Partitions: A Novel (16 page)

Don’t let them
: She implied he was the calculating leader who had to keep the wild other ones in check. By denying Saif and Qasim—and himself—Ayub would exert
more
power than by forcing Simran. Referring to Simran as an item to be sold made him realize how much more this
piece
would sell for, intact. None of this was communicated directly. A push from Aisha would have made him push back. Immediately after her comment, Aisha yawned and withdrew—a show of indifference so he wouldn’t think she was trying to work her own will.

Ayub looked at Aisha and then back at Simran, still not lowering her. One of Simran’s hands shot up to the roots of her hair and back over her chest again, unable to decide on the greater emergency. The pain or the shame.

Qasim adjusted himself with a finger and spat to the side. “I’m second.”

Ayub glanced his way in irritation.

Saif made it worse, hand digging in his kameez pocket. “I have a coin.”

Ayub turned to Saif and gave a loud shush. Saif’s hand stopped moving, slunk out of the pocket, and hung at his side. Ayub dropped Simran, and her legs buckled as she landed. He shook her clothes one more time to be sure, then threw them on her bowed head of hair. “Get dressed.”

She got back into her clothes while they watched. Ayub noticed the smell of the exhaust just then and glanced angrily at Qasim. “Why haven’t you turned off the engine yet? It’s a waste of fuel.”

It had been Ayub, of course, who left it running in the first place. Qasim knew better than to point that out. Ayub pointed to the bed of the truck and told Simran, “Climb on.” She didn’t move but kept glancing at Aisha, who had laid back on her bedding and faced the night sky. A twist of Simran’s ear brought her to her feet, her body wincing toward his hand.

Ayub followed her onto the truck. Staring up at him, she scrambled away on her heels and hands until her back hit a hard surface. She found herself beside Aisha, on one end of her bedding, the stains on it stiff, rough as scabs. But he came after her only to bind her wrists and ankles. He tied her tighter than he had the other two. When his loops and figure eights were finished, he ran his hand up her soft inner forearm, just once. An indulgence. Aisha saw it and knew what it meant: the girl might last this night out, but not the next.

*   *   *

The blueprint has grown in the dust by the time Masud returns. Small squares crowd inside a spacious rectangle. Children Masud has never seen before, children of the camp, have come to watch. “We’re building a hospital,” Lucky explains to the crowd. Masud arrives during the tour Lucky gives the other children. A stick points to the projected rooms and wings. “This is where the sick people wait. In this room, right next to it, me, Billi, and Rimzim take the patient in and do a full checkup, complete, everything. Our doctor sahib sits here, in the examining room, and we go in and tell him how this next person has a problem with his heart, this next person has a problem keeping his food down, that kind of thing. Then he says, all right, I have to operate. So this room here is where he does his operations. Big operations, the kind they can’t even do in London, that’s what he does here. At night, after we clean up, this is where the assistants eat and sleep. It’s our living quarters. It’s going to have a kitchen, a kabbadi ground, a schoolhouse, everything.”

Afterward, Masud joins the end of the line outside the medical tent. Children come and go. The coin of his stethoscope bell set on each chest, they listen to their own hearts. The day is so hot he doesn’t have to rub it warm against his palm.

The sight of the children delighting in the instrument reminds me of Shankar and Keshav playing, in my last days, with my own black bag, my own stethoscope. I had no use for the instruments by then. The twins weren’t old enough to understand, but I sat up one afternoon, brought their faces side by side, put one earpiece in Keshav’s left ear, one in Shankar’s right, and had them listen to my heart. I held my breath so they wouldn’t hear my wet wheeze. They weren’t at an age when they sat still very long, and soon they were both grabbing for the bell. Keshav grabbed the cord and made off with the stethoscope entirely, and Shankar wailed until Sonia picked him up. Keshav also loved putting the bulb of my blood pressure meter in his mouth. I always kept an eye on the pressure column because I was afraid it would snap and spill the poisonous mercury. That was only one of the hundreds of things I worried about on that helpless cot. I wish I had let up worrying and just rejoiced in watching them play. Even the screaming matches had something sweet in them, if only I had been receptive. But I was impatient with life and death alike. There were whole days I longed for silence. There were whole nights I longed for clamor.

Two hours later, Dr. Rutherford looks up and sees Masud walked in by a nurse. He recognizes him and stands up to shake his hand, but Masud points down and says, “Foot.” He begins to undo his shoelaces.

“Good God, man, I had no idea you came as a patient. I would have taken you right away. Please. Here. Is this the foot, then?”

He guides Masud to the examining table and cups his shoe heel. The dust of the road flakes off on his bare palm. I had forgotten about it too, but there it is, that first careless razor cut Masud suffered outside his house. His mind has refused to acknowledge it until now. I didn’t even see him limp. If I think back, though, I should have seen the way he shifted his weight to the other foot whenever he wasn’t walking. The lame dog in his escort always got thrown the largest scrap of roti, tail high and swinging, slack paw held gingerly off the ground.

The cut’s splayed edges have turned a dusky bluish black. Beyond this, the whole back of his foot glows pink, almost to the shin. It looks like something he might have treated on the road. Medically, I am shocked any infection could have progressed this far in only forty-eight hours, even accounting for the damp, hot shoe. It’s as if his cut stained itself this color by leeching some trace of infection from every wound he treated.

Rutherford scoots back on his wheeled stool, partly from the shock of the cut, partly from the smell. “This is going to need an aggressive debridement.” He shakes his head. “Fresh dressings, changed twice daily. Penicillin would work wonders. Our field hospitals had it when I served in France. Splendid drug. But there’s no getting any out here.”

Masud looks down. Out of his bag he takes the empty iodine bottle and the lone shred of gauze.

“Oh, certainly—disinfectant. I can get you disinfectant. We can clean and dress it for now. Nasty wound there … some of this tissue may well have to be cut out. I’ll get you seen first thing. Our surgeon should be here soon. He was scheduled to be here already, of course, but circumstances held him up where he was, I imagine. Roads can’t be smooth going between here and Rawalpindi.”

Masud nods as Rutherford gestures his nurse over, and they set to work. It gives me great satisfaction to see Masud’s foot being washed, and by an Englishman at that—that’s always what humble kings are doing to wise Brahmins, in our stories. They always have a basin brought and wash the dust off the wandering holy man’s lotus-pink feet.

It means even more to me because I know Masud is not finished walking.

*   *   *

I can almost always get a clear read on people. Each mind swims in its skull before me like a fish in a glass bowl. But with Aisha right now—the truck parked again, Saif told to stay back and watch the girls—I can’t see clearly how she feels about Simran. The water is murky, the glass frosted.

Saif is easier to read. He doesn’t want the girls to know he is lowest ranked among the three, that Ayub doesn’t trust him on the hunt. He wants to project power, command, aggression. So he paces back and forth, trying to keep up a show of masculine energy, fists at his sides. Periodically he checks up the road as if there were some specific threat he were stationed here to watch for. He wants to impress them. Simran in particular. The strutting doesn’t last very long. He goes around the side of the truck. They can hear the patter of his urine in the dust. After that, some more strutting. At last he tires of it, squats in the sun, and stares straight ahead. He spits to the side on occasion, waves away a fly if it lands on his ear or lip.

Simran I can read, too. Naturally she feels close to Aisha. She is not certain what Aisha said the previous night; she was too scared to understand the words said to her or around her. Her refusal to follow Ayub’s commands had not been defiance, just the slack limbs of prey in the jaw. Whatever Aisha said, it had called off the men. Simran had gotten her clothes back. Though by then, of course, it was too late. They had all seen her. I see the intense shame that surges and subsides in her like nausea. She cannot bear to look at Saif, or even to let Saif see her face. The whole time he guards the truck, she keeps her face between her knees and packs herself as deeply into a corner as she can. Uma blocks his view of her from some angles. But not from all. This is how bad she feels from being
seen
. If she were to be touched.…

It’s part of what confuses Aisha’s feelings toward Simran: her vulnerability, her hypersensitivity to things Aisha herself scarcely registers. Like the gazes of men. When she first alerted Ayub to Simran walking up the road, she had assumed the girl was detritus, like Uma. Her mouth had gone dry with guilt to see terrified innocence. It wasn’t the thing she had intended to deliver. So she intervened.

As soon as the truck ground to life under them and Simran fell weeping on her shoulder, Aisha regretted delaying the violence. Hard thoughts chipped at her guilt. How long would Simran have lasted out there before some gang cut her up? Better to be merchandise; she would be kept in good condition if someone spent money to acquire her, and even better condition if she earned an income, as Aisha did. Still, the guilt hasn’t gone away, and neither has the sense of ownership.
Two bangs with my fist on that cabin window
, Aisha thinks,
have altered this child’s life, permanently
.

At least that is what I
think
I read in her—but I see, simultaneously, a second, wholly separate set of thoughts. It’s the split that allows her to surrender her body three or four times on an average worknight. It works at every level. So the first mind thinks about guilt and regret. The second mind realizes she can exploit this trust, tell Simran the stories that will keep her docile, a willing captive. Isn’t that what she has been paid to do? She has an obligation, doesn’t she? Besides, it is merciful to tell Simran these lies. The lies will reconcile her to her captivity, make her believe things will be harder off the truck than on it.

So Aisha went to work on her in the morning and by now, with a few spells of rest, has told her the stories she has heard and some she has invented. How families don’t take back daughters who have been in captivity. How villages hold such girls lower than dogs, lower even than their untouchables. The story about the friend of hers they burned alive. Stories about the gangs out in the countryside; if a girl didn’t have protectors, like Ayub bhaiyya, they would gag her in a cave and keep her there for a week, a public woman. This truck was taking them to Lahore, where the men would find them work, place them in good households.

So Aisha did her job as the Scheherazade, facts and lies mated into stories, until Simran looked at her and responded with her own account, in three sentences, of how she came here. The bloodstain on her front and the bloodstain on her back. Aisha went quiet after that.

Simran went on to dream aloud about Amritsar and service in the temple there. At that moment, the partition between Aisha’s first and second mind, the woman’s and the whore’s, tore open. Waters divided until then mixed, and the mixture grew murky.

It’s that murk I’m staring into when I try to read Aisha. But her confusion gives me hope. If there is one thing dangerously abundant right now, it is certainty. Certainty makes possible in men the most extreme good and the most extreme evil. A land like the Punjab, five rivers and three faiths, could do with a little less certainty.

My thoughts switch back to Saif. I am startled by the new geyser of happiness inside him. Ayub and Qasim are slogging back to the van. Ayub has brought back scratches, Qasim, a new limp. Whatever they attempted without Saif’s help has gone awry, it seems. Qasim, waving Saif away, claims he stepped across a ditch wrong, and Ayub doesn’t contradict him, letting him save face. The nailmarks across Ayub’s cheek have their own story, but he doesn’t care enough about Saif’s opinion to come up with a falsehood. Saif rejoices to see them empty-handed, even though it means less money for him as well.

I know better than to rejoice for whatever girl they failed to bring in. The fact that she is not here doesn’t mean she escaped. Ayub and Qasim aren’t in a hurry. Their minds are curiously blank of any memory of what just happened, or at least of any memory I can access. I suspect that she fought hard, and that they fought back harder—knowing Ayub, too hard. I scan half a kilometer, every direction. Sure enough, I find a girl’s body tucked into a gulch. She’s the one, I suspect. The berry that ruptured bright and red between their fingers.

*   *   *

The surgeon arrives a little over an hour after Masud’s wound is dressed. The shoe feels tight now. It stays on in spite of the laces being more or less undone, tucked under the tongue so he won’t tread on them. Swollen and split, the shoe mimics the cut it covers.

An open jeep and a truck squeeze and angle miraculously between the tents. Children jog beside the truck and dart close to tap its sides. They think it brings water and food. The surgeon, Dr. Tahir, is a military man, a surgeon in the newly formed Pakistani army. He grips the overhead bar and sways with the potholes. A thin scarf keeps the road dust from his nose and mouth, but the tradeoff is heat. Sweat and hair oil slick his forehead. Dark ovals soak his back, chest, and underarms. When he steps from the jeep, gratefully undoing the scarf to pat his forehead and temples, Rutherford and three other camp physicians come forward bearing lists of the most emergent cases. In spite of what Rutherford said earlier, Masud’s name is not on his list. Masud wouldn’t have wanted that anyway. Trimming the dead skin off his careless razor-nick mustn’t delay the amputation of feet gone outright gangrenous.