Partitions: A Novel (10 page)

“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 transfer, 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.

“Have to get this to the goldsmith later this morning.”

“Who do you use?”

“I used to use Shah, the Hindu. But he left back in March, when he found out our boys had him first on the list. Joined his brothers in East Africa.”

“I knew him. He was a real sisterfucking cheat, that Gujju.”

“They all are. Ours are no better. These days I go to Nasruddin.” He lifts the bag disinterestedly. “I won’t get as much as I did for those boys, though. That was great luck.”

“I had a lucky night, too. Look at this.”

Qasim pulls out a fob watch the size of his palm. A chain rustles free and swings, and he cups the chain with his other hand, brings it up, and pours it like water into the hand with the fob. “It still works,” he can’t help but marvel. He has seen delicate things up close only after they have been broken. “They worked on the man with sticks. Not one bone wasn’t broken, I swear. A rich man, bungalow like an Angrez and the Angrezi gold fob, too. I felt around and found this thing in his breast pocket. Think how sturdy it must be.”

Qasim lets Saif hold it. Saif is jealous. Fake detachment in his voice, raising and lowering the watch on the scale of his hand, he says, “Most of the weight is the gears, on the inside. Not gold. I could take it to Nasruddin, but you wouldn’t get much.”

Qasim snatches back the prize. “Who told you I wanted to melt it down?”

“Better to pawn it.”

Qasim shakes his head. “This is staying in my pocket from now on. I am going to be rich as the fellow I took it from, soon enough. So rich I am going to need this to match my suits. I am through with foraging. This is Pakistan now, Saif. This is
ours
.”

“What, you plan to become a diplomat?”

They are sitting on the terrace of a house looted to the lintels. Their heels tap the wall and bounce and swing, like those of schoolboys. The city is a filthy spread, a table where others finished eating. As if at sunset the people broke a fast and fell on it, knives out.

The money these days, Qasim explains, is in girls.
In girls
, he phrases it, the way a businessman might say
in rice
or
in shipping
or
in gold.
They are everywhere, left unattended, needing only to be roped and put in a truck. No fathers, no brothers around, and if present, powerless ones, brainy little Hindus; toss a bloody shirt on the road and they turn and run, it’s as good as a roadblock. Out in the country, he says, it’s a free grab. None of this tugging trinkets off corpses, swollen fingers stubborn in the rings. Certain nawabs are paying three thousand rupees for each piece—Qasim uses the English word,
piece
—even though they know the supply is high; they want first choice, want to have the girls stood in a row so they can lift and squeeze a breast, thumb the lips up to check the teeth. Many of the girls are torn, marked up, but even the damaged ones are selling. And it’s clean work, just like what they’re doing now. Yesterday Saif was lucky to find those two boys, the smaller one almost exactly what the old widow wanted, but how often did Qasim get him tips like that? These girls are longing for someone to give them houses, chores, masters. They know their own men won’t take them back. Seizing and selling them—it’s a way of returning them to life. “They’ll be
thankful.
” Qasim grins at Saif and claps the muscled part between the neck and shoulder and squeezes roughly. “And how do you think they’ll thank us, hehn, brother?” Saif grins and lets himself be shaken; he has let that
us
pass unquestioned. He is sold.

*   *   *

All Masud can think about is his hand. The pages lie crinkled behind him, spoor of a strange beast. His fingers fan and flex, fan and flex. The black bag he holds in his good hand. His attention is all on his soiled one. Don’t let it touch the bag, don’t let it touch his sleeve or pantleg. It may well be a mercy to have this distraction. He has so much else to think about: his slit foot, for example, throbbing in the shoe. The tooth of hunger lodged in his abdomen. His dusting of ashes, his ruined clinic, his having nowhere to go.

An ox jingles behind him. He passes some coughing and a long, whistled wheeze, coming from behind a pile of bundles. The wheeze deepens echoingly into a rasp and spit. For a moment, he is reminded of a sick ward, and he begins thinking about what he must do here. Not in any willed way. His expression doesn’t change. But I can sense the difference. He walks at a slight distance from the others, again unknowingly. Two steps aside, no more, but visibly an outlier, not entirely part of this kafila. His companions here are farmers, field hands and their families, who have many of them never seen a city. Sometimes he overhears conversations and cannot make out the words. Punjabi, Urdu, Farsi, English, he speaks them all. What sets him apart is their way of speaking, slurred, aspirated, full of contractions and hoarse elisions. The familiar made unfamiliar. Four decades of a pediatric practice haven’t made him fluent in their speech. After all, not many patients came to him from the surrounding countryside. The parents rarely saw doctors themselves so they were even less likely to bring a child in. The healthy children lived and joined them in the fields. The sick ones died.

As I watch him walk, I watch the walk itself. His gait. The others, too. It reminds me of something my father once said when I was a boy. We were attending my youngest aunt’s wedding. There was twenty-one years’ difference between my father and her. My grandfather had remarried and continued fathering children into his late sixties. My father took us as a formality. This second lineage was never as close—a kind of mirror family with its own stories and cousin-clusters. Even the cuisine was unfamiliar. The patriarch had never had a taste for onion-stuffed naan before the second wife. Quiet politeness partitioned the two branches. It was somehow worse than being at a stranger’s wedding. My siblings and I were a little wary of the stepcousins, who had already divided into their usual teams for cricket. One stepcousin chalked the wickets on a wall, another spun a washerwoman’s bat. So we stuck together, and my father kept up a commentary. This was a treat. I remember the day because he didn’t speak to us often. He told us how a good samosa needed more mirchi and less potato than this, how there were clouds to the east and the good weather might not last through the ceremony. And then he pointed at three men passing the tent.

“Mians. You can tell just from their walk,” he said, indicating them with his chin. Then he showed us, straightening his back and neck; I had never noticed his natural slouch before. “Like lions.”

I studied them before they passed, his words showing me what I was seeing. Everything about them took on a different air, and the contrast with my relatives, dough-colored and dough-soft, only confirmed it: they were harder than we were, fiercer, of one mind. Meat-eating warrior stock. No wonder they had come to this land as conquerors, sons of Mahmud of Ghazni and Muhammad of Ghor. They were, for the most part, poorer than we were, but there was something rough and masculine even about their poverty. Our yellow gold rings and wrist chains would not suit them. We Hindus, I thought, glancing at my Ganesha-bellied half uncles—we were henpecked, bookish, slope-shouldered. No wonder our kingdoms fell to such fighters. Fighters they seemed by nature, forced to crank sugarcane juice and push carts by effete civilization. You could tell their true vocation, I thought, from their walk. “Like lions.”

Compare Masud. Compare the twelve hundred or so Muslims to either side of him in this kafila. People scared for themselves and for their families, no prowess-of-Islam swagger. They were always one extreme or another to my father: they were either a fearless master race or the grandsons of potscrubbers who had converted to ingratiate themselves with some invading sultan. How little we knew each other, though for centuries our homes had shared walls. How little we will learn, now that all we share is a border.

*   *   *

Simran eats for what feels like the first time, finally far enough from home to have an appetite. When the hunger comes, it’s an emergency. Khari biscuits from the kitchen’s steel bin, one handful for the journey, flake her front. A mouthful sticks to the inside of her cheek and stalls on the slope of her throat. She has no water to wash them down in this land of five rivers. Still, she licks her ring fingertip to collect the flakes one by one.

Her goal is Amritsar, but her feet wander. She stops and stares at the tops of trees. Deep trembling breaths. It may be the altitude, but it looks as if she were about to weep. She finds a spiral road, and she walks it on the side of the drop. No rail, only the rare kilometer marker, or a sign in English letters. At one point she is faced with a metal fence and, overhead, thickly bundled, sagging power lines. A sign meets her here, too, a black zigzag. Electricity hums inside some low buildings, generating light for the cities of the region. She looks in without comprehending, like a holy mendicant from a former century. A gatekeeper eyes her as she passes, assuming, from the blood, that she is a cutting beggar, the kind who would bury a cleaver in her own arm and wait by the shoes outside a temple. Yet Simran has no wound to explain the blood and no beggar’s bowl. She moves on, no footprints behind her, no words. Afterward he finds it hard to remember her face.

A quarter mile on, a bus surprises her. One moment isolation, not one sense reporting to her mind. And then thunder at face level, dust and pebbles swirling around her, pinpricks, the brief smell of heat and petrol. She shields her face with both arms, as if against a blast, and stops walking. Through the dispersing dust, she makes out the whites of three passengers’ eyes, their closed mouths. An older woman with her handbag close to her chest. One man in spectacles, one man in Freedom Fighter homespun. They stare at her through the receding window. The sight of her doesn’t provoke a glance or murmur. They, too, are searching her for signs of the violence done to her. Are her clothes torn? Is her face cut? The blood makes them curious.

Feeling the inquisition of their looks, she decides she mustn’t show herself this way. When the next vehicle approaches, this one a truck, she has been listening for it, and she slides herself a little down the side of the drop and waits. She likes having the drop so close to her. It comforts her, as the knives do.

Her hunger shrinks. Her eyes darken and sink into their sockets. The sun reddens her cheeks, an illusion of health. By noon, the ground, hours baking, hurts her feet. She tries to tear what she is wearing into strips to wrap them, but she isn’t strong enough. Then her slowed mind remembers her knives, and she stabs and twists to start a rip. The cloth—its length enough to wrap once and knot, but not enough to wrap twice—is too thin to make a good sole. The long ends of the knots spill forward and tickle her. Within the hour, they have loosened a second time, and are good for one last swipe of sweat before they litter the roadside, tiny bloodstained scarves.