Partitions: A Novel

by Majmudar, Amit

  “Have to get this to the goldsmith later this morning.”

  “Who do you use?”

  “I used to use Shah, the Hindu. But he left back in March, when he found out our boys had him first on the list. Joined his brothers in East Africa.”

  “I knew him. He was a real sisterfucking cheat, that Gujju.”

  “They all are. Ours are no better. These days I go to Nasruddin.” He lifts the bag disinterestedly. “I won’t get as much as I did for those boys, though. That was great luck.”

  “I had a lucky night, too. Look at this.”

  Qasim pulls out a fob watch the size of his palm. A chain rustles free and swings, and he cups the chain with his other hand, brings it up, and pours it like water into the hand with the fob. “It still works,” he can’t help but marvel. He has seen delicate things up close only after they have been broken. “They worked on the man with sticks. Not one bone wasn’t broken, I swear. A rich man, bungalow like an Angrez and the Angrezi gold fob, too. I felt around and found this thing in his breast pocket. Think how sturdy it must be.”

  Qasim lets Saif hold it. Saif is jealous. Fake detachment in his voice, raising and lowering the watch on the scale of his hand, he says, “Most of the weight is the gears, on the inside. Not gold. I could take it to Nasruddin, but you wouldn’t get much.”

  Qasim snatches back the prize. “Who told you I wanted to melt it down?”

  “Better to pawn it.”

  Qasim shakes his head. “This is staying in my pocket from now on. I am going to be rich as the fellow I took it from, soon enough. So rich I am going to need this to match my suits. I am through with foraging. This is Pakistan now, Saif. This is ours.”

  “What, you plan to become a diplomat?”

  They are sitting on the terrace of a house looted to the lintels. Their heels tap the wall and bounce and swing, like those of schoolboys. The city is a filthy spread, a table where others finished eating. As if at sunset the people broke a fast and fell on it, knives out.

  The money these days, Qasim explains, is in girls. In girls, he phrases it, the way a businessman might say in rice or in shipping or in gold. They are everywhere, left unattended, needing only to be roped and put in a truck. No fathers, no brothers around, and if present, powerless ones, brainy little Hindus; toss a bloody shirt on the road and they turn and run, it’s as good as a roadblock. Out in the country, he says, it’s a free grab. None of this tugging trinkets off corpses, swollen fingers stubborn in the rings. Certain nawabs are paying three thousand rupees for each piece—Qasim uses the English word, piece—even though they know the supply is high; they want first choice, want to have the girls stood in a row so they can lift and squeeze a breast, thumb the lips up to check the teeth. Many of the girls are torn, marked up, but even the damaged ones are selling. And it’s clean work, just like what they’re doing now. Yesterday Saif was lucky to find those two boys, the smaller one almost exactly what the old widow wanted, but how often did Qasim get him tips like that? These girls are longing for someone to give them houses, chores, masters. They know their own men won’t take them back. Seizing and selling them—it’s a way of returning them to life. “They’ll be thankful.” Qasim grins at Saif and claps the muscled part between the neck and shoulder and squeezes roughly. “And how do you think they’ll thank us, hehn, brother?” Saif grins and lets himself be shaken; he has let that us pass unquestioned. He is sold.

  * * *

  All Masud can think about is his hand. The pages lie crinkled behind him, spoor of a strange beast. His fingers fan and flex, fan and flex. The black bag he holds in his good hand. His attention is all on his soiled one. Don’t let it touch the bag, don’t let it touch his sleeve or pantleg. It may well be a mercy to have this distraction. He has so much else to think about: his slit foot, for example, throbbing in the shoe. The tooth of hunger lodged in his abdomen. His dusting of ashes, his ruined clinic, his having nowhere to go.

  An ox jingles behind him. He passes some coughing and a long, whistled wheeze, coming from behind a pile of bundles. The wheeze deepens echoingly into a rasp and spit. For a moment, he is reminded of a sick ward, and he begins thinking about what he must do here. Not in any willed way. His expression doesn’t change. But I can sense the difference. He walks at a slight distance from the others, again unknowingly. Two steps aside, no more, but visibly an outlier, not entirely part of this kafila. His companions here are farmers, field hands and their families, who have many of them never seen a city. Sometimes he overhears conversations and cannot make out the words. Punjabi, Urdu, Farsi, English, he speaks them all. What sets him apart is their way of speaking, slurred, aspirated, full of contractions and hoarse elisions. The familiar made unfamiliar. Four decades of a pediatric practice haven’t made him fluent in their speech. After all, not many patients came to him from the surrounding countryside. The parents rarely saw doctors themselves so they were even less likely to bring a child in. The healthy children lived and joined them in the fields. The sick ones died.

  As I watch him walk, I watch the walk itself. His gait. The others, too. It reminds me of something my father once said when I was a boy. We were attending my youngest aunt’s wedding. There was twenty-one years’ difference between my father and her. My grandfather had remarried and continued fathering children into his late sixties. My father took us as a formality. This second lineage was never as close—a kind of mirror family with its own stories and cousin-clusters. Even the cuisine was unfamiliar. The patriarch had never had a taste for onion-stuffed naan before the second wife. Quiet politeness partitioned the two branches. It was somehow worse than being at a stranger’s wedding. My siblings and I were a little wary of the stepcousins, who had already divided into their usual teams for cricket. One stepcousin chalked the wickets on a wall, another spun a washerwoman’s bat. So we stuck together, and my father kept up a commentary. This was a treat. I remember the day because he didn’t speak to us often. He told us how a good samosa needed more mirchi and less potato than this, how there were clouds to the east and the good weather might not last through the ceremony. And then he pointed at three men passing the tent.

  “Mians. You can tell just from their walk,” he said, indicating them with his chin. Then he showed us, straightening his back and neck; I had never noticed his natural slouch before. “Like lions.”

  I studied them before they passed, his words showing me what I was seeing. Everything about them took on a different air, and the contrast with my relatives, dough-colored and dough-soft, only confirmed it: they were harder than we were, fiercer, of one mind. Meat-eating warrior stock. No wonder they had come to this land as conquerors, sons of Mahmud of Ghazni and Muhammad of Ghor. They were, for the most part, poorer than we were, but there was something rough and masculine even about their poverty. Our yellow gold rings and wrist chains would not suit them. We Hindus, I thought, glancing at my Ganesha-bellied half uncles—we were henpecked, bookish, slope-shouldered. No wonder our kingdoms fell to such fighters. Fighters they seemed by nature, forced to crank sugarcane juice and push carts by effete civilization. You could tell their true vocation, I thought, from their walk. “Like lions.”

  Compare Masud. Compare the twelve hundred or so Muslims to either side of him in this kafila. People scared for themselves and for their families, no prowess-of-Islam swagger. They were always one extreme or another to my father: they were either a fearless master race or the grandsons of potscrubbers who had converted to ingratiate themselves with some invading sultan. How little we knew each other, though for centuries our homes had shared walls. How little we will learn, now that all we share is a border.

  * * *

  Simran eats for what feels like the first time, finally far enough from home to have an appetite. When the hunger comes, it’s an emergency. Khari biscuits from the kitchen’s steel bin, one handful for the journey, flake her front. A mouthful sticks to the inside of her cheek and stalls on the slope of her throat. She has no water to wash the
m down in this land of five rivers. Still, she licks her ring fingertip to collect the flakes one by one.

  Her goal is Amritsar, but her feet wander. She stops and stares at the tops of trees. Deep trembling breaths. It may be the altitude, but it looks as if she were about to weep. She finds a spiral road, and she walks it on the side of the drop. No rail, only the rare kilometer marker, or a sign in English letters. At one point she is faced with a metal fence and, overhead, thickly bundled, sagging power lines. A sign meets her here, too, a black zigzag. Electricity hums inside some low buildings, generating light for the cities of the region. She looks in without comprehending, like a holy mendicant from a former century. A gatekeeper eyes her as she passes, assuming, from the blood, that she is a cutting beggar, the kind who would bury a cleaver in her own arm and wait by the shoes outside a temple. Yet Simran has no wound to explain the blood and no beggar’s bowl. She moves on, no footprints behind her, no words. Afterward he finds it hard to remember her face.

  A quarter mile on, a bus surprises her. One moment isolation, not one sense reporting to her mind. And then thunder at face level, dust and pebbles swirling around her, pinpricks, the brief smell of heat and petrol. She shields her face with both arms, as if against a blast, and stops walking. Through the dispersing dust, she makes out the whites of three passengers’ eyes, their closed mouths. An older woman with her handbag close to her chest. One man in spectacles, one man in Freedom Fighter homespun. They stare at her through the receding window. The sight of her doesn’t provoke a glance or murmur. They, too, are searching her for signs of the violence done to her. Are her clothes torn? Is her face cut? The blood makes them curious.

  Feeling the inquisition of their looks, she decides she mustn’t show herself this way. When the next vehicle approaches, this one a truck, she has been listening for it, and she slides herself a little down the side of the drop and waits. She likes having the drop so close to her. It comforts her, as the knives do.

  Her hunger shrinks. Her eyes darken and sink into their sockets. The sun reddens her cheeks, an illusion of health. By noon, the ground, hours baking, hurts her feet. She tries to tear what she is wearing into strips to wrap them, but she isn’t strong enough. Then her slowed mind remembers her knives, and she stabs and twists to start a rip. The cloth—its length enough to wrap once and knot, but not enough to wrap twice—is too thin to make a good sole. The long ends of the knots spill forward and tickle her. Within the hour, they have loosened a second time, and are good for one last swipe of sweat before they litter the roadside, tiny bloodstained scarves.

  * * *

  The twins don’t run for long. Keshav could keep going. Shankar can’t. His heart throws itself rhythmically against his throat. Its tip thumps far to the side, almost in line with his armpit, between the two lowest ribs. It makes the fractures pang in synchrony. His heart has ballooned over years of forcing blood through a pinched hose. Lips and palms gray, neck muscles straining to pull each breath, he calls to his brother and squats on the ground. Shankar has noticed this posture helps him, he doesn’t know why; he learned to do it at around the same time he learned to run.

  Keshav knows what has happened, so he doesn’t tell his brother to keep running, even though they are still in sight of the widow’s crow-crowded roof. Instead he runs back and helps him to the shade of a wall, out of the visible street, where Shankar drops into his squat again. Sonia never understood how far inside the defect lay, so she would massage Shankar’s hands when they turned this way, as if to loosen them pink. Keshav does the same. Shankar nods. He still breathes hard. I keep an eye on the street while Keshav closes his hands on Shankar’s closed hands. Prayer within prayer.

  * * *

  Let them have this breather. Dispersal is giving way to convergence. Clear across the city, Saif and Qasim have climbed into their truck. I hear the door shut; the window rolls down and Saif’s elbow appears. They will be heading north. North of them, Simran walks so the afternoon sun is behind her. Over the next two hours, it will burn her neck. Masud, on the Indian side of the border, is coming directly toward her, across dozens of kilometers.

  Masud’s progress will be slow. He has heard a child suffering close by, and the sound, triggering a reflex, halts him. The tiny hairs along his ear rise, sentient antennae. He ventures out of the kafila and parts some branches to reveal a faint, insistent sobbing, where a boy of four or five holds his leg. Masud kneels. The bag’s brass latch clicks open. It has been waiting.

  4

  CONVERGENCE

  The three of them sit hip-to-hip in the cabin of the truck. Ayub, whose cousin in Rawalpindi owns the truck, has promised he will be the only one to drive it. Saif or Qasim or both could sit more comfortably in the cavernous, rattling hold of the truck, but that is where the girls will be bundled. Already it bears a female air, an air of subordination, not a place for men.

  I watch as the truck heads north, driver’s side to passenger window: Ayub, Qasim, Saif. A strange blankness in Ayub as he watches the road, eyes semifocused at a middle distance. Thought and perception almost yogically overcome in the hypnosis of driving. Qasim is irked: he sits in the middle and envies the endless gust Saif faces with narrowed eyes. It was only natural that Qasim take the middle spot, as the connecting friend between Ayub and Saif. But after an hour squeezed here, he decides, they all know each other the same. He plans on pressing Saif to switch at the first stop. Saif, meanwhile, isn’t enjoying the window seat, neither the wind nor the view. His mind is replaying Ayub’s reaction when Qasim introduced Saif as their third man. The almost contemptuous glance at Saif’s unhealthy-looking frame, about as fleshed out as a bicycle’s. Then the meeting of the eyes with Qasim, and Qasim’s quick reassuring nod. Ayub says nothing to welcome Saif, and this rankles too. He doesn’t note how Ayub doesn’t say much to Qasim, either, or how Ayub, surly and friendless, needed Qasim to find him his third. Ayub’s only welcome, before they climbed in, was a breakdown of how the profits will be split: 30 percent to Ayub, 30 percent to Ayub’s cousin whose truck this is, 20 percent each to Qasim and Saif. Qasim seemed to have accepted the arrangement already, so Saif nodded. Though he knows he wasn’t really in a position to haggle, he is angry over the mute docility of his nod. It must have confirmed, he thinks, Ayub’s impression of his weakness. Saif wants to prove himself violent and masculine to Ayub, and he wants Qasim not to regret inviting him in on this. I see this eagerness intensify as we ride north, and it scares me.

  Qasim, still irritated, picks at some dirty adhesive left over from the picture of Gayatri that had been taped to the dash. He scrapes off shreds and rolls them into a tiny ball. Just that week, the picture had been torn off and crushed and thrown out the window. The truck belonged to a rich grain merchant before Ayub’s cousin took possession of it. The cousin wants to get the truck out of the area because he is worried order might be restored any day now, and all that has changed hands might be reclaimed and returned.

  The truck has a Mercedes engine and space to carry ten, maybe fifteen girls. Any more might be hard for three men to herd. The girls are usually docile by the end of the ride and don’t run, Ayub heard, even if you let the chains drop. They simply don’t know where to run; the surroundings paralyze them. But Ayub wants to start his business right and has taken advice from the more seasoned hunter-gatherers in his tribe. What he needs, they have told him, is a “Scheherazade.” So he hired a girl from Qasai Gali, in Rawalpindi, who offers this second service. They stop to pick her up before heading out.

  The Scheherazade’s name is Aisha, but the other girls, as they are boarded, will call her by a Hindu name, Kusum. Her voice confessionally breathless during the whole shuddering ride, Kusum will tell stories of what the girls’ own families will do to them if they dare go home. Hiring her is their main initial expense, other than fuel and rope. Saif and Qasim have to pay in, 40 percent each. Ayub, who is providing the truck, sets these terms and covers the difference. It is too late to argue: Aisha’s madam
is waiting by Ayub’s window, and Aisha’s bedding has thumped into the back of the truck. The madam looks back and holds a finger up to Aisha, which tells her to wait until the counting has finished. When the madam is satisfied, Aisha climbs aboard.

  These are the hours she usually sleeps, and her breathing slows even before Ayub shifts gear. Sleep deprivation switches her instantly into dream sleep. The potholes don’t disturb her, nor do the rougher patches of road. I am happier back here with her than with the men up front, whose minds are colorless, cramped as the cabin they’re sitting in. Aisha fascinates me because she has arrived at the same attitude toward her body as I have toward mine. She is oddly bodiless. The still-darkening bite marks on her right shoulder. The ache between her thighs. Her nipples chafed and gnawed like a nursing mother’s. She is as little aware of them awake as she is when asleep.

  In her dream, she can sense things, but she never glimpses her own body. Her gaze floats free. Other people are pointing at sarees laid out on the sand or sipping water from green coconut shells. A kite maker rubs glass shards on a thick bundle of kite string. A few horses are led past on the shore, children given rides atop them. At some point, as a girl, she must have visited a shore. Now she is revisiting it, disembodied, as if after her own death, blessing all she sees. I can tell she is only observing her own dream—she lost the habit of participating in her waking life, too. How close this is to how I am now. I dwell beside her a while. I stroke the long, wild blanket of her hair, let down six years ago and never tied back up.