Partitions: A Novel (13 page)

Saif hides his hand. He doesn’t want Ayub and Qasim seeing the gouge, between his first and second knuckles, deeper than the other teeth marks. The snatching was sloppy enough and witnessed in full. They don’t have to know that Saif damaged the piece, too.

Ayub, for his part, is keen-eyed enough to see the gum is still bleeding. He watches Aisha’s reaction when he says, “So we let this one go.”

Aisha scoots back and extends her arms for the younger one, welcoming the body into the truck. As Ayub shuts the bay and Qasim stands up front beside the open passenger door (he wants the window this time, especially now that Saif is soiled), the sister realizes she is being left behind. Set free. Free to run back to her family, there to explain—what? How her sister was snatched, but she made it back? A sinkhole opens in her chest, deeper than any gunshot, which can, at its worst, go no farther in than through and through. She and I are the only ones who feel it. Saif lets go of her elbow and wipes his hand, relieved not to haul this humiliation for the rest of the trip. Ayub rattles the keys and gets behind the wheel. The truck coughs. The girl lunges for the latch at the back, fingers scrabbling at it. Her thought isn’t to break her sister out, which is what it looks like to Saif. She is already resigned to the spoliation. All she wants now is to stay with her sister. Not to let her wake up alone, or next to that girl, or under one of these men. To protect her from the one thing she can protect her from, which is being alone. Saif shoves her shoulder, but she falls back only a step. The truck starts inching ahead, and Qasim whistles sharply, walking beside it. Saif, humiliated again, shoves her a second time, pushing low and with a few steps’ momentum, hands flat to her chest as if she were a man. This time he gets a better result. Ayub looks out the window as Saif climbs in wet and dusty and stinking, the only one on whom the expedition tells. Ayub’s annoyance shows on the pedal after Qasim shuts the door. Saif hides his hands between his thighs. They ride in silence.

*   *   *

Simran, almost out of the mountains, laps at a stream on all fours. Distractedly, scarcely aware of what she is doing, she walks her palms into the water and lets her chest kiss the flow. The water, icy, shocks her breathing shallow. Downstream the water turns hazy pink as some of the old blood washes loose. She undoes her braid, and her fingers comb gummed blood into the stream. Rearing on her knees, she wrings it out. Wet hair, a long straight rope of it, drapes her spine and trickles past the small of her back, gooseflesh everywhere. She heads back to the road. Not much traffic on it. Just one truck, miles away. But coming.

*   *   *

Masud never learns their true names. Only their nicknames. Dhimmy, Badshah, Rimzim, Jack. Street names from some forgotten city, their derivations lost, Lucky short maybe for Luqman, Billi, “cat,” instead of Bilal. They are organized and tireless. Two scout ahead, two check up on those he left behind. They note how far a skin infection’s red has spread past the black border Masud drew around it, their measurements in finger-widths. They jog up the kafila begging for water to boil, and on three occasions he finds a pot going, ready to sterilize his instruments. His bag itself cooperates, too. The tincture of iodine keeps pouring. The roll of gauze narrows far more slowly than it spins. The orphans find him lengths of clean, or at least clean-looking, cloth for tourniquets and bandages. Better cloth than what they wear. Pled from the living or scavenged off the dead, Masud doesn’t ask.

Where he goes, he goes as an entourage. The stray dogs have multiplied around him, drawn by scraps of the roti in which he is sporadically paid. He scatters small pieces like he’s feeding ducks, ever smaller shreds for ever more numerous dogs. But they stick around even when he has no food to give them, quiet and well-behaved, his little irregular regiment. Only the occasional shrill scuffle and streak of infighting, usually at meal time. When night falls and shouts wander the darkness, any torch that comes too close trips a havoc of barking. The dogs’ necks strain and lengthen, their eyes glow back defiantly. For two hundred feet in both directions, the kafila is safe, and Masud, cheek on his black bag, sleeps in the eye of the maelstrom.

*   *   *

By night my boys have found the rail tracks again. They needed help, and help found them, peering down from a rooftop and hissing to get their attention. Her name was Maya Rani, and she slid a ladder down to them. It takes trust to climb a ladder offered you; you are vulnerable during that hand-over-hand, foot-over-foot upward passage, and at the mercy of whoever let it down to you. They wouldn’t have gone up if it hadn’t been a child. She was three years older than them, though small for her age. The boys were drawn to her because her skin was as dark, and the same quality of dark, as their mother’s.

“You’re twins,” she said, delighted to see them side by side. “I thought so.” Neither the assumption that Shankar was younger, nor the comment on their sizes; just twins. She left it at that and slid the ladder hurriedly onto the terrace again, that brief perilous communication to the earth retracted. It felt safe up there, as if the terrace were a floating island and she had just drawn aboard the anchor. Housefires brightened as dusk dimmed. The sparks they gave off grew bodies and became gangs with torches.

“What are you doing up here?” Shankar asked.

“Watching.” She gestured over the burning city. “What were
you
doing down
there
?”

“We need to find our mother.”

“Isn’t your father around?”

“No.”

“Mine isn’t either. He never was.”

“Do you live here? In this house?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you afraid to be up here, then?”

“Why would I be afraid? They come sometimes and shout at me. But no one dares touch me. Me or any of my friends. I haven’t set foot on the ground for days. We jump from roof to roof, and all they can do is point up at the whites of our feet. No one dares come up and touch us.”

Her fearlessness was unusual enough, in that city, in that time, for the boys to credit her with some mysterious power. Keshav raised his hand and hovered it beside her bare arm. As though her dark skin were a candle where he drew warmth. “What happens?”

Maya laid her palm flat on her own arm and lifted it away. She did this twice. “I don’t know. They’re just scared to touch me.”

“Can I?”

She held her arm out to them. On it my boys each rested a fair-skinned, soft, half-Brahmin hand. The contrast reminded me of their infancy, the contrast between their cheeks and Sonia’s breasts as she cupped their soft skulls and cradled them aslant along her forearms.

“Did you feel anything?”

“Skin,” said Keshav.

“Skin,” agreed Shankar.

“Do you need to eat? The pots were still warm down there. They left in a rush, food still on the plates. One of the rotis was torn partway.”

“We ate last night.” Shankar looked at his feet. “That was it.”

“Here.” Maya went to a coarse sack that had been a bag of durum once and still had the miller’s stamp and weight in kilograms. In it she kept a treasure of copper utensils, a salt shaker and a pepper shaker, and a full set of silverware, spoons stacked separately and bound by a string. No forks, she saw no use for forks—nothing they could poke that fingers couldn’t grab more efficiently. Butter knives she had thrown in carelessly, and she took one out and smiled, using its dull edge to dimple her palm. “What good is a knife like this? Look at my hand. Look. Doesn’t cut anything. It’s for show, like most things in these houses. They buy things and put things out just so other people can see. Only the kitchens have useful stuff.”

The boys knelt to admire her trove, which she spread out. A ladle, tongs slightly flame-discolored at the pinch, a strainer. A steel rolling pin, heavy as a bludgeon—she had never seen one made of anything other than wood. A cylinder for churning out sev. And then, with a flourish, the grater. This one’s sharpness she respected, and her voice lowered accordingly: she had sliced her thumb, she warned, just putting it in the bag.

“It’s going to be a dowry. I already have enough for mine, though this sevi I might take. The rest is for my baby sister. Fifteen years from now, when she is ready, I’ll take this out of a trunk and show her what I saved up for her. Who won’t marry her then? She’ll have whoever she wants.”

She skipped downstairs and brought up two plates heaped high with lukewarm food. I clapped my hands noiselessly: they had gotten full dinners, two nights in a row! I wished I could tell Sonia. She would be so relieved to know they were eating. But I am not looking at Sonia. The thought of her weakens my smile. I must not look there.

My boys fell to their food, not caring, as we had taught them not to care, who served it or who prepared it. The color of hunger is fire, in every stomach the same. Before they started, she slid out one spoon gingerly and, with delicious ceremony, swirled their buttermilk’s cumin sediment. While they ate, she stood and gazed out over the streets. It wasn’t much of a vista, as the terrace wasn’t that high off the ground, but she could see for two blocks in either direction, and it felt to her like a tower. Sometimes she giggled, and I looked where she was looking; the giggle meant she had seen a body beaten or stabbed.

“Do you want to stay up here with me?”

“We have to find our mother. We have to get to the railroad tracks.”

“The tracks? You’re far away from the tracks.”

“We know.”

“It might be dangerous to walk down there. On the ground.”

“We have to get to the tracks and follow the tracks to Delhi.”

“To find our mother.”

Maya Rani nodded. Her trip downstairs this time brought back a silver case of kumkum, found at the foot of a framed picture of Gayatri. Dabbing her ring finger, she drew the boys a map, carefully to scale. On the terrace floor she traced crossroads the color of blood. Round daubs meant a mosque or statue they could use as a landmark. But looking around at the darkness, she lost faith in her map. Her directions trailed off. Distractedly she rubbed the kumkum along the part in her hair, like a bride’s sindoor, and said, “It’s night.”

“Is that where we turn?” Shankar insisted. His quick mind was memorizing her lines of kumkum black in the moonlight. “At the mosque?”

“Come on. I’ll take you.”

“But you said it isn’t safe.”

“You can watch over us from up here, Maya Rani.”

“Come on.”

*   *   *

Simran has a hare’s ear for trucks, and when this one comes, even though its lights aren’t on in the twilight, she slides off the road and lets it pass. She is out of the mountains, and the trucks worry her more now that she doesn’t have a comfortable abyss, only her arsenal of kitchen knives. She crouches in the brush, her back to an infinite flatness. The truck passes.

What she doesn’t know is that this truck bears a cargo of eyes. Her figure is just visible to Aisha as Simran gets onto the road and continues walking. Unmistakably female. Unmistakably young. Aisha feels something like pity for the would-be abductors who have been driving her around the whole day. The trip started before noon, and they have harvested only two girls. One is the sister, a twelve-year-old, still occasionally vomiting over the side—either from terror, or motion sickness, or the skull blow Ayub gave her. Between crying and vomiting, she has not been well enough even to share her name, in spite of Aisha’s sisterly coaxing. Aisha had parted the girl’s hair and found the whole back of her scalp purplish black and swollen soft.

The second girl they brought back had been refuse—tattooed right across the forehead.
Good luck selling that one
, she thought when Ayub pushed her into the truck. No blow had been required. The girl, who said her name was Uma, had come along passively, used to being handled. I study Uma briefly and discover she is puzzled her three captors have not raped her yet. I follow her eyes to Aisha and the young girl. Uma assumes the men sated themselves on the other two earlier in the afternoon and will get to her later that night. The detachedness of her contemplation is unbearable to me. Every boundary demarcating her has been violated already. She is, body and mind, all one perforation. Nothing holds her in, nothing holds her together. Through all those holes and rents she has dispersed, though yet living, as I almost dispersed when I died. Neither the will to live nor the will to kill herself. No will at all. This is a state I had not thought possible. I am dead but not deadened; she is deadened but not dead. I pull away.

At Aisha’s pounding, the truck stops. Ayub bolts out, thinking one of the girls has escaped. “What happened?”

“Look. There.”

*   *   *

One girl motionless in the dark. One girl getting smaller.

Maya Rani has led my twins to the tracks, has toed the tracks like a river she dare not enter. And she has left. They keep waiting for her to find some stairwell, some ladder to the rooftops where she is invincible. They want to see her fly from roof to roof in a flash of choli sewn with little disks of mirror, dark against the darkness, so they can be sure she is safe, untouchable. A fish of the air, altitude her water. But she walks until they cannot see her. Even after her vanishing, Keshav thinks he sees her, once, illuminated from the side by a distant fire. But he isn’t sure, and neither am I. Because I am not following her. I don’t even know where Masud is right now. He has his guardians. Simran and my twins are alone. I am all they have.

Simran doesn’t even have herself. When the hands come for her, she holds a knife flush with her neck, a prayer on her lips. Yet the pose, even as she does it, changes its meaning; it becomes a threat:
any closer and I will kill myself, any closer, any closer and I swear I will.…
She threatens suicide in front of someone who doesn’t consider her fully alive. It’s not what she intended it to be, a glorious martyrdom, the pure Sikh virgin defying the predator Mussulmaan. It’s just a threat with which her hand refuses to cooperate. Her hand resists like statuary. Her neck resists like leather. The point touches it, dimples it, but just won’t slide through. I know the anatomy. Her jugular flutters under the knife. Half an inch in, and the cut will be sufficient for a steady, venous bleed. Not the jet of the carotid, nothing so dramatic; but the vein would bleed her out just as totally, a deliberate tipping of the cup until she is all poured. But the vein isn’t going to bleed.