by Shobha Rao
By now the sun was beginning to set. The sky glowed with streaks of burnt orange and a pale and luminous green. Jenkins felt a thin breeze from the west though it was still hot. He wiped his face with a handkerchief; he was exhausted, the heat was dizzying. He felt strangely broken by it, and by the day, and by Delhi. He looked around him—at the endless desert sands and the houses made of earth and the thin dusty grasses wheezing in the wind and Abheet Singh walking beside him, his face alert and beautiful against the barren land—and it occurred to him that the vicar was right: he could never return to England. That just the thought of Warwick and the Midlands and his mother and his father and even the pubs and the cricket matches and the afternoon teas had become unbearable for him, that it was this barren land, in the end, that seemed to him the promised one.
Maybe it was because of this thought that Jenkins shuddered, or maybe it was the one that followed: that he would soon have to leave, Pakistan would be born in a month’s time, and what need would they have for him, for any of the British? He thought of the days ahead, and the days upon days that awaited him, and all the concealment of these many long years and he thought in that moment that he could not take another step, that really, there were no steps left to be taken.
Abheet Singh stopped in midstride. “Sir,” he said, “you’re trembling.”
Jenkins looked down at his hands. His baton shook like a divining rod over water. His palms were clammy, cold, and yet his body burned and shook with sorrow; he gripped one arm with the other. “It’s nothing,” he said quickly. “Feeling a bit off, is all.”
Abheet Singh looked from his hands into his eyes. They were within sight of the police station, tucked behind a high gate. The road in front led off toward the marketplace in one direction and the emptiness of the desert in another. The country all around was quiet. But for the two of them it hardly seemed inhabited. Only the sparrows had ventured into the treetops, chirping as the sun set. Abheet Singh looked a long while into Jenkins’s eyes then slowly, almost tenderly, he reached toward him, wrapped his hand around his trembling wrist, and stilled it. The motion was so delicate, so utterly benevolent and sexless, that Jenkins could hardly breathe, and in that moment he thought he might’ve come to know, for the briefest moment, the thing for which he’d always yearned, the thing that was the opposite of his many, many lonely years, the opposite—at this, he closed his eyes—of his concealment.
* * *
When he thought back over the incident he could never decide what had come first: had Abheet Singh released his wrist first or had Jenkins looked away first. Though what he did recall with great clarity was that afterward he’d rushed through the station gates, straight past Iqbal, and disappeared into his office. He’d closed the door—something he’d never before done—and splashed water on his face from the bowl on the washstand. The water was nearly as hot as his skin. He’d then thrown himself into his chair, rose, paced then slumped back into the chair. He could still feel Abheet Singh’s hand on his wrist. The touch had seared, branded itself into his skin. In his recollections, even moments later as he sat at his desk, he felt their pulses pounding against each other’s like the sea against rock. How terrifying and how beautiful. Jenkins took a deep breath. But he must focus, he had no time to waste: he had to write the day’s report, submit it to the head office in the morning. He picked up his pen and was just beginning to write on his decision to impose the curfew when there was a knock on the door.
Jenkins held his voice steady. “Come in.”
Subinspector Iqbal stepped in and smiled mischievously. Did he know about the touch? He saluted Jenkins, with the proper knifelike motion, and waited for him to speak.
“What is it, Subinspector?”
“More trouble, sir. More of the shops have been looted.”
“Who is it this time?” Jenkins sighed.
“The Hindus, of course.” Iqbal said this with lavish seriousness, but Jenkins thought he saw the faintest smile drift across his face. He grimaced; he couldn’t withstand another scandal.
“Don’t just stand there,” Jenkins shouted. “Get Singh and get out there!” Just saying his name sent a shiver through him.
“But sir, the jeep.”
“Forget the jeep. You can’t catch them in a jeep.”
Iqbal hung his head and scooted out miserably. Jenkins sent a telegram to the head office: LOOTING SPREADING. NEED VEHICLE, PERSONNEL. NO CASUALTIES. Then he too headed to the marketplace on foot. It took him twenty minutes to reach it, even half-jogging part of the way. He broke into a full sprint when the smell of fire reached him.
Still it was useless, and far worse than he’d imagined; the curfew had been pointless. The market was razed. The five or six shops around the main square had been torched. Most of the wares had been carried off but the shelves were dragged into the square and burned. Charred bits of wood stuck out of the earth like scarecrows. The stalls too lay collapsed in a heap, no better than rags. Aside from a mangy dog poking around the stalls—sniffing for the fragrant sweetmeats that had tumbled from their displays—the entire square was empty. Where the hell were Iqbal and Abheet Singh? Jenkins heard shouts in the distance, coming from the north side of the market. He rushed toward the clamor of voices, the roar of footsteps. He ran through the maze of streets, turned left at the peepal tree and there, at the end of an alley, was a crowd of villagers, ten deep, gathered around something Jenkins couldn’t see.
“Chal!” he yelled, pushing through the crowd, “Chal!”
They only pressed closer. A hand reached for his baton, another—thick and vehement—gripped his arm. He shook free of it, grabbed his baton, and clubbed his way toward the center.
He saw Iqbal first, at the head of the mob, and then he saw Abheet Singh, on the ground. Blood had already begun seeping into the dirt. His turban had been ripped from his head and lay some distance away, unmoving, as if it too had been wounded. Abheet Singh’s hair had come loose. Jenkins looked at it until his eyes blurred then he slid to the ground. He reached out his hand—it was the earth trembling, wasn’t it—and stroked Abheet Singh’s hair. It was silken, as he’d known it would be, and so dark that he could well imagine diving into its pool at midnight. He knelt lower, gathered fistfuls of it and lifted them to his face, his mouth, swallowing back tears. It was then, as he bent his head into Abheet Singh’s hair, that the smell of sweat and rust and desert sage and all those bodies pressed together made him swoon. He could hardly rise, and only then with Iqbal’s help.
* * *
The day after Abheet Singh’s death Jenkins had filed a full report with the head office. They’d responded two days later by sending additional inspectors to assist in what they had termed a “shoddy and obtuse” investigation. While Jenkins waited for Abheet Singh’s wife the new inspectors and Iqbal were in the field interrogating every villager and shop owner in Rawalpindi. The straw-filled holding cell was now crowded with suspects. The district superintendent, along with the inspectors, had sent a further brittle message to Jenkins: “The circumstances leading to Subinspector Abheet Singh’s death are under review, as is your service with the Imperial Police.”
He read the note again then threw it into the dustbin. He could already see the gray, grimy shores of England.
He took another sip of his tea; he waited. Yes, she’d be easy enough to deal with, he considered, if only she wouldn’t ask too many questions. Well, that was hardly a concern; he’d never heard an Indian woman speak, let alone ask a question. It occurred to him that she might be pretty. That was disconcerting, yes, though improbable. But she had been touched by him, they both had, and there was a fineness to that: being touched by a beautiful man.
He heard footsteps. After a slight shuffling two figures, a young woman and an old man, appeared just outside his door. So she’s brought someone with her, Jenkins sniffed, I might’ve guessed. He nodded for them to enter but the woman gestured to the old man to wait on the bench. It was only after he was seated that she s
tepped into Jenkins’s office. She stood for a moment, slim, wearing a lavender shalwar with a thin white veil pulled over her shoulders and hair. Her skin was pale, shimmering in the yellow light that pushed through the window, and from what Jenkins could see of her downturned face she had a rounded chin and plain features, almost crude, so unlike the rarefied features of her husband.
“Please,” Jenkins gestured, “please sit down.”
She walked to the chair, her eyes still cast down. “Sat Sri Akal,” she whispered.
Jenkins recognized it as a common Sikh greeting. “Yes, indeed.” He cleared his throat. “Well, Mrs. Singh—”
“Yes, I know,” she interrupted in Urdu. “You want to express some condolence, some sadness. Isn’t that so?” She looked up at him, the veil fell away, and Jenkins saw that she was not as plain as he’d imagined. Her eyes were extraordinary, accusing, ablaze in the curtained room.
“He was a good man,” Jenkins said, wanting those eyes to stay on him, to punish him.
She smiled. “You’re better than him.”
“Am I?”
Jenkins didn’t know what she meant but it occurred to him—with a certain horror—that this woman was not grieving. Not at all. That she had none of the weight, none of the blankness of grief. But there was something in her eyes, something more delicate.
“He’d managed to leave the fields,” she began, looking past him. “He was proud of that. He was afraid, after the accident, that he wouldn’t pass the physical.”
“An accident?” Jenkins’s voice faltered. “I never noticed.”
Her eyes darted back to him. “You’re lying. It was obvious. His arm was never the same. He could hardly raise it past his shoulder.” She smiled faintly. “Believe me, I know.”
It was then that Jenkins noticed the slight bruise on the side of her face. He smiled back despite the pain that shot through his spine. “No, not a thing.” He looked beyond her, at the fan, and it seemed to him a murderous thing. A thing that would go on and on, revolving through all of time, slicing through everything that was ever dear to him.
“Cruelty’s a strange thing,” she said after a long moment. “It gets so you actually miss it.”
Her eyes drifted toward the window. It was curtained against the heat, and Jenkins became acutely aware—even though they were behind him—of the tawdriness of these curtains. He felt old. And he felt that some understanding had eluded him; that if life had ever had any nobility it had most certainly, and most perversely, passed him by.
She rose to go, pulling her veil close around her shoulders.
Jenkins wanted to see her out but all he could manage was to rise slightly from his chair.
She turned at the door. “Did he say anything before he died?”
“Your name.”
It was a lie she forgave, it seemed to him, and very nearly expected. Once she’d left he drew the curtain back. He watched the two figures—hers straight and determined, her white veil blowing in the hot desert wind, and the old man’s bent, weakened, as if the land and the woman beside him were too vast, and had stolen his strength—as they walked toward the outskirts of town. And the horizon, already white with midday heat, seemed just another thin cloth that she could, if she chose, pull like a veil across her face.
UNLEASHED
The doorman found me the next morning, a Saturday. Just before he did, I was dreaming. I was dreaming that my little sister, Meena, was shaking me awake. “Wake up,” she was saying. “We’ll be late for school.”
We were both adults in the dream, but what she was saying seemed to have a certain logic to it. “I thought this was summer vacation,” I said.
It was summer in New York, when the doorman found me. I was in the elevator. I suppose I’d been there all night. Or at least, whatever part of the night remained after I got back from the party. Meena and my husband, Vikram, had been there, but I left without telling them. I couldn’t remember much more of the party, only that I felt old. Not older than the other people at the party, just old.
I blinked my eyes open, having lost the last part of my dream, and the doorman—I’d passed him in the lobby for months (Vikram had actually chatted with him once and found out he’d lived in India many years ago)—smiled shyly and said in a perfect British accent, “Nine B, isn’t it?” And though I was embarrassed, and everything Meena had done came back to me in a rush of pain, it felt like a small kindness: the doorman’s brevity, his not saying anything about my being sprawled out on the floor of the elevator, stinking of alcohol, my mouth cottony and rank with stale whiskey. He led me to my door, waited till I found my key, and then stepped aside. “If you need anything else,” he said.
I nodded quickly, not meeting his eyes.
By then my head was swimming, and I felt something coming up my throat. I lurched inside and raced to the bathroom. I had never had more than a glass of wine with dinner, maybe two, but after the party I hailed a taxi back to the apartment, saw the round neon sign for Dive 75, and lost count of the number of whiskey sours. I don’t even know what came out first in the bathroom: bile or tears. I gripped the toilet seat, sobbing, then sat back against the wall and that’s when it came to me, the last part of my dream: “But it’s summer vacation,” I said. And Meena, just like that, just as if she hadn’t slept with my husband, said, “It doesn’t matter, Anju. You have to wake up, anyway.”
* * *
When Meena and I were in elementary school, me in sixth grade and she in third, our family moved to the United States. Our father got a job teaching in Albany, New York. We stood outside our house that first winter, laughing at each snowflake that landed on us. “Look.” Meena giggled, pointing to my head. “You have more dandruff than Dad.” I shook my head free of snowflakes, glanced down at my hands, and realized I could no longer feel them. Or my toes. I’d never known such cold in India, and it had never occurred to me that cold could do such a thing: crawl into you, as a thief into a house, and steal your fingers and then your toes.
* * *
I saw the doorman again the following Monday morning. When I hesitated, he seemed to understand. “I won’t tell him,” he said, and the firmness and melancholy in his voice felt as if someone had pulled me ashore after a long time at sea.
“I don’t know your name.”
“Jenkins.”
I stood there, fussing with the latch on my purse. I wanted to explain to Jenkins about Vikram, how he’d told me he loved me by the boathouse in Central Park, with the springtime leaves unfurling around us like flags, and how, when he’d asked me to marry him, Amma had breathed, “A cardiologist!” and how all that delight so suddenly had gone sour, like curdling milk.
“My husband tells me you lived in India,” I said.
Jenkins smiled. “A long time ago.”
“When?”
“During Partition.”
“But that was forty years ago! You must hardly remember a thing.”
He smiled again, and this time the smile was slow and patient, as if he’d spent years considering that exact statement, and then he said, “On the contrary, my dear, I remember everything.”
* * *
Behind our house in Albany was a creek, and beyond that creek lived the Finleys. They had one son, Sean, who was older than me and Meena. All that first summer after we moved to New York, we played along the creek. We built dams and made paper sailboats and played cowboys and Indians. “You have to be the Indians,” Sean said, “obviously.”
Meena and I looked at each other.
He handed us some sticks. “Here’s some arrows,” he said, holstering a toy pistol in his belt.
“That’s not fair,” Meena said. “How come you get a gun and we only have arrows?”
Sean sighed loudly. “That’s how it was. Don’t you even know your own history?”
“I don’t think we’re those kind of Indians,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter any to me,” Sean said, “you still can’t have the gun.”
One late afternoon, we played cowboys and Indians, and Sean killed Meena when she jumped from behind one tree to the next, and he killed me while I was hiding behind a huckleberry bush. Afterward he walked triumphantly along the perimeter of the yard and the creek and then we all lay down in the tall grass. The leaves of the birch trees that lined our yard swayed in the breeze and the sun dappled us with coins of light. In the air was the scent of honeysuckle and birch sap and wild lavender. We’d been in America for eight months now, and the sky, as I gazed up at it, no longer felt new to me but shone like polished silver. Here, all the dirt and noise and crowds of India were gone, and we could lie on a wide expanse of grass undisturbed, the sky spinning around us blue and empty and feverish with light.
I was nearly asleep when Sean sat up and said, “I know a new game.”
“We have to get home,” I said. The sun had dipped low behind the birch trees, and the creek was a dark, silent ribbon.
“You’ll like it.” He got up and walked to the clump of trees. He stood on the far side of one, where we couldn’t see him.
Meena looked at me. A distant lawn mower sputtered like a weeping animal in the hush of twilight.
“Come on!” he yelled.
Meena got up first. I followed. His pants and underwear were around his ankles. There it hung, a deflated balloon. We stared at it. “Go ahead,” he said. “Put it in your mouth.” We stood there unmoving until he took Meena by the wrist and pushed her onto her knees. Then he grabbed the back of her head and pulled her to him. I thought I might cry but why should I cry when Meena wasn’t? Then, when she was done, I did the same. It felt rubbery, flimsy, thin, like a second tongue, and then it stiffened and my mouth filled with something warm and acrid. Sean pulled away and I scrambled to my feet. Meena wasn’t watching either of us; she was standing by a tree, scraping at its bark. Even from where I was standing I could see that her tiny fingernails were bleeding. I yanked her wrist away and that’s when I heard it again: the lawn mower. It filled the hollow of my head like a rush of water, and I said to it, “Stay with me. Go on and on forever. I’ll be fine, so long as you’re with me.”