Milkweed Editions

Afshan accepted her lot cheerfully. She helped her mother-in-law, chaffed the maize, tended and milked the two goats and frolicked her way through her chores. Occasionally, when his mother scolded her, Qasim felt wretched. He loved her vivacious, girlish ways and was totally won by her affection. He teased her and played pranks. When he was particularly unkind or obdurate, his wife and his mother combined to give him a thrashing. Then Qasim would shout, “I am your husband. How dare you!” and he would hate her.

The earth is not easy to carve up. India required a deft and sensitive surgeon, but the British, steeped in domestic preoccupation, hastily and carelessly butchered it. They were not deliberately mischievous—only cruelly negligent! A million Indians died. The earth sealed its clumsy new boundaries in blood as town by town, farm by farm, the border was defined. Trains carrying refugees sped through the darkness of night—Hindus going one way and Muslims the other. They left at odd hours to try to dodge mobs bent on their destruction. Yet trains were ambushed and looted and their fleeing occupants slaughtered.

Sikander cut his way frantically through the ripe wheat as he ran towards the mud walls of his hut. His wife Zohra, standing in the courtyard, watched him. In the heat-hazed dawn neat squares of rippling wheat stretched towards the horizon and—riding on sudden swells of the breeze—came the distant chants of “ Hari Hari Mahadev!” “ Bole so Nihal. Sat siri Akal!” and an occasional, piercing, “ Ya Alieeee!” An ugly bloated ebb and flow of noise engulfed everything. The corn, the earth, the air, and the sky seemed full of threat.

... Only one hundred and twenty thousand in the whole world. We have to be extra wary, or we’ll be neither here nor there... ” And then, surmounting his uncharacteristic hesitancy, and in thunderous voice, he declaimed: “We must hunt with the hounds and run with the hare!”
Everybody clapped and gravely said: “Hear! Hear!” as they always do, reflexively, every time anyone airs a British proverb in suitably ringing tones.
“The goddamn English!” I think, infected by Colonel Bharucha’s startling ferocity at this “dastardly” (one of Father’s favorite words, just as “plucky” is Mother’s) instance of British treachery. “They gave us polio!” And notwithstanding the compatible and sanguine nature of my relationship with my disease, I feel it is my first personal involvement with Indian politics: the Quit-India sentiment that has fired the imagination of a subject people and will soon sweep away the Raj!

I shake my head in a firm negative. “She’ll marry—have children—lead a carefree, happy life. No need to strain her with studies and exams,” he advises, thereby sealing my fate.
Mother’s mouth is again working—her eyes again brimming. And driven by unfathomable demons, again her guilt surfaces. “I don’t know where I went wrong,” she says. “It’s my fault... I neglected her—left her to the care of ayahs. None of the other children who went to the same park contracted polio.”
“It’s no one’s fault really,” says Colonel Bharucha, reassuring her as usual. “Lenny is weak. Some child with only the symptoms of a severe cold could have passed the virus.” And then he roars a shocking postscript: “If anyone’s to blame, blame the British! There was no polio in India till they brought it here!”
As far as I’m concerned this is insurgence—an open declaration of war by the two hundred Parsees of Lahore of the British Empire! I am shocked because Colonel Bharucha is the president of our community in Lahore. And, except for a few designated renegades, the Parsees have been careful to adopt a discreet and politically naive profile. At the last community dinner, held on the roof of the YMCA building on the Mall, Colonel Bharucha had cautioned (between the blood-chilling whines of the microphone): “We must tread carefully ... We have served the English faithfully, and earned their trust ... So, we have prospered! But we are the smallest minority in India

“Brother,” the Sikh granthi says when the tumult subsides, “our villages come from the same racial stock. Muslim or Sikh, we are basically Jats. We are brothers. How can we fight each other?”

dependent on each other: bound by our toil; by Mandi prices set by the Banyas—they’re our common enemy—those city Hindus. To us villagers, what does it matter if a peasant is a Hindu, or a Muslim, or a Sikh?”

Ayah carries me screaming into the kitchen and proceeds to splash my face at the sink. Imam Din pops a chicken heart into my mouth.

“I’ll take only what I have to,” Mother shouts, locking herself into the bathroom. “I haven’t even paid Lenny’s physiotherapist yet... I’ve to buy the children’s clothes for Christmas and New Year.” (Christmas, Easter, Eid, Divali. We celebrate them all.)

Leaving Rosy to cope with her hurt feelings and bruised flesh, I crouch before them. One by one I lift the fragile jars and remove their tiny crystal stoppers. They gleam, reflecting rainbow hues—insinuating questions ... What is eternity? Why are the stars? Where do cats lay their eggs? And why don’t hospitals have flushing bedpans built into the beds?