Partitions: A Novel Page 5
“Yes?”
The sharp, impatient tone paralyzes Masud’s tongue. He knows himself; it would be futile to try answering. Out of his bag he produces a calling card. One of two hundred he had printed in England four decades ago, when he graduated. A precious chit, wood-textured, the ink letters raised in a way a fingertip could feel. He hopes the officer will hand it back to him, and he does.
“You are a doctor?”
Masud nods, returning the card to his stack.
“No one needs a doctor here.”
Masud zips the bag’s inner pocket and looks up.
“What is your business?”
Masud frowns expressively. He points down the street he has just walked. “That—that—”
“Yes?”
Masud has never encountered the police before. His eyes go to the pistol at the man’s waist, the white undershirt visible between his too-taut buttons, the tobacco-stained teeth. The notion of requesting, from this man—what? A jeep ride to safety in Pakistan? And did Pakistan really mean safety? Whom did he know in this conjured country, Pakistan? Where would he knock? Where would he sleep, and what would he put under his head? Pakistan. It’s no longer a question, after what he saw this morning, of where, only where else. Masud’s mouth is open. He feels a surge at the base of his throat that can’t break and gush.
The officer glances at Masud’s clothes. English-style, ash-blackened, like some gentleman stovecleaner.
“Do you want to file a report?”
Masud nods because it is the easiest thing he can do. The officer gestures to him to sit. Only there is no bench where he gestures, no chair, only the unswept floor and the wall for backrest. Masud lowers himself and sits with his bag in his lap. The policewallah joins his colleague, who is lazily inspecting the typewriter, pressing one letter very delicately and tentatively: first the resistance, then the give, the key sinking, the typebar rising to strike.
* * *
Lying on my cot, propped on three watermelon-shaped pillows, I too had waited once. I remember the room exactly. It was all I saw for a year. I got to know the tiles and the patterns of plaster on the ceiling. When the fevers came, and the room was lit by a single moving candle, I saw faces and figures in the spongework. Evenings, I would watch the bugs fleck the wall. The occasional three-fingered lizard. My fellow motionless ones. They basked, I baked.
Shankar and Keshav made of me, as they grew, a kind of playground. They crawled to me in the mornings, pulled up on my cot, and patted me awake with their little hands. I might open my eyes and see one of them face-to-face. About the kindest way to be awoken to a day of suffering. When they started walking and could climb onto me—my last two months—I was a landscape. Sonia taught them the parts of my face. Eyes, teeth: they would point and say the word. Bloodshot eyes. The teeth I brushed over a steel bowl, too weak to shift into a seated position, just curling forward at the neck to spit. They were still learning to give kisses when I departed. Not yet the pursed-lips kind of kiss that makes a deliberate click, but a kiss. She would bring them after their baths. That is one of the last images I have: Keshav on her hip; her, leaning to bring his face close; and then the press of his lips on my silvery stubble.
She did make an effort to shave and bathe me regularly. I was careful to gauge how exhausted she was and offer to skip a day. Many nights she fell asleep beside the twins because they would cry whenever she tried to rise. The spread of bedding stayed on the floor, mussed as it was when they awoke from it. I got to fearing Damyanti might hear I had fallen ill and visit again. I did not want her to see the mess and report Sonia’s poor upkeep of the flat to my mother and father. Because I was the third child, by then; before I became bedbound, she had been able to keep up.
My practice had been closed for a year. No money was coming in. Hiring her a helper now would mean less savings for when I was gone. I showed her my accounts, the documentation she would need, and the key to the bank deposit box where I stored my first wife’s wedding sets—though she swore she would never sell them. We discussed whether she could go back to the church to teach English. I told her she could repent her marriage to me, even raise the boys as Christians, if that was what it took to get help. Such things were all words anyway, I told her, but greatly gratifying to those people.
I wrote to my father and told him, in formal, typewritten English, that the office was his to sell, as I “would not be practicing there any longer.” I made no mention of why. No reference to how my heart, the very muscle of it infected, had ballooned in my chest. (I could feel the tip of it bumping my chest wall by then, in line with the armpit.) Nothing about the fevers or the way I got winded lifting even little Shankar. I didn’t say anything, either, about how well Shankar was doing. My suffering and my joy were both closed off. I had left that life.
At that point, I had already moved us to our new flat. Probably my father assumed I was setting up a new practice. I did not expect him to send me any money from the sale; I had never formally purchased it from him, and the title was still in his name. He didn’t disappoint me. At least he hadn’t pursued that punishment earlier, selling the building and telling me after the papers were signed. He could have done that. I guess I should have been more grateful and made mention of that in the letter I typed him. But he had been clear that marrying Sonia was the supreme act of ingratitude—to him personally (considering all he had given me), to the memory of my first wife, to my own ancestors going back thousands of years. The coldness of my business letter didn’t matter. After a crime like mine, what good were niceties? I had listened to his reproaches and asked him, when he paused to wipe his flushed brow, to forgive me. Me, forty-seven years old. Fresh rage shook him and threw his silver hair forward over his brow. That noble head gone wild—I had never been able to oppose him, not as a boy, not as a man. Even as a man, all I could do was run away.
I took us to that new flat when Sonia learned she was pregnant. So early in our marriage! Too early. I changed her life too drastically. I didn’t think of that then, of course; in those first months I was experiencing, for the first time in my life, pure sexual exhilaration. I ordered a break in my morning and afternoon schedules to come home to her. She would be waiting for me with the shutters closed and the fan going. Horns, trucks, the sound of the street below, the long wail of the Frontier Mail as it approached city limits—and a steady, greedy slapping in that small hot room, her dark body under my fair-skinned one. For the last minute or so, I would place my hands over her larger scars or just close my eyes. In time the scars stopped bothering me. She would observe my labors and sometimes intercept, with a fingertip, the sweat before it dripped off my chin or the tip of my nose. It must have been a game for her. At fifteen years old, a ward of the church, cared for; at seventeen and a half, pregnant with twins, wife to a Hindu man almost thrice her age.
I had made the decision to move hastily, almost out of irritation. The wives in the houses surrounding mine had all been friends of my first wife. They had, over the past eleven years, rotated cooking my meals—and, knowing me to be fairly wealthy, had proposed candidates of their own for my remarriage. I never made an announcement. They assumed, from Sonia’s dark skin, that I had hired a new slum girl to clean the house. The first day, one of them asked me if my “girl” were interested in coming over afterward; she wanted to see how well she washed dishes, seeing as Nazneen, her usual girl, had been getting careless. I smiled and gave her the good news. She congratulated me to my face, of course, sweetness of speech and formal invitations. By the next day, everyone was speculating, disapproving, making, I am sure, horrified faces. They could see the scars on her arms. What dirt had I tracked into the neighborhood?
Everyone knew—even the bricklayers, two Muslims, who were laying a new walkway in Ramchand Parikh’s courtyard, two houses down. Ramchand owned a steel foundry and could have lived much more extravagantly than he did. Building a new house had struck the penny-pinching Gujarati in him as far too costly, so he had su
bjected his current home to a series of renovations, collectively cheaper and quicker. Every day, on my way to work, I passed the week’s bricklayers, woodworkers, painters, or gardeners—maybe the same ones, maybe different. I never looked closely enough to know. We existed on opposite sides of an invisible partition.
The day after word of my marriage got out, though, the bricklayers paused in their work and both raised a hand. I stopped and wondered what to say. I decided on nothing. I raised my hand in return—what else to do?—and walked on, puzzled. Over the next several days, I got more than just raises of the hand. I got smiles, salaams, I got a sahib. I was not used to this, being a Brahmin born and a Brahmin still, though happily tainted—quite removed from these hard men and their tasks in the sun. I knew it had something to do with bringing Sonia into my house. Were they mocking me? One day I passed close to one of the bricklayers. He was standing in a sweat-stained kameez with the sleeves rolled up, and drinking from a steel cup. His beard had caught a few drops of the water. I stopped and spoke to him, asking him what Parikh sahib was having them build. I wanted, perversely, to see whether he still respected my caste and wealth, whether this Muslim workman could hold back his smirk when answering me.
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 sud
den 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.