Partitions: A Novel (18 page)

“What happened?” Ayub snaps.

Aisha dangles a length of limp rope and tosses it toward him. “Which one of you tied her up?” Ayub snatches the rope, wraps his hands with it, and pulls it taut. His body shakes with the frustration, or else with the tension of so many opposing muscles firing at once. “Take her down, Saif!” he bellows at the field. Uma stirs and cowers lower behind her propped-up knees.

Saif is swatting aside the ticklish stalks. He hears his name in the distance and runs harder, but it is still slow going. He goes fastest when his eyes are closed. Simran knows he is after her and has started sobbing as she runs. This is another mistake. Sound is the only way he can target her. He struggles to keep track of her sobbing over the stalks he shakes and the huff of his own panting. She runs with one arm over her downturned face, one hand groping forward, like a woman with acid splashed in her eyes. When his hand smacks her back, the impact feels hollow to him. The hooped barrel of her ribs, empty. She stumbles, both arms out, balance lost. Her body falls in the direction it was just running; the movement is out of her control now. He slams blindly into her, chest to back. It tips her forward. He falls too, landing beyond her, only part of her under him, what seems to be her head under his leg. But the rest of her is free, and she bats his leg aside and scampers back. He lunges. The sugarcane stalks shake and shed. She is still getting away, her kicks startlingly strong. His head snaps away from her, his eyes flinch shut, and his shoulders shrug protectively, defending himself even as he grabs for her. A sudden panic comes over him—what kind of man does it make him if he can’t even subdue this slight girl? Would another man, would Ayub or Qasim, have this much trouble? He snarls aloud, to exhort himself, to make himself feel powerful and savage, and doing so he makes another full-body lunge.

She is at once softer and harder than the pillows his bachelorhood has rutted on all these years. His first excitement isn’t even sexual. He has been a scavenger his whole life. For the first time he has actually run something down, and that is what excites him. Chased it and outrun it and taken it down. One kind of excitement feeds the next. Where are the others? The others are never going to find them this deep in the field. He was running for minutes, minutes—tracing her by sound, his senses aroused, like a real predator. They are all alone here. Only the moonlight penetrates. Quiet. His panting. The tussle of her body against the sun-bleached leaf chaff on the ground—which is also the rolling and straining of her body against his. He feels her slipping. He wonders briefly if she might be feeling lust right now, under a man’s weight for the first time. A body-wide reflex, maybe, surprising her. A cracking and loosening, a flow, maybe, that takes place against her will. What did her
body
know of fear or revulsion? Her body must want things her mind doesn’t allow. It is like that with all girls. So he wants to know. What are the consequences, here, in the middle of a sugarcane field, at night? Strangely enough, it’s curiosity that tugs at her drawstring and snakes his fingers between her legs. At this point, at the start of this, he doesn’t intend to damage the “piece.” Though he has fantasized often enough by now about breaking the seal, sometimes thought about it in the humming truck itself, between Ayub and Qasim, his forearms crossed to conceal his stub erection. He still thinks of Simran as money. He just wants to feel, to know, to be the first man ever to touch her there. And to see if something might take over in her body and make her seek more of the sensation. After all, there is nothing stopping him, he’s hidden on all sides. She’s hardly going to go complain to Ayub.

He feels. Damp but not wet. The mouth pursed. He had not expected so much coarse hair. She is older than he first thought. Her nails sink in his forehead and scratch down. He squinches his eyes and bucks back. One hand stays where it is; the other hand grabs one wrist and then the other and forces them to the ground. Now that she’s secured there, arms lusciously overhead, like a nautch girl pantomiming a snake, he slides off to kneel beside her. Blood trails down his nose and drips on her face. Doesn’t she know how he can punish her? Doesn’t she respect him? She doesn’t respect him. She has seen him humiliated in front of the others. How dare she not fear him? How dare she still struggle? How dare she not plead for mercy? He scrubs at her with the flat of his hand, hard, as if he were rubbing a stain out of wool. Her legs kick wildly at first but then contract to her chest as the pain strikes her silent. He throws his head down and bites the soft flesh of the bosom where he has seen bitemarks on Uma. It is as satisfying as meat. He wishes he could tear off and chew what he has gathered between his teeth. His hand jerks free and out and covers his mouth and nose. He breathes. The scent, at once new and familiar, dizzies him. His clamp on her wrists weakens with it. He must not let this chance go. His eyes close. He is never going to get anything this lovely and young and clean, ever. He is going to go through the rest of his life and never get anything this good. A sudden, biological desperation surges through him.
This is my only chance to have a girl like this.

Her hands have slipped free. She rolls and is on her feet again before his eyes can open, running, one hand clutching her undone drawstring, the other over the depressions of his teeth, ripening blood-vivid in the moonlight, like pomegranate seeds. He follows and breaks through the edge of the sugarcane field onto an unexpected road.

His quarry crouches bawling behind a tall, bony old man dressed in an Englishman’s tatters. He is bent slightly at the waist, turned away from Saif. He holds his palm flat over Simran, as if he wished to stroke her crying but has hesitated. As if he were blessing her. Around them, a phalanx of dogs locks into place, assesses Saif with scowls and faint whistles, and starts up a frenzied barking.

*   *   *

Masud sees the wiry figure against the sugarcane. The man’s shoulders heave, and he holds his arms at a distance from his sides. It’s the blood on his face and forehead that makes Masud wonder if Saif and Simran are a couple, pursued together through the field by some third assailant or a gang of assailants. So he shushes the dogs once, and they go quiet one by one, reluctantly.

Masud turns up his palm and moves it side to side, asking the question,
What?

“She’s mine,” says Saif, pointing. His mind, rapid with adrenaline, assesses the old man as weak and possibly a deaf-mute. But the dogs seem keenly trained to his commands. Saif can’t advance. He has to intimidate. “If you don’t give her up, I’ll bring my friends and find you. You, your dogs, the girl, no one will get away.”

Simran whispers through a throat hoarse with shrieking. “Don’t give me up. They’re going to sell me. Please don’t give me up.
Please
. Your God will bless you. Please.”

Masud shakes his head, scarcely comprehending. Tears blur his eyes as the idea of it comes home. He sees where Simran is holding herself and his face crushes into a grimace. He had deadened himself, as every physician deadens himself, to what the wounds on the refugee women implied; he had not thought about it, never imagined it. Otherwise how could he have ever moved on to the next patient? But here it is at last, the violence in progress, as it is happening. The dozens of female bodies he has treated, each one an aftermath, shake his memory. He tries to speak. “S-s-sell?”

“It’s our business, old man. If not us, someone else. Give her here.”

Masud reaches in his pocket and takes out the fat billfold he saved from his burning house. He steps between the dogs and drops it in the dirt and retreats. His hands join.

Saif stares in awe at the money. There are enough notes there—he can skim hundreds and present the remainder as her purchase price. He smiles. His attention is off Simran. He comes forward and reaches down. He isn’t even thinking about the dogs.

He should be. As soon as he touches the money, Masud’s invisible hold on them breaks. All seven launch at Saif noiselessly. Right hand still clutching the money, but his arms and flanks dangling spry, bony dogs, Saif staggers howling into the sugarcane.

*   *   *

As soon as that howling stops—and it stops as soon as Saif’s throat is low enough to the ground—the whistle of a train replaces it. Masud’s arm covers Simran, who cries harder now that she feels safe. She cries so hard she coughs, coughs so hard she vomits. Not food. Only the dark green bile of an empty stomach. Masud stays beside her. He looks up at the sound of the eastbound train, and his ears twitch back like an alert animal’s. I see him thinking how those tracks could lead them into India, where this girl will be safer. Provided he can get her to a camp there. The whistle stops, replaced by a distant clacking. The tracks are straight ahead.

The border isn’t far. Masud, though wandering upstream in the kafila, has drifted farther east in its current than he knows. Ayub was bringing the truck closer to the border, hoping to catch this kafila at its fullest, after every tributary in the countryside had flowed into it.

Keshav and Shankar aren’t far, either. They are just over the border, passing with the tracks through one of hundreds of small border villages that have sifted, by chance, to one side or another of the line. They have arrived, though they don’t realize it, in India.

I leave Saif in the sugarcane field, Masud and Simran on the road. I disperse into the hot night and collect in front of my boys. I walk backward, facing them. Keshav has his arm over Shankar the same way Masud has his over Simran. It can’t be long now. Everything in medicine says it should have happened hours ago. For him to have lasted until now … It can’t be long.

And it isn’t long. I am with them only minutes when Shankar collapses. He drops face first, leaving empty the curve of Keshav’s arm. When Keshav turns him onto his back, the first thing he sees is his brother’s bleeding nose, and he uses his sleeve to dab at it. Shankar doesn’t respond to his name. He doesn’t respond to a shake of his arm, a hand on his cheek. In the moonlight, Keshav can see the veins on his brother’s neck huge, rounded, fluttering strangely. The biggest one gives a little under his fingertip. He comes back to Shankar’s face, grips it in both hands, speaks to him. The head drops to one side when he lets go. That is when Keshav hears it.

Hare hare Mahadev!

Mahadev: like Shankar, another name for Shiva.

Hare hare Mahadev!

Sixteen Hindu men are burning the house of a Muslim lawyer. The lawyer fled across the border days ago. He left behind one hundred and eight thick leatherbound volumes of jurisprudence and one slimmer but infinite Qur’an. The bonfire has been set up in the courtyard. Some of the men are inside the gate, some are whistling outside, clapping flames into the sky like spooked birds.

Hare hare Mahadev!

“Those are our people, Shankar!” Keshav whispers excitedly. “Those are Hindus! Did you hear? Those are Hindus!”

He has a vision of all these men following him to this spot and carrying Shankar to a police jeep or a bus and driving, fast, to some tall, clean hospital. He leaves his brother’s side and breaks into a run. The burning house shines on his eyes, so lately wet with tears.

*   *   *

Jaggu, Bhupinder, Mangal, Indrajit, Amar, Apu, Hasmukh … I search their minds the way they searched the drawers in that burning house. They found no jewelry. I find no mercy. I know what kind of human beings these are. And Keshav is running toward them. It is a meaningless reflex, I know, but I scoop my arm across his stomach the way I used to when he was small and had just learned to walk and headed recklessly for the stairs. He doesn’t even register it as a protesting wind.

Hare hare Mahadev!

The one named Jaggu grabs him by the collar. It’s the kameez the widow Shanaaz put on him. Keshav is still explaining, pointing behind him to where Shankar lies unconscious. He doesn’t understand what is happening. The others turn from the fire and smile at the child.

“What’s your name, chhote mian?”

“Keshav!”

“What was that? Qasif?”

Keshav shakes his head, afraid to speak. The hold on his collar has tightened, and the cloth cuts into his neck. In the light from the house, I can see Jaggu’s tobacco-ravaged teeth. His paan-pink, clown-lurid lips.

“Where did you come from, Qasif mian?”

Keshav knows something has gone wrong. These are his people, Hindus, he heard them chanting, he can see the tilaks on their foreheads. “But we’re the
same
,” he chokes. “My brother…”

“Where did you come from?”

Keshav points.

“Hasmukh! Say, isn’t that way Pakistan?”

Hasmukh, whose name means
smiling face
, keeps smiling. Amar, whose name means
deathless
, picks up one of the red metal fuel cans lined up along the outer wall of the lawyer’s bungalow. While he unscrews the cap, Jaggu puts his thumb and forefinger to either side of Keshav’s chin.

“Tell me, cute boy, is your home in Pakistan?”

Keshav nods. It is, after all. Or was.

“Then what are you doing in
Hindustan
? This isn’t your country. You know that, right?”

The can bucks and sloshes.

“You know that, right?”

Jaggu lets go of Keshav’s collar and steps away from the splash. Keshav is surrounded by these men now, and he stands trembling in the hot night while the kerosene soaks his hair, his clothes. Amar walks around him clockwise, thorough, making sure the back gets doused, too. The shirt drenches transparent and sticks to his small chest and stomach, rising and falling rapidly. Keshav’s eyes look from man to man. Hindu to fellow Hindu.

Jaggu has brought a matchbox out of his pocket. His thumb slides the matchbox open. His middle finger slides it shut. He tilts the matchbox striking surface up, the match in his other hand angled slant, the dainty pinky lifted clear.

6

SETTLEMENTS

I am nothing if not cold. I am nothing if not air. I am nothing, granted, but I am here.