Their Language of Love (20 page)

Yet we hear nothing—no sound of talking, children quarrelling or crying, of repairs being carried out—or any of the noises our refugee neighbours might be expected to make. It is eerie.

And then one afternoon, standing on my toes, I glimpse a small scruffy form through a gap in the wall (no more than a slit really) where the clay has worn away. I cannot tell if it’s a boy or a girl or an apparition. The shadowy form appears to have such an attuned awareness that it senses my presence in advance, and I catch only a spectral glimpse as it dissolves at the far corner of my vision.

Impelled by curiosity—and by my loneliness now that even Sheila and Ravi have gone—I peep into my new neighbour’s compound through the crack in the wall, hoping to trap a potential playmate. A few days later, crouching slyly beneath the wall, I suddenly spring up to peer through the slit, and startle a pair of black eyes staring straight at me.

I step back—look away nonchalantly—praying the eyes will stay. A stealthy glance reassures me. I pick up a sharp stone and quickly begin to sketch hopscotch lines in the mud on our drive. I throw the stone in one square after another, enthusiastically playing against myself, aware I’m being observed.

I am suddenly conscious of the short frock I have outgrown. The waist, pulled by sashes stitched to either side and tied at the back, squeezes my ribs. The seams hurt
under my arms, and when I bend the least bit I know my white cotton knickers, with dusty patches where I sit, are on embarrassing display. Never mind. Even if they offend the viewer, I’m sure my skipping skills won’t. I skip rope, twirling it faster and faster, and turning round and round in one spot I breathlessly recite: ‘Teddy bear, Teddy bear, turn around: Teddy bear, Teddy bear, touch the ground.’

And again, I sense I’m alone. I rush to the wall but my phantasmal neighbour’s neglected compound is empty.

The next few days I play close to the damaged wall. Sometimes the eyes are there, sometimes not. I look towards the wall more frequently, and notice, gradually, that my glance no longer scares the viewer away. Once in a rare while I even smile, careful to look away at once, my lids demurely lowered, my expression shy: trying with whatever wiles I can to detain, disarm and entice the invisible and elusive object of my fascination.

It is almost the end of October. The days are still warm but, as each day takes us closer to winter, the fresher air is exhilarating. People on the streets smile more readily, the tonga horses snort and shake their necks and appear to pull their loads more easily, and even the refugees, absorbed into the gullies and the more crowded areas of Lahore as the camps shrink, appear at last to be less visible.

One such heady afternoon, when the eyes blocking the crack suddenly disappear and I see a smudge of pale light instead, I dash to the wall and glue my eye to the hole. A small boy, so extremely thin he looks brittle, is squatting a few feet away, concentrating on striking a marble lying in a
notch in the dust. His skull-like face has dry, flaky patches, and two deep lines between his eyebrows that I have never before seen on a child. He is wearing threadbare pyjamas of thin cotton and the dirty cord tying the gathers round his waist trails in the mud. The sun-charred little body is covered with scabs and wounds. It is as if his tiny body has been carelessly carved and then stuck together again to form an ungainly dwarf.

I don’t know how to react; I feel sorry for him and at the same time repulsed. He hits the marble he was aiming at, gets up to retrieve the marbles and as he turns away I see the improbable wound on the back of his cropped head. It is a raw and flaming scar, as if bone and flesh had been callously gouged out, and my compassion fuses me to him.

Joanne is in the kitchen and Vijay is flitting between the dining table and the kitchen, filling stainless-steel glasses with water and arranging bowls containing a variety of pickles and chutneys. He places a stack of silvery platters, their rims gleaming, next to the glasses. The smell of mango pickle is strong in the room and, noticing our eyes darting to the table, Vijay’s mother says, ‘We have made only a simple vegetarian meal today: just a thal.’ She sounds apologetic—as if their hospitality will not stand up to our expectations.

I know how much trouble it is to prepare the different vegetables and lentils that add up to the ‘simple’ veggie thal.

Glancing at his sisters-in-law, Sikander says, ‘The girls didn’t eat any lunch when they heard you were cooking
vegetarian, Maajee … They’re ready to gobble up everything.’

The sisters-in-law solemnly nod.

‘I’ve been looking forward to the food all day,’ I say, doing my bit to reassure her.

Turning from me to Vijay, who is folding cutlery in paper napkins, Mr Khan facetiously declares, ‘I say, yaar, Joanne bhabi has really straightened you out—you’re such a well-trained husband!’

And at that moment, involuntarily, my hand reaches out to lightly feel Mr Khan’s hair.

Startled by the unexpected touch Sikander whips around. He notices my embarrassment—and the unusual position of my hand in the air—and passing a hand down the back of his head, dryly, matter-of-factly, says, ‘I’m wearing a wig. The scar is still there.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to …’ I say, almost incoherent with embarrassment. But Mr Khan grants me a smile of such indulgent complicity that, acknowledging my childhood claim as his friend, I am compelled to ask, ‘What about the other scars … are they still …?’

Wordlessly opening the cuff button Sikander peels his shirt-sleeve back. The scars are fainter, diminished, and on that strong brown arm innocuous: not at all like the dangerous welts and scabs afflicting the pitiful creature I saw for the first time on that mellow afternoon through a slit in the compound wall. With one finger, gently, I touch the arm, and responding to the touch, Sikander twists it to show me the other scars.

‘You want to see the back of my head?’ he asks.

I nod.

Sikander turns, and with a deft movement of his fingers lifts up part of the hairpiece to show the scar. It has pale ridges of thick scar tissue, and the hair growing round it has given it the shape of a four-day-old crescent moon.

Sikander smoothes down his hair and notices that, except for the children shouting as they play outside, the room has become quiet; even Vijay has come from the dining table to peer at his friend’s scalp.

‘I think I’m out of cigarettes,’ Sikander says, patting his empty pockets with the agitation of an addict suddenly in need of a smoke. ‘I’ll be back in ten minutes, yaar,’ he tells Vijay, abruptly getting up.

While Sikander is out, Vijay and his mother huddle on either side of me, and Joanne, drawn from the kitchen by the hushed and confiding tone of their voices, pads over wiping her hands on a towel. Sitting sideways on the low back of the sofa, she joins them in plying me with questions, and volunteering information.

Could I tell them what Mr Khan looked like as a little boy? Do I remember hearing anything at all about what happened to his mother, to Ammi-ji? No? Well, they noticed Mr Khan’s reticence when the subject came up once or twice … realized it was a matter of some delicacy, and considerate of his feelings, they stopped asking questions …

But this much they know: except for Mr Khan, Ammi-ji’s immediate family was killed during the attack on their village … They suspect she has been through something terrible.

Glancing at Vijay, Joanne inquires: ‘How old would she have been?’

‘Even if she had grown children, twenty-four or twenty-five at most,’ says Vijay. ‘They marry them off by eleven or twelve in the villages … as soon as they start menstruating.’ Like many married men who have grown up in Hindu joint families, Vijay has few inhibitions about using words like menstruation.

‘You don’t recall any young woman with the boy?’ Joanne inquires, looking at me. ‘She must have been quite tall … if Mr Khan is anything to go by … Pretty, too …?’

I cannot help smiling. Mr Khan is too rugged-looking to allow for any link with prettiness. But I know what she means. Mrs Khan and her sisters, too, are tall. Straight-backed rustics used to balancing goods on their heads.

They have known Sikander Khan for a long time and his mother’s anticipated arrival has caused a stir within their community of family and friends. Since the focus of interest revolves so keenly round Ammi-ji, I search my memory. I dimly remember a thin, squatting figure scrubbing clothes, scouring tinny utensils with mud and ash, peeling squashes and other cheap vegetables, kneading dough and slapping it into chapattis …

The ragged cotton chaddar covering her head was always drawn forward to shadow her profile. The colour of her form blended with the ash, the earth, the utensils she washed, the pale seasonal vegetables she peeled. This must be Ammi-ji: a figure the hue of mud, bent perpetually to accommodate the angle of drudgery and poverty. I don’t recall her face or
the skin on her dusty bare feet; the shape of her hands or whether she wore bangles … or if she was tall.

All I knew as a child was that my little refugee friend’s village was attacked by the Sikhs, that he had been hurt in a way that no one belonging to my child’s world should.

I did not understand the complete significance of the word ‘refugees’ at the time. I thought, on the vague basis of my understanding of the Hindu caste system, that the ‘refugees’ were a low caste—like the untouchable castes—who were suddenly pouring into Lahore. And it was in the nature of this caste—much as the untouchable castes were born to clean gutters, sweep toilets and skin dead animals—to be inescapably poor, ragged, homeless: forever looking for work and places to stay.

Sikander had described some of the details of the attack … and of his miraculous survival. His account of it, supplied in small, suddenly recalled snatches—brought to mind by chance associations while we played—was so jumbled, so full of bizarre incident, that I accepted it as the baggage of truth-enlivened-by-fantasy that every child carries within. Although I dimly realized the broader implications of what had happened, that the British Raj had ended, that there were religious riots between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, and the country was divided because of them, I was too young to understand the underlying combustibility of the events that preceded the partition of India: that had driven my friends and neighbours away and turned a little boy’s world into a nightmare. Although I grew up hearing stories of what had happened to so-and-
so’s mother, sister or daughter, I had heard no mention at all of Ammi-ji or her ordeal.

Excited by my ignorance, and the spirit of instruction burning in us all to remedy this lack, Mrs Khan and her three sisters also move closer; those who can dragging their chairs forward, those who can’t settling on the rug at my feet. The entire ensemble now combines to enlighten me: in five languages—English, Punjabi and Urdu, which I understand, and Kannada and Marathi—contributed by Vijay’s mother in earnest, but brief, fusillades—which I don’t.

The boys and some of the men in the village, I am informed, were huddled in a dark room at the back of a barn when the Sikhs smote the door shouting: ‘Open up. Open up!’

And, when the door was opened, the hideous swish of long steel swords dazzling their eyes in the sunlight, severing first his father’s head, then his uncle’s, then his brother’s. His own merely sliced at the back, and his neck saved, because he was only nine years old, and short. They left him for dead. How he survived, how he arrived in Pakistan, is another story.

‘Ammi-ji says the village women ran towards the Chaudhrys’ house,’ says Mrs Khan in assertive Punjabi. Being Ammi-ji’s daughter-in-law she is permitted, for the moment at least, to hold centre stage. ‘They knew what the Sikhs would do to them … women are the spoils of war … no matter what you are—Hindu, Muslim, Sikh—women bear the brunt …’

Rather than fall into the hands of the Sikhs, the poor women planned to burn themselves. They had stored kerosene … but when the attack came they had no time … Thirty thousand men, mad with blood-lust, waving swords and sten-guns!

Mrs Khan casts her eyes about in a way that makes us draw even closer, and having ascertained that Mr Khan is still absent, whispers, ‘Ammi-ji told me once that she went mad! She would have killed herself if she could. So would you … so would I … She heard her eleven-year-old daughter scream: “Do anything you want with me, but don’t hurt me. For God’s sake don’t hurt me!”’

We look away, the girl’s tormented cries ringing unbearably in our ears. Joanne and the youngest sister, Shehla, brush their eyes. But by the time we are able to talk again, Mrs Khan’s moment is over, and the medley of languages again asserts itself: ‘God knows how many women died …’ A helpless spreading of hands and deep sighs.

‘Pregnant women were paraded naked, their stomachs slashed …’

‘Yes-ji, and the babies were swung by their heels and dashed against walls.’

Much shaking of heads, God’s help and mercy evoked.

‘God knows how many women were lifted … but, then, everybody carried women off. Sikhs and Hindus—Muslim women. Muslims—Sikh and Hindu women.’

A general clucking of tongues: an air of commiseration.

‘Bhagwan, help us,’ sighs Vijay’s mother.

‘Allah, have mercy on us,’ says Mrs Khan, echoing her
evocation, and in resounding Punjabi again asserts her authority as chief speaker. ‘His mother had a bad experience … very bad,’ and when she has our full attention, again lowers her voice: ‘Ammi-ji never talks about it, but those who knew her when she was recovered, say …’

Here Mrs Khan stops short. Having second thoughts about disclosing what her mother-in-law never talks about, she makes a deft switch and in a banal, rhetorical tone of voice says, ‘She saw horrible things. Horrible. Babies tossed into boiling oil …’

Sikander Khan, who has bought his pack and smoked his cigarette outside, quietly comes into the sitting room.

Halfway through dinner two handsome, broad-shouldered Sikhs in grey suits join us. I gather they are cousins. Their long hair is tucked away in blue turbans, and their beards tied in neat rolls beneath their chins. Again there is an explosion of welcome: a flurry to feed the latecomers and a great deal of hand-slapping and embracing among the men. Considering what I heard just a few moments ago, I am a little surprised at the cordiality between Sikander Khan and the young Sikhs. I hear one of the men say in Urdu, ‘Any further news about Ammi-ji’s arrival?’