A Moment Comes

by Jennifer Bradbury

  “Where have you been?” she asks sharply.

  I swallow, attempt a smile but can’t with all the food in my mouth. I keep my lips sealed. Grimace. Nod.

  She descends a few steps as she keeps her eyes locked on mine. But it’s not like before. There is nothing longing or moony about her now. The fire has moved from her cheeks into her eyes. Her chin tilts up so that she looks down the length of her nose at me.

  “You were quite long in returning from the telegraph office,” she accuses. And I begin to understand that she is angry with me. Furious, even.

  “The b-bicycle,” I stammer, “the chain—”

  “And pinching food from the kitchen, I see,” she says, nodding at the bread still in my hand. I look at it as I try to force down the bite in my mouth. And I realize that maybe I should not worry about my plans surviving, but my own survival instead.

  “I missed the meal when I—”

  “Don’t let it happen again,” she says dismissively. “Father wants to see you. He leaves in moments. But he has been waiting for you. After he goes, there are trunks to pack. I think he means to send some as early as the morning.”

  “Tomorrow?” I say, realizing that if their things are going, she will not be far behind.

  Margaret nods. “There’s nothing left for us to do here.” She pauses, takes another step closer. She’s almost as tall as I am. I’d nearly forgotten.

  She waits a moment after that last word before sliding past me for the front door. I watch her go, my last desperate, stupid hope trailing in her wake.

  I stand there in the dim hall a moment, the bread soggy now against my palm, and wonder how I will find Abbu and Ammi in Pakistan. How I will face them, if I can find them at all.

  I shove the naan into my pyjamas with the apple. My appetite is gone. The stairs seem steeper than they did this morning as I climb them. And stupidly, I still wonder where Anu is.

  I find Mr. Darnsley in the study where I left him, wrapping the stand for the transit in a piece of velvet.

  “Finally,” he says without looking up. “I was beginning to worry.”

  “Sorry,” I say. Why is Margaret so angry with me? What did I do wrong? Just an hour or two ago, we were talking. Did she hate the chocolate?

  Mr. Darnsley interrupts my thoughts. “Are you all right, Tariq?”

  I gulp, searching for words. “The young miss said you are leaving,” I manage lamely.

  He leans against the corner of his desk. “The car is waiting downstairs.”

  “Shall I continue packing these for you?”

  “In the crate there,” he says, pointing at the box stationed on the floor. I open the door of the bookcase and begin pulling down the volumes and wedging them into the box. Filling up every inch of space by puzzling the books against one another.

  “What do you think will happen, Tariq?” he asks me, acting like he isn’t in a rush, like there is not a giant car waiting downstairs to drive him away from this place forever.

  Startled by the question, I look up. “Sir?”

  He is staring at one of the few maps remaining unpacked. “Mountbatten secured promises from all sides back in June that whatever the boundary looked like, no one would raise a fuss about it.”

  I had read as much in the papers.

  “Do you think they will keep their word?” he asked.

  The stack of books I’m holding grows heavy. Why does he care what I think? “It is difficult to say, sir.”

  He sighs. We both know it’s going to get worse. He changes the subject.

  “You’ve been a model employee.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I say. The box is nearly half-full now.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of writing you a reference,” he says, reaching for an envelope. “When you arrive in Pakistan, I hope it will prove useful to have some testimonial from a former employer. When you apply at university, for instance.”

  I stare at the simple brown envelope in his hand, the same shade as the paper on the parcel I just buried in the rubbish heap. I almost laugh at it. At the gesture. I should be grateful for the kindness. I should be thankful for his concern. I should be content to have taken my place in a long line of my forebears who have served dutifully at the right hand of the British Raj.

  I should.

  I hesitate. What if I delivered Sameer’s package? If Darnsley can cast me off, if Margaret can throw me over, and all I’ve got to show for all my work and sacrifice is one budhoo letter, then what do I owe them?

  But I take the letter, mutter my thanks, and lay it on the table next to where I’m working.

  “You’ll be running Pakistan in no time,” he says, shaking my hand, collecting his briefcase, and stalking out the door.

  Running. I’ll be running, I think as I hear his footfalls on the stairs.

  I stand there for a while, hating him for the fact that he will return to England. He gets to go. Just like that.

  And I’m trapped here.

  Outside, I hear Mrs. Darnsley and Margaret shouting their good-byes as the car drives away.

  It is over, I realize. He has gone. I’m finished. My bitterness grows as I clean up after him, pack his supplies, his maps. I envy every single piece I place inside every box, because they’re going where I never will.

  CHAPTER 21

  * * *

  ANUPREET

  “I miss him already,” Margaret sighs, looking out the window.

  “It’s barely been an hour,” her mother points out. “And the sooner we get these things packed, the sooner we can join him.” She picks up the wooden box where she stores her jewelry, carries it to the bed, and settles herself on the cover. “Go on, then,” she says to Margaret gently.

  Margaret doesn’t move. “How long do you think it will take my harmonium to get to London?” she asks, catching my eye. I see the mischief in her look and have to dig my fingernail into my palm to keep from laughing.

  Mrs. Darnsley sets her jaw. “There will be no need for that thing in London,” she says. “You’ll have your piano.”

  Margaret keeps her expression solemn—how does she do that? She is, to borrow my favorite of her phrases, winding up her mother. “I’m quite sotted with it, though. Glenn Miller sounds divine on it, and Beethoven’s not bad, either.”

  “Margaret—”

  “Really, Mummy, I could play it for your ladies’ circle. Won’t it be a treat? A nice, musical way to remind everyone of all the important work we’ve been doing abroad—”

  “Go and pack, darling,” Mrs. Darnsley says, smirking. “You can open up a music school when we get back for all I care, so long as we’re home.”

  Margaret rolls her eyes, annoyed her mother won’t play along. “Fine,” she says, backing into the hall. “But I’m dead serious about humping it home with us.”

  “You sound like a common soldier,” her mother scolds without looking up from her earrings and necklaces. “Honestly.”

  Margaret smiles at me, sticks her tongue out at her mother as she clicks her heels together, throws a hand up in salute, and marches off to her room.

  I’ve been helping the ladies pack since this morning. I knew something was coming, but it wasn’t until the car was readied that I realized Mr. Darnsley was leaving. Old Shibani in the kitchen told me it was meant to be a secret, meant to keep the family safer if their comings and goings weren’t known.

  But since then I’ve been too busy packing up their wardrobes to give much thought to what they need to be kept safe from.

  And I’m glad to be busy. When my hands fall still, my mind is given to conjuring up pictures of the insides of train cars . . . of imagining whether my tiny cousins—the little ones who weren’t even old enough yet to go to school—were killed quickly on the train with the rest, or taken, sold, and hurt. It turns my stomach to pray that they are dead, that they are not suffering, but I pray it daily.

  Mrs. Darnsley sits on her bed, carefully wrapping up her earrings and combs in small cotton squ
ares, then tucking them into a velvet roll. “I can’t say I’m sorry to be leaving India,” she says to me. “It never did grow on me as they say it does.”

  It stings to hear her say this. And I wish I had enough words in English to make her understand that she hasn’t seen the real India. Not the one I know. This version of my home has more in common with a python shedding its skin. Ugly. Messy. Mean.

  This isn’t India! I want to scream at her. But it wouldn’t do any good. She’s already made up her mind.

  So I say nothing, folding up a dress I’ve never seen Mrs. Darnsley wear, taking care not to flatten the little ruffles lined up on either side of the buttons. So many clothes, all in wonderful fabrics. Soft cottons and wool so light and smooth I wonder at what the sheep must be like in England. But the colors are sad whites, muted grays, and tans. Strange that a fine lady as wealthy as Mrs. Darnsley seems so afraid of color. And I imagine the garments made over in proper crimsons, purples, and golds.

  I smile as I fold them over themselves carefully, sliding paper so thin between the folds as my mistress has shown me. To prevent wrinkles, she told me.

  “When you’ve finished mine, you can help Margaret,” she says, tucking another bundle into the case. “Though that girl has probably simply crammed everything into her trunks. I think she’s even more eager to leave than I am.”

  She can’t be, I think. Not like her mother. She’ll miss me; I know it. Won’t she?

  And what will happen to me when they’ve gone? Maybe Papaji and Biji will let me go back to school, let me out of the house again since nothing bad has happened to me while I’ve been here.

  “I don’t know when we’ll—” Mrs. Darnsley begins before a sound like thunder cuts her short.

  For a split second my heart lifts at the prospect of rain, of the real monsoon arriving, of a single clap of thunder followed by a flood of water from the heavens.

  But thunder doesn’t shatter glass.

  The windows on the south wall of the room, the ones overlooking the top of the rear wall and the small alley, shatter, the glass dripping inward like the rain I’d almost expected. The mirror on the small vanity table cracks from top to bottom, and the tiny vials and pots of lotions that Mrs. Darnsley uses on her face skitter across the polished surface. One near the edge leaps to the floor, the scent of jasmine flooding the room along with something else.

  Smoke and dust and plaster.

  And then Mrs. Darnsley is screaming.

  Her screams come like an echo, filling the room with noise and fear and surprise. I can’t seem to remember how to move, my bare feet planted in a sea of broken glass. I stare at the floor, waiting to see if my blood appears there in fat drops as it did that afternoon in the shop those months ago.

  I realize that perhaps this is the only reason I know it is a bomb, the only reason I’m not screaming as Mrs. Darnsley is. Somehow my mind recalled the sound of a bomb from that day.

  When no blood appears on the floor, I toss the blouse back into the wardrobe, and then pick my way across the floor to the bed where my mistress sits shaking on the cover.

  “Ma’am!” I say.

  She looks to me, eyes wide, cheeks flushed, hands shaking around a pearl necklace she had been in the middle of stowing when the blast came. She screams again.

  I place a hand on her shoulder. “Are you hurt?”

  “Margaret!” she barks after a silence. I hurry across for the door, picking up a sliver of glass in my toe as I go, Mrs. Darnsley following close behind. We bolt across the hall to Margaret’s room.

  She’s sitting on the floor, whiter than I ever thought she could get, given how pale she is to start with. All her windows are intact. “Was that—?” Margaret asks, looking at her mother.

  Her mother nods, scoops her up in her arms. Hugs her fiercely. “I think so. It certainly sounded like a bomb.”

  I turn, run back across the hall in the direction of where the sound came from. Margaret and her mother are right behind me.

  The little sitting room is showered in glass. We tiptoe across the bits, cluster at one shattered window, and look out into the back alley.

  So much dust still shimmers in the air; I choke with the thickness of it. Through the haze, I see a great chunk of the wall missing. Beyond this hole, the rubbish pile is strewn all over the street. A few stragglers are still running from the site, toward the lines of people crowding either end of the alley, looking to see what caused the noise, if anyone is hurt.

  But only one person is running toward the place where the bomb went off.

  Tariq.

  He rounds the corner of the compound, pushing through the throng and breaking into the alley. He runs toward the hole in the wall, eyes wild. When he reaches it, when he sees, he stops, leans over, clutching at his stomach as if he will be sick. Then he stands, pushes his hair back from his forehead like he’s trying to pull it out, and looks around. He scans the crowds gathered at either side, like he’s looking for someone.

  Then his face pales even more, and I follow his eyes to the pile of clothing near the hole in the wall.

  It stirs. A flash of green . . . a green kurta. The little boy!

  Tariq is running to him—the boy who has been picking about in the rubbish heap since the Darnsleys came to stay.

  The boy Margaret’s been leaving presents for back there since that day her father and Tariq came back from the north. Nahi! Nahi!

  “God in heaven . . . ,” Margaret whispers, grabbing my arm, seeing what I am seeing.

  Tariq scoops the boy into his arms, just in time to hand him to the wailing woman who has appeared in the clearing. The boy’s mother. The child makes no sound, as if he is sleeping, though his leg is a bloody mess.

  “Oh, God,” Margaret wails, making as if she means to run to the stairs and out to the alley.

  “Stop!” her mother screams, catching her with surprising speed, holding her fast with even more surprising strength. “Stop!” she repeats, eyes flashing as she forces her daughter to look at her. “There might be another blast! You can’t go out there!”

  Margaret tries to wrestle away, but who knew how strong her mother was? After a moment Margaret slumps against her. “But the little boy—” She breaks off with a sob.

  The sound of the boy’s mother screaming, crying for a doctor, pulls me back to the window. She and the boy are almost out of my sight, but Tariq stands frozen there, looking wildly around. Like he’s searching for someone in particular.

  What is he doing?

  And then Tariq seems to ask himself the same question. He backs up quickly, hurries back toward the crowd, the crowd that’s already thinning out. He dives into the mass, pushes his way back through, upsetting a man carrying spools of mattress webbing on his head. The coils tumble free, but Tariq doesn’t stop, doesn’t even slow down as he hurries back to the front of the house and out of sight.

  “You saw no one in the alley before?” the sipahi asks me.

  “Nahi,” I tell the policemen. I’m almost sure this one has already asked me his questions. The same questions. They all ask me the same questions. All of us.

  I do not understand.

  I do not understand how one bomb that goes off in an alley behind this house raises such a fuss.

  There are fires and terrifying noises every night now. Markets sacked. Temples burned. Whole trains of people murdered.

  And no one asks questions about any of those.

  None of the officers ask about the child, either. And none can answer my questions about his well-being, even though I persist in asking, tell them repeatedly that my mistress wishes to know how he is.

  They are not concerned for one beggar boy.

  But there are more policemen here now than I’ve ever seen in one place. Their brown uniforms and polished clubs litter the courtyard, fanning around the gates and the street outside the Darnsleys’ home like a small army.

  And the right hand doesn’t seem to know what the left is doing. They all
chase one another around, getting in one another’s way, ask us the same questions over and over again, making a show of how important a matter this is to the police.

  Because apparently it’s the closest anyone’s come to killing one of the men working on the boundary award.

  The officer questioning me now pushes at his pagri, edging back the band, the fine hair at his temple stuck to his skin by sweat.

  He looks at me. They all look at me. They pretend to want to know what I might have seen. But then they all ask the question eventually.

  He points at my scar. “How did that happen?”

  “I was in a shop. A window broke. The glass,” I say.

  He shakes his head as if it is merely an inconvenience. “Pity.”

  I start to move back into the house, back to a bit of work before another of the inspectors can intercept me. But this one is persistent.

  “You saw nothing, then?” he asks.

  I hesitate. What did I see? What made Tariq run toward the blast?

  I shake my head. “Nahi.”

  He lets me go.

  Inside the house, I hurry back up the stairs to Mrs. Darnsley’s room. Shibani and I have already swept up all the broken glass. And now Ma’am is even more eager to finish packing, finish leaving.

  “Good, Anu,” she says when I return. She is warmer toward me now. I don’t know if it has to do with what we’ve been through, or if it’s because of the stuff she’s been drinking since we all came back inside. The dozens of little pots and vials on her dressing table have been packed away, replaced by only one bottle of amber-colored liquid. It’s half-empty now.

  I resume my work at her wardrobe. After folding three dresses and boxing up a hat I’ve never seen her wear, she lights a cigarette and speaks again.

  “We had bombs in London, you know,” she says, pulling at the cigarette, “during the war.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say.

  “Awful time,” she says. “Blackout curtains, the sirens . . . ”

  I do not know what blackout curtains are.