Partitions: A Novel (6 page)

Masud crouches in his black hole, peeking around what is left of the counter. The street stays empty. A sheet of newspaper coasts into view and pauses. A new wind picks it up, and it is gone in a crinkle. Masud waits. What scared him inside was the sight of three men, far enough off that he could not see their faces or even judge their ages. They hadn’t been holding weapons, not that he could see. But he thought ahead—three of them walking on one side of the street, him on the other, bald head down, quick steps, bag fixed at his side—and he could all too easily imagine them crossing obliquely, asking his name, asking where he was going. He scurried inside. His footsteps went mute, over matted ash. The burned-out jeweler’s felt safe the way a cleft tree feels safe in a lightning storm. The violence had visited already and satisfied itself. Too much was still out there for the violence to circle back. Other stores, other people.

This is the eighteenth minute he has been watching the street. Most of this time, he has been motionless. Small noises make his scalp tug. Any noise—once even the crack of his own knee. His ears flick back. His heartbeats crowd close and spread out again.

A few minutes ago, one hand loosened from the bag and combed the ashes beside him. At first pensively, distracted; and now idly, focusing on the texture. His ring finger pricks on something. A splinter? He brings up his hand and sees a tiny gold earring that studs the pad of his finger. It must have dropped during the night’s snatching and stuffing. He forgets the pain for a moment; the sight makes him feel as if a lovely winged insect has chosen to alight on his finger. And sting. Blood domes slowly and drips. He sucks his black finger, unhygienic though he knows this to be. The earring he rolls between his thumb and forefinger, meanwhile, and finally slips into his pocket when he stands.

Outside, the daylight shows him wasted and ash-smeared like an ascetic of some wholly other faith. Round black stains on the seat of his pants mark where his bony pelvis ground the ash hardest. It is this figure that presents itself at the police station half an hour later. The city, as he walked, changed around him. Sparrows became willing to speak again. The hush and curfew lost its hold as the streets broadened. He felt like he was exiting a plague quarantine. But his nerves did not let up. When the first casual bicycle swooped past him, he flinched as if he had been struck and checked over his shoulder. Nothing. More people, open shop fronts, stalls on the roadside. He marveled how the violence respected borders, how the unspeakable in one place could be conversation in another. There was no partition, no checkpoint or sign, but he had left, appreciably, the Muslim part of the city. The eyes that met his and skipped down his body had no pity in them. Some eyed him with the disgust of the clean for the soiled. Others were simply curious, trying to locate his wounds, find the blood.

Outside the police chowki, he hears paper ripping. Clock-steady, unrelenting. A fan, its blades edged in dust, turns overhead, so slowly it seems the power has just been cut. The thick heat doesn’t stir. Two officers stand by a desk at the far end of the room. The other desks are vacant. Filing cabinets stand with their drawers pulled out to varying depths.

One policewallah is ripping pages from a ledger laid out on the desk. The other is checking his work. Even page to the left pile. Odd page to the right pile. Finally all that is left is a cloth cover. Scissors divide this cleanly, along the gum and coarse, frayed threads of the binding. In the lull, Masud steps forward. He is not the sort to speak up or approach on his own, so the men start on the next ledger, and he has to stand through four hundred more rips. Occasionally he steps outside and puzzles up at the sleeping building, then returns to observe the ritual going on inside. Shouldn’t there be alarm bells? Dozens of uniformed young men, rifles on their shoulders, busily running into the street? Reports being written? The policewallahs are bald, elderly men, their paunches administrative. They move on to the dilemma of a telephone. One holds up the receiver, another turns the base upside down, and they discuss the situation without rancor or aggression. A handkerchief dabs a forehead. A shrug, a nod. They have a toolbox on a chair, and a screwdriver is selected for the dismantling.

Masud makes a noise with his throat. They look up from their task. The task has been started, however, and they finish it. Metal parts, the bell and the arm that strikes it, the dial—the telephone is disassembled and collected into a heap of parts. They begin to haggle over each component. They make trades. At last the phone is evenly distributed, and one of the men approaches Masud.

“Yes?”

The sharp, impatient tone paralyzes Masud’s tongue. He knows himself; it would be futile to try answering. Out of his bag he produces a calling card. One of two hundred he had printed in England four decades ago, when he graduated. A precious chit, wood-textured, the ink letters raised in a way a fingertip could feel. He hopes the officer will hand it back to him, and he does.

“You are a doctor?”

Masud nods, returning the card to his stack.

“No one needs a doctor here.”

Masud zips the bag’s inner pocket and looks up.

“What is your business?”

Masud frowns expressively. He points down the street he has just walked. “That—that—”

“Yes?”

Masud has never encountered the police before. His eyes go to the pistol at the man’s waist, the white undershirt visible between his too-taut buttons, the tobacco-stained teeth. The notion of requesting, from this man—what? A jeep ride to safety in Pakistan? And did Pakistan really mean safety? Whom did he know in this conjured country, Pakistan? Where would he knock? Where would he sleep, and what would he put under his head? Pakistan. It’s no longer a question, after what he saw this morning, of
where
, only where
else
. Masud’s mouth is open. He feels a surge at the base of his throat that can’t break and gush.

The officer glances at Masud’s clothes. English-style, ash-blackened, like some gentleman stovecleaner.

“Do you want to file a report?”

Masud nods because it is the easiest thing he can do. The officer gestures to him to sit. Only there is no bench where he gestures, no chair, only the unswept floor and the wall for backrest. Masud lowers himself and sits with his bag in his lap. The policewallah joins his colleague, who is lazily inspecting the typewriter, pressing one letter very delicately and tentatively: first the resistance, then the give, the key sinking, the typebar rising to strike.

*   *   *

Lying on my cot, propped on three watermelon-shaped pillows, I too had waited once. I remember the room exactly. It was all I saw for a year. I got to know the tiles and the patterns of plaster on the ceiling. When the fevers came, and the room was lit by a single moving candle, I saw faces and figures in the spongework. Evenings, I would watch the bugs fleck the wall. The occasional three-fingered lizard. My fellow motionless ones. They basked, I baked.

Shankar and Keshav made of me, as they grew, a kind of playground. They crawled to me in the mornings, pulled up on my cot, and patted me awake with their little hands. I might open my eyes and see one of them face-to-face. About the kindest way to be awoken to a day of suffering. When they started walking and could climb onto me—my last two months—I was a landscape. Sonia taught them the parts of my face. Eyes, teeth: they would point and say the word. Bloodshot eyes. The teeth I brushed over a steel bowl, too weak to shift into a seated position, just curling forward at the neck to spit. They were still learning to give kisses when I departed. Not yet the pursed-lips kind of kiss that makes a deliberate click, but a kiss. She would bring them after their baths. That is one of the last images I have: Keshav on her hip; her, leaning to bring his face close; and then the press of his lips on my silvery stubble.

She did make an effort to shave and bathe me regularly. I was careful to gauge how exhausted she was and offer to skip a day. Many nights she fell asleep beside the twins because they would cry whenever she tried to rise. The spread of bedding stayed on the floor, mussed as it was when they awoke from it. I got to fearing Damyanti might hear I had fallen ill and visit again. I did not want her to see the mess and report Sonia’s poor upkeep of the flat to my mother and father. Because I was the third child, by then; before I became bedbound, she had been able to keep up.

My practice had been closed for a year. No money was coming in. Hiring her a helper now would mean less savings for when I was gone. I showed her my accounts, the documentation she would need, and the key to the bank deposit box where I stored my first wife’s wedding sets—though she swore she would never sell them. We discussed whether she could go back to the church to teach English. I told her she could repent her marriage to me, even raise the boys as Christians, if that was what it took to get help. Such things were all words anyway, I told her, but greatly gratifying to those people.

I wrote to my father and told him, in formal, typewritten English, that the office was his to sell, as I “would not be practicing there any longer.” I made no mention of why. No reference to how my heart, the very muscle of it infected, had ballooned in my chest. (I could feel the tip of it bumping my chest wall by then, in line with the armpit.) Nothing about the fevers or the way I got winded lifting even little Shankar. I didn’t say anything, either, about how well Shankar was doing. My suffering and my joy were both closed off. I had left that life.

At that point, I had already moved us to our new flat. Probably my father assumed I was setting up a new practice. I did not expect him to send me any money from the sale; I had never formally purchased it from him, and the title was still in his name. He didn’t disappoint me. At least he hadn’t pursued that punishment earlier, selling the building and telling me after the papers were signed. He could have done that. I guess I should have been more grateful and made mention of that in the letter I typed him. But he had been clear that marrying Sonia was the supreme act of ingratitude—to him personally (considering all he had given me), to the memory of my first wife, to my own ancestors going back thousands of years. The coldness of my business letter didn’t matter. After a crime like mine, what good were niceties? I had listened to his reproaches and asked him, when he paused to wipe his flushed brow, to forgive me. Me, forty-seven years old. Fresh rage shook him and threw his silver hair forward over his brow. That noble head gone wild—I had never been able to oppose him, not as a boy, not as a man. Even as a man, all I could do was run away.

I took us to that new flat when Sonia learned she was pregnant. So early in our marriage! Too early. I changed her life too drastically. I didn’t think of that then, of course; in those first months I was experiencing, for the first time in my life, pure sexual exhilaration. I ordered a break in my morning and afternoon schedules to come home to her. She would be waiting for me with the shutters closed and the fan going. Horns, trucks, the sound of the street below, the long wail of the Frontier Mail as it approached city limits—and a steady, greedy slapping in that small hot room, her dark body under my fair-skinned one. For the last minute or so, I would place my hands over her larger scars or just close my eyes. In time the scars stopped bothering me. She would observe my labors and sometimes intercept, with a fingertip, the sweat before it dripped off my chin or the tip of my nose. It must have been a game for her. At fifteen years old, a ward of the church, cared for; at seventeen and a half, pregnant with twins, wife to a Hindu man almost thrice her age.

I had made the decision to move hastily, almost out of irritation. The wives in the houses surrounding mine had all been friends of my first wife. They had, over the past eleven years, rotated cooking my meals—and, knowing me to be fairly wealthy, had proposed candidates of their own for my remarriage. I never made an announcement. They assumed, from Sonia’s dark skin, that I had hired a new slum girl to clean the house. The first day, one of them asked me if my “girl” were interested in coming over afterward; she wanted to see how well she washed dishes, seeing as Nazneen, her usual girl, had been getting careless. I smiled and gave her the good news. She congratulated me to my face, of course, sweetness of speech and formal invitations. By the next day, everyone was speculating, disapproving, making, I am sure, horrified faces. They could see the scars on her arms. What dirt had I tracked into the neighborhood?

Everyone knew—even the bricklayers, two Muslims, who were laying a new walkway in Ramchand Parikh’s courtyard, two houses down. Ramchand owned a steel foundry and could have lived much more extravagantly than he did. Building a new house had struck the penny-pinching Gujarati in him as far too costly, so he had subjected his current home to a series of renovations, collectively cheaper and quicker. Every day, on my way to work, I passed the week’s bricklayers, woodworkers, painters, or gardeners—maybe the same ones, maybe different. I never looked closely enough to know. We existed on opposite sides of an invisible partition.

The day after word of my marriage got out, though, the bricklayers paused in their work and both raised a hand. I stopped and wondered what to say. I decided on nothing. I raised my hand in return—what else to do?—and walked on, puzzled. Over the next several days, I got more than just raises of the hand. I got smiles, salaams, I got a sahib. I was not used to this, being a Brahmin born and a Brahmin still, though happily tainted—quite removed from these hard men and their tasks in the sun. I knew it had something to do with bringing Sonia into my house. Were they mocking me? One day I passed close to one of the bricklayers. He was standing in a sweat-stained kameez with the sleeves rolled up, and drinking from a steel cup. His beard had caught a few drops of the water. I stopped and spoke to him, asking him what Parikh sahib was having them build. I wanted, perversely, to see whether he still respected my caste and wealth, whether this Muslim workman could hold back his smirk when answering me.