Partitions: A Novel

by Majmudar, Amit

  The ring of men around Keshav shifts a little and breaks. The one named Mangal comes over to see what’s wrong. He has his hand in his pocket; he has a matchbox of his own. This one has a Devi printed on it, Gayatri, riding a tiger. It is a simple line drawing. Her arms hold a discus, a mace, a conch shell. The fourth hand is held flat, a red dot on the palm, blessing.

  Run, Keshav! This is your chance!

  If only I could tell him there’s an opening behind him he can slip through. It’s such a miraculous device, a voice. I never knew how miraculous when I had one. A radius of disturbance that originated in me and signified something. I don’t have a voice. I open my mouth and jut my face forward, but nothing comes out. Keshav is looking from one man to the other. I lunge as Mangal takes out a match of his own and aligns it to strike. A quick bob of his hand, a practice stroke.

  Part of the lawyer’s roof cracks behind the wall. Sparks fountain into the night sky and glide over the treetops, over the wall, over us. The smaller ones blink out while still airborne, shredded feathers of ash. The larger ones arc and float and loop and fall on us, still lit. Keshav stands under them, staring up. I split myself a third time and leap into the sky, trying to intercept the sparks with my bare chest. I snuff them in the transparent silhouette of my absence. I see one coming in from the side, and I divide again. Fainter and fainter each time. I have never spread myself so recklessly before. I start losing control of it. I smear into a dome, hints of faces and elbows and twisted torsos deforming my surface. And this dome starts to swell, rise, spread thinner than dead skin.

  The sparks, as they penetrate my chest, swell and brighten like meteors entering an atmosphere.

  * * *

  What Masud has to do now he has done only three times before in his career. It’s an emergency procedure, not for the kind of patients who walked, or were carried, into his clinic. Army medics had more practice with the desperate stab and pull, gunfire close by. Masud performed all three of his needle decompressions on a single day twenty-two years ago, after a small earthquake in southern Gurdaspur. The bodies had been crushed by rubble, and his fingers, feeling for the space between the ribs, had dimpled their chests visibly, every strut and rafter snapped. All three patients (only one had been a child) had died by nightfall of that injury and others. And in Gurdaspur he’d had the right supplies and had been able to leave in a tube.

  This child’s injuries are less severe, Masud can see, after a quick slide of his scalpel slits the silk. The boy is drawing long, fierce breaths, the diaphragm still pulling though the mind has gone slack. The bruise covers his side, but the rib cage doesn’t sink or buckle when Masud’s fingertip finds the groove between ribs. The other hand holds the glass syringe clear, its plunger all the way down. He must make sure it doesn’t touch anything. Now he reaches in the bag, and his hand comes up already unscrewing, with a deft thumb, the cap of a new iodine bottle. He pours it over Shankar’s chest, not rationing it. The Krishna blue of his cyanosis darkens further from the spill of iodine. Masud tilts the needle toward Shankar’s collarbone and eases it in just above the heart. It is a risk, he knows—the heart may have grown large, after so many years of the blue disease—but any higher and he risks hitting the vessels under the collarbone. There is only so much room in a chest with a heart as big as Shankar’s, but he is counting on the tension of the air to have shifted the heart slightly to the right. Seeing the needle’s tip slide through the skin, Simran gasps. The wound on her own chest, at almost the same spot, oozes afresh and spots the gauze square Masud has taped there. Shankar lies motionless, not present to experience the pain. There. It’s in. Masud steadies the syringe, steadies his dyed-purple fingertips on the plunger. He draws back.

  * * *

  Now, Keshav, while they aren’t looking, go!

  I don’t have a voice. I barely even have the afterimage of a body. Keshav can’t hear me. But when he runs, it feels to me like he has. I sense him sprint through the thin, invisible film that’s left of me, popping me like a bubble. I sink in synchrony with the sparks. They turn to ash flakes. I land without troubling the dust. Amar, Jaggu, and two others run after Keshav, and their feet pound through me. It is all I can do to follow Keshav where his running takes him.

  He starts out headed for Shankar, but he shifts direction quickly. The last thing he wants is these men finding his brother. So he cuts between two mud houses and skips over an open gutter, its long, man-made ditch overgrown with tall grasses.

  As his brother, unknown to him, starts to breathe a little more easily, Keshav, too, feels a change. He takes in lungfuls of dry night air, and no matter how hard he runs, he doesn’t get short of breath.

  Shankar’s shortness of breath seems mysteriously transferred to the men chasing Keshav. Part of me knows it’s really their dozens of bidis a day, and their soft, well-fed bellies, and the fact that they don’t care enough about burning Keshav to chase him very long. Even the kerosene had been only a quarter can, left over from the lawyer’s house, not enough to burn anything but a child. An amusement had presented itself, worth pursuing so long as it was convenient. To sniff the wind and go pouncing on rustles would ruin their night out. I know all this, but I like to imagine Shankar has distributed his suffering to them when, breathless after forty feet, they give up, heads down, hands on their hips. Jaggu, the biggest smoker, gives up first. The others stop running as soon as they see him hang his arms and heave in place. They were looking for an excuse. He bares his teeth, scrapes phlegm from deep in his throat, and spits. “Matches,” he grunts. They walk back to the burning house, where a dance has broken out in the firelight, their buddies, arms high and index fingers up, shrugging their shoulders and singing. Amar snatches up the fuel can he just emptied and drums on it, sharp and loud and hollow, striking it with his wedding band.

  * * *

  I move away from their festivities. I feel so heavy, I check for footprints. I make my way to Shankar. Simran is staring at Masud, who has Shankar in his lap. The syringe full of air and pinkish froth he tossed into the brush, and the spot on Shankar’s chest is dressed. She is thinking about what Masud just said to her, the first words he has spoken—clearly, without the stammer. As if she were a child, or a woman as trustworthy as a child. “We can’t leave him alone.”

  Many small things in that comment make Simran feel safe. The use of a we that includes her. The addition of another traveler, making her not the only one who clings to this frail old man. There will be someone weaker than she, someone she can take care of, her little brother given back to her. The prospect counteracts the deep-reaching shudder and prickle of neck every time she remembers what happened in the sugarcane field. Every time, and she can’t help but think of it every few minutes, it’s as if Saif’s hand touches her again. The pain from the bite was and is far stronger, but the hand did something worse than hurt. It was the inroad of something animal. The snout of a rooting boar. Nausea lurches inside her.

  Masud, of course, means what he says medically. The lung is only partly reexpanded, though Shankar does breathe more easily. The tension was relieved, as he can tell from the subsiding neck veins; but without a tube to drain the chest, the lung could collapse again. He is worried. What he did here, though necessary, was a drastic measure, potentially harmful. As a physician, he wants to see it through. But a stronger bond is already forming. Just the act of cradling Shankar like this—it’s not something Masud has done often, for all his years of practice. His patients either wailed in their mothers’ laps or were old enough to sit on the examining table by themselves. He never had the leisure to cradle one of them.

  Shankar stirs. A dream thought makes his brow flinch. He is conscious again, though fast asleep. Masud rocks a little. For the first time, they notice the distant fire of the lawyer’s house and the dancing going on there. Masud looks away. The recovery in his arms takes precedence; he has no time to fear. He has slid a partition around Shankar, Simran, and himself, swift and private as a hospital curtain, and
the cruel joys of those cruel men are outside it. Simran, too, feels unafraid. It’s not the dogs who reassure her, though they do maintain their skittish, erratic orbit. It’s Masud himself, gentle and quiet and unshaven. Masud, who weighs perhaps no more than she does.

  “Doctor ji,” she says, speaking up for the first time. “My name is Simran. What is your name?”

  “Ibrahim.”

  Simran, stung, searches Masud’s face and frame and clothes for some corroborative sign—anything that will connect him to Ayub, Qasim, and Saif, or to the monstrous Mussulmaans of Sikh history. She searches a long time and finds nothing but an old man cradling a child.

  Another boy crosses the barrier effortlessly, unchecked by the dogs, not one growl. His clothes stick to his body, and he smells of pungent kerosene. The long run hasn’t winded Keshav. He breathes as calmly as Shankar. The sight of the brother, larger in size but otherwise identical, brings everything back to Masud’s keen memory: which books he spread open, and to which illustrations; what Sonia looked like, and how she bore long scars on her arms. He smiles at Keshav, and the first thing out of his mouth is a name.

  “Dr. Roshan Jaitly,” he says. “Your father is Dr. Roshan Jaitly.”

  * * *

  The sound of my name strengthens me for their journey. Masud has Shankar in his arms, Simran holds Masud’s black bag and Keshav’s hand. Masud asks Simran where she is bound, and Simran, though part of her feels she has already arrived, says Amritsar. When Masud asks if she has family there, she says nothing, but Masud nods as if she answered, and he promises to put her on a bus. Her answer comes after a few minutes more of walking in silence. “My Guru is there.” No one hears her. She isn’t certain, afterward, that she said it aloud.

  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?”