Partitions: A Novel (11 page)

*   *   *

The twins don’t run for long. Keshav could keep going. Shankar can’t. His heart throws itself rhythmically against his throat. Its tip thumps far to the side, almost in line with his armpit, between the two lowest ribs. It makes the fractures pang in synchrony. His heart has ballooned over years of forcing blood through a pinched hose. Lips and palms gray, neck muscles straining to pull each breath, he calls to his brother and squats on the ground. Shankar has noticed this posture helps him, he doesn’t know why; he learned to do it at around the same time he learned to run.

Keshav knows what has happened, so he doesn’t tell his brother to keep running, even though they are still in sight of the widow’s crow-crowded roof. Instead he runs back and helps him to the shade of a wall, out of the visible street, where Shankar drops into his squat again. Sonia never understood how far inside the defect lay, so she would massage Shankar’s hands when they turned this way, as if to loosen them pink. Keshav does the same. Shankar nods. He still breathes hard. I keep an eye on the street while Keshav closes his hands on Shankar’s closed hands. Prayer within prayer.

*   *   *

Let them have this breather. Dispersal is giving way to convergence. Clear across the city, Saif and Qasim have climbed into their truck. I hear the door shut; the window rolls down and Saif’s elbow appears. They will be heading north. North of them, Simran walks so the afternoon sun is behind her. Over the next two hours, it will burn her neck. Masud, on the Indian side of the border, is coming directly toward her, across dozens of kilometers.

Masud’s progress will be slow. He has heard a child suffering close by, and the sound, triggering a reflex, halts him. The tiny hairs along his ear rise, sentient antennae. He ventures out of the kafila and parts some branches to reveal a faint, insistent sobbing, where a boy of four or five holds his leg. Masud kneels. The bag’s brass latch clicks open. It has been waiting.

4

CONVERGENCE

The three of them sit hip-to-hip in the cabin of the truck. Ayub, whose cousin in Rawalpindi owns the truck, has promised he will be the only one to drive it. Saif or Qasim or both could sit more comfortably in the cavernous, rattling hold of the truck, but that is where the girls will be bundled. Already it bears a female air, an air of subordination, not a place for men.

I watch as the truck heads north, driver’s side to passenger window: Ayub, Qasim, Saif. A strange blankness in Ayub as he watches the road, eyes semifocused at a middle distance. Thought and perception almost yogically overcome in the hypnosis of driving. Qasim is irked: he sits in the middle and envies the endless gust Saif faces with narrowed eyes. It was only natural that Qasim take the middle spot, as the connecting friend between Ayub and Saif. But after an hour squeezed here, he decides, they all know each other the same. He plans on pressing Saif to switch at the first stop. Saif, meanwhile, isn’t enjoying the window seat, neither the wind nor the view. His mind is replaying Ayub’s reaction when Qasim introduced Saif as their third man. The almost contemptuous glance at Saif’s unhealthy-looking frame, about as fleshed out as a bicycle’s. Then the meeting of the eyes with Qasim, and Qasim’s quick reassuring nod. Ayub says nothing to welcome Saif, and this rankles too. He doesn’t note how Ayub doesn’t say much to Qasim, either, or how Ayub, surly and friendless, needed Qasim to find him his third. Ayub’s only welcome, before they climbed in, was a breakdown of how the profits will be split: 30 percent to Ayub, 30 percent to Ayub’s cousin whose truck this is, 20 percent each to Qasim and Saif. Qasim seemed to have accepted the arrangement already, so Saif nodded. Though he knows he wasn’t really in a position to haggle, he is angry over the mute docility of his nod. It must have confirmed, he thinks, Ayub’s impression of his weakness. Saif wants to prove himself violent and masculine to Ayub, and he wants Qasim not to regret inviting him in on this. I see this eagerness intensify as we ride north, and it scares me.

Qasim, still irritated, picks at some dirty adhesive left over from the picture of Gayatri that had been taped to the dash. He scrapes off shreds and rolls them into a tiny ball. Just that week, the picture had been torn off and crushed and thrown out the window. The truck belonged to a rich grain merchant before Ayub’s cousin took possession of it. The cousin wants to get the truck out of the area because he is worried order might be restored any day now, and all that has changed hands might be reclaimed and returned.

The truck has a Mercedes engine and space to carry ten, maybe fifteen girls. Any more might be hard for three men to herd. The girls are usually docile by the end of the ride and don’t run, Ayub heard, even if you let the chains drop. They simply don’t know
where
to run; the surroundings paralyze them. But Ayub wants to start his business right and has taken advice from the more seasoned hunter-gatherers in his tribe. What he needs, they have told him, is a “Scheherazade.” So he hired a girl from Qasai Gali, in Rawalpindi, who offers this second service. They stop to pick her up before heading out.

The Scheherazade’s name is Aisha, but the other girls, as they are boarded, will call her by a Hindu name, Kusum. Her voice confessionally breathless during the whole shuddering ride, Kusum will tell stories of what the girls’ own families will do to them if they dare go home. Hiring her is their main initial expense, other than fuel and rope. Saif and Qasim have to pay in, 40 percent each. Ayub, who is providing the truck, sets these terms and covers the difference. It is too late to argue: Aisha’s madam is waiting by Ayub’s window, and Aisha’s bedding has thumped into the back of the truck. The madam looks back and holds a finger up to Aisha, which tells her to wait until the counting has finished. When the madam is satisfied, Aisha climbs aboard.

These are the hours she usually sleeps, and her breathing slows even before Ayub shifts gear. Sleep deprivation switches her instantly into dream sleep. The potholes don’t disturb her, nor do the rougher patches of road. I am happier back here with her than with the men up front, whose minds are colorless, cramped as the cabin they’re sitting in. Aisha fascinates me because she has arrived at the same attitude toward her body as I have toward mine. She is oddly bodiless. The still-darkening bite marks on her right shoulder. The ache between her thighs. Her nipples chafed and gnawed like a nursing mother’s. She is as little aware of them awake as she is when asleep.

In her dream, she can sense things, but she never glimpses her own body. Her gaze floats free. Other people are pointing at sarees laid out on the sand or sipping water from green coconut shells. A kite maker rubs glass shards on a thick bundle of kite string. A few horses are led past on the shore, children given rides atop them. At some point, as a girl, she must have visited a shore. Now she is revisiting it, disembodied, as if after her own death, blessing all she sees. I can tell she is only observing her own dream—she lost the habit of participating in her waking life, too. How close this is to how I am now. I dwell beside her a while. I stroke the long, wild blanket of her hair, let down six years ago and never tied back up.

*   *   *

The boys are lost. They have never been in this part of the city, and the part they know is nowhere near. After what happened, they don’t trust adults enough to ask the way to the tracks. They are waiting to find someone closer to their age. Hope and instinct bid them turn at this street or that one. Sprints, of whatever distance Shankar can manage, take them down the quieter ones, but soon they are at the periphery of a populous square, looking at the backs of four police officers. They carry long rifles on their shoulders. Oil from the rifles has marked their white uniform shirts. They are watching something. Some kind of festival. My passage troubles the bidi smoke in front of a policewallah’s face. Briefly, my own face’s contours show, like a glass mask rising through water. Then I am gone.

A bear-sized Sikh named Prabhcharan is being held down in the square. Knees push in his back. Two men use both hands to secure his arms. Another man has thrown himself sideways over the lower back and beats, with what looks like a washerwoman’s bat, the Sikh’s hamstrings and the backs of his knees. I count four men and still they are having trouble. The pull on Prabhcharan’s sleeves has torn his black kameez open, baring his dark-haired chest. This is not a straightforward murder—that would have been accomplished minutes ago. This is a subjugation and a show. The policewallahs maintain a supervisory distance, having received instructions not to help. One puts his pinkies to his mouth and whistles.

Prabhcharan roars and swings his left arm forward, then his right. The small men lose their holds and tumble, scraping pavement, but they spring to their feet. The Sikh has reared onto his knees, and his torso torques, one arm dislocated at his side, the other elbow high and reaching behind him, as if to pluck off a hooked bat. The third man, who slid off as Prabhcharan rose, now takes two-handed lumberjack-swings at a thigh. The other men are back; they run behind the Sikh and charge him as if he were a door, leading with their shoulders. The policewallah behind me picks the bidi from his mouth and shouts, “Get on top of him, Ismail! Get on him!” The whole tangle of bodies falls in a mound, the Sikh at the bottom of the pile, and a cheer goes up from the crowd. They begin to chant
kes, kes, kes
, and two more men come out of the crowd. Prabhcharan’s body bucks and jerks under the weight of his attackers, but they have him pinned now, and the one on his back V’s his palms behind the Sikh’s head, forcing it steady against the pavement. Now they are working at the turban. The thick knot comes loose. They extricate the cloth; it is passed on from where the work is being done and waved like a banner. A few children of three or four, understanding nothing, jump after the long maroon cloth, snatching at it, a game with a prize. The hair is astonishingly long.

“What are they doing to him? Officer sahib! Save him!”

Keshav, get back!

The policewallah turns to Keshav with a look of murderous annoyance. Shankar emerges from the alley and pulls at his brother’s arm. “Haat!” spits the officer, saying the word used for stray dogs.

“But he’s…”

Shankar tugs harder. The officer shows Keshav the back of his hand; if there were not so much to miss right now, he might have struck him.

Get back, son!

Keshav drifts with Shankar into the shelter of shadow. In the square, Prabhcharan roars again and forces a shoulder off the ground. A fist pounds it twice, flat. His face lifts but the hair covers it. The chanting keeps up. A hand gathers his hair. Desperation makes him snap upward with his teeth. Ineffectual; the hair has been gathered, rope-thick, in a hand at his scalp, streaming and spreading beyond. They start crudely with a knife until someone runs scissors over. Swiftly now, in great swoops and snaps, the locks are cropped close to the scalp, some uneven patches, some patches pink and oozing where hair has been ripped outright. The beard is finished shortly. He is docile now and doesn’t buck, as if all his strength had rested in his hair. A man walks a larger knife over. One hand cups Prabhcharan’s chin and jerks back. His head tilts skyward unprotesting, eyes rolling white, throat bared.

*   *   *

It reminds me of Sonia combing her wet hair straight down, the comb leaving fine runnels. This must have been late, three months or so left; I remember the boys climbing on me, but I was still strong enough to lift Shankar straight up, my hands under his thighs, a throne. His tiny feet, smudged from the floor, dangled above my face, feet the focus of all devotion. He stared around the room from this new height. She was combing her hair, and it got me noticing the boys’ hair. It was splaying out over their ears. I pressed some of Keshav’s between my index and middle fingers to show her how long it was. She nodded and said, “They’re getting stronger. It’s harder and harder to hold them steady.”

Mightn’t she try cutting their hair while they slept? It always came out uneven, she told me, as she couldn’t turn on a proper light to work by; and worse, if she shifted them over to the opposite cheek, she risked waking them up halfway done, different lengths to either side of the part.

I was feeling stronger than usual, and I volunteered to hold them. I hobbled to the bathroom and sat shirtless, only the Brahmin thread across my chest. First Keshav, then Shankar. I kept one hand on both forearms and my legs ingeniously lotussed over his. My other hand secured his head against my chest, my rough old palm over soft cheeks and the tiny marble of a chin. It could have been a new yogic asana. How they cried! They had a terror of the scissors undiminished by Sonia’s singing and my assurances. The crying ended only when I let them go.

Afterward, smooth, black cuttings stuck to my shoulders and specked my white chest hair. The hair was wet, so wiping the cuttings off spread them into thin, individual clingers. I ended up bathing with the boys, something I rarely did. I was so short of breath by the middle of it that Sonia knotted her saree around her waist and took over. After a brisk soaping, each limb received two pours of the cup. She was systematic. I caught my breath on the bathroom floor, wheezing, drowning from the edema in my lungs. Still, I picked up Shankar to see his new haircut in the mirror. Our faces were next to each other there. It could have been how the hair had diminished relative to the face, but his cheeks seemed fuller, pinker. I could have mistaken him for Keshav—the first time that was true. I appeared skeletal, my nose longer because of the sinkholes where my cheeks had been. I should have looked freshly bathed, but I looked instead as if I had run inside during a storm. Father and son.

That contrast, Shankar’s face next to mine, made me grateful for the bargain I had made. I set him down and nodded at myself in the mirror. A nod of assurance and acceptance.
You saw for yourself. Everything has been taken care of. Now you live up to your end.
I returned to the cot that night coughing and spitting into a steel cup. Three months would have to pass before I rose from it. And not on my feet.