Many births created worm and insect. Many births created elephant, fish and deer. Many births created bird and snake. Many births created ox and horse…matter…was recycled many times as rocks and mountains. Many births produced plant life. It took innumerable births to produce the human body.
GURU GRANTH SAHIB
I know what we are leaving behind. Our villa with its huge veranda, its two large cement sitting chairs where I spend hours taking the sun in. The two kitchens, one for us and one for my chacha and chachi, my father’s brother and his wife, who live with us. The immense hallway where Father has installed a swing, a swing in the house. The three wooden carved doors with delicate patterns and animals on them which I outline with my finger. The upper courtyard and the lower courtyard. We leave the huge backyard that fits one hundred cots in it. We know because our neighbours hosted weddings there. The huge pomelo tree in the front yard. The tree with the flowers that only gives scent at night, scent that we can smell from the end of our street. We leave my family’s orchards and warehouses full of fruits like guava and mango and varieties of apricots I will never see again. We leave behind mountains of fruit and seeds to rot. We leave the best, reddest blood oranges in the world. We leave a variety of corn my grandparents grow that is white as the Himalayan peaks. We leave the smell of their corn popping in a few handfuls of heated sand in a cast-iron pan over burning wood in a hole in the ground, an oven called baddhi. We leave the origins of that song:
Bhathi waliye chambe diye daariye, Peeran da paraga bhun de
Oh flower of jasmine, you own the oven, bake me one lot of pain
Tainu dewan hanjuan da bhara, Peeran da paraga bhun de
I’ll pay you in terms of tears, bake me one lot of pain
We leave our friends, our schools, and my beloved first teacher, Ganga. We leave my kindergarten classroom, where we sat on black and white tiles, a checkerboard floor. We leave my grade-school teachers’ lessons of good and evil, large and small, happy and sad, that later evolved into the disciplines of political science, mathematics, and social studies. We leave the huge peepal (sacred fig) tree, so large that the villagers built a platform around its base where I played. We leave my best friend Vidya, with whom I bathed in the running water at the fork of the Dor River, my teacher Ganga herself a lesson then for us, her namesake the most sacred of all rivers, fierce or gentle as the terrain dictates.
We leave the cheating milkwoman, who adds water to the buffalo milk she delivers every day. I know because the milk will not leave a ring around my glass. We leave Prabha halwai, the confectionary where my father stops first thing every morning to have jalebi in milk and every evening to bring home kalakand sweets, the best in all of Hazara. We leave the sound of my father approaching the house after work, which we can hear from our veranda, his special boots clicking steadily on the brick road. We leave the invaluables—my mother’s term for the things she values most—the intricate stonework of the necklaces my father brought us back from his trips to Kashmir, my favourite comb, my favourite kameez. We leave my grandparents’ fields, their buffalos, cows, and the donkeys they use to load their goods to bring them to market, the view of foothills of the Himalayas from my grandparents’ house, their white tips, the innumerables. So why then, when a government official comes to the door one day in late 1947, in Dehradun, asking what we left behind in order to make a retribution claim for Partition, does my father say “nothing”? Maybe because he hopes that everything will be reincarnated into the rocks and the mountains that surrounded our village for millennia? What is Partition then, for him, but nature, human nature, manifest?
I can draw a map in this imaginary space between me and the past world. Here, where my right hand is, is Haripur. You walk about two miles out into the countryside farther to the right, and there is a river. The Dor River. Across from it, farther to the right, is the village of Mankarai. There is one Gurudwara, ten Hindu families, and the rest are Muslim. My whole family lives there, grandparents, aunts, uncles. To visit them we hike for three or four hours, uphill. At Vaisakhi—the Sikh new year, the Hindu solar new year, and harvest festival—we go to the Dor River to bathe, pretending it is Ganga. The villagers from the other side go too. If you call them, they can hear you. To cross the river, you pull up your pants and take your shoes in your hand. There is no bridge. I remember that two young men from our street went to World War II. One Brahmin and one other Hindu. The mother of one of them wouldn’t let me play on her front lawn without covering my head for fear that bad luck be struck upon her son. They both came back just before the war ended, wounded, only to leave again a couple of years later for good, for Partition.
Mother makes chapattis. They are perfectly round, a circumference entirely calculated by first measuring a tangent, thanks to the discovery of constants. The first one she makes is reserved for the Brahmin, who will come later in the day to pick it up. The last one she makes is for a crow or a dog, whichever comes first. The rest are for us, but there must always be one left over at the end of the day, reserved for nobody, for nothing. That is how Mother would define abundance if she knew the word in English. How she achieves it, on the other hand, is a mystery. I am already bathed, dressed in my salwar kameez, and outside, content to throw five nameless stones onto the cement floor. I grasp them in my fist in groups of one, two, three, and then four while tossing another straight up. That one will fall either where I want it to or where it will. I hope for intersection but do not worry too much about the outcome. The five of us are here now. Mother, Father, Sister, Brother, and me. There will come a time when I will be the only one left of us. Still up in the air.
We leave Haripur in the hottest month, July, 1947. Our father tells us we are going on a holiday to the holy city of Haridwar where the Ganga River leaves the Himalayan foothills. But Mother packs a box full of good, antique wedding clothing and jewellery, a few steel plates and bowls with our names engraved on them, and a phulkari, Father takes all our money. He wears a vest under his shirt and shovels notes into the pockets of the vest. He thinks we will come back when everything settles down. Our village and the entire district of Hazara, Punjab, is about to become part of Pakistan. We kids are not allowed to take anything. One family member refuses to leave with the rest of us. It is my masi’s father. He lives in a village on the other side of the Dor River. I have never known his real name. He insists on staying behind alone, sending all his family members ahead to join our caravan. He is a kind of saint. If someone gives him a shirt, he gives it away to beggars. He never wears shoes. People call him Bhagatji, holy one. The Muslims of the village finally tell him he has to leave. We cannot save you, they say. He goes to the Gurudwara to take the holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, with him. It is all he needs. He carries it on his head to cross the river. When he is in the middle of the river, some Muslims—they suddenly seem innumerable when the British start drawing the line—arriving from the other side attack him. But another, from our village, comes and says, “If you harm him, you can kill me first.” They let him go. When he arrives in Haripur he lays the Guru Granth Sahib in a small flowing rivulet there by his feet. He then lays himself down on the bank that is still his homeland, and recites some lines from the book from memory—In an instant, He changes the beggar into a king, and the king into a beggar. He fills what is empty, and empties what is full. Such are His ways—and dies. A few Hindus still left in Haripur telegram us in Haridwar. Though we have already crossed the imaginary line into India, one of my uncles travels the eight hundred kilometres back to Haripur, cremates the body, and brings back the ashes to pour them into the real Ganga.
We stay for one year in one room in a dharmshala, which is the only place refugees can stay for free. My nani, mama, my mother’s two buas, Sharda masi’s mother and father, three children, me, my two sisters and brother, my mami and her two sons. I have lost count. We cook on the veranda, rice, dhal and chapattis, and sleep on the concrete floor. I get what my father thinks is typhoid fever from the long travel. Lying in bed, I overhear all the conversations of my relatives. They speak of blood in the river, blood on the trains, and say that even the fruit there has started to taste like blood. Human blood in the blood oranges. Blood has soaked the soil. When you break a branch off a tree, blood comes out. I am not allowed to eat any grain, something to do with recovery from typhoid fever. One day my sister Sharda sneaks me a mouse-sized piece of chapatti by hiding it under the pillow after dinner. My father finds it and yells at her that she is trying to kill me. It takes forty days for my fever to finally break. I forget how to walk because I am so weak. My father holds my finger like I am an infant taking her first steps. It is possible I actually got polio, but was one of the ninety-nine out of one hundred who did not get permanent paralysis. Maybe it was the daily dip in the Ganga just a few metres away from our dharmshala that saved me. That river can never be polluted, they say, not even by invisible viruses, not even by Partition.
In Haridwar, the neighbours are distant; everyone still feels like a refugee. One knocks on the front door and shouts, Bapu par goli chal gayi!—bullets got Mahatma Gandhi! Bapu is the Gujarati word for “father.” The remaining Hindi is passive, lacking in the gory details that got dropped as the news travelled by word of mouth to us from Birla house in Delhi. I try to build my own image by asking Father questions. Where? Three holes in the chest. How? Father starts to cry. He says it does not matter how because that is how kismet works. Pulling the trigger is linked to other destinies. Life is an eternal and universal sea with a surface as rough as Himalayan peaks. That is why no amount of knowledge can predict the trajectory of such bullets. Not even the theory of ballistics. Father uses the English word because he does not know the Hindi one and reminds us we must still pay attention to those subjects in school. This is enough to focus my mind. I picture an equilateral triangle: three black dots on a white handspun-cotton background. No blood. What is important, Father tells us, is that Bapu chanted Hai Ram three times as the bullets went in. For the next few days, as the news continues to spread, Indians everywhere cry and whisper Hai Ram. Us Hindus believe Bapu needs ten million Hai Rams to receive moksha. Which he does, easily, because on January 30, 1948, there are at least 345 million Indians on the planet. When Bapu is liberated from the cycle of birth and death, India is still an infant learning how to speak.
After one year, my father finally hears of a job possibility in Dehradun. He sends us ahead to find a house and settle down while he travels to Saharanpur to discuss business partnerships. When we arrive, people are grabbing the abandoned houses of the Muslims who have fled to what will become Pakistan. We take a small house in Dhamawala Mohalla with two bedrooms, a front room, a kitchen, a veranda. But after one night the police come and tell us we cannot live there because its family is returning. We grab another house, even smaller. When my father arrives, he says no, we cannot live there, either. We cannot take advantage, take some other family’s home. They may come back someday. Instead, he rents a house through the proper channels. The man takes six months’ advance rent, forty rupees. It is a very nice house with three bedrooms, two kitchens, a bathroom. The address is 46 Araghar.
We learn in school that dehra means “camp” and dun means “valley.” That the mountains nearby are the Siwaliks, part of the same mighty Himalayas we left behind. We learn Dehradun was established by Guru Ram Rai three hundred years ago. Ram Rai was exiled and shunned by the Sikhs for some heretic act and started his own following. My mother takes us to his temple and shows us that halva is halva no matter where you live, and that that is the whole point of halva, but it still tastes different to me. Our teacher takes us to the Rispana River in the rainy season to learn about flooding, but all I can see is the Dor. One day Nehruji comes to Dehradun to give some inspiring speeches to relocated people like us at the large open grassland called the Parade Ground. But I cannot understand how Punjab can now have two different names: Pakistan and India. In the fall, in the festival of Dussehra, the victory of Rama is celebrated on the same grounds, with the burning of a large sculpture of Ravana made out of wood. Afterwards, we search everywhere for a burnt piece of the wood, which will bring us luck, but we cannot find any. One day my father comes back from Sajanpur for work with a terrible rash. I am the first to know because at that age, I still sleep beside my father. The only thing to do, the locals tell us, is to go and bathe in the sulphur spring waters of Sahastradhara, whose name means “a thousand springs.” The whole family goes. We walk for hours, northwest towards the hills, taking shortcuts through mango orchards. It works.
But the lack of luck in the unfound charred Ravana is still with us. The second time he gets a rash, my father goes on his own. He leaves his vest on the ground for two minutes while he goes to the spring to splash his face. When he comes back his vest is gone, as well as the ten thousand rupees he was carrying in it from a recent business transaction. But when he gets home and our neighbours come with sympathy—losing ten thousand rupees then was like losing one hundred thousand dollars today—he says that money is just like dirt on his hands. It will come back.
I think our luck changes after something magical happens at school. An old man brings a dog to show us that if even a dog can do math, then we children can do it. He stands at the front of the classroom and calmly says “one plus one” and the dog barks twice. “Three plus two” and the dog barks five times. I go home to tell my father what happened. He says there must be some trick behind it. Like the British making us all learn English. “How has that helped me? There is no way to say jalebi in English.” And they have too many unnecessary words. Look at us. We can say the same word for yesterday and tomorrow and everyone understands which one we mean.
There are still some Britishers who live in Dehradun after Partition. They live in a posh area northeast of us, near Dalanwala. I walk by there when I have to go to Dwarka Store for something. I envy the girls I see on occasion who go to the school nearby, the Welham School. We hardly ever see white people, but once I see a young boy in the market at Paltan Bazaar, and then the same boy again going in to the Ideal Book Depot. He must be five years older than me. I know he sees me too. It is the first time I have seen a white boy up close. Later on, my teachers tell me it must be that Bond child, Ruskin Bond, a name I erase from memory until my daughter brings home his novels sixty years later and leaves them lying on her dining-room table. She reads me a passage from one entitled The Room on the Roof:
After the partition of the country, when hate made religion its own, Somi’s family had to leave their home in the Punjab and trek southwards; they had walked hundreds of miles and the mother had carried Somi, who was then six, on her back. Life in India had to be started again, right from the beginning, for they had lost most of their property: the father found work in Delhi, the sisters were married off, and Somi and his mother settled down in Dehra, where the boy attended school.
But that is not fiction at all, I tell my daughter. How can that be fiction?
Four years later, my father got sick. Diabetes. How does he notice? In the summertime, he goes to pee in the dry riverbed just outside our front yard. He sees the sugar. Nobody goes to the doctor. There is no medicine, just some saints who prescribe herbs. But that is not entirely the reason for my father’s demise. Remember our lack of luck. A letter comes saying that my uncle, his brother, has died. They settled in another town, on the other side of Lucknow. My mother tries to hide the letter from my father, but people start coming to the house to give us their sympathy. My father finds out that way and gets on the next train to Lucknow. It is summertime again, there is drought. Maybe he is dehydrated. While in Lucknow, he goes to my sister’s house. She relocated there with her husband when she married in 1950. My father can barely speak when he arrives. “Here is one rupee. Here are two mangos. Now don’t talk to me.” He is depressed. His heart sinks. No, more than that. He feels the whole world is falling. Perhaps like the one thousand springs of Shasradhara, too numerous to ever really count. He stops in Haridwar, which is on the way back to Dehradun; he walks to the Ganga and says to himself, “I don’t have any home.” But you meet people you know on that river. Ganga does her magic. One of my aunts is there and sees my father. She telegrams us. My mama—my mother’s brother—brings him home. But my father keeps repeating “I don’t have a home.” He will not take food from my mother. He will only eat from the neighbours, who bring food, to appease their sympathy. By then he is spending all day lying down, and then, in July, the same month in which we left our home in Haripur three years earlier, he dies.
When Father dies, Mother does not whisper Hai Ram, but instead says, Mai margai. I am in no mood for Punjabi metaphors. I take her words—I am dead—at face value. Which is what leads me to Bapu Industrial Home and its promise of training in life skills. I am thirteen, old enough to get a job, old enough to get married, and, most importantly, old enough to save Mother’s life. I think that is what life skills must ultimately do. Mother and I travel by tonga, and I cannot help but notice the tongawalla’s lethargic movements. I wonder what skills are required for his profession other than being male. He holds the reins too loosely to be a leader. He looks too thin to do any real labour. He is not even a good businessman. The fare negotiated is exactly halfway between what Mother initially offers and what he initially quotes. From his reluctance to get going, even the horse seems to think the tongawalla can do better than that.
I take it upon myself to accumulate ten million Hai Rams for my father. There is no time limit, and I intend to live long. I spend the entire tonga ride chanting Hai Ram.
I choose training in tailoring and embroidery for myself, and hosiery for Mother. She starts out making socks on a Singer knitting machine. She picks up the techniques quickly, alternating between pulling at threads and turning a crank, everything always in clockwise rotation. She tells me she likes the circular motion—how it feels like she is going nowhere, and then suddenly she is done. She learns to hand-knit thick sweaters in popular solid colours. Cream (for cream), plum (for plums), or forest green (for the pine forests of the Doon Valley’s surrounding foothills). She tells me she enjoys how the linear movements of her hands make her thoughts nice and simple and slow down time. As for the finished sweaters, she can never take money for them. She tells us of Sister Mother Teresa helping lepers in Calcutta. She distributes the sweaters to neighbours, insisting that they try them on first for size to prove her estimates are correct. I make elaborately embroidered one-of-a-kind monogrammed handkerchiefs. I count the petals and leaves along the borders for what I think is an added luxury: perfect symmetry. I finish them with an equilateral triangle defined by three tiny red hearts. I sell them to friends and strangers for four annas apiece. Each sale could buy me three pieces of hard candy from the candywalla. But four handkerchiefs mean one rupee. Four rupees mean one Tenali Raman book with its useful stories on how to outwit kings, gurus, and men. I buy nothing. Successful application, I learn, is not everything in life. Each participant in Bapu’s training program must also complete a theory workbook—the mechanics of the knitting machines, the geometry of cutting patterns, the physics of stitches. Mother never learned to write in Hindi so I do all the theory for her, including signing her name on the assignments. I make my handwriting far worse for my own pages so the administrators can see a difference between young and old. I realize it is much harder to try your worst at something than to try your best at it. I learn to never want to do that again.
My first real job requires neither tailoring, nor embroidery skills, nor fake signatures. I work as a teacher’s assistant at a private school in Anand Chowk. The administration writes down on see-through receipts that they pay me sixty rupees per month, but they only give me thirty. I accept their need to inflate my work. I sign my true signature and add three hearts so they know I am content. The job is to make sure children write neatly on their slates, that their simple sums add up. When they do not, we use blocks of clean clay, mitti, to wipe and start again. One day, a girl comes to school without any pieces of chalk. When I ask her why, she says her mother ate them, like cookies, dipped in wet mitti because she has a baby in her tummy. I buy her a new set of chalk pieces and tell her to hide them from her mother. Because even a loving mother can be transformed into the enemy of her school-aged daughter, succumbing to new cravings originating in the womb. It is then I remember Father’s words to me before his death—Choose marriage or education—and I begin to prepare for high school studies. I get home from work, eat one paratha, drink one glass of milk, and head back out into the evening, my bike left at the side of Onkar Road to save time. The guruji there says I do not have to pay the fees, but I negotiate because I do not want pity: “If you take ten rupees from everyone else, then take four from me.” Guruji is also a psychologist. One day he reads my face and says, “This girl is going to be something, she has great kismet.” There is no one around to hear it, so I do not believe him. That night, when I return home, rain starts to fall in buckets just as I arrive safely onto the veranda. For a moment, I feel as though I have stepped into my future. But I run back out into the rain and force myself to get drenched with the present. I apply for Elementary Teacher Training at a nearby college. My application is rejected despite Guruji’s glowing reference. The administrators say, “This is not for you, munni, you are too young,” as though they do not know about life skills. I get into the next college by lying about my age. They want me to be seventeen, but I am fourteen, so I say I am sixteen, and they accept. But one month, I cannot pay the seven-rupee-a-month tuition, and they do not merely threaten to remove my name; they remove it. Even street children warn the birds by yelling Shoo! before they fling stones at them. I have to borrow money from one of the students’ mothers to get back in. The mother asks me to make the teachers give her daughter extra marks. Her daughter is neither bright nor pretty. I tell the mother I will, but I am only a teacher-in-training and have no say. So I owe her, like a rainbow owes meteorology.
When the school year ends, I am sent to a month-long camp—Samaj Sudhar Samiti—for the improvement of a remote village, Nehrugram. Gardening, agriculture, building roads, education of the illiterate children. The woman who organizes the camp is a highly educated member of parliament. She is still a devout follower of Bapu and continues to wear only Khadi clothes. Nevertheless, she accepts my hand-embroidered machine-spun handkerchief gift. In the field, I discover I know instinctively how to plant flowers, to space them far enough apart for breathing room, close enough for pollen exchange. The garden plot is like a square of cloth, and I have learned that decoration must be both beautiful and functional. The member of parliament is pregnant, expecting her fourth child, perhaps because the first three are girls. The last I hear of her is from Mother: she went in for the delivery, they gave her an overdose, and they took the baby out. My mother says these three phrases in quick succession, as though time and causation are the same thing. I get depressed, but I do not use anything like the word depressed because I do not know the meaning of it yet, and the closest thing in Hindi translates to “sinking heart.” What was all her education about?
I become a full-time teacher at the age of sixteen (eighteen on paper) at my former junior high school because I know the superintendent. At breaks I drink unsweetened nimboo sherbet. There is a control on sugar. My former teachers use ghur for their tea in the staff room. I tease them: Do you really need to have tea if you cannot afford sugar? They like me even less after that. They already know I am underage and that my English is weak. They watch me like hawks. I buy a book of English translation for six annas to shield myself. I borrow a copy of Radiant Reading to use for my class. The cover is a muted orange, like mango-coloured chalk. At the bottom of the cover are the words Allied Publisher. I pronounce it “al-eed” in my head for years and then only once out loud, in the staff room. I am told that my pronunciation is part of why the British gave up on India. I think that might be a good thing, but I correct myself. The first story in the Radiant Reading book is by someone so famous, I tell the children, he needs only one name. He is Italian. I do not admit that I have never heard of him. The most difficult five words to be found in the story appear at the outset in bold, floating across the page in a zigzag pattern:
trussed refusal obliged
wrath
impudence
I know none of them, and my book of English translation does not contain them. I pronounce them anyway, as if they are enigmatic Sanskrit mantras for communicating with God. The first one is easy because I hear the word trust. I assure the children the meanings will become apparent in the context of the story. We read the short story together, out loud, each child taking a few sentences.
I later ask Guruji how to use a hawk to catch a crane. He says, “With falconry.” A wild hawk must first be blinded to get accustomed to the human voice and become dependent on humans for food. Its eyelids are sealed, a stitch of linen on the lower lid. A hound is needed too, to mediate. To prevent the crane from thrashing around and damaging the hawk, which is, after all, the more delicate of the two birds. He tells me rich people do it as a sport. He tells me there are only two men in Dehradun who still know the art of falconry: a man named Sirdar Mohamed Osman, a descendant of the king of Afghanistan, and his father. They walk through their neighbourhood of Dalanwala, the birds on their fists and their dogs beside them. The birds are known by name, the most famous of which is Kali Rani—“Black Queen.” And just when I think Guruji knows everything, he says, “Enough of this talk about birds and death. Tell me, how is it that you have not gotten chopai yet?” To have chopai means to have four legs—as in getting married. I am shocked. Despite all his knowledge, Guruji does not seem to understand the simplest thing: it is marriage or education. But I do not have a witty response, only a mental image of embroidered eyelids.
In spite of his shortcomings, I continue to study under Guruji. Mother sits with me, knitting a sweater, and when my eyes close, craving the blindness of sleep to go hunting for ignorance, she wakes me up and asks if she can make me a cup of green tea. I start drinking black tea only later. Like most things in my life, I will not like it at first but will get used to it. I attempt my bachelor of arts. Some of my college classes, like Transportation, are full of boys—there are only three girls. Two of us sit high up in the last row. One girl sits up front. She is a boy’s type of girl. I never talk to the boys. I have chosen education. Then I get back my grades. I fail one subject, English. I must go to a neighbouring city, Meerut, to retake the exam. Mother and I travel by train overnight in second class. Mother collects water at the platform so we can wash our faces upon arrival. I watch as she pumps the push-cock into a large leather flask and notice the Saaf Mitti sign above an adjacent cement tub. Clean clay to wipe your hands with. I remember the student I bought chalk for. Her mother ended up having another girl, who died before her first birthday. The neighbours suspected murder, but no one attempted to prove it. On the train, the paani pande comes by to offer us cool drinking water. Mother tells him to give me extra, explaining the reason for the voyage. She knows that because he is a Brahmin, his gesture, like my buying chalk for a student, will bring me good fortune. Three weeks later the results are published in the newspaper, which say I passed, but then the mark sheet comes in the mail: I failed. The ground beneath me starts to walk. This time I must redo the entire English course completely. One of my teachers lives right beside the college. I must go, with my head covered simultaneously in shame and disguise, and stay there overnight so no one notices me going to class every morning. I borrow saris from my friend Bhabi in colours I would never wear. Every morning leading up to the exam, I stop at the Hanuman Mandir and offer prasad: flowers, some fruit. In other words, I keep my head covered from morning to night for weeks. Then I pass.
One day, I am walking with my bike and Mother to the market and a woman I do not recognize stops us. “Listen, behenji, I like this girl, bahut sharif. She minds her own business.” It turns out there is a boy behind this compliment, one who is in the truck business and “lives like a royal family. Needs a good girl.” Mother flatly responds, No. Bhabi’s mother is envious. “If it were my daughter, I would never say no to him.” Another boy is suggested. Engineer, widowed with a four-month-old baby. No. There is the pilot who lives in Agra. He is Father’s previous wife’s (she died in childbirth) aunt’s son. The boy’s aunt comes to visit us at home: “You have to say yes before I leave.” No. Because we are related. “Plus, I don’t want to give my daughter to a pilot, that’s dangerous.” Three suitors, three tiny hearts I stitch onto cotton, pen onto letters, with no sentimentality.
Then I do get married, in the winter of 1967, at the late, fake age of twenty-five. One year later, I take an airplane to Paris and then to Montreal to join my husband, who has gotten a visa and a job right away because of his education. The pilot talks of wind speeds. The total travel time keeps increasing until we arrive. A few months later we take the train to the small gold-mining town of Geraldton (Hai Ram). Night comes before I have the chance to see the sun. I am told never to walk alone in the dark because of “Indians.” The next morning, with my head wrapped in a shawl, I step out onto the balcony of the motel room that temporarily houses us. It is thirty below. The view: snow, a wide road, and not a single human. My arteries constrict from the cold, my heart beats faster. The religious man who shot Gandhi twenty years ago must have taken into account the effects of heart rate when he took aim. Three bullet holes in the chest, which Father attributed to destiny, and I to the triangulation of past, present, and future. Three minutes later, I am back inside, my hair frosty white at the temples and the words trussed, refusal, obliged, wrath, and impudence forming on my tongue, transient and symmetric, like ice.
May his head burn! Your words are rocks thrown at my forehead! I will peel her skin off! Threats and insults like these do not sound that bad in their native Punjabi. Even when they are directed at loved ones. Even when they come from your own mother. The pronouns are catalysts for combustion, a quick, irreversible reaction, with only ashes for proof. However, an English word like partition can sit in an Indian’s mouth for hours, or even for a lifetime, in motion toward something shapeless, and then melted, gone. Sometimes partition represents a noun (a broken door), sometimes it is a verb (to depart and never return), but it is never clear who is at fault. An Urdu poet once called partition a birthday party for “anonymous” and a funeral for “unanimity.” A mathematician saw it in his mind as a fractal, a Koch snowflake, a continuous curve without tangents. A political scientist speaks only of before-and-after maps, the thick red Radcliffe line. Nobody ever truly understands one another. Translation is never simple.