Partitions: A Novel (20 page)

Simran doesn’t think of Amritsar the way she did before. It’s not that her faith has weakened. Her faith has come out of her captivity untouched by Saif or any other man. She prayed on Ayub’s truck as intensely as she had in the mountains. But it was never God she was seeking in Amritsar. It was people. And Simran has people now. An old Muslim doctor, two little Hindu boys—protectors needing her protection. Masud’s talk of a bus to Amritsar makes her anxious, and not just because she’s never ridden in one before. A few days ago, she might have thought such an opportunity divine intervention, a miracle, God calling her close. In the gray light before this dawn, though, she wants to stay near Masud. That’s where she senses blessedness. The closer she stands to him, the calmer she feels. His plan about the bus … does he want to be rid of her? Does he consider the boys, too, a nuisance? Stray dogs and stray people, picked up like burrs. No. It’s impossible to imagine such thoughts in him. She wishes there were some way she could be useful to him, show him how capable she is. Not some simpering child but Simran Kaur, a Sikh girl, selfless, tireless, strong. If she could just show him, he would never want to send her away.

She watches him for minutes at a time. His back and neck, mostly, since he walks just ahead of her. But she notices, too, the wrapped foot and the open shoe, and the limp.

“Did you hurt your foot, Doctor ji?”

He looks down at it as if she has brought it to his attention for the first time. “I should change the dressing.”

“Let me. I can do it.” She looks down at the bag. “Is everything in here?”

He sits down, gratefully, and lays Shankar across his lap. Shankar’s arm drops the way I remember it doing when he was an infant. An old reflex of mine wants to tuck it back. As if aware of what I’m thinking, Simran sets the black bag beside Masud and lifts Shankar’s limp arm off the dust. Masud, who has been wearing his stethoscope around his neck to have it at the ready, checks Shankar’s breath sounds. I watch his face the way patients used to watch mine. There must be no worsening, at least, because he reaches over Shankar and cups the shoe heel. Simran’s eager hands brush his. She takes over, placing the shoe neatly beside the bag and unwrapping Rutherford’s dressing, dirt-stained and bloodsoaked where exposed, fresh white where the shoe covered it. The skin to either side of the cut is white and raised, dead. Rutherford had inked the outer border of the cellulitis. Masud can see a new blush along his shin. Simran sucks in her breath. Her eyes soften.

Masud almost wants to cover his wound, fearing for her. To bring out compassion so soon after what happened to her—hasn’t he added, in a way, to her suffering? At first he marvels at a woman, and at a woman’s resources. Masud has seen this in the mothers of ailing infants. So have I. But gradually he marvels at Simran specifically, as I did at Sonia. Not an abstraction: this woman. This one and no other. The one who watches him snip the dead skin from one edge of the cut, then naturally takes the surgical scissors and cuts the other edge. The one who comes very close to his feet to make sure she avoids the intact skin, who checks his face to make sure she is doing it right and isn’t causing him pain. He could have done it more quickly. Probably more safely, too. But he doesn’t mind giving her this power over him. She rinses his foot with the disinfectant and dabs it dry with the gauze squares he unwraps for her and lays on his palm for her to take. It is a strange sight to see Masud, until now the deft physician, make himself the assistant to her ministrations. That bony hand a little tray for her. She watched him dress her own wound earlier that night, and her work is neat, girlishly careful. Neater perhaps than he would have dressed it himself. When she is done, she holds her arms out and receives Shankar so Masud can fix his shoe and rise. Shankar, handed across, turns his face to Simran’s chest. Some distress half dreamed troubles his brow and opens his mouth, and he looks to me briefly as he did in his infancy, rooting to his mother’s breast. He opens his eyes.

*   *   *

When Keshav found Shankar cradled by an old man, and then heard that old man speak my name, his first thought was that his grandfather had come to rescue him. I had never suspected he and Shankar might be curious about my parents, but it does make sense. The twins must have gathered their grandparents were still alive and in the same city. Sonia would not have lied to the boys about that. Over time, they must have daydreamed great things about the grandparents they never met. Wealth, drivers in uniforms, a haveli. Maybe they even thought they were being watched, from a distance, someday to be plucked from their lives and declared heirs, their mother waited on by servants and delivered rose sherbet on a tray.

I realize that I have not wondered, all this time, whether my parents and sisters made it out of Pakistan or not. If I had the strength right now, I would go scanning cities for my relatives. I don’t. Besides, if they fled before Sonia did and didn’t offer to take her and the boys along, I’m not sure I care to find them. I suspect that may well be what happened.

Keshav’s sense of smell has gotten used to the kerosene on his clothes and hair, but every so often his face turns a certain way, or his hand rises idly to brush at sweat, and he can smell it anew. Chemical, sinister. The terror rushes back. Until this night, he always associated the kerosene smell with his mother’s cooking—familiar clicks, followed by the catch of the flame. He wants to be rid of the smell. So he rubs earth on his arms and neck. Clawed-up, gravel-flecked handfuls of it. He works them into his skin as if they were soap, but he can’t soak or mask the fuel smell. Unlike Shankar, he still wears the kameez the widow Shanaaz put on him. He peels it up and off, leaves it on the ground, and steps away.

He is still staring at it when he hears Shankar scream his name. He rushes over, and Shankar, terrified, looks from Masud to Simran, Simran to Masud. His fear is understandable—these are two strangers he has never seen before, and his brother is nowhere to be found. Keshav rushes his embrace over Shankar as if his brother were on fire. “Kaka,” he says, pointing at Masud, meaning uncle—specifically, father’s brother. My brother. And then, because he has no other term for her, “Kaki,” meaning Simran. Father’s brother’s wife.

The twins will keep these names for them, never calling them mother and father. For all my gratitude I am, selfishly I know, pleased.

Keshav’s bare arms, I see in the growing light, have streaks of earth on them in a pattern much like Sonia’s scars. Those marked arms hold Shankar, but his brother goes calm only under Masud’s stethoscope. Shankar looks down at the bell as it touches his silk shirt. An old memory of trust takes over. Keshav guides him into Masud’s arms, and Shankar allows himself to be carried—awake now and peacefully studying Masud’s half-bearded, half-stubbled chin as he stares at the tracks ahead.

*   *   *

The heat that day is the worst of the days they have wandered. Shankar and Keshav inherited my light skin, and they are peeling at the shoulders, necks, and noses. Keshav is wearing Shankar’s green kameez now, at his brother’s insistence, but it gives little protection. Half of Shankar’s torso wears the bruise, whose color has evolved into an unusual purplish gold. Twice he tries to walk on his own, but he goes pale and stumbles. Masud scoops him up again. Shankar may be lighter than Keshav, but he is still a grown child, and Masud can carry him only so far. Before the sun rose, he ignored the sharp, growing ache in the small of his back, and he shifted Shankar’s weight as little as possible. By noon, when they have followed the tracks east just short of Atari, Masud feels himself going faint. His arms ache, his back, his cut foot. He can’t go on, and he slides with Shankar to the ground. The dogs converge sniffing and whimpering, and Simran dabs and blows on his wet forehead. Shankar looks up at Masud and touches the side of his face.

“I can walk by myself, kaka,” he says.

Masud peels his wet shirt off his skin, breathing through his mouth. “Are you boys thirsty?” He glances at Simran. “Do you need water?”

This is his way of expressing thirst. He says it as though he can go find them some. Simran places her small hands between him and the sun, and his clenched eyes relax.

In the shade of her hands, he starts saying things that she has been dreading: He can get her onto a bus. It’s a short ride now, here to Amritsar. She can be with her people by evening.

“But you?” she asks. “The boys?”

“We’re going on to Delhi,” says Keshav. “We have to meet our mother there.” His tone makes it sound like the exact place and time have been arranged already.

Shankar says nothing at first. He glances down and fingers the gauze badge on his chest, tracing its frame of neatly torn surgical tape. “We’ll go with you,” he declares. “I can walk. Just watch. I’m feeling better.”

Simran bites her lip, thinking he means go with her, to Amritsar; but it becomes clear he means with Masud, into Atari. To arrange for her departure. They are only a few minutes off the tracks, on an unmarked road, when Masud turns to the sound of an engine. Simran cringes; as soon as they got onto the road, she feared exactly that sound, because any truck could be Ayub’s.

It isn’t a truck, though. It’s a passenger bus. Masud waves his arms, sensing, as he did before, a detached kindness guiding the courses and intersections of people, which violent men try to disrupt but succeed in disrupting only for a time.

Buses have been running only sporadically that August, their drivers as brave as the people who ride them. The one that Masud waves to a hissing stop is driven by a Sikh named Deepjyot Singh, who twice that week saved the lives of his riders, or the fraction of his riders who would have been targeted. Both attempted stops had taken place at dusk, both times on the outskirts of Amritsar. Once from a Muslim mob, the second time from a mob of fellow Sikhs, who saw his turban in the driver’s window and didn’t even brandish weapons, expecting him to stop and let them inspect his passengers. Both times, Deepjyot flicked up his high beams, set his wipers on the fastest setting (entirely for effect; he wanted his bus to look like a possessed beast), kicked off his sandals, and smashed the pedal. Both times the mob scattered like krill before the whale. A few knocks and thumps under the chassis had some passengers gawking out the rear glass to see the bodies, and the rest clapping and whistling. Yet he always refused the flapping rupees his passengers tried to force on him as they got off the bus. It was no feat of bravery, he told them, to recognize cowards.

The bus is at capacity behind him, but he opens the door. Masud holds out the money he cut from the lining of his black bag. He tries to speak, but the awareness of people watching from the windows defeats him. All he can do is point at Simran and swallow. Keshav comes forward to speak for him, and Simran goes quietly up the steps. She is unsettled to see one of her own, a fellow Sikh—and, from the small pictures taped to the dash, one as devout as she. She fears Deepjyot can see the trespass on her as clearly as bootprints over flowers. Keshav explains how she has come from far away and has walked for hours on an empty stomach, but her people are in Amritsar. The passengers, seeing only her face over the guard rail, pity her and shift in their seats. A man in the second row rises, squeezing the standing passengers that much closer together, and gestures at his seat. Simran looks at these people—city people, strangers—and at the driver nodding, waving away the fare Masud offers him. She skips down the steps and faces Masud. “You are my people,” she says. She waits. Masud stands rigid, the only movement on him the sweat dropping past his ear. Keshav and Shankar step closer to her.

Deepjyot Singh speaks up from his high seat. The roof, he offers, has only two families on it as of the prior stop. “There’s room up there for all four of you.” He waves his hand to include them all. “The whole family.”

So all four of them, the “whole family,” climb onto the high perch of the bus roof. Simran, as she guides Shankar into her lap, hears the sound of water being poured. One of the families, in spite of the heat and scarcity, hands her a steel cupful in welcome. When they are settled, Masud raps twice on the roof, and the bus starts up again. Each mouth takes one sip. Masud receives it last and takes his own. They are still exposed to the sun, but the wind makes up for it once the bus gathers speed. Below, Masud’s loyal strays crisscross the dust and exhaust, barking not at the bus itself but skyward. Not in protest, it seems from their tails, but joy.

*   *   *

She is staying with Masud because she trusts him. Trust keeps her from thinking of Masud as a Muslim, or of the boys as Hindus. It’s nothing like love yet, so soon after all that happened. Rather she treasures them for the rare, chance finds they are. Everyone else is a risk. Her own father had been a risk. Leave Masud and the boys, and she would be alone again, though shoulder to shoulder on a bus. The same as on the roadside.
How lucky I am
, she thinks. She takes her hair back from the loud, hot wind. She brings it forward and restores, at last, her braid.

And so it comes about that at a Sikh refugee camp outside Amritsar, a Muslim doctor ministers to the wounded and dying. Masud presents himself at the medical tents together with Simran. He introduces her as a nurse, and a nurse she will become, in time, with his training. The first wound she helps heal will be Masud’s own. The cut on his foot will heal completely, leaving not even the thin, divisive line of a scar.

The doctors who meet them never guess at Masud’s lifelong stammer. When Simran is with him, everything he says, even if not addressed to her, is for her ears. He doesn’t need a translator when she is around. The surface of his tongue just isn’t as sticky anymore. The consonants that used to snag there and thrash in place come out freely, fully winged. It seems to Masud that something mechanical in his voice has fixed and oiled itself at last. In the increasingly rare instances Simran isn’t with him seeing patients, though, he’s thrown back, and has to hurry out to find Keshav or Shankar. In time, he won’t require her presence, his speech letting go of her hand and walking on its own.