Partitions: A Novel

by Majmudar, Amit

  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.

  The doctors, on that first day, express their worry about what may happen if the camp learns he is a Muslim. The young men pacing the grounds here lost family members, the doctors warn him. They lost honor. The phrase the doctors use, portentously, is make trouble for you. Simran and Masud have little doubt what that means. It might be better if he continued east, the doctors suggest, on to Delhi—there was word of a large Muslim camp at Purana Qila, already swelling into the largest in the country. He would be safer there.

  Masud shakes his head and says he will serve here. During their time in the camp, he takes the last name Singh. The false identity doesn’t trouble him the way it would have just a day before, when he walked in the kafila and answered those who asked him with his given, Muslim name. He knows his caregiving is neither Muslim, nor Sikh, nor Hindu. Or rather it is all three of these. The name, on the man or on the God, is something around it, not of it—thinner than the gloves on his scrubbed hands and peeled off just as easily.

  * * *

  On the third night, when Shankar can walk on his own, my twins set out again to find their mother. They tell no one. Simran is sleeping. Masud is sleeping. The boys pass a few cookfires. The families around them don’t look up, remembering other fires, wilder fires, fires that consumed rather than fed. To either side of them, the tents crest motionless, like waves on a pictured sea. This is the problem with distances over water. Everything seems closer. The edge of this camp, Delhi, reunion. They walk endlessly. It feels as if they’re walking in a circle, the way people will when they have no landmarks and no roads.

  “Are you okay?”

  Shankar nods.

  It’s over half an hour before they see a military jeep, and in it, two dozing soldiers. A boundary of sorts. Probably the far edge of the camp at whatever hour the soldiers put away their playing cards, rested their rifles across their chests, and fell asleep. The border they marked between the camp and the hostile world has already shifted. Cloth tents, groups of bodies huddled against the night, unhitched carts have formed irregular new settlement
s. The spaces among them are filling in gradually. Beyond them, the boys see the slow, sludged rivers of two kafilas, continually emptying into this vast stagnation. Shankar sees it and begins to sob. Keshav sees a pile of trash nearby, one of many dumps at what had been, at dusk, the edge of the camp. He climbs to the top of it and shouts the word Ma, fists clenched, chin at the sky. No one stirs, not even the soldiers. The scene before him doesn’t change its thick, clotted shuffle, and the single cloud across the moon doesn’t change its sluggish writhing. Twice more he calls to her. His voice disperses. It finds nothing to enter, nothing to echo against. He comes down to join his brother, and they walk back the way they came.

  * * *

  They have walked me to the edge of their lives. I don’t follow them back to their new family. They are safe tonight, and they will be safe from here on. But I have one last journey to make, back into Pakistan. I have been gathering strength for it, but the wind of the passage dissolves me further. When I arrive at the well, Sonia is standing on the edge of it. Bare feet on a ring of stone. The moment our twins turn their backs to the journey, her last reluctance eases. I raise a hand, and my fingers swirl up and away, a granularity finer than pollen. I watch her balance on the edge of the well, her arms tilted forward, her face tilted down.

  I kept myself from following her all this time. I could not bear to face this. Now I trace her back to the moment on the train platform, and before that as well. I see her struggling against the man who pulls her away. But then, outside the station, when he turns her to face him, she lays her hands on either side of his face. I know the man. Ghulam Sikri, the foreman, whose men had been working a few houses down from ours. The ones who had befriended me. They had built the cabinets in our upstairs room. In a flash I remember the voice of Ramchand Parikh, arguing with his wife. Nothing like that Dr. Jaitly, who lets his wife … Ghulam Sikri is telling her he sent his brother to get the boys at the next station—but she must not board that train. He would have grabbed the boys, too, he says, but he arrived just in time to get to her, he couldn’t reach them before they boarded.

  The train already left. He is now walking with her arm in his fist. Why she walks, at first, even those few steps with him, the strange reflex that drew her hands to his face in that moment of panic and confusion—understanding those few seconds forces me farther back. Now she pulls against his grip, she screams; he jerks her flush and whispers a threat to leave the boys on the train. Her passivity after that, I can understand. But those first seconds, her hands rising to his face—they force me into the past.

  * * *

  He came to visit the new flat when the twins were four weeks old. He had to see if they were his. Not a word passed between him and Sonia. Keshav was napping, Shankar was inconsolable on Sonia’s arm. He stood in the doorway and watched her pace and bob, pace and bob. Shankar’s thin mewling paused only to store the next breath. She saw him at last and stopped. The wrap fell away from Shankar’s chest and right arm. Glimpsing the baby at last—my baby, not his—Ghulam Sikri felt intense revulsion. I can imagine what Shankar looked like in his eyes. Gray complexion, the skull too large for the body, no baby fat. A kind of monkey-infant, absurdly shaven. Its open mouth pulsing with that small, high-pitched noise. The disappointment dizzied him, and he missed a step on the way downstairs, just catching himself. I can see him there, in the past. He had convinced himself, over that month, that he—younger, more virile than me—had to be the father. He expected to look at the twins and see himself. His rights would be undeniable once he held his sons face-to-face. Sonia would pack their clothes and come away. He had envisioned all of this.

  Instead he saw Shankar, our beautiful wastrel. And through Shankar, me.

  Yet that hadn’t been the last time he had visited. Another afternoon, after tears and arguments, she took him to our inside room while the children cried in their cloth swings. They were back out before the last pushes had swung to a stop. It was a hurried regression, a quick sip of the fond former addiction. Naturally it opened the need back up. I face it at last: the sight of them together. The sight of him loafing downstairs, endlessly spinning a coin on the step, signaled with a knock when the twins had gone to sleep. I wonder if the old hushed rumor is true, the one about the Muslim male’s superior prowess in bed. Yet when I look at them, there in the past, all I see are two young people making love. They suited each other. Certainly I didn’t make for a natural match. Strength mating with beauty: what was I ever but the rich old man with the beautiful young wife? It is an old story. A common story. But I never did think it would be mine.

  Ghulam Sikri tried not to look at the twins. He didn’t ask about them, either. How he must have hated them. One afternoon, he did look intently at Keshav. It had occurred to him, on the way over, that the sickly twin might be mine, the healthy one, his own. To him it seemed possible, logical really, that his heartier seed might be responsible for the strange difference between Sonia’s twins. And yet Keshav looked just as much like me as Shankar.

  He and Sonia met only during the first year, when I was still healthy, and she and I were still making love. After I fell ill, they stopped meeting. Probably because I stayed in the flat so much more. My patients saw the padlock at my office so often, most stopped coming to see me. So the few times in the week I did make it there, I had no one to examine but myself. Erratic heartbeat, impossibly high fevers, shortness of breath after a few stairs. My legs and feet swelled. They held the contour of my fingertip when I pressed on them. Sonia’s own legs had swollen with pregnancy so recently … and there I was, a year later, loosening my laces. When I curled up on the cot and began dying in earnest, they had no opportunity at all.

  My constant presence wasn’t the only reason. After the funeral—Ghulam Sikri cut the wood and built my Brahmin’s pyre himself, to save Sonia money—she stopped allowing him upstairs. Maybe because the boys were getting older. Maybe the guilt hit her hardest after I was gone. Or had the guilt been less while I was around because she could make up for it? Was that why she was always so uncomplaining? Was that why I never had to ring my bell a second time?

  * * *

  And so he waited for days outside her flat, watching, knowing she would have to leave soon. We both kept watch, but really, he was her only protector in that city. She didn’t know about either of us. Ghulam Sikri declined two opportunities for paying work in the first week of his vigil. By August no one was building much of anything, in anticipation of the coming destruction. If she didn’t leave, he decided, he would warn her the city wasn’t safe and was soon to be less so. Then, on the last afternoon he was willing to wait, he saw Sonia hurry onto the street with the twins.

  So he followed her to the train station. More than one friend had told him about the trains—everybody knew, it seemed, except for the crowds on the platforms. Where the trains would be stopped. How many of our boys would be waiting. He shoved people aside as he tracked her, always staying close enough to tap her shoulder.

  I can go back and pick him out of the crowd, now that I am willing to face this. There he is. He is staring at the twins. The bald spots on opposite sides of their heads. He believes they are the ones who have kept Sonia from him, even in her widowhood, when she should have been his. He had been so overjoyed I was gone, he had spent a whole day in the sun building my pyre. But when he arrived for his reward, the door was locked to him, and he heard the boys, as usual, crying inside.

  It’s on the platform he conceives the idea. How easy it would be, he thinks, to part them. I could have her for myself at last. He waits until the crucial moment when her hands release their hands and she is rising, as if on a wave, into the marked train. He held that braid before, twisted it around his hand as he stood behind her. He reaches for it again, as is his right. He pulls.

  * * *

  For four days, he kept her under lock. On the fourth, she called to him, begged him to find her boys, tugged his hands onto her breasts and pleaded. He led her to the bathroom and filled a
bucket and ordered her to wash. The water was icy. Watching her bathe had been one of the things he had never been able to do. He told her he loved her and that out of love he wished to give her a new life. The life they should have had together. With that new life, he would give her new sons as well. Everything would be restored to her, he promised. Just not in the same form.

  And then he called her a new name. And then he undressed.

  And now she is standing over the well. In her mind, she hears the sermons of her childhood. Warnings about the wages of sin and the evil in woman. She believes her boys are dead and that she, because of her sin, caused their deaths. She steps into the well. The splash she makes is small. There are other women in the well. Cold arms and cold hair stroke her scarred arms and chest. She is only neck deep. She lowers her face. She kicks to make room for herself. At last, the bodies under her shift and give, and she sinks a little, the part in her hair still visible above the water. It takes a few minutes. Bubbles rest on the surface. At last they break, and she is released. I follow her into the universe.

  On my last day alive, I asked for a newspaper. I hadn’t asked for one in maybe seven months by then. It wasn’t an expense I could justify. But on my last day, I wanted one worse than I wanted breath. Sonia took Shankar on her hip and called down the stairs to the boy of ten or so who hung around the flat and ran errands for the tenants. Meanwhile Keshav stood by the cot, pointing at places on my arm and pressing his mouth on them. Sonia had taught him hurt places were to be kissed. I must have seemed all one hurt place. It was a kind of anointing.

  My hands had trouble with the paper. Sonia unfolded it for me. I took it from her. I don’t know what I was looking for. I think I wanted the feel and smell and crinkle of my old interest in the world, and the simple physical act, too, of holding the world open and reading it. I wanted some of its dark stain on my fingertips again. There were stories about the war, I remember, and what it meant for British rule. Weariness overcame me, and I let my eyes blur the letters. I took in only the various sizes of the headlines. The stories became blocks. Bricks of a single edifice I could not enter.