Partitions: A Novel

by Majmudar, Amit

  He has turned from the crowd when two of the orphans find him. It is the first time they touch his hand.

  “We found a medical tent, Doctor sahib.”

  “There’s an Angrezi doctor there, and two nurses.”

  “I need to see them,” says Masud.

  Rimzim leads the way, a few steps ahead, chest out like a bodyguard. Lucky holds Masud’s hand.

  “Where are the others?” asks Masud.

  “Around,” says Lucky. “Are you going to build a hospital here?”

  “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “We can’t go back to your old hospital, right? It isn’t safe for us there. You will have to build one here, in Pakistan.”

  “This madness will end soon, boys. We will all go back home.”

  Rimzim looks over his shoulder. “But if you go back, Doctor sahib, won’t you have to treat everyone?”

  “Yes. I would.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Yes. Remember yesterday, when you said you wanted to be a doctor?”

  “I remember.”

  “That is what doctors do.”

  “I don’t want to be a doctor, then,” Rimzim says, and waves his hand to dismiss the idea.

  Lucky tugs Masud’s hand. “India has all the hospitals. Pakistan needs hospitals, right? Me and the other boys were thinking, we could help you build one. We could work there. We wouldn’t take a salary, at first. But we would build a separate quarters where we would sleep and live.”

  “I’m not working there if we’re letting Hindus come,” insists Rimzim.

  “We’ll build it in Pakistan. This side of the border.” Lucky looks up at Masud. “I can draw you the plans, if you like. I have them in my head.”

  “I’d like to see them, Lucky.”

  They have brought him to the six large, military-style tents that serve as the center of the camp. A jeep is parked nearby, but it’s uncertain how it got there, as no road seems to lead up to it. People, some seated, some standing, wait in long lines that wrap around the tent corners and intersect and lose coherence, merging with the formless crowds of the camp itself. Lucky kneels and traces a large rectangle in the dirt. Rimzim, for all his declarations, kneels too, interested in the blueprint the other boys have come up with and intending to make corrections to it. He also intends to keep the crowds from treading on their work. “We’ll have it ready when you come back,” Lucky promises.

  Masud nods and approaches the red cross over the main tent. He is gazing out at the line when an English doctor in a pink-flecked white apron shoulders through the flap. He is toweling his hands and forearms, and he stops short on seeing Masud’s black bag and European-style clothes, however filthy.

  “Hello there,” he says. Masud turns. “We weren’t expecting a volunteer. Dr. Alan Rutherford.”

  Masud wipes his dirty right hand on his dirtier pant leg and shakes the hand offered him. He is reminded of his medical student days, his professors, the contemptuous eyerolling of his British classmates whenever he presented cases. The stammer, which had eased around the orphans, pinches his tongue and won’t let go. He remembers the cards in his black bag. Rutherford takes one.

  “‘Dr. Ibrahim Masud,’” he reads, the last syllable dwelled on for an extra second. “‘Pediatrics. Royal College.’ Class of ’31, myself. We don’t have a pediatrician here in the camp. Heaven knows we could use one. But if you need to rest beforehand … Have you come from far?”

  “Out th-there,” says Masud, pointing.

  “Have you worked at any of the other camps yet?”

  “Out there,” Masud repeats. He raises his bag. “I … I work.”

  Rutherford shades his eyes. “Out there? Do you mean the refugee columns?”

  Masud nods.

  “That’s … that’s incredibly brave of you, Dr. Masud, but … but there’s no need to have taken such a risk. If you wish to help, I can set you up here. There’s plenty of work. We’re getting more supplies driven down from Lahore this afternoon.”

  Masud nods again. Rutherford eyes him. He wonders if Masud has been roughed up somehow while out caring for people in the column. Every one of his patients has stories of snatchings and stabbings, and not just at night. Rutherford is a selfless man, well into his second decade in India, for six of those years field surgeon to a Gurkha regiment; but for all his skill shooting a pistol on a range, and a build suited to the army, he is terrified to venture upstream into the kafila. Not without an armed escort, a convoy preferably, men in uniform with rifles over their shoulders. Enough bang and whizz to scatter the mobs. Selfless though his actions are, in his heart the barrier has not come down yet. He isn’t a part of the crowd he treats. He perceives himself as the refugees perceive him: The white British doctor, six foot four, tall enough to see the top of every head in his vicinity. Here to help. Here to suture and dress the crude things these people have done to each other with their daggers and scythes. His compassion is genuine, but so is his remove. His concern for Masud is genuine, too, when he says, “You’re welcome to rest until then.”

  Masud nods as Rutherford waves in his next patient and reenters the tent. I can see the restlessness that underlies Masud’s stare. These are the people who made it across, he is thinking. These are the ones who have already survived. The ones out there, though …

  * * *

  Part of me stays beside Masud and keeps watch, but I have gone from the wind at his ear to a whisper.

  First I whisk north, then northwest. Villages pass under me. The occasional column of smoke dimples inward, and the swirls take the shapes of my thoughts. I make out two boys holding each other: Shankar and Keshav, in a gravel ditch beside the train tracks. I see how Keshav slept, cheek on Shankar’s shoulder, while Shankar shifted endlessly, forcing his panicked eyes shut but getting at best five or ten minutes’ rest at a time. He spent the whole night in this slow suffocation. The image spreads into formless smoke.

  I keep going. At a certain altitude I can sense the earth curve in every direction away from me. During my early wanderings, in those weeks right after I left my feverish cot, I feared I would leave the earth entirely, its gravity not strong enough to hold me in orbit. I feared I would be flung into the darkness that hides behind the brightest daylight. The sky, I realized, was just a partition between the world and an emptiness, an illusion put there to let us go about our work. The blue sky all this time no better than a painted ceiling. I felt the urge, too, to seep out of myself, dilute to nothing, my consciousness a colorless, odorless gas, undetectable.

  I don’t feel that now, though. I have never been so alive to the world, not even when I lived; never so close to the world, not even when I was in it. So I can go this high and dive at will, this time to Ayub’s truck rattling down a country road, a quarter mile from the kafila it tracks. I sit on the cabin and look down. Simran sits close to Aisha, wrists and ankles bound. She doesn’t know her as Aisha, of course. To Simran, she is Kusum, stolen from her family in Sheikupura five days ago. For a time during the night, Simran had her cheek on Aisha’s shoulder, the same way Keshav did on Shankar’s. Only Aisha, too, was sleeping. When she woke up and saw Simran there, she moved her shoulder away, not wanting this intimacy, not wanting the responsibility that came with having protected her. The face with its small, girl features dropped and caught itself. Simran’s eyes struggled open, drugged as though with opium, and she didn’t seem to understand the rejection. Only after two straight hours of soft crying had she been able to sleep at all. She stayed awake until dawn and past dawn, terrified just by the proximity of Ayub sprawled lengthwise at the far end of the flatbed.

  Qasim and Saif had smirked at him when he parked the truck and told them he was going in the back to sleep. He actually paused to speak as he pocketed the keys. “Why are you smiling?”

  “Save a little for us,” said Qasim.

  “I’m going back there,” Ayub shot back, “to protect my investment.” He used the English word. To his ear
, the word made him sound shrewd, self-possessed, cold—above the itch and small heat that agitated men like Qasim and Saif.

  Aisha had sensed that in him perfectly, knowing men as well as she did. Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, she had seen them all, and they were more alike than they thought. She knew how the feeling of power made the sensation of pleasure possible for them. So when she saw Ayub raising Simran off the ground, and the other two approaching, the skinny one biting his thumbnail in uneasy fascination, she knew what to say to Ayub. Two sentences, almost a riddle, in brusque, brash, village-girl Urdu. “Don’t let them bite the apple you mean to sell, Ayub mian. No one’s that hungry.”

  Don’t let them: She implied he was the calculating leader who had to keep the wild other ones in check. By denying Saif and Qasim—and himself—Ayub would exert more power than by forcing Simran. Referring to Simran as an item to be sold made him realize how much more this piece would sell for, intact. None of this was communicated directly. A push from Aisha would have made him push back. Immediately after her comment, Aisha yawned and withdrew—a show of indifference so he wouldn’t think she was trying to work her own will.

  Ayub looked at Aisha and then back at Simran, still not lowering her. One of Simran’s hands shot up to the roots of her hair and back over her chest again, unable to decide on the greater emergency. The pain or the shame.

  Qasim adjusted himself with a finger and spat to the side. “I’m second.”

  Ayub glanced his way in irritation.

  Saif made it worse, hand digging in his kameez pocket. “I have a coin.”

  Ayub turned to Saif and gave a loud shush. Saif’s hand stopped moving, slunk out of the pocket, and hung at his side. Ayub dropped Simran, and her legs buckled as she landed. He shook her clothes one more time to be sure, then threw them on her bowed head of hair. “Get dressed.”

  She got back into her clothes while they watched. Ayub noticed the smell of the exhaust just then and glanced angrily at Qasim. “Why haven’t you turned off the engine yet? It’s a waste of fuel.”

  It had been Ayub, of course, who left it running in the first place. Qasim knew better than to point that out. Ayub pointed to the bed of the truck and told Simran, “Climb on.” She didn’t move but kept glancing at Aisha, who had laid back on her bedding and faced the night sky. A twist of Simran’s ear brought her to her feet, her body wincing toward his hand.

  Ayub followed her onto the truck. Staring up at him, she scrambled away on her heels and hands until her back hit a hard surface. She found herself beside Aisha, on one end of her bedding, the stains on it stiff, rough as scabs. But he came after her only to bind her wrists and ankles. He tied her tighter than he had the other two. When his loops and figure eights were finished, he ran his hand up her soft inner forearm, just once. An indulgence. Aisha saw it and knew what it meant: the girl might last this night out, but not the next.

  * * *

  The blueprint has grown in the dust by the time Masud returns. Small squares crowd inside a spacious rectangle. Children Masud has never seen before, children of the camp, have come to watch. “We’re building a hospital,” Lucky explains to the crowd. Masud arrives during the tour Lucky gives the other children. A stick points to the projected rooms and wings. “This is where the sick people wait. In this room, right next to it, me, Billi, and Rimzim take the patient in and do a full checkup, complete, everything. Our doctor sahib sits here, in the examining room, and we go in and tell him how this next person has a problem with his heart, this next person has a problem keeping his food down, that kind of thing. Then he says, all right, I have to operate. So this room here is where he does his operations. Big operations, the kind they can’t even do in London, that’s what he does here. At night, after we clean up, this is where the assistants eat and sleep. It’s our living quarters. It’s going to have a kitchen, a kabbadi ground, a schoolhouse, everything.”

  Afterward, Masud joins the end of the line outside the medical tent. Children come and go. The coin of his stethoscope bell set on each chest, they listen to their own hearts. The day is so hot he doesn’t have to rub it warm against his palm.

  The sight of the children delighting in the instrument reminds me of Shankar and Keshav playing, in my last days, with my own black bag, my own stethoscope. I had no use for the instruments by then. The twins weren’t old enough to understand, but I sat up one afternoon, brought their faces side by side, put one earpiece in Keshav’s left ear, one in Shankar’s right, and had them listen to my heart. I held my breath so they wouldn’t hear my wet wheeze. They weren’t at an age when they sat still very long, and soon they were both grabbing for the bell. Keshav grabbed the cord and made off with the stethoscope entirely, and Shankar wailed until Sonia picked him up. Keshav also loved putting the bulb of my blood pressure meter in his mouth. I always kept an eye on the pressure column because I was afraid it would snap and spill the poisonous mercury. That was only one of the hundreds of things I worried about on that helpless cot. I wish I had let up worrying and just rejoiced in watching them play. Even the screaming matches had something sweet in them, if only I had been receptive. But I was impatient with life and death alike. There were whole days I longed for silence. There were whole nights I longed for clamor.

  Two hours later, Dr. Rutherford looks up and sees Masud walked in by a nurse. He recognizes him and stands up to shake his hand, but Masud points down and says, “Foot.” He begins to undo his shoelaces.

  “Good God, man, I had no idea you came as a patient. I would have taken you right away. Please. Here. Is this the foot, then?”

  He guides Masud to the examining table and cups his shoe heel. The dust of the road flakes off on his bare palm. I had forgotten about it too, but there it is, that first careless razor cut Masud suffered outside his house. His mind has refused to acknowledge it until now. I didn’t even see him limp. If I think back, though, I should have seen the way he shifted his weight to the other foot whenever he wasn’t walking. The lame dog in his escort always got thrown the largest scrap of roti, tail high and swinging, slack paw held gingerly off the ground.

  The cut’s splayed edges have turned a dusky bluish black. Beyond this, the whole back of his foot glows pink, almost to the shin. It looks like something he might have treated on the road. Medically, I am shocked any infection could have progressed this far in only forty-eight hours, even accounting for the damp, hot shoe. It’s as if his cut stained itself this color by leeching some trace of infection from every wound he treated.

  Rutherford scoots back on his wheeled stool, partly from the shock of the cut, partly from the smell. “This is going to need an aggressive debridement.” He shakes his head. “Fresh dressings, changed twice daily. Penicillin would work wonders. Our field hospitals had it when I served in France. Splendid drug. But there’s no getting any out here.”

  Masud looks down. Out of his bag he takes the empty iodine bottle and the lone shred of gauze.

  “Oh, certainly—disinfectant. I can get you disinfectant. We can clean and dress it for now. Nasty wound there … some of this tissue may well have to be cut out. I’ll get you seen first thing. Our surgeon should be here soon. He was scheduled to be here already, of course, but circumstances held him up where he was, I imagine. Roads can’t be smooth going between here and Rawalpindi.”

  Masud nods as Rutherford gestures his nurse over, and they set to work. It gives me great satisfaction to see Masud’s foot being washed, and by an Englishman at that—that’s always what humble kings are doing to wise Brahmins, in our stories. They always have a basin brought and wash the dust off the wandering holy man’s lotus-pink feet.

  It means even more to me because I know Masud is not finished walking.

  * * *

  I can almost always get a clear read on people. Each mind swims in its skull before me like a fish in a glass bowl. But with Aisha right now—the truck parked again, Saif told to stay back and watch the girls—I can’t see clearly how she feels about Simran. The water i
s murky, the glass frosted.

  Saif is easier to read. He doesn’t want the girls to know he is lowest ranked among the three, that Ayub doesn’t trust him on the hunt. He wants to project power, command, aggression. So he paces back and forth, trying to keep up a show of masculine energy, fists at his sides. Periodically he checks up the road as if there were some specific threat he were stationed here to watch for. He wants to impress them. Simran in particular. The strutting doesn’t last very long. He goes around the side of the truck. They can hear the patter of his urine in the dust. After that, some more strutting. At last he tires of it, squats in the sun, and stares straight ahead. He spits to the side on occasion, waves away a fly if it lands on his ear or lip.

  Simran I can read, too. Naturally she feels close to Aisha. She is not certain what Aisha said the previous night; she was too scared to understand the words said to her or around her. Her refusal to follow Ayub’s commands had not been defiance, just the slack limbs of prey in the jaw. Whatever Aisha said, it had called off the men. Simran had gotten her clothes back. Though by then, of course, it was too late. They had all seen her. I see the intense shame that surges and subsides in her like nausea. She cannot bear to look at Saif, or even to let Saif see her face. The whole time he guards the truck, she keeps her face between her knees and packs herself as deeply into a corner as she can. Uma blocks his view of her from some angles. But not from all. This is how bad she feels from being seen. If she were to be touched.…

  It’s part of what confuses Aisha’s feelings toward Simran: her vulnerability, her hypersensitivity to things Aisha herself scarcely registers. Like the gazes of men. When she first alerted Ayub to Simran walking up the road, she had assumed the girl was detritus, like Uma. Her mouth had gone dry with guilt to see terrified innocence. It wasn’t the thing she had intended to deliver. So she intervened.