They’re gone. They’re really gone. And I am still here. We both are.
I grab at his hand, pull. “Come inside,” I urge him. Tariq nods. But he doesn’t move yet.
“They’ll come back, won’t they?” I ask.
He nods again. It’s nearly dark now.
“Chalo,” I beg, letting go of his hand. I can’t stay out here any longer. I head for corner opposite the one where Sameer disappeared.
He stays still. Why won’t he come? “Hurry up!”
He looks at the knife in his hand, as if he is considering using it some other way. “He’s right.”
I want to scream at him that we must run, but I wait.
“My life is worth nothing now,” he says, thumbing the knife’s edge.
“No!” I snap. “Tariq—”
“I’ve nothing left,” he says. “My plans . . . ”
He stops. Looks at me. “I’m sorry.”
Sorry? I shake my head. I don’t understand.
“Truly,” he says. “For all of it.”
And I wonder what exactly he’s apologizing to me for. Sameer? Or the bomb? Or that day in the kitchen? Or maybe for the train?
Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter now. He saved me. He saved my life. “You are forgiven,” I assure him, mostly to get him moving, to get us to safety.
I extend my hand. He looks at it a moment, his face going soft. But he doesn’t take it. Instead, he walks over to the pile of rubble at the base of the wall. He moves one of the larger chunks of concrete, drops the knife behind it, and then puts the stone back.
He turns. “It served its purpose,” he says. “My brother will be satisfied.”
I have no idea what he means, but his hand is in mine now, and we’re racing toward the edge of the compound, cutting our way up the busy lane to the front gate. Half a dozen policemen and our regular guard stand there. Two of the officers start to move toward us before the guard waves us by with a grunt. We hurry to the rear entrance of the house.
Margaret is upstairs, still playing the vaja. And I realize that she’s been playing the whole time we’ve been in the alley.
Which means she saw nothing.
I tighten my fingers on Tariq’s hand, drag him up the stairs and straight to Margaret before I can convince myself that I’m not doing the right thing.
She stops playing abruptly as we barrel into the room. “You haven’t finished the job behind the compound already, have you?” she asks. Her eyes dart to our hands, still laced together. I release his quickly, let my arms fall to my sides. But something shifts in Margaret.
I shake my head, unsure now of what to say. “Nahi.”
“Then what do you want?” she demands.
“Your father, miss,” I say, adding, “we need him.”
She rises to her feet. “We haven’t been able to reach Daddy yet. He likely hasn’t even reached Delhi. Mother phoned Radcliffe’s residence to leave a message, and sent a wire to the viceroy’s residence—”
I stop listening as I realize he cannot help us. And he cannot help Tariq from so far away, even if we could reach him by phone.
What are we going to do?
I look up at Margaret.
Her eyes tear up. She shakes her head. “He doesn’t even know about the bomb. Not yet. He’d be here otherwise, with us. But Mummy says it’s better that he’s not.”
She’s worried about him. If someone tried to get to him here, they might try to get to him or the others in Delhi. I reach for her hand. She draws it back, crosses her arms, sniffs.
“At any rate, it’s nearly done. The car will be back by dawn. Mummy and I will go. Pakistan gets independence tomorrow, India the next day, and that’s all she wrote. Everybody will leave and everything will settle down and go back to normal.” She’s trying to convince herself. But she doesn’t believe it. Neither do I. It’s only going to get worse. For a while, at least. It will be a long time before anyone can get on a train and feel safe. There is no normal anymore.
But I can’t do anything about that. Only Tariq can I do anything for.
“Madam?” I ask. “Can we see her?”
“Mother is indisposed. This afternoon’s events and Father’s absence resurrected an old habit. I had no idea you could scare up that much whiskey in this country, but Mother managed.” Margaret leans against the bedpost. “She’s useless until morning.”
“She needs help?” I ask, confused.
Tariq mumbles behind me. “She means the mistress is intoxicated.”
“Yes, the mistress is drunk,” Margaret says. “Almost dying has a way of driving her into a bottle. She went through sherry by the pint during the blitz back home. So I’m afraid if there’s something you require, I’m the only one who can answer.”
Finally I speak about what brought me up the stairs.
“We need help, miss,” I say quietly.
She chokes out a laugh. “Help? Oh, you two seem to have done quite—”
I cut her off. “Tariq is in trouble.”
She waits a beat. “What kind of trouble?”
Tariq looks nervously out the front window at the guards, at the street, and I wonder if the shadows and silhouettes moving there look as threatening to him as they do to me. Every one could be Sameer and his friends.
“Please, miss, not so near the windows—”
She makes a face. “What are you on about?”
“If we can see out, then they can see in,” Tariq explains.
Margaret is incredulous. “They?”
“Your father’s office, miss? Please?” I beg, already moving for the door.
“What is going on?” Margaret demands, racing to catch up, reaching the office before me and opening the door. Once we’re inside the room, she switches on the light on the desk, shuts the door behind us. The screens are still closed, the deep veranda blocking much of the view.
“Tell me,” she demands.
“The bomb,” I begin. “Tariq did . . . not.”
She looks annoyed. “Of course he didn’t—” But she stops herself. Her expression changes, washing through a hundred different emotions before she speaks again, eyes wide with surprise and understanding. “My window,” she says. “That’s what you were worried that I saw!” She begins to sound panicked now, takes a step backward. “You brought it here!”
Tariq steps forward, barks out a protest, but then I speak again. I don’t know what makes me so bold. Perhaps it was almost dying twice in one day. Perhaps it is the debt I owe to him now, but something in me wants to make Margaret understand, to see if this one problem can find a way of resolving itself. “He didn’t know,” I say.
“It’s true!” Tariq says. “I intercepted the parcel that was being delivered because I saw it came from a fellow I once knew. Sameer. His name is Sameer. We were at school together for a while, but he’s taken up with some dangerous people. They meant it for your father. I just thought it was some kind of nasty prank, so I threw it in the rubbish before I came back inside. But had I known it was a bomb—”
Margaret’s eyes go wide with shock, then they narrow. “Why should I believe you?” she asks. “You’ve been manipulating and deceiving since you arrived in this house. Scheming, plotting—”
“I believe him,” I say to her.
She looks at me like I’m too simple to understand.
“Miss, this Sameer was here . . . just now.” I tell her quickly what happened in the alley. Her face changes many times as she listens, wearing shock and anger and fury by turns.
“Is this true?” she demands of Tariq when I finish my tale. He nods.
“The knife?” she asks.
“My brother’s. He brought it back from the war in Africa. It’s in the alley now.”
“Bells,” she whispers, sinking into her father’s chair. She presses her lips together, thinking. “These men,” she says. “They will kill you?”
He nods. “They may have already killed Sameer if his friends have repeated what I s
aid in the alley. At any rate, they will come for me eventually.”
“Can’t your family protect you? Friends?”
He hesitates, drops his eyes. “They have gone to Pakistan already. I stayed behind. . . . ”
He doesn’t finish. His family left for Pakistan? But why didn’t he go with them? I look to Margaret—she seems to already know.
“Damned idiot,” she says.
His silence offers agreement.
She exhales. “What do you think I can do for you?” she asks, but she doesn’t sound angry anymore. “Go see the coppers.”
“No!” he shouts. “They’ll never believe me. A Muslim who remains in India while his family has gone on will be seen as one who stayed behind to make trouble. And tomorrow when the award is announced—”
“They will be even less inclined to offer protection to the likes of you,” she says, her voice grim.
We’re silent a moment. In the distance, thunder rumbles again. Rain—the real kind—is coming. Soon.
“We have to wait for Father to call,” Margaret says, her voice strained. “I don’t know what else to do.”
I look around the room, at the piles of parcels and crates that we all spent the day packing, the lids not yet nailed onto the frames of the biggest boxes, and suddenly I have an idea.
CHAPTER 25
* * *
MARGARET
Anu darts across the room to the largest of Father’s crates, the lid resting against the side. She studies the instruments, the stand for the transit, the leather cylinders capped on either end, dozens of maps rolled tightly inside. She crouches down to read the shipping information affixed to the lid. It is printed in English and Hindi, or Punjabi; I still can’t tell them apart.
“This crate,” she says, running a fingertip across the words printed in Father’s careful hand. “When leaving?”
A popping noise from outside makes me jump, but it’s only a motorcycle backfiring. I turn back to Anu. “Tomorrow. First thing.”
She looks up at me, the question in her eyes.
Tariq understands before I do. “You cannot mean to send me to London inside a wooden box!”
Anu straightens. “Only Bombay—”
My mind races, thoughts vaulting over one another, but I force myself to think clearly. It’s mad. But not entirely. Not entirely. “The crate goes overland to Bombay and then is loaded onto a steamer,” I say. “It will be weeks before it reaches England.” Anu is clever with more than just hair oil and dancing.
“I’ll suffocate,” Tariq whispers. But he does not panic, even now. “Or starve.”
“Maybe not. And if what you say about Sameer is true, you’re worse than dead if you stay here,” I tell him.
Tariq hesitates, stares at the box as if he isn’t so certain this is so.
“How many days to Bombay?” I ask him, trying to remember where it is on the map.
“By truck? Four, perhaps five with the roads as they are,” Tariq says. “But the crate might be left sitting somewhere for days before—”
Anu surveys the chasm of the crate, says something to Tariq in Punjabi.
He hesitates, shrugs. “Haan.”
“What did she say?” I ask, jealousy flaring up a tic that they can shut me out.
“She says I only need to be out of Jalandhar,” he replies.
She really is dead clever, this girl. I pick up her line of reasoning. “You can get out of the box at any time after the first day or two and figure out from there what to do. Aren’t there scads of Muslims in Bombay?” I ask him, wondering if word of his betrayal could spread so far. Somehow I doubt it.
He nods. “Yes. Much of the city. I would be safer there.”
We look at the crate again, this time Tariq moving to its edge, peering inside, but he is still careful not to touch it. As if he is afraid. It is large enough for him to fit comfortably. Quite wide, and if he curls up his legs a bit, he should be all right.
“The instruments,” he says, sizing up the crate, perhaps trying to figure out what it will be like to be nailed shut inside it.
“If we leave them in there with you, they’ll end up busted. Or you,” I point out.
I think of him in the box. Nestled into the straw, his delicate features protected against the bumps and jostles of the road. And I think of what Mother said of Anu: “If I could ship home a dozen of her, I would.” I insanely wonder what Mother might do if the crate arrived in London with Tariq as cargo.
Even more insanely, I think that his appearance would surely, finally put to rest any harping on the subject of Alec. It’s almost enough for me to want it to work. But I know it can’t, of course, not to London. But Bombay . . . maybe.
“We move”—Anupreet scoops up the transit case—“to other crates.” She deposits it in another smaller box nearby. “But this . . . ” She lifts out the transit stand and surveys the other crates.
“It’s too long,” I say, looking at the other packing options, finding them all woefully small. “It can stay behind,” I say, feeling almost giddy at the thought of doing this. I take the contraption from Anu, lean it up against the wall. “Anyhow, Father was always a bit stunned that his kit made it here at all. I think he’ll be almost relieved if something takes a walk this time.”
Anu rummages about in the straw, drawing out other items. Tariq, looking dazed, joins in. We work, pulling things carefully from the box. Soon a great heap of equipment litters the floor around us. We dig deeper, silent, listening to the noise from the street outside, the sound of the pack of guards at the gates laughing. Once or twice my hand brushes one of Tariq’s or Anu’s below the surface, swimming through the sea of straw. And it strikes me, oddly, that that they feel familiar. Like they could be the hands of anyone, that their color or beauty or scars are invisible to my own fingers.
When the job is done, I stand, look down into the box and try to imagine it as a cozy place, not just the best alternative to a violent death in the street. I try to picture Tariq sleeping there, like something in a fairy tale—Snow White under her case of glass or Sleeping Beauty in her tower. I try not to think too much about the practicalities like hunger or thirst or what he will do to relieve himself.
Or what he will do if the box really does go missing.
“Food and water,” Anu says, pointing at the box. Again, I’m surprised at her quickness. And then a bit shamefaced at my surprise. How could I have thought so little of her this whole time? I was too busy trying to decide if she was my friend or my rival for Tariq. What a git I’ve been.
“I’ll need a hammer or pry bar to let myself out,” Tariq says, staring in despair at the box.
“Bit of luck that this one doesn’t have a proper lock on it like the trunks,” I offer. Bugger it all, but I’ve almost forgotten now how angry I was with him. The fury and embarrassment I felt a few hours ago seem so far away now. We’re not so different, I reckon. After all, I’m no stranger to wanting things beyond my reach.
Plus, he saved Anu’s life. And, yes, Father’s. He saved my father’s life. Tariq nicked the package from the delivery boy, made sure it didn’t get into Father’s hands, was the only reason the bomb didn’t go off in the house, where it might have injured Mummy or me or one of the staff.
And I realize in a rush that he didn’t have to do any of those things. All he had to do was nothing. It would have been easier for him. And the people who sent the bomb might have rewarded him for it in the bargain, too.
But he did something.
Then I realize with a shock that in protecting us, the little boy was harmed. Tears start at my eyes as I think that he might have seen the parcel, might have thought it was another of my little presents. Nausea washes over me again, but then . . . then! I realize that if he’d opened it properly, it wouldn’t have been his leg that was hurt. More likely he stepped on it climbing over the rubbish heap. The thought doesn’t give me much comfort, but I don’t expect I deserve it, anyhow. I choke back my tears, yank myself toge
ther as Tariq asks, “But even if I make it to Bombay, what then?”
“Father has a reference for you,” I say quickly, turning and going to the desk.
“He has given it to me already,” Tariq says. But something else catches my eye.
The commendation Father received from Mountbatten.
The small brass medal is still in the case on the desktop, the letter on the creamy paper open next to it. I look at the signature on the page, the last viceroy’s regal hand peaking and falling like the jagged outline of the Himalayas.
“This,” I say, picking it up. “We can use this.”
Tariq and Anupreet join me at the desk. “How?” she asks.
“Another letter,” I say, staring at the signature, convincing myself I can make a go of forging it. “Another letter”—I hurry to the crate nearest the window, lift out the Corona typewriter, grab a sheet of paper, and feed it between the drums—“containing a reference and bearing the signature of Mountbatten himself.”
Anupreet is nodding excitedly.
“You can find work, at least,” I say to Tariq, adding, “all they’ll need is a piece of paper with the viceroy’s signature on it, and you’ll have a job quicker than they can say ‘Bob’s your uncle.’ ”
I’m being a bit sunnier about the whole thing than it deserves, but the poor bloke will need something to hope for. Surviving the journey out of the Punjab will be the hard part.
Outside, the noise grows louder and I go to the window.
“What’s happening?” I ask, catching a chorus of voices singing in the distance.
Tariq listens. “Early celebrations for independence.”
Funny, but it doesn’t feel festive. Not like it was in London two years ago when the war ended in Europe. That was a corker, it was. Dancing in the streets, parades, the whole bit. And everybody smiling at everybody else, Trafalgar Square all the way up to Buckingham Palace one solid river of people, all happy for the first time in years.
But I know it won’t be the same out there. There’s a pitch to the celebrations and the singing outside that makes it sound an awful lot like the riots of just the other week. The words of the songs may be different, but the tone is the same. No one is screaming, at least.
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