Nimita's Place

  “My money,” the tonga driver said.

  “Wait a while. I might need you again soon.” What if something had happened to the car? Or if Nimita had driven it away at the first sign of trouble?

  “What is this?” The tonga driver spat. Karan put his hands into his pockets, jingled some coins.

  “I’m paying you. A full three rupees. But just wait five minutes, I might need to go somewhere again.”

  “Five minutes,” the tonga driver said.

  In the dark, the courtyard looked alien, threatening. Something crunched against Karan’s feet, nearly piercing the sole of his custom-made leather shoe, bought just a few months ago from Anarkali Bazaar. He returned to the gate guard’s post and felt for the electric torch that should be there. They had even bought batteries for it, and with such items being so expensive and rare after the war, Radheshyam had strict orders not to use the torch except in emergencies.

  The torch worked but Karan switched it off almost immediately. Then he made himself turn it on again and look at the damage.

  The courtyard was a mess of shattered glass, scraps of clothes, splintered wood and overturned furniture. Slowly, carefully, he stepped through it, holding the beam of light on likely heaps and breathing out gratefully when they were revealed as only broken goods, not people.

  Inside the house, he tried to move faster but it was like walking on sand. Clothes, hairbrushes, tooth powder, broken glass covered his bedroom floor. He found a pillow that held Urmila-Baby’s scent and held it to his chest while going through the upper storey. Then the barsaati on the rooftop and then back down again to the living room. Into the kitchen and then back into the courtyard, calling for Nimita and the baby.

  A faint sound and he whirled in his steps. Under a tree, something moved. The torch showed only more rags at first, but under its light, as though there was something magical in the beam, the rags were turning into clothes and a barely recognisable human shape.

  “Ramu?” No, it was Rahim, eyes swollen shut, lips bloody, right leg bent in a position so awkward that Karan felt a sympathetic pain.

  “What happened?” He knelt by the body and saw the lips trying to move. Water. There was water in the kitchen and the taps still worked, though the earthen storage jars had been shattered. He brought Rahim water in his cupped hands again and again.

  On one of the trips he noticed something that made the entire night of shocks and horrors fade into dreamlike bliss. The Ford car was not in its garage. Nimita must have driven it away.

  He went out to the road where the tonga driver was still waiting. “A man is hurt. I need help.”

  The tonga driver clucked his tongue but got out of his perch and tied the horse to a tree. Together, they lifted Rahim out of the courtyard and somehow got him into the tonga.

  Mayo Hospital was closer but—“Sir Ganga Ram Hospital,” Karan said. Something about the night made him want the protection of a Hindu name.

  On the way there, Rahim managed to say: “Bibiji, Baby, left. Safe.”

  “Don’t talk. Everything will be fine,” Karan said and pressed Rahim’s hand.

  There was a line at the hospital. “Wait at the back,” the orderly said, not even looking at Rahim hanging pitifully between Karan and the tonga driver.

  Karan paid the tonga driver and settled down to wait with the half-conscious Rahim, who muttered and moaned and once, called for water, before falling into what appeared to be a sleep.

  Sometime around midnight, they were finally ushered into a huge hall with mattresses and cots and seen to by a doctor with blood on his coat. There were no cots for Rahim so Karan and an orderly laid him on a blanket on the floor and covered him with a sheet. The man was burning with fever and threw it off. Karan tipped the orderly to sponge and feed Rahim and headed to where he hoped to find his family: the Khosla bungalow in Model Town.

  There was no one there. The gates were locked and he could see his blue Ford car inside but repeated banging and calling attracted only the neighbour’s watchman. He came to tell Karan: “They’ve gone away.”

  The next step was to take the tonga to the home of Mr Qureshi. There he learnt of his father-in-law’s death and his wife’s escape.

  “I should go back to Delhi then,” Karan said, light-headed with horror and relief.

  “Stay and eat something,” said Mr Qureshi. “Let’s talk some more.”

  Was it right to eat mutton a day after your father-in-law’s funeral? Probably not, but Karan would not have remembered in his hunger, had Shehnaz-Auntyji not quietly placed a full bowl of mangoes and bananas and other fruits before him, along with curds and lassi. Karan ate half the bowl of fruit and all the curds and lassi.

  “What will you do now?” Mr Qureshi asked.

  What was there to be done? See what could be salvaged from home. Go to the factory. Find someone to handle the sale of the land.

  It overwhelmed him, just thinking of it.

  Mr Qureshi patted his hand. “Please let me help,” he said.

  With an advance from Mr Qureshi in his pocket, Karan went to the factory. Akbar Jobber was there. Work continued though it seemed only half the labourers were on the floor that day.

  Karan’s clerk Raman had fled, it seemed, taking the petty cash with him. Akbar spat on the floor. Karan did not reprimand him. He told Akbar that further orders would come from Mr Qureshi. Mr Qureshi would handle all the payments also.

  He hoped Mr Qureshi would be able to make good on his promise and find a buyer for the factory, not make Karan’s last words to his employees a lie. Mr Qureshi would also find a buyer for Karan’s house and land and wire him the rest of the money in Delhi. He would handle this himself, he had sworn.

  He went back to the hospital where Rahim had regained consciousness and could eat some of the parathas Karan had gotten packed from the Qureshi household. With each birdlike mouthful, the servant told the bits of the story he knew: how Bibiji had gone with Babyji and Shukla-Bibi and Radheshyam, how Rahim had sent his wife and children to maulvi sahib and waited to guard the house. How the men had come. After that, he remembered little.

  Karan dusted his hands on his knees, unable to look his servant in the eye. “Rahim, where is your wife? She must be told where you are.”

  “Sahibji, don’t go. It’s dangerous.”

  “I won’t go,” Karan said, calling over a ward boy and giving him 12 annas with the message for the family residing with maulvi sahib. “The Pir Hazrat Baba Nauguzah, understood? Near Naulakha. Come straight back as soon as you have spoken to the Bibiji and tell this man.”

  Rahim sank down on his blanket. “Thank you, Sahibji.”

  Karan looked at him, at the one swollen eye, almost invisible in purple bruises, the other bloodshot. This was goodbye now, he realised. As soon as he left here, after one last stop at home to check for valuables, this was farewell. Who knew when he would return or if he would ever be able to employ Rahim again?

  Ramu—Rahim—had been a silent presence in the Sachdev household for years, fetching, carrying, being scolded by Mummy for not being fast enough, pressing Daddy’s tired legs, running to the doctor when Dilip-Praji had his attacks. He was like furniture, a necessary part of the household. Karan had helped arrange his marriage. Rahim had been beaten and left to die in the wreckage of Karan’s house, for trying to save it.

  What could be said at a time like this?

  “Rahim,” he tried and the tears started.

  The injured man sobbed too, pressing Karan’s hand. “Sahibji, you too are going.”

  “God bless you,” Karan said, taking money out of his pocket and putting it next to Rahim without counting it. “Tip the orderly so he feeds you properly. Buy your medicines.”

  Rahim shook his head and Karan pressed his hand. “I owe you everything.”

  “No, no, no.”

  “If you are ever in need, I want you to come to Delhi, do you understand? To this address.” Karan said Pratik Lal Chand’s address twice and made Rahim
repeat it too. After that, he got up and walked off, not daring to look back.

  The rest of the day was a blur. Nothing to be found in the house. The banks were shut, no withdrawals possible. All he had to rely on was Mr Qureshi’s advance and the promise of funds from the land sales.

  Exhausted, he returned to the train station and managed to buy a ticket back to Delhi. The first-class carriage was full so he took a second-class berth. What did it matter? He was going back to his family and they were all safe.

  Later, Karan would berate himself again and again, thinking of the many things he could have done differently. Returned to the Qureshis for the night. Gone to the cantonment and tracked down Nimita’s uncle—though at that time he was certain Charan-Mamaji would have escorted his niece to Delhi himself. Even taken a later train to Delhi. So many ways he could have escaped his fate.

  Instead he boarded the train, desperate to get to his family, not knowing that it would be derailed just past Amritsar by a homemade bomb on the tracks.

  As the gang who had set the explosives swarmed into the second-class carriage, Karan tried to run to the exit but was blocked by screaming bodies who all had the same idea. Better-fed and stronger than many of them, he kicked his way out of the door and jumped onto the tracks.

  He hadn’t gotten very far before a wildly swinging sickle cut at him and forced him down. He curled into himself, hoping to avoid the slashing blade but a tearing pain in his side sent him towards the dark.

  When he woke, he was hot and sweaty beneath a blanket that was so heavy it didn’t yield to his hands. Only when he kicked and pushed at the same time did parts of it move, rolling over his chest, over his face, exposing his nose to the sun and a welcome breath of air. A breath that turned rancid in his lungs even as he realised what he was smelling. What he had been lying beneath.

  Bodies. And with that thought, he yelled like a madman, kicking and punching and clawing his way out of the heap and rolling, rolling over sharp stones and blessed gravel—at least that meant he was not covered in someone else’s death.

  Flies buzzed and lit on his nose. He tried to get up but his knees buckled. He fell back down and lay, too weak to move, as another train chugged past. No one pulled the emergency cord and insisted the masses by the line be given funerals.

  Thirsty, delirious, he drifted in and out of reality for hours until evening brought cooling breezes and shadow. He began crawling along the line.

  Dead men saved his life. He had woken without shoes, without his jacket carrying Mr Qureshi’s advance, without his wallet carrying the rest of the money he’d brought from Delhi. There were other bodies like his, robbed and stripped and left to rot, but some of them still had shoes. These were big but comforting to his swollen feet, bleeding on the stones.

  He relieved another body of a scarf to bandage the gaping wound in his chest that was oozing liquid. None of the dead had water, though sometime before dawn, he passed a tiny village with a well. It was not entirely dry.

  He rested in that ghost settlement for two days, only once wondering where everybody had gone. By then he had developed a horror of the railway and began moving with a safe distance between him and the track. He stumbled across a procession of villagers on their way to Jullunder, men, women and children carrying all their possessions and driving their cattle. They looked at him uneasily but noted his Western clothes and did not drive him away.

  At Jullunder, he stood, dazed, trying to remember the home of his father’s friend Mr Advani. He coaxed and threatened a tonga driver into taking him there on promise of payment but on reaching there, found the home locked. “The family has gone to Ludhiana,” a neighbour said.

  The tonga driver began making a noise and Karan, ready to shout back, found himself tipping forward instead, holding a hand to his slowly festering chest.

  The neighbour took him in, an act of incredible kindness, and for the next two weeks, Karan sweated out a fever while dreaming of being killed, or worse, surviving the death of his wife and child. Fourteen days later, he was well enough to sit up a little and cry his story out on the broad chest of Mr Jagjinder Singh, garage owner. He begged the price of a telegram to Delhi and was told the communications were not to be trusted these days.

  A week later, he was able to walk and further beggared his dignity by borrowing the train fare for a second-class ticket to Delhi. He left Mr Singh’s home with a full heart and no idea how to repay his debt, apart from a money order once he reached Delhi.

  But there were no seats on the train.

  Everyone was leaving, everyone had better reasons for demanding a ticket on the train. Finally, Karan joined the ranks of heaving refugee families and scaled the side of the first-class carriage, hands gripping the railings of the windows, then feet pushing off the rims while the scandalised first-class passengers reared back from the rabble outside.

  Helping hands lifted him to the roof of the train. And that was how he finally reached Delhi, without money, in a dead man’s shoes, having left everything of value behind.

  Part Seven

  2015

  1.

  Opening my eyes, I realise it was not a dream. Last night was real. My body is a stone rolling off the bed. My hands are too stiff to turn on the tap or grip the toothbrush the first time.

  Doing aarti means the stone must open the door.

  “What’s going on?” Chia Ying’s voice.

  I think of going back in but Irving sees me. “Hey,” he says and his voice is so normal that I nod at him on my way to the kitchen.

  Follow the algorithm. Light the gas after two tries. Put the tealight near the flame, feel the burning sensation too late, suck the fingers, try again. Take the tealight back to the room and move it clockwise against the pictures of Shiva and Parvati and Rama and Sita and Lakshmana.

  My hand stops at the small statue of elephant-headed Ganesha. There is a stone in my throat.

  I finish the aarti.

  Outside, Chia Ying and Irving are sitting at the dining table. “Morning,” Chia Ying says. Her lips are pulled apart to show teeth. I don’t think she is angry at me but it makes me stop.

  “Have a seat. Coffee? I made mocha again.”

  I don’t really want to sit with Irving. “No, it’s okay” but she’s gone into the kitchen.

  The mocha is good. There is a box on the table. My right wrist aches, and my left hand unconsciously rubs it.

  “I bought buns,” Irving says. “From that bunbelievable place.” His voice cracks.

  The cup splashes mocha on the table just as Chia Ying comes back in. She dabs the spill with tissue. “Can one of you tell me what is going on?” Her moving hand drips mocha drops towards Irving’s white cotton shirt.

  “Chia Ying.” Is that my voice? How funny it sounds. It’s the buzzing in my ears. “This is between Irving and me.”

  She finishes mopping up the spill and goes into her bedroom.

  She doesn’t come back.

  Irving clears his throat.

  I thought I was Irving’s first Indian friend. It never occurred to me that Vicky Malhotra would have Chinese friends.

  “How long?”

  “Sorry?”

  My turn to clear my throat. “How long have you known?”

  His eyes are very black. I never noticed them before through his spectacles. The irises are so large and black.

  “I knew you and he were together. Vicky told me,” he clears his throat again. “When I came back to Hong Kong. Four years ago.”

  The dilation of the pupils of the eyes indicates nervousness or anger. My eyes must be equally big right now.

  “So all the while you knew. Before you moved in, you knew.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “That you were both together. That it ended badly and he is sorry for that.” Irving’s voice cracks again. “He—he just wants to apologise. When he found out that I’d be moving to Singapore—”

  “Becoming flatmates
. Was that your idea?”

  He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to.

  I want to ask him how Vicky knew I was in Singapore, but I know how. Facebook. Anyone can find anyone on Facebook. My privacy settings are very, very strong but my relatives have no filters. Every few hours I’m tagged by one of the buas or cousins or uncles. Even my job posting in Singapore was shared online by Dad, and Romy-Bhaiya and every bua and chachi.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I tried once.” He looks at the table. “It was never the right time.”

  “That is not a good excuse, Irving.”

  He looks at me.

  After a while, he says: “I thought. I didn’t know. I mean.”

  I see him looking at my hands. It is like pulling a nail out of a wall but I move the left hand away from my right wrist.

  “Why do you keep doing that?”

  His question is enough to make me laugh, enough to make Chia Ying come running out of her bedroom and shoo Irving away.

  There is a stone in my chest and I heave and heave but it doesn’t come out.

  “Ssh, it’s okay,” Chia Ying says, rubbing my back. I can’t stop crying because the last person who said that to me was Dadi.

  I never told Dadi. Dadi, who never ever lied to me, I never told her the short truth or the long truth or any truth of what happened.

  I was going to. I was going to tell all of them, ten years ago, when Romy-Bhaiya got married.

  Romy-Bhaiya decided to get married in the last year of my BSc programme, the year I had to do a six-month research project for a full 35 per cent of my final marks. Actual, hands-on research, designing experiments to find out things that were unknown, not just hidden at the back of a textbook. It was brand-new territory for me. Even Mr Hong-Kong-returned found it hard. It was stressful because we couldn’t guarantee we would score the full 35 per cent with the project.

  So we ate a lot. Masala dosas, cream bum, jam bum. It’s basic biology: the brain notes that you are in a stressful situation, which for centuries has meant low availability of food. The brain, which works on glucose, sends you in search of calorie-dense nutrients, namely sweet and fatty stuff.