by Braham Singh
Mohan Driver was in no state. Ernst preferred the simmering fart he’d known for almost thirty years to this befuddled version. It got his goat. So did Salim Ali, now all of a sudden tacked to his sleeve and going on and on in a thick Mallu accent that made his instruction incomprehensible. Ernst tried to shake him off and cross the damn road, but the little Mallu was a pit bull that wouldn’t let go. At the same time, he was a Chihuahua shying away from a Hindu refugee camp. Marxist to the core, Salim Ali’s survival instincts were all Muslim.
‘Go home,’ Ernst said. ‘I’ll be fine.’ Releasing Ernst’s sleeve, a reluctant Salim Ali looked relieved .
On his part, Ernst felt light-headed crossing Trombay Road with the Furies playing a bongo on his shoulder. When he got woozy and stumbled on the other side, she surprised him by reaching out to grip his elbow with raw, male strength. Her hands were wet and bloody but he was used to blood by now, and she appeared to have no problem with him dripping cow dung that anyway, is more fuel than shit—ask any Indian. They squeezed through the gully, working past a day’s worth of very slippery, Jhama garbage. She held him in a vice-like grip, insisting he take deep breaths. He found traction on garbage strewn around like organic confetti and they moved forward one step in filth at a time. She let go his elbow when they surfaced for air on the other side. A stroll through Sindhi Camp can change a white man forever.
Two lanes deep inside Sindhi Camp, an open umbrella aimed at them from the nullah that ran along her family’s half of a Nissen hut. The umbrella jiggled a bit and then stood up to collapse with dignity, revealing the dhoti-clad E.M. Forster character scurrying past Mohan Driver’s glare earlier that evening. The man’s left hand was wet from scrubbing his arse with water from the lota. Caught shitting wet-handed in the enemy camp, the slum dweller sought to stare it out, his excrement lying coiled in the nullah. Ernst saw Bhairavi’s eyes blaze back in the dark. She barked some complicated abuse in Marathi that he felt needed checking out with Parvatibai. Having just taken on a Deputy Commissioner of Police, she was back to busting balls and this time she kept at it with no one to stop her—a machine-gun peppering the shitter with invective.
The machine-gun then swivelled to aim at Ernst.
‘You know how people die in refugee camps?’
Staring down the barrel, Ernst concluded there could be no correct answer.
‘Do you?’ she challenged again.
A big man—whiter than he—saved him just in time by emerging from the front door. He showed signs of a rude awakening and held on to a red notebook for support.
‘Shame,’ the girl’s father said. ‘They die of shame.’
16
Mauripur Road
Aayaa Mir, Bhaga Pir.
A wrapped body lay asleep inside just by the door. The dishevelled space next to it—where the father was before his daughter’s spectacular vernacular brought him rushing out. There was torn notepaper around the empty space creating waves on the bed sheet. Ernst saw numbers crawl up and down the strewn notepapers’ lined surface in neat rows going nowhere.
‘My son,’ her father said, and Ernst wondered if the swaddled son too was her colour, or Sindhi-white like his parents. The sleeping form appeared afloat on the sea of crumpled notepaper. The numbers looked familiar. Mohan Driver spent his spare time on them too, when not visiting whores on Foras Road. Clearly, Matka—Bombay’s very own number game—had her old man by the balls.
She explained Ernst to her father, then the cow dung, and the blood. He took off on Sikh truck drivers. Ernst corrected him. The driver was Maratha with a handlebar moustache, straight out of Kolhapur. Her father appeared leery. Ghati at the wheel? Strange he said, because Marathas didn’t drive trucks—Sikhs did—whereas, apparently, nothing strange about a white man covered in shit walking around in a refugee camp with his daughter.
A bucket inside the doorway collected water dripping in from a wet patch on the ceiling. ‘No monsoon as yet, still…’ the man looked at the bucket with an un-Sindhi resignation. It was embarrassing because one expected more of a challenge from so much bulk. If this big, defeated, Sindhi-white man was her father, any genes they shared were lying low and it wasn’t just about the colour.
Ernst laughed.
‘You should’ve seen the leak in my roof.’
‘Your roof leaks?’ He looked at the European.
‘At Purandhar Fort. They interned Germans there during the war. Water would pour on my bunk from the roof when it rained. I asked if they could do something to stop the leak. I was told, “When the monsoon stops, the leak will stop.”’
‘Of course,’ her father said. ‘Very Indian.’
‘They were British.’
All this while, the front door’s left open, and the body on the floor sleeping through the chatter. Homes in Sindhi Camp and across chawls across Bombay came standard with the same furniture he saw inside: folding chairs, the charpoy laden with bedding, two pummelled sofas with frayed doilies, a green Godrej cupboard in the other room. Then the kitchen area, where the Bushane cylinder and gas stove held pride of place. Spotless utensils lined the flaking walls that didn’t give a damn. An equally spotless floor called it quits, not too far from the open, shit-ridden nullah outside bubbling with raw sewage. An inch of cement across the threshold would usually keep the two domains apart. In this case, a raised porch delivered that extra separation and status.
While dismal when looking down from Salim Ali’s balcony, at this angle the front room came into its own. There was a walnut-veneered HMV radiogram on display and a Guru Nanak portrait on the wall. Sindhi Hindus revered just this first of the ten Sikh Gurus. Enough for many Sindhis to have one son keep unshorn hair like a Sikh. The radiogram indicated a past frame of mind upbeat enough to make such a reckless purchase. ‘We’ll beat this,’ it seemed to say. Guru Nanak, his open palm blessing the room, seemed to agree.
The two men sat on a listing string cot with the moonlight casting long shadows. The father appeared to relax.
He was Chabildas, he said. Chabildas Lalwani. ‘Would you like to wash up?’ he asked .
Ernst declined. It was fine. He had to leave soon anyway. Go home; take a proper shower. He looked at her father and smiled. He can’t be my age.
~
Indians believe in churails, who are witches, only worse. Hot nights like these, a breeze would whistle in from the west and people who knew it was the sea granting pre-monsoon favours, would anyway blame this one, specific churail for fucking with them from the haunted house. That Bhoot Bangla, somewhere deep in the jhopadpatti slums cupping Sindhi Camp at its far end.
‘It’s that churail again,’ the father said as a matter of fact, the breeze stirring his white mane. Bhairavi went indoors to wash the goat blood off and make chai. They heard her pump up the pressure in the primus stove, Bushane gas being strictly reserved for special occasions. Her mother was nowhere around, and the body on the floor slept on undisturbed. It would probably take an atom bomb to wake him. Or, the stove exploding as it did every other day on the third or fourth page of the Times of India .
‘How did you get to Bombay, Dada?’ Ernst asked, maybe the first time a European had addressed the man with the correct honorific for a Sindhi patriarch. He looked at Ernst, as if for the first time.
‘It took one evening. Aayaa Mir, Bhaga Pir.’
Ernst leaned in.
‘When Muslims come, wise men run. We ran, so now we are refugees.
‘Me too.’
‘It’s not the same. I know your history. Your Government killed Yehudis and the Germans remained silent. Over here, Muslims killed Hindus while the Government remained silent.’
Ernst nodded his head Indian-style, ceding superiority to the one-sided version of the Partition and never mind the Muslims massacred. Someone should warn the man though. We Jews don’t like sharing victim status.
‘You lost everything?’ he asked Ernst.
‘Yes. You? ’
‘Everything. Even my c
harpoy. But now I have this one.’ He bounced a bit on the knotted jute and Ernst bounced every time the larger frame descended. Bhairavi emerged with two steaming glasses for the bouncing men.
‘You have her.’
‘Her? I have a son.’
If she heard, it didn’t show. He stopped bouncing.
‘Ours was the only haveli, in fact, the only pukka structure in Mauripur Village. Fifteen miles out from Karachi. All the surrounding land was mine. When the British built their air force base in Mauripur, they had to buy the land from me.’
She was behind Ernst now, changed into a salwaar kameez to look like a schoolgirl handing him his chai. Her fingers were dark against his and wet from making tea. Touching them, he thought of Chhote Bhai’s black on her brown and paused again to take in all that glistening, dark flesh sweating all over each other on the Golf Club greens. Chabildas stepped in. Her father, after all, even though moments ago he owned up to only a son. ‘Millions fled, leaving their homes behind,’ Chabildas said. ‘We were just one of many. Be that as it may, the world will never forget the day I left Pakistan.’
Ernst leaned in once more.
‘Eleventh September, Nineteen Forty-Eight. The Father of Pakistan, their Quaid-e-Azam, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, died the same day.’
Chabildas basked in happy thoughts.
‘So much stuff… I hired a truck to carry our household goods to the Kiamari Docks in Karachi. We were booked on the P&O boat to Hong Kong where my business partners were waiting. We couldn’t wait to get there. Start anew.
‘My Alsatians were upset that day. It killed me to leave them behind. They snarled at the Pathan truck driver and his cleaner-boy, forcing them back into the truck. The truck driver was dark for a Pathan.’ Bhairavi came to collect their empty glasses. ‘Her colour,’ he said. ‘I should have heeded the dogs. Now I see his face every time I look at her. My wife was climbing the walls inside. She asked me how I could trust two Muslims. But they looked harmless enough, that truck driver and his little cleaner-boy. ’
Chabildas produced a pencil out of thin air to flick against the red notebook in his hand.
‘Bit late in the day, being Nineteen Forty Eight and already a year since Partition, but by August we were finally ready to leave Pakistan. I had everything, most of my money, the dowry my wife brought, everything I’d adorned her with, everything reduced to so many diamonds in four little pouches lying on my bed.
‘There was rioting and the Karachi Pogrom in full swing since February that year. Hindus were being robbed and killed and all the while we’re thinking it can’t happen to us. Then Hindus start paying mobs to shoot them, instead of slitting their throats in accordance with the Koran. Time to go. We left home dressed like Muslims. My wife wore a burkha and held a Koran wrapped in green cloth. Other than the Pathan driver and his cleaner-boy, no Muslim could have known we were Hindus. The Pathan’s truck went in front and we followed in the family car. A Packard Clipper. Ten thousand dollars. Those days.’
Chabildas coughed. He turned to ask her for some water, leaving Ernst with a one-eyed Fiat stuck in his craw.
The drive down Mauripur Road was relatively uneventful, even though dead bodies lay strewn around. Handcarts would come to carry away the corpses. Regardless, the Packard was making good time and the docks still forty minutes away. ‘Then the bhenchod railway signal goes down on Lyari Bridge,’ Chabildas said, stunning Ernst with the choice abuse out of nowhere.
Once on Karachi’s Lyari Bridge, it appeared Chabildas had enough—with the story, with being the gracious patriarch, with Ernst, Pakistan, the whole damned world. His earlier bonhomie began losing air by the second. The family story stalled and sputtered to a halt behind the family’s Packard, waiting at the railway crossing while a Mujahir mob gathered. They didn’t look happy—Muslims who fled India to become refugees in their very own Islamic Republic. There was no sign of the truck carrying the family’s stuff as the mob closed in. But the dark-skinned Pathan truck driver was there, leading the mob, pointing to the Packard, his cherubic little cleaner tugging at the Pathan’s salwaar and jumping up and down in excitement.
~
‘I’ll take your leave now,’ Chabildas said, struggling to get up. The girl took his elbow.
‘What happened to the diamonds?’
‘I put them in a hole carved with my knife in that Koran. Put the damn book to some use. At least the diamonds made it here.’
‘Who didn’t make it?’
Chabildas looked at him as if digesting something distasteful. Could be Teutonic persistence. The man didn’t bother to reply and shrugging Bhairavi’s hand away, he creaked up the porch. Once on top, he rallied. Straightening his back, Chabildas cast off a decade the way he dismissed his daughter’s assistance. His tone changed as he spoke down to Ernst—the language gone coarse. That first bhenchod had set him free. He waved the red book like a Sindhi Mao.
‘You want to know who didn’t make it? Look around this refugee camp. See anyone who did?’
Chabildas lowered his little red book.
‘Did you know Jinnah’s airplane landed at the old RAF airbase behind my house when he flew into Karachi to die? The army ambulance went past our haveli with sirens blaring while we were getting ready to leave for Hong Kong.
‘Then, we find the fucker’s ambulance stalled at the Lyari Bridge railway crossing. That’s why our car couldn’t move even after the train had passed. We saw the ambulance back doors wide open for air. The Father of their bhenchod nation was inside on a stretcher, lying still. Two women beside him worked to keep the flies off their Quaid’s face, mouth, eyes, lips, everywhere. One was an English nurse, using a piece of cardboard to fan the flies away.’
Chabildas peered at Ernst, as if to see if there were any flies around him. Bending forward, he grinned.
‘Want to know the best part?’ Adrenalin flared in those eyes and Ernst was now able to see Mauripur’s zamindar clearly. The Mauripur landlord: owning so much of the surrounding acreage that the British had to come to him for their airbase. Chabildas finally looked the part.
‘We saw the ambulance driver staring at a dry dipstick he had just pulled out from the petrol tank. The circumcised fucks put the Father of their nation in an ambulance without petrol! Mohammed Ali Jinnah died in front of us and the rest of the bhenchod, sisterfucking refugees he and that fuck Gandhi went created.’
Chabildas was quiet, lost in staring Pakistan down.
‘Mauripur Road,’ he said. ‘It ate Jinnah, then it ate me.’
And just like that, he went inside and to his bedding on the floor without bothering to shut the door. Knees creaked, knuckles cracked, and lying down next to his boy, Chabildas let out a healthy fart. Without so much as a fuck-off, he turned his back and vanished inside the thin bed sheet, leaving his unmarried daughter in the safe hands of a gora his own age.
~
‘What just happened?’ Ernst asked.
‘His sugar gets the better of him late evenings. Besides, there’s a certain protocol to the Partition. What happened, who got killed, who got raped, where’s the need to ask? What happened, happened. There’s nothing you can do about it.’
‘Who got raped?’
‘Salim Ali is right. You’re the type who doesn’t let go. That day in Karachi, things happened to my parents between Lyari Bridge and Chinna Creek. Dada was taking his wife to Hong Kong. Instead, they ended up here.’ She looked at her sleeping father. ‘He wanted his firstborn to be a son. After Mauripur Road, he had me instead. Not just the wrong sex, but wrong colour. Maybe he should’ve listened to my mother when she was climbing the walls that day, asking him not to trust the Pathan truck driver and his cleaner-boy. Now whenever he looks at me, he sees the dark-skinned Pathan truck driver. You know, I’d love to see my mother do that again—climb walls. She doesn’t do wall-climbing anymore. She doesn’t do much of anything anymore. Just smiles. All day, she just smiles.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The Partition did strange things to its survivors. It did something to her on Mauripur Road, or maybe it was the Pathan truck driver and the Mujahir mob. Don’t ask. Never ask what happened with her, or how I was born. Ask about my younger brother instead. The one conceived here. Born here, and pure. He, we can discuss. ’
Maya—she who feeds our illusions—must have felt some pity for Ernst, because she went nudged Bhairavi’s brother, who shifted in his sleep. He tossed around a bit, and the bed sheet fell off his face to reveal flowing hair and creamy-white skin. It partially covered his head like a sari, and the beauty of the boy was quite breathtaking.
‘He is a poet,’ Ernst said, nodding towards Kirti, the caddie-boy sleeping like a baby, and she didn’t ask how he knew.
‘What happened to the diamonds?’ Ernst asked.
‘Matka.’
Ernst saw the numbers around the sleeping boy, clambering over each other, trying to win back these four diamond pouches. She pointed towards the Mian Building, where a shadowy figure in granite stood watching from the second floor balcony next to Salim Ali’s flat. Made sense. A slumlord would run all the gambling on his turf, not just cricket matches. Matka was the big one. Bombay’s number game; played mainly by those who couldn’t afford it.
‘The diamonds. They paid for that building,’ she said. ‘And now I’ve to go run, do some chores.’ With that, she walked off, leaving him standing on the mud path outside her home, just like her father did minutes ago. As she weaved in and out of the shadows, he wanted to shout and ask whether she was headed for the Mian Building. Really? You’re going to him after what he did to your own father? And to Arjun?
He of course said fuck-all, but he did will her to stop. So she did, and turning her head sideways, brushed something off her shoulder before slipping into the shadow cast by the Mian Building.