“The c-country is to be split,” my father muttered, speaking half to himself, “split between Hindus and M-muslims.”
“Like the mud alley-paths between paddy fields?” I asked. I could imagine the whole land like a quilt, split into innumerable countries. “Will we have our own country? Will Qadir Chacha’s hut be a different country?”
“Eh?” Then he patted my head, “No, no, not q-quite like that. There’s just going to be t-two countries now, I suppose. I wonder what this p-part of the land is going to be.”
“You don’t know?”
“They have asked an Englishman in a g-great British university to d-draw a line on the map,” my father said, appearing close to tears. “If he d-draws the line along the river to the east, then we will b-be in India,” he muttered as he shook his head disconsolately, “but if he draws that l-line along the other river to the west, t-twenty miles away, then we will end up in P-pakistan.”
“The Englishman knows where we should live?” I was incredulous. “How?”
“How d-do I know if this E-Englishman knows anything at all?” he shouted with sudden vehemence and strode off. “Mind you, you are not to go into t-town at all. You are t-to stay home.”
I ran after him. “India or Pakistan—what is the difference?”
My father stopped at the door and slowly turned around. He bent to look me in the eye. “The M-muslims want their own country. They want us g-gone. In other places, Hindus are d-driving away M-muslims. Some people set fire to the c-court building today. No one knows what is g-going to happen. Your m-mother is c-crying. Try not t-to upset her even more.”
“After they have their lands, will the Muslims and Hindus become friends again?”
He looked at me without answering immediately. Transferring his court wig to his left hand, he walked through the door. I noticed a bloodstained bandage across his wrist.
“Stay home,” he said, and left me.
I could feel my brother’s terror. I really needed to go to Kalo Pir and have him explain everything, I decided. My father had no answers that made sense to me.
• • •
Q
ADIR
C
HACHA HAD
not yet returned, though it was well past my bedtime. I dozed off, then sprang up because a light had appeared outside my window. Opening my door, I saw it was the red moon looming over Qadir’s hut, and him crouched by the threshold. I ran across the backyard.
“Burak is gone,” he said. He had named the knock-kneed creature
after the Prophet’s flying horse, and gave it lumps of molasses. He wiped his face, twice, as if that would help. When he felt my palm on his shoulder, he wept openly.
I must see Kalo Pir
, I thought again. The grown-ups at home were either worried or weeping.
“Both sides were shouting and throwing stones,” Qadir muttered. “That’s how it started. They began to break into shops. I was looking for your baba when someone set fire to the gharry. Poor Burak was still harnessed. He started running in fright, really galloping—which I never thought I’d see. One burning wheel was wobbling from the axle,” panted Qadir. “I ran after him, but he was just gone. Oh, where could he be?” He blew his nose. “It is my disgrace that Munsef-babu, your father, came back walking, feet muddy . . . I was waiting in the fields at the edge of town . . . for Burak. Some people torched the courthouse,” Qadir said, expecting me to be shocked.
“When did you come back, Qadir Chacha?” I asked.
“An hour ago. I thought Burak might have wandered back to the stable.” Qadir’s voice was failing. He still held a lump of dry molasses.
“He’ll come back.
He
’s not mad,” I said.
“Everyone else is,” said Qadir, dolefully shaking his head. “There were people with knives and machetes, saying they’d purify this country. It’s going to be free of infidels, Hindus, they said. They want to clean the country—and make it
Pak
.”
“What is
Pak
?” I said
“
Pak?
It means pure,” said Qadir, “They want to make this The Land of the Pure, Pakistan! This will be East Pakistan.”
“There is a West one also?” I wished adults could explain better. “Are those for two different kinds of pure people?”
Qadir Chacha, who was chewing on his beard, said miserably, “One-Eyed Rafiq-ud-din the mullah is now in town, threatening that his people were going to make this land so pure that they would even clean the land of unworthy Muslims. What is happening to us, little Baba?” he said, patting my head absentmindedly, “and Burak is gone . . .”
“Who did One-Eyed Rafiq mean when he said unworthy Muslims?” I insisted.
“He says, anyone not a Sunni Muslim—or those who use holy places to speak to everybody, including Hindus.” Qadir Chacha spat on the ground. “That Rafiq and his followers harm people, then slander them. They burnt the ricks and rice granaries last autumn, then blamed the Hindus. Now they’ve joined Rahmat-ul-lah, the Wahhabi.”
“What’s Wahhabi?” There seemed to be so many groups among grown-ups.
“A Wahhabi is a pure Muslim—he sticks only to the old Arabic teachings, whatever they are—and hates anyone who does not, for they will all go to Jahannam, where all infidels will burn forever, even those who revere tombs of the saints of Islam—everybody except the mullahs and their followers. They were shouting they would confront the pir’s disciple by the river and ask him if he is on
their
side. If he is not . . .” Qadir broke off.
“But Qadir Chacha,” I said, suddenly fearful, “you said that djinns protect Allah’s beloved ones. You said that the pir by the river comforts all human beings, didn’t you?
Didn’t you?”
He was holding me tight to calm me.
“Qadir Chacha, let’s go.”
“No, no, no,” he whispered, “It is so dark!”
“I know the way,” I assured him, adding, “You can ask him about Burak. He’s sure to know.”
“Your father . . . would not like that . . .” Qadir muttered, “. . . and I . . . I forbid it absolutely,” his voice quivering with indecision.
• • •
A
S WE RAN
together under the huge red moon, the trees seemed to move about behind us, but we did not dare look back. Qadir Chacha held my palm in a sweaty grip, until I was unsure whether it was to comfort me or to be comforted. “Burak used to be afraid of the full moon,” he panted beside me.
I rushed on until I was at the wall crusted with dry creepers. A brick dislodged and fell with a clatter, setting off an indignant nightbird, which cackled and swooped above us. I spied the low doorway to the left. Leaving Qadir Chacha, his hands clapped on his ears under the flying cacophony, followed me as I ducked through the courtyard into the mosque’s sanctuary.
Kalo Pir’s candles were unlit, but the cloth that covered the old pir’s grave was iridescent with curling and dying embers. One or two sparks flew up and were lost in the gloom of the chamber.
The djinns must be here
, I thought inside my thrumming head.
A charred odour hung in the air. I stepped out of the door and saw a djinn resting on broken cobbles at the far end of the mosque. Under the smudged red moon, the carapace of its wings appeared folded, one over the other. A metallic gleam rose from its midriff like some upright ornament. I moved closer, careful not to wake the still djinn. Overhead, the bird wheeled in a crazy gyre.
“They burned the mazhar,” panted Qadir, emerging from the sanctuary behind me. “The Wahhabis desecrated the shrine.”
Hands folded over his chest, feet at an impossible angle, eyes
open and opaque, his djellaba caked with dry blood, slashed fingers curled around the impacted blade in his chest, lay Kalo Pir.
• • •
T
HROUGH THE SOILED
shadows below the trees we rushed back, Qadir Chacha and I. The grass was heavy with dew, and the old red moon had set. I emerged through the hedges of wild sheora and dhundul behind our bungalow, surprised to see my father sitting beside piles of clothes and books. I thought he would be angry, but a cleft of uncertainty had worked its way onto his forehead, giving him a puzzled look, devoid of authority.
“Kush . . .” he whispered, as if verifying my presence.
“Yes, Baba,” I said, longing to tell him where I had been and what I had seen, but he appeared distraught and absentminded.
“Kush,” he said again. “Go to your mother. See that she gets everything together, but in just one box.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. The first time in my life I was being sent to my mother, and not a word about my nocturnal adventure: Was she worried too? Sushma must have complained about my absence. And what
everything
needed to be packed into one box? Was I being sent away for my truancy? I entered my mother’s bedroom and smelt its close odour of mourning, and saw a box, open and half-full. All over the floor lay items of clothing, old photos, smaller boxes. On the bed crouched my mother on all fours while Sushma hovered over her, wringing her hands.
“We have an hour, less,” Sushma croaked at me, as if all this were my fault. I glared back at her.
“Why?” I asked my mother. All she did was bury her face in the bedclothes and wail.
“All right, I promise . . .” I began. All this because of a night out without telling her!
What did she care?
Resentment welled in me.
“Son, you need to take a few clothes.” My father had come in and stood behind me.
“Why? Why should I go anywhere?” I burst out.
“None of us thought it would c-come to this,” he said softly.
If I had to leave, I would! Would they send Qadir Chacha away too? Fine—I thought angrily—I would go with him to his village in Bihar which he had told me about: yellow wheatfields, lychee trees, the small hills nearby. I would leave with him if my father did not want me either. I looked Baba squarely in the eye. “I don’t need either of you,” I said. “In two more months I will be eight years old.”
My father blinked. “What do you m-mean?” he muttered, his palms pointing upward. One of them had a scar, long since healed, though he never told me how he had cut himself, no matter how many times I asked.
“Kush,” he said, now kneeling in front of me, face-to-face. “The c-country is broken. There are k-killings everywhere. We have to get to the city, to C-calcutta.” He stopped, tentatively reaching for my shoulder.
“A long way? Across the river?”
“Yes,” he said. “To the west.”
“When will we come back?”
He shook his head in silence.
• • •
I
T RAINED ALL
night. The bullock cart on which we sat crowded together swayed and squelched in the mud. The plaited bamboo
awning above us held in place a piece of tarred canvas, a ragged sari ineffectually draping the back. It was gloomy inside. I could feel the lurch and pull of the wet, muscular beast, wheezing and trundling us over the unfriendly suck of mud below. The rain fell, lulling us under its drone. Ma sat propped with pillows, her back to the wet driver, who had not spoken a word, while Sushma perched beside her, cramped in an angular crouch, snuffling and moaning. Baba and I huddled together where the mattress sloped outside and grew increasingly soggy.
In a trench by the night road, I spied a number of bodies piled over each other. Their stretched limbs looked like firewood, pale and stiff. At the lip of that trench lay a dismembered hand, its index finger stiff and pointing.
I leant out of our cart to see, but Baba pulled me back, roughly for once, drawing the sari closed across the back so Ma would notice nothing. “Hush!” he whispered to me, his hand shaking, his back tense, each time I started to ask him something. He winced everytime he heard the smallest noise, although the dripping rain, the hum of monsoon insects, and the shifting curtains of night hid us as we left our home far behind.
Every couple of hours the bullock would abruptly stop, impervious to the clicking sound the driver made or the blow or two of his switch, while the reek of manure filled our nostrils. Then the beast would choose a green patch and graze, dumb and insistent. The driver sat resigned, quiet as a stork, while the bullock fed. Finally it would urinate copiously, its sulphurous whiff drifting in the wet breeze, and with great reluctance, would pull us out of the placid space and move unhurriedly on, past village after deserted village. If we were fleeing, we were doing so very slowly indeed.
The rain stopped near dawn. When I poked my head out from behind the drying sari curtain, I was greeted by a faint aroma of flowers. Looking up, I saw the last white scattered stars, like jasmine overhead. The bullock stopped yet again, and I waited for the familiar whiff of the beast’s offal. But it simply stood. Then I heard the sound of the moving river. Across that was safety. Ma curled asleep, holding close the small box containing all her jewels.
I stood by our belongings stacked under a peepul tree, its branches heavy with the rains that had swept through the land. A hawk flew high, wheeling in slow circles in the clear sky. I wondered if it could tell the difference between where we were headed—which Baba now called “our country”—from the land we were leaving behind, because someone had drawn a line on a map in a far country where it was day when here it was night.
My mother sat on the only suitcase we had, Sushma beside her on the ground, cross-legged. Baba had gone to the hut at the edge of the river. Fishermen lived there, he told us, who could ferry us across the river.
“Will there be a cart to take us from there?” asked Sushma, querulously. I could see a scowl on my father’s face, and then he looked sideways and said, “Yes, of course.” Mother looked reassured. I realized, for the first time in my life, that he was lying.
My father came back with a brown whip of a man, and between us, we carried everything except Ma’s mattress, swollen to twice its girth in the rain.
The fisherman was taciturn. He said his name was Jadab when Baba asked him. “A Hindu name,” my father muttered, as if comforted.
The boat was just a dugout with a single oar and a ragged sail, its bottom slippery with mud which gave off a fishy stench. Ma
began to complain, but at the sight of the groaning river on which torn branches swept along by the slap and tug of water, she fell silent. Sushma looked with great disapproval at the boat, but kept her own counsel.