Partitions: A Novel Page 7

  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.

  The term he uses to address the widow, maasi, mother’s sister, stops her short because it is so close to mother, it contains the word mother inside it. The sound of that word in Keshav’s mouth, the extra syllable so easy to chip away, shows her a future forming already, these boys her boys, coming home to her, eating the food of her hands. They would grow up to be brilliant; their fair skin and quick eyes and parentage and Hindu blood made that a certainty. She had enough to send one to England to study, and if she sold some of her gold, enough to send both. No young wife with her full womb would have a fuller home than the much-pitied Shanaaz, widowed at thirty-nine after proving barren an unbearable quarter century, no prayer, no pilgrimage, no remedy enough. Once, on the recommendation of the Ayurvedic doctor Munshi, she had eaten a mouthful of raw ashvagandha, which smelled of horse urine and rainfall over turned earth.

  She sits them on the kitchen floor and gets two tawas going. They have eaten nothing all day. Simply breathing traps them there. The smells of flour, of cumin. Strange other smells, none of them wholly unappetizing. Soon she is clipping tongs on a pan and dropping the roti onto raw flame, that final drop that swells it with steam. Snatching it by the edge, she glistens it with ghee and folds it. Her hands do not mind the heat. Two mouths wait. It’s as though she calls on two more arms. She had not expected Saif to deliver so early. The mutton and dahl, which she prepared for herself, fills their plates. The ladle comes up empty. It doesn’t even tap the side or bottom of the pot. How natural this feels, she thinks. Providing, feeding. So this is the magic that endows mothers! Two hungry boys tonight, and I didn’t expect them, and everything is sufficient, the dough, the lamb, me.

  Keshav pauses before he pinches a bite. Shankar, always the hungrier, puts a cube in his mouth. It doesn’t give like paneer. It doesn’t cleave and crush like potato. He chews but doesn’t make much progress. It has a stringy, gritty, resilient texture—and yet it gives out its own juice, as if it were a fruit.

  “What’s wrong, beta? Did you get a clove?”

  Shankar shakes his head.

  “A bone?”

  He leans forward. The mouthful drops into his palm. The curry is off it, inside him now. The morsel itself, shredded, is grayish yellow. Her flour-pale hand strokes his head and slides away the plate. She scrapes the lamb back into the pot.

  “You will get a taste for it, in time. A good Brahmin boy, of course. Our food is dirty, dirty. There’s nothing in the dahl, beta. The dahl you can eat.”

  He spoons it twice to appease her. The widow goes on making her rotis, but some of the joy has gone out of it. Shankar wishes he had not refused her food, but wouldn’t it have been worse if he vomited? He fears he has endangered himself and his brother; her puzzling hospitality feels, all of a sudden, like captivity. He wants to get back to the train tracks. He wants to keep looking for his mother, who, he suspects, isn’t coming here at all, but his legs are locked under him.

  Keshav, reassured, bends forward and scoops his dahl makhni. A small black lentil peel sticks to his lower lip. “The dahl is okay, bhaiyya,” he says, and Shankar wants to stop him from eating so freely here, as if it might commit them to this house irrevocably. It’s a difference I noticed even when they were toddlers: Shankar always worried, hesitant around strangers, moving water, ledges of any height; Keshav, meanwhile, all trust, extending arms whenever arms were extended to him. Trust is a reflex with Keshav.

  Thin mattresses in the next room smell stale, and dust dims the lantern when she unfolds them, dust either blown off the floor or thumped from the opening mattress itself. The settling sheet swells and exhales mothball-breath. Her lies are more and more halfhearted: Your mother will be waiting for you at dawn. Your mother wants you to get a night’s sleep before she fetches you tomorrow. The boys say nothing, her food heavy in their bellies, sleep heavy on their eyes. Lullabies she has practiced every morning while bathing, her rhythm each cupful’s splash over her shoulder, immobilize the boys further, like spells. This gentle inflexibility, these reassurances—the boys can’t read their situation. They lie down parallel, docile, as if drugged, and they stare at the ceiling. Meanwhile, she padlocks the door from the inside, slips the key between her breasts, and snuffs the lantern. Moonlight takes over, and the crickets seem to grow louder in the new darkness. The widow nestles her immense softness between them and throws an arm across her eyes. Soon she is louder than the crickets, snoring.

  * * *

  Morning. I am in the sky again. I take in the kafilas. They are broader than I last remember. Great human rivers, the vanished Sarasvati reborn with all her tributaries. My mind bobs on those slow rivers, a paper boat. The one I want trickles east-west. Migrant field hands who walked one way to eat now walk the other way to starve. Craftsmen have left their workbenches tipped over, as if whoever had been working there sprang to his feet at a klaxon’s sound. Drill or brush or awl is laid beside unsanded wood. Most are villagers, of course, farmers in turbans, danda across the shoulders, forearms perched on it and the hands slack at the wrist. A casual, herder’s pose—when they’re the ones being herded. The way they stare at the ground shows the difference: such men usually turn their heads up to the clouds. I see one turn to face a suspicious shake in the roadside brush, danda slid around, both hands on it, ready if … Nothing. A boar, maybe. Or sparrows mating.

  On the road with these villagers, a stooped, gentlemanly figure keeps pace. He seems dropped here by accident. A grime-collared button-down, no turban on his balding head. His scuffed doctor’s bag makes him look as if he has strayed on a house call.

  Morning. At precisely this early hour, Masud has done the same one thing for decades. A familiar pang starts low and in front—he knows, from studies and experience, this is where rectal distention sends its pain. His body has not forgotten.

  Dozens of people, adults and children, squat by the roadside. They leave behind coils of off-green or strangely bright brown without so much as the stray dog’s kick-back of dust. Masud has seen this his whole life and yet never been part of it. Background and foreground shift, his vision bringing out these low human shrubs, unaware of themselves, sometimes even meeting his eyes without shame. The women do it there too, sarees bunched at their sides, because it would be risky to venture far from the kafila. Hunters wait in the fields; he heard them in the night and kept walking. A shout prematurely muffled, the snatching of the slowest, the smallest, the lame.… A few steps out, and he gets a falling feeling. Each kafila negotiates a narrow ridge between abyss and abyss. The fields to each side are deceptively flat, deceptively solid.

  What will he do for
paper? Everywhere he looks is dust and twisted stem. His hand leaves off holding his stomach and brings the answer out of his black bag. The pharmacopoeia. The book falls open along a crease of much use—children’s laxative tinctures and stool softeners, magnesium, sennakot, oil. One of the commonest problems a pediatrician sees, natural enough for the book to splay there. Two pages thumb effortlessly off the binding’s gum. He looks ahead, looks over his shoulder, flushes. He drifts a little further off the dirt road, where he slows and stops, afraid to continue. Privacy is possible out there, if he ventures far enough. It will mean absolute vulnerability—not even the glass armor of another’s witness, which is all the kafila can provide. He must do it here. He sets his black bag at his feet and unbuckles his belt. He cannot face the crowds behind him, as the others do. Even the empty field embarrasses him. As he squats, elbows clipping his shirttails, he holds the two small pages over his eyes like the black bar of anonymity in a medical photograph, the infirmity naked beneath.

  * * *

  Morning. Simran is picking out a knife. She has used all of these, she knows their virtues and shortcomings. This slender one, due for sharpening, tapped at coriander and slid through bananas when Jasbir wanted them in sugar and milk. This one, serried, sawed at radish and potato, good too for taking the nubs off okra, leaving that watery mucus on her fingertips. And this one. The one for meat.

  She takes them all, even the finger-length one with the green plastic handle. Of all the knives, it had drawn her blood most often, its sharpness so easily underestimated.

  Her long back is soaked red, her kameez one bloodstain. She could change clothes. She could even bathe; a bucket of yesterday morning’s water sits out back, flecked black. A single curved green leaf hovers among reflected clouds. Cleaning up doesn’t occur to her. Instead she tucks away the knives. Her lips are moving. I catch scattered words of what I can tell is a prayer. She is already growing sure of her escape route. All she has to do is get to Amritsar. Once she gets to the Golden Temple, she will find work on the grounds. She will live alone, unmarried. She will work and pray and pray through her work. Hadn’t she daydreamed about just such a thing, whenever her mother and father talked about giving her to a husband? Already Amritsar has given her purpose and sharpened her movements. It’s the same way that my boys have fixated on Delhi, and for the same reason. As if in such times there were still safety in numbers. These city names are calming mantras, arbitrary fixed points, words imagined into refuges. They could just as well have said heaven.

  Simran emerges from her house, crusted maroon with dried clots and armed, two knives ingeniously looped in her drawstring, two others wrapped in cloth and tucked in her waistband. The whole time she is murmuring, and her free hand carries a string of prayer beads.

  The village has recovered overnight, the prior day’s violence a late-autumn storm, a gang that blew through. Clear skies today, everything has had time to dry. It startles her how the routines hold exactly, minus the two dozen Sikhs murdered the previous day. Forty-year-old Rahmat Ali still loiters under the tree at the hub of the village, on his back, left calf splayed against right knee, tobacco spit streaking the dust to his side. When he looks up, he seems to be talking to the leaves, but really he is talking to Taqt Ali, his brother, several feet away hammering shoe leather. He lays off his work to stare at her as she passes. She is enough of a sight that even Rahmat Ali sits up. Either man could have taken her and kept her for himself—Taqt Ali might have gifted her to his brother, as some ancient ghazi would a distributed slave girl, the ancestral power relationships restored. Because Rahmat did need a wife. Even yesterday, during the action, he had shown his customary laziness. They had been to three villages; there had been plenty of girls, starting at twelve, but he hadn’t liked any.

  “Is that Jaswant Kaur’s girl?”

  “It is.”

  The brothers don’t touch her, and neither does anyone else. No one comes after her. In an hour, she is in the mountains again. Safe passage. At least this far. The villagers thought she had died with her family. No one had counted the shrouded bodies in the room; Taqt himself had bolted to chase down the men. The crowd had heard stories of faked deaths, and the blood, by their standards, didn’t seem enough—so each corpse had gotten a few perfunctory pokes of steel. They see Simran and her dyed clothes, and, though they are not by nature superstitious men, they believe their eyes. They believe she has risen. The story goes to the rest of the village and the villages surrounding, always the detail of the prayer beads, always the tone of awe.

  * * *

  Morning. The sparrows make their market-noise around the house of the widow Shanaaz. She is sleeping on her belly, one arm over Keshav’s chest, one over Shankar’s. It was a suffocating weight for some time, and they tried more than once, in the darkness, to set the arm aside and breathe. Shankar slid her arm almost to his neck so she wouldn’t press on his rib cage. No matter how loudly she snored, she never seemed fully asleep. There was a startling shrewdness in the way her arm kept repositioning itself to make sure they could not leave. The boys stayed up late, speaking without voice, their moonlit raised hands making deft signals, like those of deaf children. In an hour, though, they fell asleep.

  Not me. Throughout the night I poured thoughts into their minds. A little of the deluge soaked in, I hope. Even if they had stayed up and tried to leave, there was no way to slip out of that locked room, the key dropped where they could not fetch it, metal bars across the window.

  The first thing Shanaaz does on waking is look to that window. Two sparrows perch on the bars. When they see her lift her head, they skip one skip and vanish.

  In the improved light, she can see exactly what she purchased. She turns from one serene sleeping profile to the other, then brings her face up close and aligns it directly over Shankar’s, which is tilted away from her. I rise protectively but cannot part them. I can see her, too, in this light. Her cleft chin and thick eyebrow make a profile nothing like my son’s. She pauses there, filling with admiration and adoration. The imitation-love a kindhearted stranger is capable of feeling for a beautiful child. Not love. Next is Keshav. I know the study she is making. I did it too, in my last weeks. Hers is the effort to learn, mine was the effort to memorize. The kissing starts now, first gently and slowly, as she doesn’t know how deeply they sleep. She switches between faces and sometimes between cheeks. Then, because they don’t stir, her lips part a little and press harder and leave tiny glints of saliva. Her nose crushes to the side. Shankar’s brow crinkles. He shifts, and his bewildered eyes open to the light. He blinks three times, frowning. Keshav, connected to him, awakens too. They are startled to see her and scoot away as they sit upright. Then Keshav senses the distance and hurries next to Shankar. They hold each other. Her smile pushes their backs flat against the wall.

  “Hungry?”

  They shake their heads. “Where’s our mother?” Keshav asks.

  “She sent someone,” says the widow. Her morning breath fills the room. “He came in the night. She had to go on to Delhi, to make sure everything is in order. She will send for you. Until then, she said, you must behave. Are you hungry, my babies?”

  Shankar shakes his head. Her eyes lock on him and beam.

  “No, no,” she murmurs. “You are good Brahmin boys, you bathe at dawn, right? You always bathe in the morning, like a ritual. Come. We will bathe.”

  The boys shake their heads.

  “Don’t worry, Maasi will bathe you.”

  She holds Shankar’s wrist and with her other hand reaches for the key. She takes Shankar with her, already lifting his arm and tugging at the shirt. He snatches his arm back, and it vanishes up the sleeve. The shirt is already half off. Keshav follows, love his leash. They watch while she heats a pot full of water and pours it two inches high in an empty blue bucket. During the time it takes to heat, she rubs Shankar’s naked back clockwise, pausing to trace the nicking of his spine. When she tongs the pot off the flame and focuses on the tran
sfer, one hand still firmly on Shankar’s wrist, Shankar looks at Keshav and makes a quick gesture and mouths, Bhaag. Run.

  The water steams breathily into the bucket. Her attention is there. Keshav has a clear line to the front door and the daylight beyond it. He stays. So do I. We stay because we are family.

  Now Shankar is in the bathroom. The faucet thunders into the bucket. Shards of hot water sprinkle his hand. The widow blocks the doorway. She wants his drawstring. He looks down as her finger hooks his waistband, the knuckle hard against his stomach, and fishes for the loop. Where his feet touched the wet floor, he sees two dirt prints.

  “Maasi,” he says.

  “Speak, beta.”

  The drawstring is out but not undone yet. She reaches past him to keep the bucket from overflowing.

  “I saw a lizard, maasi.”

  “Where? I’ll clap my hands at him, and he’ll run away.”

  “In there. Behind the bucket.”

  “Where?”

  He points. She takes a step inside.

  “I’ll get him.” She smiles at his fear, plays along. “Lizard? Where are you, Lizard?” She claps once. Another step. Twice. “Lizard…”

  As soon as she is through the door, Shankar slips outside, pulls the door shut and slides the latch, grinding it into its hole in the wall. The door starts shaking. An imprisoned, hollow voice calls to her babies, her baby boys, her precious ones. The shaking stops, and now a powerful blow rattles the door but doesn’t shift the latch. A second, concentrated shock, louder: full body. A third. The hallway is empty, and the front door stands open. Shankar’s wet footprints tell the flight of both boys. In the street, Keshav is checking over his shoulder, while Shankar is swimming up into his torn green silk kameez. When it slips onto him, his arms are left straight up, as if in victory.

  * * *

  Saif Nasir had a busy night. He trailed two different gangs through the city, always trotting at a scavenger’s distance from the feast. The take had been good; the second gang had been the best kind, randy and impatient and murderous, not one ring or earring stripped. Only the available necklace snatched and stuffed in the pocket, sometimes not even that. Every gang left its fingerprint, to his mind. A jackal can tell the pride from its scent on the leavings. The first gang, the one he abandoned after an hour, had begun to annoy him. The men had been vain, wanting to send messages, to humiliate—and that meant keeping the girls alive. Twice he had knelt to peel a nostril back and unscrew the patch of a nose ring when the girl twisted away and moaned. That was enough. A whole sack of trinkets and fillings sits knotted on his lap as he talks to Qasim.