Her kameez is sweat-dark at the armpits and back, and her dupatta is gone. The heat has made the pulled-taut hair frizz around her face. It catches the sunlight and makes a kind of halo. From one direction, she hears the sound of a drum. Any direction but that. She bolts. Impatient gunshots from inside the house close off her childhood forever. She runs lightly. The balls of her feet leave hare-tracks up the dry dirt road.

  * * *

  The man beating that drum is named Dera Ismail. The strap makes a diagonal on his back. He is the only one in the crowd who doesn’t carry a dagger or a sword. His hands are busy on the sides of his drum, and his face is ecstatic, mouth open, eyes closed. Behind him, blades jab at the sky, and the occasional skip or jig gives things the air of a wedding procession. Which is only right, as Dera has played at hundreds of weddings, in this village and the ones surrounding it. Hindu and Sikh weddings, too, not just Muslim ones. He has a reputation for playing any drum well, pakhawaj, tabla, dhol—and has amused children, at several of those weddings, by feats of percussion using his fingers to slap the grooves between his knuckles, or two spoons, or a handful of marbles. With the marbles, what he did was closer to juggling. Tap, bounce, bounce, a sweep of his hand, the sharp marble-on-tile notes intercut with tongue clicks and water-drip noises he made with his lips. When the time came, he shrugged on his dhol, ran to the gathering crowd, and whistled the way he did to cue his musicians. They cheered when they saw him. He brought an air of festival and ceremony. He is playing his dhol wholeheartedly now, left arm occasionally throwing itself out with panache. Every other job has been just that, a job, flat-fee work for a hired musician, his face indifferent while the groom’s brothers and friends danced splendidly around him. Today he inhabits his music. Face up, smiling now. Eyes closed against the sun as he walks. His lids glow red. He could be playing at his own wedding.

  * * *

  Masud watches the street. He is white-eyed and white-knuckled, low and sniffing like a hare hunted into its hole. Behind him, under him, everything is black. Ash inks his cheeks and fingers, soaks his button-down gray. His fingers curl stiffly through the handles of his bag, which he holds at his chin, off the ashes. The ashes under him are soft, papery, still warm. The jeweler’s glass counter has melted and dried again, trapping some earrings. They lie stuck to their backdrop. Necklaces of worked, dark yellow gold have long since been looted. The same goes for cylinders displaying bracelets. From the sign, which said Brilliant Jewelers—now on the ground, crumpled as though by half a dozen kicks, the sign treated no better than the owner—there was no way to know a man named Atif Khan owned the store. Individually, none of the men knew this, either; only the many had known, and the many had singled it out.

  Masud crouches in his black hole, peeking around what is left of the counter. The street stays empty. A sheet of newspaper coasts into view and pauses. A new wind picks it up, and it is gone in a crinkle. Masud waits. What scared him inside was the sight of three men, far enough off that he could not see their faces or even judge their ages. They hadn’t been holding weapons, not that he could see. But he thought ahead—three of them walking on one side of the street, him on the other, bald head down, quick steps, bag fixed at his side—and he could all too easily imagine them crossing obliquely, asking his name, asking where he was going. He scurried inside. His footsteps went mute, over matted ash. The burned-out jeweler’s felt safe the way a cleft tree feels safe in a lightning storm. The violence had visited already and satisfied itself. Too much was still out there for the violence to circle back. Other stores, other people.

  This is the eighteenth minute he has been watching the street. Most of this time, he has been motionless. Small noises make his scalp tug. Any noise—once even the crack of his own knee. His ears flick back. His heartbeats crowd close and spread out again.

  A few minutes ago, one hand loosened from the bag and combed the ashes beside him. At first pensively, distracted; and now idly, focusing on the texture. His ring finger pricks on something. A splinter? He brings up his hand and sees a tiny gold earring that studs the pad of his finger. It must have dropped during the night’s snatching and stuffing. He forgets the pain for a moment; the sight makes him feel as if a lovely winged insect has chosen to alight on his finger. And sting. Blood domes slowly and drips. He sucks his black finger, unhygienic though he knows this to be. The earring he rolls between his thumb and forefinger, meanwhile, and finally slips into his pocket when he stands.

  Outside, the daylight shows him wasted and ash-smeared like an ascetic of some wholly other faith. Round black stains on the seat of his pants mark where his bony pelvis ground the ash hardest. It is this figure that presents itself at the police station half an hour later. The city, as he walked, changed around him. Sparrows became willing to speak again. The hush and curfew lost its hold as the streets broadened. He felt like he was exiting a plague quarantine. But his nerves did not let up. When the first casual bicycle swooped past him, he flinched as
if he had been struck and checked over his shoulder. Nothing. More people, open shop fronts, stalls on the roadside. He marveled how the violence respected borders, how the unspeakable in one place could be conversation in another. There was no partition, no checkpoint or sign, but he had left, appreciably, the Muslim part of the city. The eyes that met his and skipped down his body had no pity in them. Some eyed him with the disgust of the clean for the soiled. Others were simply curious, trying to locate his wounds, find the blood.

  Outside the police chowki, he hears paper ripping. Clock-steady, unrelenting. A fan, its blades edged in dust, turns overhead, so slowly it seems the power has just been cut. The thick heat doesn’t stir. Two officers stand by a desk at the far end of the room. The other desks are vacant. Filing cabinets stand with their drawers pulled out to varying depths.

  One policewallah is ripping pages from a ledger laid out on the desk. The other is checking his work. Even page to the left pile. Odd page to the right pile. Finally all that is left is a cloth cover. Scissors divide this cleanly, along the gum and coarse, frayed threads of the binding. In the lull, Masud steps forward. He is not the sort to speak up or approach on his own, so the men start on the next ledger, and he has to stand through four hundred more rips. Occasionally he steps outside and puzzles up at the sleeping building, then returns to observe the ritual going on inside. Shouldn’t there be alarm bells? Dozens of uniformed young men, rifles on their shoulders, busily running into the street? Reports being written? The policewallahs are bald, elderly men, their paunches administrative. They move on to the dilemma of a telephone. One holds up the receiver, another turns the base upside down, and they discuss the situation without rancor or aggression. A handkerchief dabs a forehead. A shrug, a nod. They have a toolbox on a chair, and a screwdriver is selected for the dismantling.

  Masud makes a noise with his throat. They look up from their task. The task has been started, however, and they finish it. Metal parts, the bell and the arm that strikes it, the dial—the telephone is disassembled and collected into a heap of parts. They begin to haggle over each component. They make trades. At last the phone is evenly distributed, and one of the men approaches Masud.