Partitions: A Novel (3 page)

Masud is an innocent. He has seen these people, Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, only as parents worried about their suffering children. Vulnerability, compassion, devastation. They have waited to see him shoulder to shoulder, drawn to his name from nearby villages. The children from the villages are always far gone before they get to him, their abscesses the size of his fist, diphtheria swelling their necks like a sounding toad’s. He has always seen the parents mixed democratically along the overcrowded clinic corridors, backs chalked with whitewash where they sat leaning against the walls, stroking the meek, sleepless heads in their laps.

A turn of his head, then his whole body, shows him the extent of what has happened overnight. His block is not the only one burning. The city is bleeding smoke into the sky. It’s taken the smell of smoke to prove to him he isn’t Ibrahim Masud to anyone but himself now. His profession, too, means nothing.
Muslim
: That’s suddenly the defining thing about him. The only detail, everything around it effaced. When did this happen? The official line is that he can stay if he wants or leave for Pakistan. His choice—stay here in India or shift west. Just over there. Like crossing the aisle on a bus.

Masud hurries inside, skipping once from the pain in his foot. The smoke stings his eyes. His cough sounds at different points in the haze. Pants, shirt, money, glasses, shoes. These are to be expected. But he also takes his black doctor’s bag. As though he could let the house burn but must not be late to work. He will go to the clinic because the clinic is the only place he feels safe. It feels protected from further suffering because of the suffering already there. Violence would not trespass on the dominion of illness.

His bicycle seat and pedals fit themselves as always to his body, and he cycles, his speed no different than on any other day, down his usual route. The only difference is that no one is out, and broken glass and smoking trash heaps litter the street. His pulse has just gone calm, given this pacifier of familiarity, when he rounds a corner to find vultures. At least three dozen of them crowd the street and rooftops. At regular intervals down the street, they pose atop the streetlamps the British put up fifteen years earlier. Some groom themselves, others meditate. The death here is old. This convocation is thick as seagulls along a shore.

A dog trots past and weaves among the bodies as though to show him a way through. One shoe on the ground, one on a pedal, Masud looks back, around the corner, wondering about the smoking heaps he passed. He gets off and walks the bike. His progress is slow up a crooked runnel of limbs and wings. The chain clicks. He keeps his eyes on the passage between the bodies, not the bodies themselves. The vultures poke, shuffle to a more suitable angle, and poke. He thumbs his bell. They make way, a fluster of wings, a reluctant hop. He thumbs the bell twice more, turning the handlebars, stepping carefully. The road was never so long. It takes whole minutes of walking this way before he can get back on and pedal. He stands on the pedals because everything feels uphill now. At last, he stops before his clinic. He gets off the bike and holds it a while, hand on the seat, looking. Finally his hand slides to his side, and the bike tips away from him. He lets it fall. The rear wheel turns slowly in the air.

*   *   *

This is the clinic where, years earlier, we had traveled with the boys. Dr. Ibrahim Masud had a reputation that had traveled as far east as Delhi and as far west as our own city. Sonia’s midwife, Haleema bibi, who had over several visits fallen into the role of grandmother and counselor, spoke of his knowledge with the same voice such women use when speaking of their superstitions. He alone, she declared, running her ancient hand over Shankar’s head, he alone would
know
.

I had heard of him from my own father, years ago. In his final year in London, my father had been introduced to this young Punjabi who was just starting his studies. Masud was, at that time, only seventeen. My father had expected to take him for a fitting at the nearest tailor’s and help him find Indian food; to warn him which instructors would be hostile to him, which ones indifferent; to speak their warm home language after a long day of anatomy Latin.

Yet Ibrahim needed no companionship and felt, it seemed, no homesickness at all. He had gotten the year’s textbooks while still in India and was able to recite them rocking back and forth, as religious students did the Qur’an. A recording, impossible to converse with. The chapter on chronic pulmonary phthisis from Eustace Smith’s
On the Wasting Diseases of Infants and Children
tumbled out fluently. Ibrahim’s own name, though, came out “Ib ib ibbbbb,” like uncontrollable hiccups.

Years later, my father came across Masud’s study of plague deaths in the Amritsar and Kasur districts, published in the
Indian Medical Archives
. It was the writing my father would have expected of him: meticulous accounting, like a census taker’s, but no interpretation, no commentary. Data without an idea, more tables than words.

I bring it before my vanished eyes and read. This is how Masud’s mind worked. Something verbal, perceptual, emotional was missing. For all that, his mind contained his field. The two best-known pediatricians in Lahore shook their heads over Shankar and pointed us east.

*   *   *

The boys slept well on the train. Our arms and the compartment embedded rocking motion inside rocking motion. We took the same Amritsar-bound train, at the same hour, that Sonia and the boys would try to take years later. They would be separated from their mother only four compartments over.

At one point, the boys woke and started crying. It wasn’t that one woke up the other. Rather both boys threw out their arms as if dropped from a height and couldn’t be consoled for some minutes. Finally the breast calmed Keshav, who drank his fill and drowsed with his mouth in place. Sonia and I traded babies so she could try the same with Shankar, who sucked only a few seconds, burrowed toward her, and fell asleep. I wonder if the moment they woke was the moment we crossed the as-yet undrawn border between Pakistan and India. Did they sense something seismic there, a future rift in the earth, the way animals get skittish before a coming earthquake? Did they sense the fault line?

*   *   *

I can still picture Dr. Masud warming the cup of his stethoscope in his hand as he stroked my son’s head. He had trouble speaking, it was true, but only to adults. Around the children, his stammer eased. Sentences, short ones, came out whole, two sometimes in succession. And so the child became an intermediary through whom he could communicate to the parents, even if the child were Shankar’s age. He spoke facing Shankar, addressed his questions as if directly to the infant in my arms, and I answered—how often his skin went blue, whether he took small feedings frequently or none at all, whether his twin had any such troubles. When he brought up the earpieces, I noticed the gentle fringe of hairs along his ears. He listened, using the bell and the flat, to Shankar’s chest and back. My boy propped in my lap, with the blankets and clothes undone, I realized anew how tiny he was. Even the child-sized stethoscope, its bell no bigger than a coin, seemed large against his ribs. Sonia must have seen him bare like this every day when soaping, rinsing, drying him, a droplet of oil in the palm enough to rub him down. I closed my eyes and felt relieved, when his examiner sat back, to wrap his starvation-thin body.

“Your papa is a doctor, hm?” Masud said.

I nodded.

He looked at Sonia and raised a finger to tell her to wait there with Keshav. Then he led me, Shankar in my arms, into his personal office and said in English, pointing at his heart, “Blue disease.” He tilted books down from a wall of them, books so thick the highest ones had to be caught on the other palm.

Diagrams of the heart and great vessels showed the red aorta curving through the chest and sprouting branches, and the pulmonary artery, painted blue, splitting in half. He angled his fist against his chest and began to explain, the fingers of one hand splaying, the fist opening and closing. His speech became fluent as he quoted the texts laid out before me. I nodded, but I was only pretending to understand, the way I used to as a boy beside my mathematics tutor—so much passion, so much desire to communicate, that I felt ashamed it should be wasted. I wanted to reward the trouble taken over me.

I understand it now, of course. I can see inside Shankar’s chest, past the three intensely painful broken ribs. I see the narrowed corridor through which his blood must pass on the way to his lungs, and the tiny new vessels his heart has desperately let down, like banyan shoots, to get the blood where it has to go. I lay open the book of his chest.

Back then, in spite of my own medical training, I understood only that something deep and unreachable in my son was flawed. I am not sure if Masud had finished speaking when I asked, “Is he going to live?”

Masud did what he did whenever the answer was no. He showed the backs of his hands, as if in namaaz, and looked at the sky. In that moment, when he referred me to heaven because there was no hope on earth, the bargain was made. In my heart, without the formality of prayer or the striking of a temple bell, I offered all I had. What was surrendered would be collected, and what was granted would be distributed, very slowly, over the next year. But at that moment, imperceptibly, my son began to thrive, and I let in my sickness unto death.

*   *   *

Masud’s hands are now crossed over his mouth. Broken glassware, forceps, two steel basins, and several boiled-sterile scalpels clutter the stone walk. They have been thrown from the room upstairs where he lances abscesses and extracts splinters. He limps inside, his left shoe soggy with blood from the razor cut. It doesn’t occur to him to check if the people who did this have left or not. On his way upstairs, he passes a sink and mirror and sees shreds of shaving cream still bearding one cheek. An intense flush goes over his face and neck. The world has gone to havoc, but his person must not surrender to it. The faucets still work. Carefully, in the ruins of his clinic, he tries to finish his interrupted shave. A scalpel off the floor serves as razor, not a kind edge to use. Two fat drops of blood spot the sink. He stops and splashes off the shaving cream. So his face remains divided, one side clean-shaven, shadow on the other.

Upstairs, a tall steel cabinet’s linens and towels have been scooped onto the floor and kicked about—no other quick way to vandalize towels. A crowbar threads the handles, paint scraped bright from the rough force-through. Inside that cabinet, a muffled voice.

“33 Firoza Bagh,” it sobs. “33 Firoza Bagh, just past the Ganesh temple … please let me out.”

The address is Masud’s own. He recognizes, after a moment, the voice of Gul Singh, his errand runner and gatekeeper. He draws out the crowbar. Gul Singh has been stuffed into the bottom shelf, half his size; his body, once it writhes onto the floor, seems to expand. “I’ll tell you, my brothers, I’ll tell you where…” His face turns up to see Masud through eyes nearly swollen shut. He stops speaking and hangs his head.

Masud kneels. Gul Singh raises his head.

“I didn’t tell them, Doctor sahib. I swear.”

He is telling the truth. The proof colors his cheek and eyes black-purple. Locked in the cabinet, he grew scared they would set fire to the clinic—so he gave up the address, but after they left. He is ashamed nonetheless, and Masud cannot bring him to his feet.

“You have to go,” moans Gul Singh. “This city isn’t safe for you.”

Masud gestures at the room. “This? This?”

Gul Singh explains how it is the same all over the city, every Muslim storefront a blown-in cavity of ash, flanked by intact Hindu or Sikh shops. Small photographs of Sikh women mutilated in Rawalpindi pass from hand to hand. Their naked backs or foreheads have been scrawled upon like the walls of a demolished gurdwara:
Aslam Khan ki biwi.
“Wife” of Aslam Khan. The group that came through looking for the rich Mussulmaan doctor spared Gul Singh because of his kes and kara, but loyal silence earned him fists to the face. He knew two of the boys—Sukhdev Kang’s sons, though they didn’t admit to knowing him. They are pious sons of a pious father, and, for all his personal loyalty to Dr. Masud, there is a part of Gul Singh, too, that believes what is happening is necessary. Some killing must be done. It is a form of communication, the only kind that can cross the partitions between this country and its neighbor, between this world and the next. Their enemies must hear the deaths and know fear; their dead must hear the deaths and know rest.
This Mussulmaan, this one, is a good man
, thinks Gul Singh—this
one
. With his arms around the doctor sahib’s bony knees, he begs him to leave the city.

Outside, Masud’s bicycle is being tilted upright by three children. One gets on the ledge behind the pedaller, but the smallest child needs to sit in the basket. Masud’s black doctor’s bag, after being shaken out curiously, is tossed on the road. The children do not think of this as stealing. They figure whoever fell off the bicycle there has long since been dragged away.

The city isn’t safe for any Mussulmaan, Gul Singh is pleading, much less a rich doctor. Hadn’t they come this morning especially for him? He must leave—but not on the trains. Gul has been hearing about it since last night; there are plans for the westbound trains. Gifts to Pakistan.

Masud bites his lip, looks around, and nods. Part of him wants to start putting everything back where it was, sweep up the glass, fold the towels, boil the scalpels clean. A broken window cuts his gaze as his gaze goes through it. It shows him the once-familiar street changed, the city itself changed, the country. He must go. He has nowhere to go. He must go.

2

DEPARTURES

Keshav locks his ankles and bare palms around the platform’s corner pillar. He looks up. A sparrow has stashed straw under the awning. It sweeps in from nothingness, hops twice, comments, hops again. It watches the mayhem of adults below and, tilting its bird neck, the scoot and effort of this child. Hand over hand, then the knees come up. He slides back down. The silk of his shirt snags the eczematous paint. His palms smell sour. Shankar gets his shoulder under his brother’s rear and stands, pushing him higher. He lets go of his own snapped ribs so he can hold his brother in place with both hands.