Partitions: A Novel (19 page)

I can see the matchhead in detail, the bulb of phosphorus studded russet. The crosshatched friction strip on the edge of the matchbox. The matchbox itself, printed with a playing card, Ace of Hearts. Every pit and white fleck in his fingernails. Three fingers, brought together the same way as when he brings a pinch of roti to his mouth. In those fingers, the pale stick. Descending casually, expertly. Jaggu has been striking them all night, striking them and dropping them and admiring each blaze like a sunrise.

No you don’t. No. You. Don’t.

Physics ordains that I cannot interfere. That these processes are stronger than I am. The passage of matter through space. A scratch unlocking a chemical flare. The slap of kerosene on the nape of a neck, the side of a face.

The can pauses high over Keshav’s head to drip its last. Amar, Hindu brother, defender of the dharma, coreligionist, shakes a few last drops out and tosses it aside.

“Send him home, Jaggu.”

That is my boy.

I gather every bit of me into arms, legs, torso, head. My insubstantial presence grows denser and denser until I am, at last, a substantial absence. A body-shaped uptick in barometric pressure. An effigy of cold air, arm straight out, gripping that matchbox in its fist.

No you don’t.

The match flares and goes out, all in the same motion. I still can’t tell if it was my hand or the match itself. Jaggu holds up the smoking head and drops it. A dud, he decides. He slides out another one. He has plenty left.

At this instant I am half-strength. Half of me is here with Keshav, but half lurches with panic at the thought of Shankar alone and unconscious and starving for oxygen. Keshav isn’t beside him. Neither am I.

He’ll be safe. Masud is coming for him. Focus here.

I blink and shake my head and clutch the matchbox, tight.

Jaggu brings the next match down.

*   *   *

Masud is coming. The dogs found their way back to him, but they are hot and exhilarated, tails restless, tongues out. They make disorderly circuits and shout challenges at trees and shadows. Masud doesn’t like knowing what they did. It makes him feel the dogs are no better than the men, the only difference that they’re on his side. One of the first to catch up with them carries in her teeth the bloody, frayed billfold. She drops it on the road a few feet ahead of him and waits, tail swinging. Masud doesn’t pick it up.

Masud decides his first priority is getting this girl to safety. They will follow the train tracks if need be to Amritsar, or else to the nearest station where he can put her on a bus to her relatives. Maybe at the station he can place her in the care of a decent-looking family. He still has some money in his black bag, sewn by hand into the lining years ago, just in case. More than enough for a fare. Masud, at this point, still thinks he can part with her. He has gone his whole life without a daughter or a wife. He cannot imagine the intensity of what he is about to feel, the love that will free his tongue.

When he sees my son just outside the village, unconscious beside the road, his reflexes take over. Simran watches him fix the stethoscope in his ears; then, because it seems right, she, too, kneels beside Shankar. She lays her hand on his head, lets it run through his sweat-damp hair. He reminds her of her little brother, Jasbir.

Masud’s mouth has fallen open. He hears two things. One he thinks of clinically. A total absence of breath sounds over the left chest. Pneumothorax. Emergency. Move.

Under that alarming silence pulses the gush and whistle-click of Shankar’s heart. It is so unusual, the defect so vanishingly rare, that Masud’s meticulous medical memory has treasured its music for years. He leans over Shankar’s face and nods even as he unwraps the sterile needle and syringe.
I remember you, little one. I have listened to your heart before.

*   *   *

The second match snuffs as it strikes. The third. His friends are watching him. He is getting impatient. He has handled the matches all night and hasn’t had this much trouble. Did they get wet? No, they wouldn’t flare like that if they were wet. He is puzzled. He strikes a fourth match. I keep my hand in place, staring at the stubble on his cheek, the absurd tilak on his forehead. I can imagine the perfunctory slokas, the tugged earlobes, the circular shake of the bell that preceded this expedition.

The ring of men around Keshav shifts a little and breaks. The one named Mangal comes over to see what’s wrong. He has his hand in his pocket; he has a matchbox of his own. This one has a Devi printed on it, Gayatri, riding a tiger. It is a simple line drawing. Her arms hold a discus, a mace, a conch shell. The fourth hand is held flat, a red dot on the palm, blessing.

Run, Keshav! This is your chance!

If only I could tell him there’s an opening behind him he can slip through. It’s such a miraculous device, a voice. I never knew how miraculous when I had one. A radius of disturbance that originated in me and signified something. I don’t have a voice. I open my mouth and jut my face forward, but nothing comes out. Keshav is looking from one man to the other. I lunge as Mangal takes out a match of his own and aligns it to strike. A quick bob of his hand, a practice stroke.

Part of the lawyer’s roof cracks behind the wall. Sparks fountain into the night sky and glide over the treetops, over the wall, over us. The smaller ones blink out while still airborne, shredded feathers of ash. The larger ones arc and float and loop and fall on us, still lit. Keshav stands under them, staring up. I split myself a third time and leap into the sky, trying to intercept the sparks with my bare chest. I snuff them in the transparent silhouette of my absence. I see one coming in from the side, and I divide again. Fainter and fainter each time. I have never spread myself so recklessly before. I start losing control of it. I smear into a dome, hints of faces and elbows and twisted torsos deforming my surface. And this dome starts to swell, rise, spread thinner than dead skin.

The sparks, as they penetrate my chest, swell and brighten like meteors entering an atmosphere.

*   *   *

What Masud has to do now he has done only three times before in his career. It’s an emergency procedure, not for the kind of patients who walked, or were carried, into his clinic. Army medics had more practice with the desperate stab and pull, gunfire close by. Masud performed all three of his needle decompressions on a single day twenty-two years ago, after a small earthquake in southern Gurdaspur. The bodies had been crushed by rubble, and his fingers, feeling for the space between the ribs, had dimpled their chests visibly, every strut and rafter snapped. All three patients (only one had been a child) had died by nightfall of that injury and others. And in Gurdaspur he’d had the right supplies and had been able to leave in a tube.

This child’s injuries are less severe, Masud can see, after a quick slide of his scalpel slits the silk. The boy is drawing long, fierce breaths, the diaphragm still pulling though the mind has gone slack. The bruise covers his side, but the rib cage doesn’t sink or buckle when Masud’s fingertip finds the groove between ribs. The other hand holds the glass syringe clear, its plunger all the way down. He must make sure it doesn’t touch anything. Now he reaches in the bag, and his hand comes up already unscrewing, with a deft thumb, the cap of a new iodine bottle. He pours it over Shankar’s chest, not rationing it. The Krishna blue of his cyanosis darkens further from the spill of iodine. Masud tilts the needle toward Shankar’s collarbone and eases it in just above the heart. It is a risk, he knows—the heart may have grown large, after so many years of the blue disease—but any higher and he risks hitting the vessels under the collarbone. There is only so much room in a chest with a heart as big as Shankar’s, but he is counting on the tension of the air to have shifted the heart slightly to the right. Seeing the needle’s tip slide through the skin, Simran gasps. The wound on her own chest, at almost the same spot, oozes afresh and spots the gauze square Masud has taped there. Shankar lies motionless, not present to experience the pain. There. It’s in. Masud steadies the syringe, steadies his dyed-purple fingertips on the plunger. He draws back.

*   *   *

Now, Keshav, while they aren’t looking, go!

I don’t have a voice. I barely even have the afterimage of a body. Keshav can’t hear me. But when he runs, it feels to me like he has. I sense him sprint through the thin, invisible film that’s left of me, popping me like a bubble. I sink in synchrony with the sparks. They turn to ash flakes. I land without troubling the dust. Amar, Jaggu, and two others run after Keshav, and their feet pound through me. It is all I can do to follow Keshav where his running takes him.

He starts out headed for Shankar, but he shifts direction quickly. The last thing he wants is these men finding his brother. So he cuts between two mud houses and skips over an open gutter, its long, man-made ditch overgrown with tall grasses.

As his brother, unknown to him, starts to breathe a little more easily, Keshav, too, feels a change. He takes in lungfuls of dry night air, and no matter how hard he runs, he doesn’t get short of breath.

Shankar’s shortness of breath seems mysteriously transferred to the men chasing Keshav. Part of me knows it’s really their dozens of bidis a day, and their soft, well-fed bellies, and the fact that they don’t care enough about burning Keshav to chase him very long. Even the kerosene had been only a quarter can, left over from the lawyer’s house, not enough to burn anything but a child. An amusement had presented itself, worth pursuing so long as it was convenient. To sniff the wind and go pouncing on rustles would ruin their night out. I know all this, but I like to imagine Shankar has distributed his suffering to them when, breathless after forty feet, they give up, heads down, hands on their hips. Jaggu, the biggest smoker, gives up first. The others stop running as soon as they see him hang his arms and heave in place. They were looking for an excuse. He bares his teeth, scrapes phlegm from deep in his throat, and spits. “Matches,” he grunts. They walk back to the burning house, where a dance has broken out in the firelight, their buddies, arms high and index fingers up, shrugging their shoulders and singing. Amar snatches up the fuel can he just emptied and drums on it, sharp and loud and hollow, striking it with his wedding band.

*   *   *

I move away from their festivities. I feel so heavy, I check for footprints. I make my way to Shankar. Simran is staring at Masud, who has Shankar in his lap. The syringe full of air and pinkish froth he tossed into the brush, and the spot on Shankar’s chest is dressed. She is thinking about what Masud just said to her, the first words he has spoken—clearly, without the stammer. As if she were a child, or a woman as trustworthy as a child. “We can’t leave him alone.”

Many small things in that comment make Simran feel safe. The use of a
we
that includes her. The addition of another traveler, making her not the only one who clings to this frail old man. There will be someone weaker than she, someone she can take care of, her little brother given back to her. The prospect counteracts the deep-reaching shudder and prickle of neck every time she remembers what happened in the sugarcane field. Every time, and she can’t help but think of it every few minutes, it’s as if Saif’s hand touches her again. The pain from the bite was and is far stronger, but the hand did something worse than hurt. It was the inroad of something animal. The snout of a rooting boar. Nausea lurches inside her.

Masud, of course, means what he says medically. The lung is only partly reexpanded, though Shankar does breathe more easily. The tension was relieved, as he can tell from the subsiding neck veins; but without a tube to drain the chest, the lung could collapse again. He is worried. What he did here, though necessary, was a drastic measure, potentially harmful. As a physician, he wants to see it through. But a stronger bond is already forming. Just the act of cradling Shankar like this—it’s not something Masud has done often, for all his years of practice. His patients either wailed in their mothers’ laps or were old enough to sit on the examining table by themselves. He never had the leisure to cradle one of them.

Shankar stirs. A dream thought makes his brow flinch. He is conscious again, though fast asleep. Masud rocks a little. For the first time, they notice the distant fire of the lawyer’s house and the dancing going on there. Masud looks away. The recovery in his arms takes precedence; he has no time to fear. He has slid a partition around Shankar, Simran, and himself, swift and private as a hospital curtain, and the cruel joys of those cruel men are outside it. Simran, too, feels unafraid. It’s not the dogs who reassure her, though they do maintain their skittish, erratic orbit. It’s Masud himself, gentle and quiet and unshaven. Masud, who weighs perhaps no more than she does.

“Doctor ji,” she says, speaking up for the first time. “My name is Simran. What is your name?”

“Ibrahim.”

Simran, stung, searches Masud’s face and frame and clothes for some corroborative sign—anything that will connect him to Ayub, Qasim, and Saif, or to the monstrous Mussulmaans of Sikh history. She searches a long time and finds nothing but an old man cradling a child.

Another boy crosses the barrier effortlessly, unchecked by the dogs, not one growl. His clothes stick to his body, and he smells of pungent kerosene. The long run hasn’t winded Keshav. He breathes as calmly as Shankar. The sight of the brother, larger in size but otherwise identical, brings everything back to Masud’s keen memory: which books he spread open, and to which illustrations; what Sonia looked like, and how she bore long scars on her arms. He smiles at Keshav, and the first thing out of his mouth is a name.

“Dr. Roshan Jaitly,” he says. “Your father is Dr. Roshan Jaitly.”

*   *   *

The sound of my name strengthens me for their journey. Masud has Shankar in his arms, Simran holds Masud’s black bag and Keshav’s hand. Masud asks Simran where she is bound, and Simran, though part of her feels she has already arrived, says Amritsar. When Masud asks if she has family there, she says nothing, but Masud nods as if she answered, and he promises to put her on a bus. Her answer comes after a few minutes more of walking in silence. “My Guru is there.” No one hears her. She isn’t certain, afterward, that she said it aloud.