Under the Jeweled Sky

by Alison McQueen

  “Please, sir, I do not need to register with you. My family is here,” Jag said. “They are waiting for me. I have to find my way to Kim Street, so if you could tell me where it is, please, that is all I need.”

  The man looked at Jag for a moment, weighing him up. They were supposed to register everyone and send them on to the most logical next point of call. Most were being directed toward temples and mandirs and camps for further assistance, and many became frustrated, particularly those who had already come from another camp. They all wanted to be allocated proper housing, just like they had been promised. It was a headache, all these people flooding in and nowhere to put them, the big family groups in particular. The man scratched his head. If this youngster said he had relatives waiting for him, then the best thing he could do was to get him out of his queue and move him along.

  “You’re sure you have family here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hm. You don’t look like a Punjabi.”

  “My mother’s side,” Jag said.

  “What was the address again?”

  “Kim Street.”

  “In which area?” he said.

  “Area?”

  “Yes. Which part of the city?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The man sifted through some papers, before pulling out a map. “Kim Street,” he said to himself. “Is it big or small?”

  “I don’t know.”

  His finger traced over the tangled diagram. He half lifted his head, raising his voice to anyone who would listen. “Does anyone know where Kim Street is?” No one seemed to take any notice. Jag stood impatiently, wanting to snatch the map from the man’s hand and run off with it.

  “Kim Street?” somebody shouted back. “It is on the other side of the railway, on the Gurdaspur side.”

  “Do you know the best way to get there?”

  The owner of the voice stood up, a head appearing from another crowded table. “Tell them to follow the Bari Daab canal. Cross over the railway lines and keep going straight for a while, then ask someone else. Everyone there will know Kim Street. It has tradesmen’s shops.”

  The man before Jag raised his hand vaguely in thanks. “Did you hear that?” he asked. Jag nodded. “If you follow this road to the end and turn left, then right, you will come to the canal. Do you want me to draw a picture for you?” Jag shook his head. “All right,” said the man. “Now move along. Who is next?” he shouted into the crowd.

  Navinder Singh came forward but was pushed aside by another man, who stepped into Jag’s space. Jag reached into the crowd and pulled Navinder’s sleeve hard. “This man is next,” he said firmly. For a moment it looked as though an argument might break out. The man who had barged in began shouting, his hands in the air. Other people shouted back at him, saying that he had pushed in front of them too.

  “Good luck,” Navinder said to Jag. “I hope you find your family.”

  “Name?” the man asked.

  “Navinder Singh.”

  “You have family registered here?”

  “No.”

  “No? Then you are in the wrong place.”

  “Please,” Navinder said. His wife was beside him now, the baby in her arms, the boy by her side, their belongings reduced to one pathetic bundle. “We have come such a long way, and we have been living out in the open for months. I have to find housing for my family. The baby is not well, coughing all the time.”

  “You are in the wrong place,” the man said. “You will have to go and register properly. You would be best to make your way to the station and join one of the camp convoys.”

  “Camp convoys? We don’t want to join a camp convoy! We have already come from a camp. We need to be housed!”

  “Did you register in the camp?”

  “Yes! But we were just left there.”

  “Then you should have waited to be allocated.”

  “We did wait! We waited and waited until we couldn’t stand it any longer. Please! You have to help us!”

  “What do you expect me to do?” the man said, throwing his hands up. “You see all these people? They all want the same thing, the same thing as you. You think I am a magician? You think I can just pull a house out of my sleeve and say here you are?” He shook his head incredulously. These people. Even if he wanted to help, there was no housing left to allocate, not within this part of the city anyway. Sure, there were no doubt some properties available, but they were valuable commodities that were being kept and sat on by all manner of people higher up the chain. “There is nothing I can do,” he said. “You really must go and register properly. Why don’t you take your family to one of the gurdwaras? You can get them some food and refresh yourselves for a while, but then you will have to go and join the lines and sign up officially, otherwise you won’t receive an allocation.”

  “But…”

  “It’s that way,” the man said, pointing ahead, straight into the crowd. “Ask one of the volunteers with the red armbands. They will give you proper directions.”

  “We can’t go back to another camp!” Navinder bent toward the man and leaned his hands on the table, coming close to his face. “We would rather die than go into a camp again.”

  The man stood up, his expression a grim picture of determination. “Then that is up to you, my friend. Now, if you will excuse me.” He faced back into the crowd. “Who’s next?” Navinder felt himself pushed aside, his body swaying as he gave way to the two men who shoved past him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to his wife. She reached out and touched his face, and the pair of them stood for a while, looking at each other, being jostled on all sides. Navinder put his hand to his wife’s cheek, his fingers resting on skin and bone where there had once been a soft mound of flesh. A few steps away, Jag watched them. Without thinking, he pushed back through the crowd. Taking hold of the boy, he lifted him quickly on to his shoulders and started off into the throng.

  “Come with me,” he shouted. “We have traveled this far together. I will not leave you now.”

  “But…” Navinder began to protest.

  Jag kept on walking, the boy clinging to his head.

  • • •

  They crossed the city quickly, averting their eyes from the bodies in the canal, black and bloated, the air ripe with a pervasive rotting aroma like dustbins that had lain unemptied for years. Over the railway tracks they picked their way, then onward, through a maze of fly-blown alleyways, stopping only to ask directions, some useful, some not, sending them in circles before they found their way again.

  The day began to dim, the sun starting to sink. They halted again, asking an old woman rummaging through a stinking pile of rubbish.

  “Kim Street?” she said. “You have already passed it.” She pointed them back in the direction from which they had come. “It is there, behind that blue building with no roof.”

  • • •

  Kim Street lay battered and exhausted, a once busy line of shop fronts now mainly boarded up, some of them burnt out and in ruins. A few stalls punctuated the way bravely with meager displays of goods long past their best and dusty sacks of rice and gram. There were no numbers, so Jag began to ask again, calling out to no one and everyone: “Number seven Kim Street? Does anybody know number seven Kim Street?”

  “Over there,” a vegetable seller called out, pointing.

  Jag followed the line of his outstretched hand. There, across the street, stood another shop, its boarding hastily banged into place, old, rough pieces of wood hammered up untidily. The sign above was still visible. Gupta Shoemaker & Quality Leather Goods. Jag bent down, sliding the boy from his shoulders, and walked over. He pulled at the door but it stuck fast, reinforced from the inside.

  “There are windows open upstairs,” Navinder said, bringing his family off the street on to the cracked slab pavement that fronted the
brief row of buildings.

  Jag banged on the door. “Hello?” he called. “Number seven Kim Street! Please open the door.” Nobody came. He pounded harder, shouting louder, wrenching at the door, hearing nothing back except the rattle of the strong lock and chain that held it shut. He ran out into the street and called up to the windows: “Number seven Kim Street! Please come down! It is me! Jagaan Ramakrishnan! Please! Mr. Gupta! It is me! I am the son of Mrs. Gupta’s sister!”

  People began to gather in the street. The vegetable seller left his stall, wiping his hands on his shirt, his pace quickening as he came to see to the commotion. Jag continued to shout, his voice howling up to the open window. The vegetable seller set his bulk before him and caught hold of his arm. Navinder Singh moved forward protectively.

  “What is all your shouting?” the vegetable seller demanded.

  “My family is in that house!” Jag wailed. “My name is Jagaan Ramakrishnan. My aunt lives there. My mother’s sister.”

  “And where is your mother?”

  “She is dead! They are both dead!”

  The vegetable seller looked him over. Could this be the boy? The one Parvesh Gupta had told him about? The one everyone had been speaking of? He looked like he’d walked all the way from Delhi, the state of him. Navinder held his ground, standing ready for trouble, his wife and children behind him.

  “Wait here,” the vegetable seller said, then went to the door, pounding on it hard. “Mrs. Gupta!” he shouted. “It is me, Deepak! Come down and open the door!” He went back out into the street and looked up at the window, hands on his hips. A woman’s face appeared briefly, peering cautiously from within. The vegetable seller waved up at her. In a while, movement came from behind the door. It opened, just a slit, a heavy chain still visible across the small gap. “Someone has come,” the vegetable seller said to Jag. “Wait here. I will speak to them. What did you say your name was again?”

  “Jagaan Ramakrishnan. And this is my friend Navinder Singh and his family. They are the ones who brought me here safely.”

  “Ah,” Deepak said. He offered Navinder a cautious greeting, nodding to him. “You wait here too.”

  The vegetable seller leaned in close to the door, speaking to whoever it was who had opened it. Every now and then, he stopped to look over his shoulder, before turning back again.

  Slowly the door opened, a woman of slight build standing there, sari pulled over her head, while two other women, much younger, peered out from the shadows behind her. She lifted the sari from her face and stepped out into the street. Jag moved toward her, quickly at first, before halting as he saw the look on her face. It was as though she had seen a ghost, her whole person standing frozen, unable to move. Jag came forward, as if to present himself to the Maharaja himself. He bowed his head.

  “My name is Jagaan Ramakrishnan,” he said. “I am the son of Abheek Ramakrishnan. My mother’s name was Naisha. She died when I was born.”

  The woman’s hand came to her mouth. She turned quickly, one of the younger women rushing out to her. The older woman reached for her hand. “He is here,” she said.

  “Is he the one?” Deepak asked.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Gupta. One glance at him was all it had taken. He had the beauty of his mother, his mouth exactly the same as Naisha’s, the beloved sister she had missed so very much. She stepped toward him. “I am your aunt,” she said. “Deepak. Close up your stall and come sit with us so that we have a man in the house.”

  “Where is my uncle?” Jag asked.

  “Come,” she said. “Let us go inside. You must be tired.”

  Navinder stood with his family, unsure of what to do. Mrs. Gupta spoke to his wife. “Come. Bring your family inside. We shall have to make more bread.”

  • • •

  Within an hour, dusk had fallen, the rooms above the workshop warmed by the yellow flames of half a dozen clay oil lamps, the light just enough to illuminate the plentiful supper they shared. Together they sat and ate, Navinder and his family, Jag and his aunt, Deepak the vegetable seller, and the two young women, Geeta and Komal, introduced by his aunt as close neighbors whose husbands had gone missing. They were staying with Mrs. Gupta while they waited for news, the three women feeling safer for being together. Jagaan tried to recall the last time he had eaten supper with a family, a high stack of warm chapattis quickly diminishing, torn up and scooped into a big dish of curried vegetables before disappearing into hungry stomachs.

  “You must miss your home,” Mrs. Gupta said to Navinder.

  “Yes,” he replied. “But I believe in karma. We were preordained to leave. Our anjal is here, our destiny. We will trust in that and build our lives again.”

  Navinder’s boy began to fall asleep, food still in his mouth, his head slipping forward sharply, then back, eyes opening for a moment before sliding closed again. Navinder gathered him up, one of the young women rising to take him through to the second room where the family slept on mats laid out on the old wooden floor.

  When Navinder returned, they were talking again, his wife this time, speaking softly, telling of the conditions in the camp, the scenes on the roads as they had trudged endless miles.

  “They said we will have to go into one of the camps again,” she said, “and hope that a house can be found for us soon. But the baby…” She looked down into her lap where the infant lay sleeping, rattling short breaths. “It is not good for the baby.”

  Mrs. Gupta fixed her eyes on Deepak. He stopped eating, setting down the piece of chapatti in his fingers.

  “I know what you are going to ask me,” he said.

  “Well, why not? It is what Taj Din would have wanted.”

  Deepak looked at Navinder, at his wife, at the infant in her lap.

  “What if somebody objects?”

  “By somebody, you mean your wife.”

  The talking stopped, everyone eating quietly for a while before Navinder broke the silence.

  “Have things been very bad here?”

  “Very bad,” Deepak said. “You can see for yourself what it has done to our beautiful city. There was rioting in the streets. Pitched battles being fought right outside that window.”

  “Are things better now?”

  “Yes. Thank God. At least the worst of it is over, but now we have all the refugees streaming in. We are trying to help them as best we can, but still they come in their thousands.”

  “We saw,” Navinder said.

  “They wanted to put Amritsar behind the line, to make it part of Pakistan. We were lucky to be able to stay in our homes. It is the ones who had to come over the border who we feel sorry for.”

  “We had to leave our home behind,” Navinder said. “My wife thought we would be able to go back one day. Now she accepts that we shall never return. We have to start again and make a new home somewhere, but with so many people…” He noticed that his wife was weeping, silent tears she tried to hide behind the veil of her thin, stained sari.

  “Let her cry,” Mrs. Gupta said. “We saw our neighbors crying when they left. Taj Din, the Moslem tailor, came to every Hindi house and wept openly before leaving.” She looked at Deepak again.

  “He was my neighbor,” Deepak said. “His family lived in the rooms above ours. All day long and half the night we would hear the beating of his little sewing machine. He made beautiful clothes. My wife had the best cholis and I the best shirts. He was a good man.”

  “And what did Taj Din say to you?” Mrs. Gupta asked him.

  “He gave his home to me,” Deepak said. “He said that he had blessed it so that it would never feel the shame of the blood that had been spilled, that its walls would never be tainted by the hatred that infected our city and its people.” Deepak looked at Mrs. Gupta. “He said that we must always remember to love our neighbor as we do our own family.” He turned to Navinder, face covered in shame. “We
have been using the space,” he admitted. “My wife said that we needed it, for the day our son marries and brings his wife into our home.”

  “He is two years old!” Mrs. Gupta said. “And you have plenty of room.”

  “Then it is settled.” Deepak drank a little water, thinking for a while, and said to Navinder, “But I will warn you now, you will not find my wife the easiest of neighbors. She snores like a water buffalo.”

  • • •

  Jag watched from the open window as Deepak, Navinder, and his weary family crossed the dark street on their way to Deepak’s home. A few minutes earlier, Jag and Navinder had embraced like brothers, Navinder’s eyes red-rimmed, his throat unable to speak.

  “Your aunt has put a basin of water for you downstairs in the kitchen at the back of the workshop.” Jag turned to see Geeta, one of the neighbor women, standing there. She set down a small pile of clean cottons—fresh pajamas and shirt, some cloths with which to wash and dry himself.

  “Thank you,” he said. She turned to leave. “Geeta?”

  “Yes?”

  “How long has your husband been missing?”

  “Three months.” Her eyes held the floor. “He went out, with Komal’s husband. Komal’s mother-in-law had the cholera. They said they would fetch the doctor or bring some medicine at least.”

  Jag looked at her and wondered if she knew that her husband was dead. They both were, hers and Komal’s. He thought about the bodies he had seen in the canal, the ones along the railway tracks, and wondered if any of those blackened remains were their menfolk. What had happened? he thought. How could this country have descended into such wretchedness? It seemed to have happened overnight, this once happy and peaceful land now an unfolding nightmare of death and destruction at every turn. Geeta’s head remained bowed.

  “They must have got caught up with the crowds,” Jag said lamely. “I hope they return safely soon.”

  “Thank you,” Geeta said. She lifted her eyes to him. “Komal and I both know that our husbands are gone, but for so long as we believe them alive, we shall not have to live as white shadows. No woman wants to be a widow. It is our darkest fear.”