Partitions: A Novel Read Free

dark.
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    Their faces are identical, but their bodies aren’t. Shankar grows into Keshav’s hand-me-downs. Other kids tease Keshav about stealing his brother’s food, even though Shankar has the bigger appetite.
    It wasn’t always so. I remember when Shankar was too weak to suck. It was a cycle that started from his first hour. Weakness kept him from sucking, which made him weaker, which kept him from sucking. When his arm worked loose from the swaddling, it hung down. The skin of it slid loosely under the thumb, no baby fat to swell it taut. I could not bear to see the arm dangle like that. I would tuck it up like a broken part and fix the cloth. His palms, his lips, the skin around his lips, and the soles of his feet deepened in color as he cried. Blue, bluish purple, purple. His color returned to gray only after his mewl slackened into sleep.
    I carried him a lot those first few weeks. The kohl Sonia used to rim his eyes made him look sicker. His brother slept, pink and blissful, after the breast or a bath and rubdown with coconut oil. Shankar was a minute older, but everything gave him a look of age. He had a full head of silken womb hair, while Keshav was baby bald, just fuzz. What little milk Shankar could get down, he didn’t keep down. His oval face hungered from the hour he was born and drew no succor from breath or breast. The shape of his face was another thing that made him look older, especially next to his brother’s, a perfect circle broken only by the bulges of his cheeks. I shook my head at the contrast of destinies. By week three, Keshav had put down roots in life and taken. Shankar fit on Sonia’s palm and upturned wrist. She held his sleep like a beggar showing the empty bowl.
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    My marriage to Sonia had contaminated me, in the opinion of my Brahmin family. So my children by that marriage were likewise impure. Because Sonia had no kin of her own, no one had been present for the birth. My mother had not come, or had been forbidden to come.
    I still believed they would all soften, my father included. I half expected, whenever I answered the door, to see them as they had been before, before my contamination. After all, hadn’t my father incurred contamination, too, when young, by sailing overseas to the Royal College to study? And by seeing, in his office, patients of every caste and no caste at all, cupping their cracked heels to test the sprain, or kneading their abdomens to find the culprit organ? His choices had been controversial in his day, for the son of a Brahmin family as high and orthodox as his. My grandfather forgave him only because he was second-born. The elder son had memorized the slokas and become a pandit like his forefathers; everything was not lost. A pandit and a ceremony purified my father when he came back. At the train station—this train station—he arrived all those years ago, shoulders sloping asymmetrically, a light bag on the left, on the right a new trunk, filled entirely, it turned out, not with gifts from England but textbooks. He wore English pants beside the Vedic fire. Still, certain ideas of blood and caste had never left him. They were objective realities to him, like the height or weight of a person. I know because that is how I thought of it too, until Sonia.
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    No quantity of rice or Sanskrit could exculpate me. My betrayal was total, and my contamination was total, my sons’ as well. What my family would have thought a divine blessing in other circumstances—twin sons, like Shri Rama himself—now struck them as animal fertility, slum fertility. What caste but the lowest, they reasoned, would have originated my orphan wife? The churches thrived off the people Gandhi was calling “harijans.” Untouchables: everyone knew what they did to girl children they didn’t want—killed them, abandoned them, or sold them to the Christians, who were always in the market for souls.
    My elder sister Damyanti visited us once