Partitions: A Novel Read Free Page B

will never understand, no matter how much I read about karma.
    It was all I could do, when he was a newborn, to throw my arm out in time and block the curtain rod that fell, without provocation, across his cradle. Later, when he started walking, the house had every corner and edge out for him like knives. I knew the difference because his brother had started walking two months before. I remember Shankar walking into a ball and chasing it, laughing every time it skipped away from him. A scorpion darted from behind our framed portrait of Bala Krishna, and I had to scoop Shankar off the ground.
    Even after my sickness started, I was always on the lookout. His face had a strangely grown-up, serious, almost worried look. He sensed the same malice in the cosmos that I did. But when he laughed, I saw his mother’s eyes in my own face, eyes that narrowed and curved into darkly shining arches, and I knew the deal I had made with the Gods was being honored.
    *   *   *
    The razor drops from Masud’s hand. He has forgotten his half-mask of shaving cream and overnight stubble. He looks down. His foot is bleeding, the cut straight, oblique, shallow. The razor is close by his foot, in the dust. He lifts his foot and puts it down, not knowing what to do. A weak gesture as if to show someone the calamity. The flames that used treetops as a bridge onto his terrace. No one is there to see it with him. The other houses are empty; they had means, and they left in time.
    Standing beside him, I stare at the smoke over his house. Shapes of smoke curl, hold, and release: a woman is underwater, her hair, undone, floating vertically; a man’s face turns aside and splits down the middle; two children embrace until parted by a wind. Blacker, thicker smoke rises and curls into itself. Everything is prefigured. Masud sees smoke. I see what I have foreseen.
    It’s not that Masud doesn’t know what has happened to the Punjab. He owns a radio—not a good one, but the radio would have to break completely before it occurred to him to replace it. Even if he didn’t, there was no way not to hear, if nothing else then at the clinic. The BBC has been discussing the issue for some time. He knew this great event was coming, but he understood the new border only in the abstract, an understanding as simple as a mapmaker’s or an Englishman’s. A line demarcating jurisdictions, not identities. He cannot hear the radio’s static for what it is—the border’s cupful of acid, flung hissing into the soil.
    Congress and the Muslim League had pounded their tables and made their speeches. Why should it alter his routine? His day has been unalterable for years now. His life takes place almost entirely inside the clinic. He gets in at nine in the morning and stays twelve, sometimes fourteen hours, even though he could leave earlier. His stammer and intense shyness keep him from easily navigating any interaction more complicated than question, examine, advise. The rare times he goes out to buy toothpaste or tea, he points with his middle finger, furrows his brow, nods or shakes his head in great, exaggerated rolls and jerks. He is pious, on the surface of it, but his prayers are merely one component of a larger, daily routine. The mind stays quite blank.
    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