And the World Changed (6 page)

Mr. Khan speaks English with a broad Pakistani accent that is pleasant to my ears. “I went to the Dyal Singh College in Lahore,” he says courteously when he learns I'm from Lahore. “It is a beautiful, historical old city.”

All at once, without any apparent reason, my eyes prickle with a fine mist, and I become entangled in a web of nostalgia so intense that I lose my breath. I quickly lower my lids, and the demeanor of half a lifetime standing me in good stead, I maintain a slight smile of polite attention while the grip of sensations from the past hauls me back through the years to Lahore, to our bungalow on Race Course Road.

I am a little child playing hopscotch outside the kitchen window. The autumn afternoon is overcast with shadows from the mighty
sheesham
trees in the front lawn. There is a brick wall to my right, a little crooked and bulging in places, and the clay cement in the grooves is eroded. I keep glancing at the wall, suppressing a great excitement.

Spellbound, I sit still on Kishen's lumpy sofa, my pulse racing at the memory. Then, clearly, as if she were in the room, I hear Mother shout: “Joy, come inside and put on your cardigan.”

Startled by the images, I snap out of my reverie. I search Mr. Khan's face so confusedly that he turns from me to Kishen's
mother and awkwardly inquires of her how she is.

I have not recalled this part of my childhood in years. Certainly not since I moved to the United States. Too enamored of the dazzling shopping malls and technical opulence of the smoothly operating country of my adoption, too frequent a visitor to Pakistan, I have not yet missed it, or given thought to the past. Perhaps it is this house, so comfortably possessed by its occupants and their Indian bric-a-brac. It takes an effort of will to remember that we are in the greenly shaven suburbs of an American city in the heart of Texas.

Bending forward with the tray, smiling at my abstraction, Suzanne abruptly brings me to earth. “Joy,” she asks, “would you like some wine?”

“I prefer this, thanks,” I say, reaching apologetically for a glass of Coke.

“I used to know a Joy . . . long, long ago,” says Mr. Khan. “I spent one or two years in Lahore when I was a child.”

Suzanne has shifted to Mr. Khan. As his hand, hesitant with the burden of choice, wavers among the glasses, I watch it compulsively. It is a swarthy, well-made hand with dark hair growing between the knuckles and on the back. The skin, up to where it disappears beneath his white shirt sleeve, is smooth and unblemished.

There must be at least a million Sikanders in Pakistan, and several million Khans. The title “Khan” is discriminately tagged on by most Pakistanis in the United States who generally lack family names in the Western tradition. The likelihood that this whole-limbed and assured man with his trim mustache and military bearing is the shy and misshapen playmate of my childhood is remote.

But that part of my mind that is still in the convoluted grip of nostalgia, with its uncanny accompaniment of sounds and images, is convinced.

Having selected a glass of orange juice, Sikander Khan leans forward to offer it to a small boy whimpering halfheartedly at
his feet. I glance obliquely at the back of Mr. Khan's head. It is as well formed as the rest of him and entirely covered with strong, short-sheared black hair.

My one-time playmate had a raw pit gouged out of his head that couldn't have grown hair in a hundred years! Still, the certainty remains with me and, not the least bit afraid of sounding presumptuous, I ask, “Was the girl you knew called Joy Joshwa? I was known as Joy Joshwa then.”

Holding the glass to the child's lips, Sikander looks at me. My body casts a shadow across his face. His dark eyes on me are veiled with conjecture. “I don't remember the last name,” he says, speaking in a considered manner. “But it could be.”

“You are Sikander!” I announce in a voice that brooks no doubt or argument. “You lived next to us on Race Course Road. You were refugees. . . . Don't you remember me?” My eyes misty, my smile wide and twitching, I know all the while how absurd it is to expect him to recall the sharp-featured and angular girl in the rounded contours and softened features of my middle-ageing womanhood.

“Was it Race Course Road?” says Sikander. He sits back and, turning his strong man's body to me, says, “I tried to locate the house when I was in Lahore. . . . But we moved to the farm land allotted to us in Sahiwal years ago. . . . I forgot the address. . . . So, it was Race Course Road!” He beams fondly at me. “You used to have pimples the size of boils!”

“Yes,” I reply, and then I don't know what to say. It is difficult to maintain poise when transported to the agonized and self-conscious persona of a boil-ridden and stringy child before a man who is, after all these years, a stranger.

Sitting opposite me—if he can ever be said to sit—Kishen comes to an explosive rescue. “You know each other? Imagine that! Childhood friends!”

Kishen has squirmed, crab-wise, clear across the huge sofa and is sitting so close to the edge that his weight is borne mostly by his thick legs. Halfway between sitting and squatting, quite
at ease with the restless energy of his body, he is radiant with the wonder of it all.

“It is incredible,” he booms with genial authority. “Incredible! After all these years you meet, not in Pakistan, but on the other side of the planet, in Houston!”

Triggered off by the fierce bout of nostalgia and the host of ghost memories stirred by Sikander's unexpected presence, the scenes that have been floundering in the murky deeps of my subconscious come into luminous focus. I see a pattern emerge, and the jumble of half-remembered events and sensations already clamor to be recorded in a novel I have just begun about the Partition of India.

Turning to Sikander, smiling fondly back at him, I repeat, “You're quite right: I had horrible pimples.”

Since childhood memories can only be accurately exhumed by the child, I will inhabit my childhood. As a writer, I am already practiced in inhabiting different bodies; dwelling in rooms, gardens, bungalows, and space from the past; zapping time.

Lahore: Autumn 1948. Pakistan is a little over a year old. The Partition riots, the arson and slaughter, have subsided. The flood of refugees—12 million Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs fleeing across borders that define India and Pakistan—has shrunk to a nervous trickle. Two gargantuan refugee camps have been set up on the outskirts of Lahore, at Walton and Badami Bagh. Bedraggled, carrying tin trunks, string cots, and cloth bundles on their heads, the refugees swamp the city looking for work, setting up house on sidewalks and in parks—or wherever they happen to be at sunset if they have wandered too far from the camps.

A young Christian couple, the Mangat Rais, live on one side of our house on Race Course Road; on the other side is the enormous bungalow of our Hindu neighbors. I don't know when they fled. My friends Sheila and Sam never even said goodbye.
Their deserted house has been looted several times. First by men in carts, shouting slogans, then by whoever chose to saunter in to pick up the leavings. Doors, sinks, wooden cabinets, electric fixtures, and wiring have all been ripped from their moorings and carried away. How swiftly the deserted house has decayed. The hedges are a spooky tangle, the garden full of weeds and white patches of caked mud.

It is still quite warm when I begin to notice signs of occupation. A window boarded up with cardboard, a diffused pallid gleam from another screened with jute sacking as candles or oil-lamps struggle to illuminate the darkness. The windows face my room across the wall that separates our houses. The possession is so subtle that it dawns on me only gradually; I have new neighbors. I know they are refugees, frightened, nervous of drawing attention to their furtive presence. I know this as children know many things without being told: But I have no way of telling if children dwell in the decaying recesses of the stolen bungalow.

Although the ominous roar of slogans shouted by distant mobs—that nauseating throb that had pulsed a continuous threat to my existence and the existence of all those I love—has at least ceased, terrible new sounds (and unaccountable silences) erupt about me. Sounds of lamentation magnified by the night—sudden unearthly shrieks—come from a nursery school hastily converted into a Recovered Women's Camp six houses away from ours. Tens of thousands of women have been kidnapped and hundreds of camps have been set up all over the Punjab to sort out and settle those who are rescued, or “recovered.”

Yet we hear nothing—no sound of talking, children quarreling or crying, of repairs being carried out—or any of the noises our refugee neighbors might be expected to make. It is eerie.

And then one afternoon, standing on my toes, I glimpse a small scruffy form through a gap in the wall (no more than a slit really) where the clay has worn away. I cannot tell if it's a boy or a girl or an apparition. The shadowy form appears to have such
an attuned awareness that it senses my presence in advance, and I catch only a spectral glimpse as it dissolves at the far corner of my vision.

Impelled by curiousity—and by my loneliness now that even Sheila and Sam have gone—I peep into my new neighbor's compound through the crack in the wall, hoping to trap a potential playmate. A few days later, crouching slyly beneath the wall, I suddenly spring up to peer through the slit, and startle a canny pair of dark eyes staring straight at me.

I step back—look away nonchalantly—praying the eyes will stay. A stealthy glance reassures me. I pick up a sharp stone and quickly begin to sketch hopscotch lines in the mud on our drive. I throw the stone in one square after another, enthusiastically playing against myself, aware I'm being observed. I am suddenly conscious of the short frock I have outgrown. The waist, pulled by sashed stitched to either side and tied at the back, squeezes my ribs. The seams hurt under my arms and when I bend the least bit I know my white cotton knickers, with dusty patches where I sit, are on embarrassing display. Never mind. If they offend the viewer, I'm sure my skipping skills won't. I skip rope, and turning around and around in one spot I breathlessly recite: “Teddy bear, Teddy bear, turn around: Teddy bear, Teddy bear, touch the ground.”

And again, I sense I'm alone. I rush to the wall but my phantasmal neighbor's neglected compound is empty.

The next few days I play close to the damaged wall. Sometimes the eyes are there, sometimes not. I look toward the wall more frequently, and notice that my glance no longer scares away the viewer. Once in a rare while I even smile, careful to look away at once, my lids demurely lowered, my expression shy: trying with whatever wiles I can to detain, disarm, and entice the invisible and elusive object of my fascination.

It is almost the end of October. The days are still warm but, as each day takes us closer to winter, the fresher air is exhilarating. People on the streets smile more readily, the tonga horses
snort and shake their necks and appear to pull their loads more easily, and even the refugees, absorbed into the gullies and the more crowded areas of Lahore as the camps shrink, appear at last to be less visible.

One such heady afternoon, when the eyes blocking the crack suddenly disappear and I see a smudge of pale light instead, I dash to the wall and glue my eye to the hole. A small boy, so extremely thin he looks like a brittle skeleton, is squatting a few feet away, concentrating on striking a marble lying in a notch in the dust. His skull-like face has dry, flaky patches, and two deep lines between his eyebrows that I have never before seen on a child. He is wearing a threadbare
shalwar
of thin cotton and the dirty cord tying the gathers around his waist trails in the mud. The sun-charred little body is covered with scabs and wounds. It is as if his tiny body had been carelessly carved and then stuck together again to form an ungainly puppet. I don't know how to react; I feel sorry for him and at the same time repulsed. He hits the marble he was aiming at, gets up to retrieve the marbles, and as he turns away I see the improbable wound on the back of his cropped head. It is a raw and flaming scar, as if bone and flesh had been callously gouged out, and my compassion ties me to him.

Suzanne is in the kitchen and Kishen is flitting between the dining table and the kitchen filling stainless-steel glasses with water and arranging bowls containing a variety of pickles. He places a stack of silvery platters, their rims gleaming, next to the glasses. The smell of mango pickle is strong in the room and, seeing our eyes darting to the table, Kishen's mother says, “We have made only a vegetarian
thal
today.” She sounds apologetic: as if their hospitality would not stand up to our expectations. I know how much trouble it is to prepare the different vegetables and lentils that add up to the
thal
. Glancing at his sisters-in-law, Sikander says, “The girls refused to eat lunch when they heard you were serving the
thal
,
Maajee
.” The sisters-in-law solemnly nod. “I've been looking forward to the food all day,” I also protest.

Turning from me to Kishen, who is folding cutlery in paper napkins, Mr. Khan declares, “I say
yaar
, you're such a well-trained husband!” and at that moment, involuntarily, my hand reaches out to lightly feel Mr. Khan's hair. Startled by the unexpected touch, Sikander whips around. He notices my discomfiture—and the unusual position of my hand in the air—and passing a hand down the back of his head, dryly says, “I'm wearing a wig. The scar is still there.”