Partitions: A Novel (17 page)

No greetings are exchanged besides a meeting of eyes and a brief nod. Tahir listens expressionlessly to the cases waiting for him. Grease blackens his fingers, and he raises his hands. It looks to me, at first, like namaaz, but really it’s the pose surgeons take after they have scrubbed, hands immaculate and elbows dripping. A nurse understands. There is no running water in the camp, so she brings a bottle of sterile saline and pours once to wet his hands and forearms. He scrubs thoroughly. When his thumb and forefinger make a ring and milk the filth down his arm, the suds gather at his wrists, a black cuff. Another rinse, another round of soap. Finally the rest of the water pours into the dirt. He slides his hands and arms under the tilted bottle. Rutherford glances uneasily at the refugees, who have gathered to watch the new arrival. To their thirst, it is drinking water. But they have seen too much to be outraged. They can believe anything of reality.

Rutherford looks past the soldiers unloading the supply truck into the medical tents. So he doesn’t see Masud helping them. At first the soldiers are wary handing boxes to this thin, elderly man. He looks like just one more wastrel refugee who happens to be sheathed in a gentleman’s clothes. But he makes the trips with unusual vigor, sometimes two boxes stacked past his chin. Then, at one point, he stops coming. They never wonder what has become of him.

I can see him. His body is tilted, his arm flexed a few degrees, tendons taut at the crook of the elbow to carry his black bag. It is much heavier now, stuffed until it can’t close, like his shoe. I see six bottles of iodine, sterilely packaged scalpels, scissors, needles, syringes. His waistband is padded with gauze packages, the belt buckled two holes wider. He is sneaking away before the children, still gathered around the truck and jeep, can notice his departure and follow. Where he is going, it won’t be safe for them. Or for him. The dogs, though, are everywhere at the same risk, everywhere just as safe. They catch wind of his passage, turn to his diminishing figure, and hurry off to join him.

*   *   *

Shankar and Keshav have no bodyguards. On crowded open-air platforms or unpeopled tracks, they walk alone. Inquiries are no use, nor is Keshav’s description of his mother, arm up and on tiptoe to communicate her height. So many people everywhere, but no one has seen anyone. The twins watch for longer periods at each station, but not because their hope is strengthening. Shankar needs the breaks. Mouth open, neck veins starting to swell, he watches. The crowds slosh and stir against the invisible dam of the platform edge, the station filling like a reservoir, people flowing in from miles around. A train arrives, and they surge into its leaks and holes. The train passes on. The boys stare hardest then, eyes eager for whatever new reality the rear edge of the train unveils. Usually only a few puddles of people and baggage remain. Or else it’s just new strangers switched in for the old strangers.

All this time their eyes are open, and I can’t stop the world from pouring in. I think of their eyes as open wounds I want to keep clean. If I can keep them clean, I can keep them from getting infected, and then those wounds won’t weep. When they hear violence coming, when they hear the drums, the gleeful wolf whistles, the rare pistol-shot (most of the killing happens intimately, blade or bludgeon), they hide. In ravines, in fields of wheat or sugarcane. Behind stray uncoupled cars if they are near a station. Shankar closes his mouth and breathes as best he can through his nose, desperate to mute his gasping and laboring. I stand between them and what they see, but the meshwork of me is all too fine.

A thin old man I could have mistaken for Masud, both from his shape and his pants and shirt, is stopped by a dozen boys. He is a Muslim, and so are these boys. Hands joined, he calls them his sons, his protectors. They demand to know his name. “You know me, boys. I am your teacher, Mr. Shah.”
Your full name, sisterfucker,
one of the boys shouts. Another boy shoves him. He scoots back a step but stays on his feet, keeps his hands joined. “Ahmed Shah, Ahmed Shah.”
Amit is a Hindu name, sisterfucker.
“Ahmed. You know me. Ahmed.”
So is Shah. Are you lying to us, Amit?
“Ahmed Shah. Ahmed Shah.”
We’ll see if you’re one of us. We’ll see if you pass the test
. Laughing aloud, they pull at his belt and drop his pants. My twins can see the slack skin of the old schoolteacher’s buttocks, each knee like the raw knob in a bole swollen by a parasite, his dignity puddled around his ankles; and, facing them, the mocking faces of the students, lit by their torches.
You pass, old man! But just barely!
One boy snatches his spectacles, searches deep and spits into each lens, then sets the glasses back on the old man’s face, dripping viscous. The papers that have fallen from the teacher’s satchel catch on a rare breeze. I see an equilateral triangle on one sheet, a dashed line down the middle of it. Bisection. I see Arabic numerals and the Hindu zero and Europe’s decimal point giving each other magnitude and place. Keshav breaks cover and gathers the papers. I snatch in vain at his shirt; Shankar’s weak arm shadows my movement exactly, but we both miss. He is lucky their laughter throws back their heads and shuts their eyes as they pass on.

Once they are around the corner, the old man feels safe to move again. He buckles his belt. He wipes his glasses on an untucked shirttail, reclaims them with his own spit, and wipes them again. Keshav runs to him with the gathered papers, and the teacher’s small, raw eyes see only a small figure running his way. It’s enough to scare him, and he skips a step back. His glasses tremble back onto his nose, askew, and he accepts the gift. Shankar and I want to scold Keshav for that dangerous kindness, but neither of us have the breath to do it.

*   *   *

Masud looks for a kafila’s passage like the one vein of ore in a mine. The distances feel longer here, the night more haunted. When he left the camp, the luck that guided him there deserted him, as though seeking out risk like this were ingratitude. Even with his lean, scarred bodyguards, he feels on his own. They sense his new vulnerability, too, and cluster closer than he remembers. Sometimes they slant so sharply across his path, he wonders whether they mean to pass between his legs. The second time he stops and says, “Now friends, did you see how I almost tripped that time? What will you do if this old man falls and breaks a hip?” There’s more ease in his tone of voice than in his mind. He hasn’t felt this way since dusk in the city. The same changes are overcoming him, the dry mouth that doesn’t mean thirst, the sweat that isn’t the heat’s fault. But he keeps walking.

When he finds the kafila, he wonders if he wandered in a circle and ended up joining the same one that bore him to Pakistan. The faces here resemble the faces there. The clothes are the same, the bundles and mules and families the same. Gashes often run at the same angles. The relationship of attacker to victim flash before him, plain as statuary: this gash glanced across the shoulder of someone running away; this one struck the forearm of someone who saw the blade descending and tried to block it. Everything is familiar. It’s only after he gets close that he can see the residual flecks of bindis on the Hindu women, or the steel kangans and hard topknots on the devout Sikhs. Externals, indistinct in the twilight, unseen by nightfall—yet precisely at nightfall, the marks by which they are targeted.

They look up and see him coated in ash, surrounded by subservient animals. Were it not for the black bag and pant legs, they would have thought him an ascetic. One elderly woman, delirious, murmurs a strange word at the sight of him: “
Pashupati
.” The rest of her talk concerns events of the prior century and shouts against imaginary assailants, and I am the only one to catch the word. It means
Father of the Animals
. It’s a name for Shiva. So is
Shankar
.

There have always been stories, of course, and even the stories are the same—only this time they say what the Muslims did to them, to their families and homes and farms. Masud does his work and listens. He is not here to fight their hatred. He is here to fight their suffering. That is all. So he clicks shut a hemostat on his crescent-shaped suture needle and bends to his work while a father or brother weeps and swears vengeance on all Islam. It is only once, after he has set and slung a child’s arm by moonlight, that a mother asks to know the doctor’s name. Her husband and she have just told him a story, too, how the Mussulmaans stomped the boy’s arm against a stair when he wouldn’t reveal where the rest of the family had gone to hide. He had only looked at the boy and said, “Brave, very brave.”

And now, opening three tins of food before him, she wants to know his name. It would be easy to lie. Hindu names and Sikh names come to mind. Instead he joins his hands and tells the truth, without a stammer, with no title to distract from it. “Ibrahim Allama Masud.”

*   *   *

The girl they took the first day, the younger of the two sisters, is dead, more or less. Aisha complains the girl hasn’t stirred all day. Ayub waits for a stretch of empty road before he pulls aside and rolls her over. He can tell something is wrong by the way the shoulders lift but the rest lies flat. It takes a hand on her shoulder and another on her hip to get her onto her back. He carried her before, and he can compare. She was lighter. A few slaps awaken nothing. That is the only way he knows to check for life. Her face is flat where she laid on it, while the rest of it is puffy, the hemorrhage having pooled black around her eye sockets. Finally Ayub scoops her in both arms, like a sleeping daughter. He gets off the truck and lays her body on the ground. This time, when it is too late, he handles her with great care, almost tenderness—setting her buttocks down first, then lowering, by degrees, her back, her skull. At the end, he eases her head up with his left hand and slides his right hand free. He spits to the side, clips a bidi between his lips, and strikes a match.

Saif and Qasim are staring at Ayub. Qasim is wondering whether Ayub will show rage at last—two botched abductions on what was supposed to be their last day, and now the first piece turns out to have been damaged, unusable. Saif actually feels triumphant. His humiliation the first day, in his struggle with the older sister, has been redeemed.
I bet he wishes he’d kept mine
, Saif thinks.
Bringing mine in, all I broke was her tooth. Not her skull.
But he is wary of saying this out loud, no matter how much he wants the truth acknowledged. Maybe he will broach it to Qasim later. When Ayub goes in the back to sleep—that’s when Saif will point out how right he’d been, from the start, to finesse the sister down exactly as he had. They should have learned from him.

I can see Saif’s vanity swelling again. Every time he thinks about himself (and that is often), he gets restless, I notice. One extreme or the other. One moment, he believes the others are laughing at him. The next moment, he dreams himself the descendant of conquerors. Right now, in his own estimation, he is shrewder, stronger, set apart. His posture has straightened a little to match.

Ayub has become conscious of the others looking at him. His thoughts until now have been exclusively of money. During his long stare at the girl, he was manipulating pitiless numbers in his head. They are watching. “One raid tonight, while we’re close to the border. Then we’re heading back west to Lahore in the morning,” he says. “If nothing else, we’ll sell the two we have.”

Neither Saif nor Qasim say anything. Simran, on the truck, glances at Uma, then whispers to Aisha, “Two? But there are three of us.”

Aisha looks down and says nothing. If it weren’t so dark, I could have seen her flush. This, too, gives me hope.

Ayub stubs the bidi in the unconscious girl’s navel, crushing it in deep. An umbilical braid of white smoke grows out of her. He walks between Qasim and Saif, and they part for him, as he intends them to. Ayub is pleased with his gesture, stubbing the bidi like that and striding between them. He dwells on it for part of the drive, how cold and hard and in command he must have appeared to everyone. But the feeling wears off, and he goes back to brooding on the four hundred rupees he left on the roadside.

*   *   *

They aren’t on the road long before Qasim, in the passenger seat, eyes hooded sensuously in the loud night wind, points at the rearview mirror and shouts. The sweep of a choli, and heels in the truck’s taillights as white as spots on a hind. Simran timed her jump to Ayub’s slowing-down before the larger holes in the road—it’s his cousin’s truck, and he had been going gently over the shocks. She landed without spraining anything and started running. If she had just run straight for the sugarcane field, Qasim wouldn’t have seen her. The instinct to run the other way crossed with the desire to hide herself in the field. So she ended up running a diagonal.

Her appearance in the mirror, which lasted only four or five seconds, synchronized exactly with the pothole’s jarring Qasim’s eyes open. It’s on a dot of time this small that Simran’s life is going to pivot.

Ayub brakes hard. The cabin lurches, and Qasim locks both arms stiff on the dash. Saif hurls forward and slams his flank. He squirms across Qasim’s startled chest. The cloud of dust that scrapes up around the truck has the pallor of moon dust. I raise the palms of my hands through it and briefly see my familiar long fingers, down to the prophetic lines. The suggestion shatters as Saif bursts through the dust and through me.

He thrust himself through the passenger window, feet first, and is already running as Ayub opens the door. Simran finally turns into the sugarcane field and vanishes. I see the place she goes in. Saif is close enough to see it too and plunges through the same swish. Qasim, also running, shouts at Saif to
run after her, run, run,
but he stops at the spot where Saif entered the field. There is something about the field’s darkness and size that scares me, too, as if these vast, shivering rustles were hundreds of brooms effacing me. Qasim shouts one more time, chest heaving.