Partitions: A Novel

by Majmudar, Amit

  Qasim and Saif have gotten down, their bared teeth and eyes gleefully white while Ayub strips Simran of her clothes. First the drawstring, which he uses the knife tangled in it to cut. His knife hand jumps when his sawing finally snaps through. Then he forces her head down and her arms over her head. She screams each time he pulls. The sleeves tear. Uma breaks a reverie and sits up straight, interested. Aisha has been watching from the beginning. The twelve-year-old girl, crescents of blood clot along the halves of her brain, is the only one of us not watching. Her pupils, under her half-open eyelids, are the size of the dots on a flown butterfly’s wings. They think she is a sound sleeper.

  Ayub shakes out Simran’s arsenal. He holds the clothes up and aside like infestation, squeezes them looking for more knives. Then he throws them in the truck and looks at what he has found. The three stare at her in the red taillights of the truck. Her arms are too thin to cover anything. No hiding herself. She spills out of her own embrace. She sinks to the ground. Ayub draws her to her feet by her braid. Once she is standing, he lays the braid on his palm. Hair converging on hair around more hair. His thumb and forefinger stroke its rainwater-down-a-curb length, tracing it from her shoulder toward his heart. His fingertips catch on the band at the end and slide it off. Ayub spreads the braid slowly, lifting and setting aside each section until he has traced it back to her shoulder, past that to the back of her head. There, at the source of her black hair, his hand grips hard and holds her aloft like a rare bulb uprooted forever from the earth.

  * * *

  If it were up to Keshav, they would be running down the tracks right now, all the way home to the far point where the tracks converged. Hadn’t they lost time at the station, then in the widow’s house, then today’s futile hours wandering the city? Keshav doesn’t want to sleep. The first station they get to, a small one an hour away by foot, is still awake. Bug-flecked bulbs and a pair of cars locked in rust on a side track. It has nothing like the crowd of the main station downtown, maybe because of the late hour, maybe because more reports have been coming back of violence on the trains. Keshav points at the distant green signal. Shankar, seeing it, glances back immediately, searching for any pinpoint of light that will dilate into a train’s eye.

  If it were up to Shankar, too, they would be running. But Shankar’s body, always separate from him, refuses. Shankar, smaller, has grown heavy all over. Simply walking feels to him like wading in floodwater. It’s not the same loud, strained breathing he went into right after they ran from the widow’s house. There’s something shallow and noiseless about it that troubles my physician’s ear, sensitive to pathology as a musician’s is to dissonance. I crouch to his chest, the side where his bruise is. Broken ribs aren’t lethal in themselves. They make for sharp, unrelenting, uncomplicated pain. Thorns in the side, not knives in the heart. In fact I used to be relieved, in the examination room, to discover a patient’s chest pain had a button I could press—it meant I wasn’t dealing with a heart attack.

  The silky rustle of expanding and subsiding lung, though, has vanished on one side. This can mean only one thing: the lung has peeled off the inner surface of his chest. A physiological vacuum-seal is supposed to keep them flush. Break the ribs, sometimes you break the seal. The lung shrinks back onto its own bronchus. The diaphragm pulls in vain. The lung doesn’t expand, or at least not as much as it’s supposed to. That’s what has happened with Shankar. It wasn’t like that when he was first injured; I know because I listened there, out of reflex. When he slept beside the widow, too, I hadn’t noticed anything. Over the past day, with the boys hurrying a stretch, dropping to their knees, peering around corners—it hasn’t been quiet enough, until now, for me to hear him breathe. The lung could have dropped anywhere, at any minor provocation. A stumble, the pressure of Keshav’s or Maya Rani’s arm holding him close before the next dash, even the stresses from his own movements. A wince of pain there like the ones before it, and at first only a crescent of dead space around the lung. Now, after their cross-city trek to the tracks at night, there must be a half inch or more.

  He doesn’t have reserves to begin with—no wonder he stops on the platform and waves Keshav on. Shankar squats, thinking it’s the usual shortness of breath. His eyes go with Keshav. His brother first tries the ticket window, on tiptoe, hands on the ledge, calling inside. From his distance, Shankar can see that no one is in the chair, no one in the booth. Keshav glances at his brother, and Shankar shakes his head. I can see the sweat on his forehead under the electric tube light. The dull blue around his lips makes him look cold in this oven of a night. A chai wallah wipes the grit from his cups with the end of his shirt. Keshav goes up to him and explains, gestures up the tracks one way and then the other, Pakistan, India. The man takes a new patch of his shirt and gets to work on his saucers now, quick rotations. Keshav asks where the stationmaster is. The man pauses a second in his work, points at the clock on the wall, and wags his thumb. When Keshav starts describing Sonia, the chai wallah interrupts him. His hand juts at the other people on the platform, at the heavens. He goes back to his work. Keshav takes Shankar’s hand and helps him rise. His brother takes short, shallow breaths, hand resting just below his throat, the sound of it like sobbing.

  * * *

  More stations. The night doesn’t get any cooler, nor Shankar’s breathing any easier, no matter how often he folds his knees to his chest. The squat, though he doesn’t know it, has a specific mechanism: it kinks the arteries to his legs, so the blood that’s supposed to go from his heart to his body goes, instead, to his lungs. Part of his “blue disease” is a hole between the right and left chambers of his heart—that muscular partition, imperfect. Squatting like this can force blood through it, get more blood to his lungs, to be loaded up with oxygen.

  What’s wrong now, though, is wrong with the lung itself. So squatting will not ease things for him. There’s no way for him to know that, so he does it every half kilometer or so. Keshav rubs his brother’s back as though helping him cough. The coughs, when they do come, skip into breathlessness, like something trying to get purchase but slipping. And yet the distance gets walked—he is strong. He has always been strong.

  They learn not to expect help. They learn to look for themselves and move on. Shankar uses each arrival as respite while Keshav checks each bench and circles each pillar. It’s like ringing every bell in the circuit of a temple, a precise, prescribed rite. He calls to her at the abandoned ticket desk, calls to her beside the station name painted in block English letters, calls to her over the empty tracks. Then he returns to Shankar, and they walk on either side of the rails, ball of a foot on every other slat, looking down. Shankar counts steps in his head to concentrate on something other than the vise he breathes against. I have seen this whole time how their steps are synchronized. At one point they notice it, too; in an absurd interval of playfulness, they switch up their steps, a pause, a reverse step, a wag of the foot, rejoicing in how they cannot escape each other, every spontaneous variation matched, a mirror image. For an absurd interval, they are both smiling, Keshav laughing, Shankar giggling noiselessly through his fractures, only his mouth open. He still thinks this is one of his spells, and he is used to Keshav making him laugh during his spells—the squat is, as Keshav likes to grimace, the same position people take over the latrine. There on the moonlit tracks, the three of us laugh a laughter that doesn’t have any happiness in it. It’s the same kind of mirth that sometimes shakes funeral goers. We stop only when Shankar lowers himself again, hand up, as if he wants a break before laughing again. His breaths stretch into long, shrill draws, nostrils flared. He and Keshav look in each other’s eyes. Shankar steadies himself and stands.

  The next station is a small one, just two slabs and two awnings. Many of the larger expresses don’t even stop there, but this night, a long train is at the platform. For no reason at all, they start to hope. It looks like the same train to them. It isn’t, of course, and in any case, it is facing them, heading the wrong way
. The boys hurry, Shankar’s hand in Keshav’s. They are already close when I realize something is off. Most of the train’s length doesn’t line up along the platform’s, only the first car’s. Not one light is on in the station, small though it is. One fixture, I can see, hasn’t finished swinging. The main signal light, facing down the track, should be red, but Keshav almost cuts his foot on its shards. He guides Shankar clear. No one is on the roof of the train. No voices in any compartment. The boys approach the engine car. No driver. The corner of the first passenger car, immediately behind it, drips a dark oil.

  “It broke down,” Keshav whispers, pointing at the ground, where the oil has pooled. He touches the oil and rubs it between his fingers. It is thinner than he expected, and rubs clear. He smells it.

  Shankar grabs his brother’s hand and points down the track. Every car drips its own black puddle. Because just across the border that night, on a crowded platform, sixteen men sat meditating, beards on their chests, swords across their knees. Simran’s cousin Harpreet had been among them. The people around them knew the object of their meditation and watched at a distance. The stationmaster, staring at their bowed turbans, changed the signal to clear the train’s arrival. The men stood in the rising steam and vanished.

  Keshav backs away from the blood and wipes his fingers on his shirt. He holds his strangely throbbing fingertips for the next half hour, as if he has been cut. As if the blood were his.

  * * *

  Masud’s sleep is precious to his entourage, as precious as the sleeper himself. The orphans lie nearby, interspersed among the strays. They sleep in shifts, like sentries. The ones who stay awake discuss him. This kafila, like any kafila, ends in a city, a camp. They decide they must get him there. He must survive. All through the night there are families still walking past, leading drowsy mules or pushing rickety-axled carts. The orphans wait for the right one, a solitary old farmer too scared to stop driving his ox cart. The cart is piled with clothes, one bundle of pots and pans, and one body, his wife’s. The children pour themselves across his way. He snaps his whip at them and shouts. The strays wake up vociferously and want in on the skirmish, but Lucky, the talker, offers the whip his arm and lets it coil around. The farmer shakes it free. The second time it spirals up Lucky’s arm, he grabs it and explains.

  Masud, disoriented, has sat up; he rubs his eyes, face in his hands like a weeping man. He is malleable, guided by the children, who reach up to lead him by his elbows. Billi brings the black bag in both hands, and they set him down snugly, cushioned with clothes. Beside the corpse of the woman, whom he never sees, he falls asleep again.

  The farmer’s first reaction had been resistance. That was to be expected. Lucky’s explanation stopped him short, though. When he saw how tenderly the children preserved this old man, he thought of his own grandchildren, in his daughter’s village. Whether they were alive tonight, and if so, where. The sight of kindness reminded him of a lost, golden past, before the invention of borders, when kindness was possible. Prehistory just last year. So he let this extra cargo onto his cart and even leaned over to help move his wife’s body closer to him. Then he clicked his tongue, and the cart clopped creakingly toward Pakistan, accompanied by a small, alertly trotting escort. Masud rocked on his side, hands joined under his cheek.

  5

  ARRIVALS

  Masud wakes up in the cart and squints into the late morning light, his back aching and half his face finely printed by the leather of his black bag. At some point in the night, he shifted it from belly level, where Billi had nestled it, to under his cheek. Yesterday’s interrupted shave has given his face a split shading, dark scruff on one side, darker beard on the other. Now, on his paler side, this network of intricate lines seems to have aged him more swiftly.

  A bewildered glance infers nothing from his driver’s back. The small body, wrapped in a white sheet, seems shaped like a woman’s, and he assumes she is sleeping. The only thing that reassures him are the strays, who aren’t alarmed. None of them are looking his way. One, low to the ground, trails an olfactory hunch off the road. Masud scoots off and lets the cart go on without him. The farmer senses the cart shake and lighten, and he looks over his shoulder to make sure nothing has fallen. He sees the doctor standing in the road, dogs calmly sniffing circles around him, and he raises a hand. Masud, still uncertain what has happened, raises his hand in answer.

  He doesn’t know it, but he is almost at the border. Only two hours, at his rate of walking, from the closest camp. He never knows when he crosses the border. It is too early in the border’s life cycle: it hasn’t budded checkpoints and manned booths yet, hasn’t sprouted its barbed wire thorns.

  He could get to the camp before noon, if all he does is walk. Lucky and Rimzim, who have kept up with the cart on foot all night, come running with summaries of the cases up the road. Two hours stretch to four. They have picked up the skills quickly, having attended dozens of examinations the prior day; Masud’s questions, around the adult patients, were often posed directly to them. So they collect the information they know he will need: where is the pain, how long has it been going on, is it dull or sharp or throbbing. Or, as is more often the case, where did they cut you, when did they cut you, what did they cut you with. The first patient he treats that morning is Lucky. Spiral whip welts wrap his forearm like two snakes up a caduceus.

  I follow Masud into the camp. Here, too, there is no physical boundary. No sign, no appreciable transition. It forms itself gradually, like a city approached from the countryside. First the outskirts. Huddles of people, human shanties. Then, as he walks farther, he passes a gradual scatter of tents. Or not tents exactly, but staked and propped lengths of burlap or saree. Under that richly colored shade, large-eyed hunted mammals cower and peer up at him. The tents get closer together, and then, by an orderly dereliction, corridors define themselves. He can look down them for hundreds of yards. He can stand at their intersections. Streets of a miniature city, complete with human sewage dropped as indifferently as cow dung. The camp. Pakistan.

  His strays have dispersed—other dogs are already established here, the tripwires of their urine everywhere. Negotiations, alliances, skirmishes growl and yelp sporadically across the camp. These, too, are questions of borders, jurisdiction, rights of access.

  The first voice Masud hears is that of a man named Maulana Ijaz. The maulana is dressed in austere white and a knit cap, a dramatic gray beard down his front. A metal trunk lies open at his feet. His eyes have rolled back, and his neck is tucked very low between his shoulders, while his face is turned directly to the sun. His hands betray his blindness as he lowers tentatively and flutters his fingers over the contents of the trunk. He brings up a small skull.

  “Look, O brothers,” he says, “look!” His whole body is stretched to get the skull as high as possible. He sways as one stalk, the skull a seedpod he wants the winds to take. “This is what they are doing to us, to our sons! They know our boys will never lower their heads. They pull us into the street and say, ‘Spit on your Qur’an,’ but we won’t do it. This child, he was a warrior to the end, and handsome, a Pathan boy, green eyes. A little man. You should have heard him shout. So this is what they did. This proud boy, ya Allah, if only they had taken my eyes before then, I wouldn’t have had to see it. Do you see, O Muslims? Do you see what Hindustan plans for our sons?”

  Masud squints at the skull. There is something wrong with it. The back of the skull balloons out, and the eye sockets are too large. Masud angles his head, studying it.

  The maulana hands the skull to the person nearest him, and it passes from hand to hand. He descends to his trunk again and this time comes up with a stack of six photographs, each in a plastic slipcover. “But it’s our daughters they have always been after. These pure girls had no one to protect them. Do not cover your eyes. Look. Look at what has been done to them.” The photographs are handed off, too. “One look and pass them on, make sure everyone gets a chance to see,” the maulana adds quietly, i
n his speaking voice. Now he switches back into his strident, public voice. “No one to protect them—but tell me, believers, do they have anyone to avenge them? What, will no one avenge them?”

  He lowers his face from the sun. The crowd remains a silent semicircle. The skull makes it to Masud. The jaw is lost; he offers his flat palm, and the maxilla rests on it, top molars biting him. He holds it only for the time it takes to pass it to the man next to him. Long enough for him to be certain the skull is no human child’s. The maulana starts up again, his blind eyes tearing up, and Masud realizes there is sincerity here, in spite of the circus-crier shrillness and the exhortations that come now. Maybe the maulana doesn’t even know he shows his congregation—his audience—a monkey’s skull. Maybe he does.

  Masud drifts away before the photographs make it to him. He saw the bite marks up close. His scalpel, just the prior day, traced the abscessed letters where a man had knifed his name. The word split and oozed as Masud’s blade followed the previous blade’s track.

  I know what bothers him about this, why he cannot bear the calls to vengeance, redemption, war: Masud can bear to see the suffering, but he cannot bear to see it presented. The maulana is recruiting. I see for the first time the young men behind him. Two Pathans. They have been taking the maulana around the camp, calling crowds together to watch his show. They collect fighters to join up and ride out. They call themselves ghazis, frontier warriors, what the first Muslims called themselves when they galloped as far as Sindh. Masud doesn’t see the past and future around this display, but he senses as much, and he cannot tolerate a reason behind speaking or showing other than compassion. If the purpose were compassion, then even raising the skull could be justified, human or nonhuman or falsified out of plaster. Raise the skull with any other motive, and it becomes a sin.