And the World Changed (7 page)

“Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to . . .” I say, almost incoherent with embarrassment. But Mr. Khan grants me a smile of such indulgent complicity that acknowledging my childhood claim to his friendship, I am compelled to ask, “What about the other scars . . . are they still . . . ?”

Wordlessly opening the cuff button Sikander peels his shirt sleeve back. The scars are fainter, diminished, and on that strong brown arm, innocuous: not at all like the dangerous welts and scabs afflicting the pitiful creature I saw for the first time on that mellow afternoon through a slit in the compound wall. With one finger, gently, I touch the arm, and responding to the touch, Sikander twists it to show me the other scars.

“You want to see the back of my head?” he asks. I nod.

Sikander turns, and with a deft movement of his fingers lifts up part of the piece to show the scar. It has pale ridges of thick scar tissue, and the hair growing around it has given it the shape of a four-day-old crescent moon.

Sikander smooths down his hair and notices that, except for the children shouting as they play outside, the room has become quiet; even Kishen has come from the dining table to peer at his famous scalp.

“I think I'm out of cigarettes,” Sikander says, patting his empty pockets with the agitation of an addict desperately in need of a smoke. “I'll be back in ten minutes,
yaar
,” he tells Kishen, getting up.

While Sikander is out, Kishen and his mother sit close to me, and Suzanne, drawn from the kitchen by the hushed tone
of their voices, joins them in pressing me with information and plying me with questions. Could I tell them what Mr. Khan looked like as a little boy? Do I know what happened to Ammijee? No? Well, they noticed Mr. Khan's reticence on the subject and stopped asking questions. . . . But they suspect she has been through something terrible. . . . Except for Mr. Khan, her entire family was killed during the attack. . . . Do I remember her? Was she pretty?

The focus of interest appears to revolve around Ammijee. They have known Sikander for a long time and his mother's anticipated arrival has caused a stir. I search my memory. I dimly perceive a thin, bent-over, squatting figure, scrubbing clothes, scouring tinny utensils with mud and ash, peeling squashes and other cheap vegetables, kneading dough, and slapping it into chapatis. . . .

The ragged cotton chador always drawn forward over her face, the color of her form blended with the mud, the ash, the utensils she washed, the pale seasonal vegetables she peeled. This must be Ammijee: a figure bent perpetually to accommodate the angle of drudgery and poverty. I don't recall her face or the color of her dusty bare feet; the shape of her hands or whether she wore bangles.

All I knew as a child was that my little refugee friend's village was attacked by the Sikhs.

I did not understand the complete significance of the word “refugees” at the time. I thought, on the nebulous basis of my understanding of the Hindu caste system, that the “refugees” were a caste—like the Brahman or
achoot
castes—who were suddently pouring into Lahore, and it was in the nature of this caste—much as the
achoots
or untouchables were born to clean gutters and sweep toilets—to be inexorably poor, ragged, homeless, forever looking for work and places to stay.

Sikander had described some of the details of the attack and of his miraculous survival. His account of it, supplied in little, suddenly recalled snatches—brought to mind by chance
associations while we played—was so jumbled, so full of bizarre incident, that I accepted it as the baggage of truth-enlivened-by-fantasy that every child carries within. Although I realized the broader implications of what had happened, that the British Raj had ended, that there were religious riots between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, and the country was divided because of them, I was too young to understand the underlying combustibility of the events preceding Partition that had driven my friends away and turned a little boy's world into a nightmare.

But I had heard no mention at all of Ammijee's ordeal. Excited by my ignorance, and the spirit of instruction burning in us all to remedy this lack, Mrs. Khan and her three sisters also move closer; those who can, dragging their chairs forward; those who can't, settling on the rug at my feet. The entire ensemble now combines to enlighten me in five languages: English, Punjabi, and Urdu, which I understand, and Kannada and Marathi—contributed by Kishen's mother in earnest but brief fusillades—which I don't.

The boys and some of the men in the village, I am informed, were huddled in a dark room at the back of a barn when the Sikhs smote the door, shouting: “Open up. Open up!”

And, when the door was opened, the hideous swish of long steel swords dazzling their eyes in the sunlight, severing first his father's head, then his uncle's, then his brother's. His own sliced at the back because he was only nine years old, and short. They left him for dead. How he survived, how he arrived in Pakistan, is another story.

“Ammijee says the village women ran toward the Chaudhrys' house,” says Mrs. Khan in assertive Punjabi. Being Ammijee's daughter-in-law, she is permitted, for the moment, at least, to hold center stage. “They know what the Sikhs would do to them . . . women are the spoils of war . . . no matter what you are—Hindu, Muslim, Sikh—women bear the brunt. . . .

“Rather than fall into the hands of the Sikhs, the poor
women planned to burn themselves. They had stored kerosene . . . but when the attack came they had no time. Thirty thousand men, mad with blood lust, waving swords and sten guns!”

Mrs. Khan casts her eyes about in a way that makes us draw closer, and having ascertained that Mr. Khan is still absent, whispers, “Ammijee says she went mad! She would have killed herself if she could. So would you: So would I. . . . She heard her eleven-year-old daughter screaming and screaming . . . she heard the mullah's sixteen-year-old daughter scream: ‘Do anything you wish with me, but don't hurt me. For God's sake don't hurt me!'”

We look away, the girls' tormented cries ringing unbearably in our ears. Suzanne and the youngest sister brush their eyes and, by the time we are able to talk again, Mrs. Khan's moment is over. The medley of languages again asserts itself: “God knows how many women died. . . .” A helpless spreading of hands and deep sighs.

“Pregnant women were paraded naked, their stomachs slashed. . . .”

“Yes-
jee
and the babies were swung by their heels and dashed against wall.”

Much shaking of heads. God's help and mercy evoked.

“God knows how many women were lifted . . . but, then, everybody carried women off. Sikhs and Hindus, Muslim women. Muslims, Sikh and Hindu women.”

A general clucking of tongues: an air of commiseration.

“Allah have mercy on us,” says Mrs. Khan, and in resounding Punjabi again asserts her authority as chief speaker. His mother had a bad experience. Very bad. Ammijee never talks about it, but those who knew her when she was recovered, say . . .”

Mrs. Khan stops short. Having second thoughts about disclosing what her mother-in-law never talks about, she makes a deft switch and in a banal, rhetorical tone of voices says, “She saw horrible things. Horrible. Babies tossed into boiling oil . . .”

Sikander Khan, having bought his pack and smoked his cigarette outside, quietly joins us.

Halfway through dinner two handsome, broad-shouldered Sikhs in gray shirts join us. I gather they are cousins. Their long hair is tucked away in blue turbans, and their beards tied in neat rolls beneath their chins. Again there is an explosion of welcome: a flurry to feed the latecomers and a great deal of hand-slapping and embracing among the men. Considering what I heard just a few moments ago, I am a little surprised at the cordiality between Sikander Khan and the young Sikhs. I hear one of the men say in Urdu, “Any further news about your Ammijee's arrival?”

His back is to me: But the sudden switch from Punjabi to Urdu, the formality in his voice, and his node of address, catch my attention. There is no apparent change in the volume of noise in the room, yet I sense we have all shared a moment of unease: an incongruous solemnity.

And then the Sikhs move to greet the women from Mr. Khan's family in Punjabi, inquire after their health and the health of their children, and indulge in a little lighthearted teasing. The unease is so dispelled, I wonder if I have not imagined it.

“You haven't invited us to a meal in almost a month,
Bhabi
,” says the stouter of the two men to Mrs. Khan. “Look at poor Pratab: See how thin he's become?” He pulls back his cousin's arms the way poultry dealers hold back chicken wings and, standing him helpless and grinning in front of Mrs. Khan, asks, “Have we offended you in some way?”

“No, no, Khushwant
Bhai
,” says Mrs. Khan, “It isn't anything like that. . . .”

“She's concerned about your health, brother,” pipes up the eldest of her three sisters, “You're too fat and fresh for your own good!” She must be in her mid-twenties.

Khushwant releases his counsing good-naturedly and the sisters, hiding their smiles in their
dupattas
, start giggling. They have perked up in the presence of these young men who speak
their language and share their ways, their religious antagonisms dissipated on American soil.

On surer ground, the same sister says, “What about the picnic you promised us? You're the one who breaks promises, and you complain about our sister!” Her face animated, her large black eyes rouguish, she is charming: And I suddenly notice how pretty the sisters are in their pleasantly plump Punjabi way.

“When would you like to go? Next Sunday?” asks Khushwant Singh gallantly.

“We'll know what's what when Sunday comes,” says another sister, tossing her long plaited hair back in a half-bullying, half-mocking gesture. She has a small, full-lipped mouth and a diamond on one side of her pert nose.

“I'll take you to the ocean next Sunday. It's a promise,” says Khushwant Singh, “But only if
Bhabi
makes
parathas
with her own hands.”

“What's wrong with my hands?” the pert sister asks. “Or with Gulnar's hands?” she indicates their youngest sister who promptly buries her face in her
dupatta
. Gulnar is the only sister not yet married. I guess she is sixteen or seventeen.

“Have either of you given me any occasion to praise your cooking?” Khushwant asks.

“They'll give you occasion on Sunday,” intervenes Mrs. Khan. “But tell me, brother,” she say, “what will you feed us? Why don't you bring chicken korma to go with the
parathas
?”

“No chicken korma till you find me a wife.”

“Lo!” says Mrs. Khan. “As if you'll agree to our choice! There are plenty of pretty Sikh girls, but you fuss!”

“I want someone just like you,
Bhabi
,” says the handsome Sikh, and turns slightly red. “A girl who knows our ways.”

“That's what you say, but you'll end up marrying a whitewashed memsahib!” At once realizing her folly the pert sister springs up from her chair and, abandoning her dinner, hugging Suzanne and holding her cheek against hers, says, “Unless it is someone like Sue
Bhabi
: She's one of us. Then we won't mind.”

Suzanne takes it, as she accepts the smaller hazards of her marriage to Kishen, in her twinkle-toed and sari-clad stride. She told me about a year back, when we were just becoming friends, that she felt content and secure in her extended Indian family. She tried to describe to me her feeling of being firmly embedded in life—in the business and purpose of living—that she, as an only child, had never experienced. Suzanne comes from a small town in New England. Her father teaches history at a university. I haven't met her family but I gather they are unpretentious and gentle folk.

It is the Sunday of the picnic. Kishen and Suzanne give me a ride to Galveston beach. It is a massive affair. Innumerable kin have been added to the group that met for dinner at Kishen's. Mr. Khan, in long white pants and a blue T-shirt, staggers across the hot sand with a stack of
parathas
wrapped in a metallic gray garbage bag. Khushwant Singh and Pratab have brought the food from a Pakistani restaurant on Hillcroft.

Later in the sultry afternoon, exhiliarated from our splashing in the ocean and the sudden shelter of an overcast sky, we converge on the dhurries spread on the sand. Mrs. Khan and her three sisters flop like exotic beetles on a striped dhurrie, their wet satin
shalwars
and
kameezes
clinging to them in rich blobs of solid color.

The
parathas
are delicious. Sikander heaps his plate with
haleem
and mutton curry and, crossing his legs like an inept yogi, sits down by me. I broach the subject that has been obsessing me: I would like to use his family's experience during the Partition in my novel.

As we eat, sucking on our fingers, drinking Coke out of cans, I ask Sikander about the attack on the village: trying, with whatever wiles I can, to penetrate the mystery surrounding Ammijee.

I gathered from the remarks Mrs. Khan let slip on the night of the party that Ammijee was kidnapped. But I want to know
what Mrs. Khan was about to say when she checked herself. I feel the missing information will unravel the full magnitude of the tragedy to my understanding and, more importantly, to my imagination. Instinctively I chose Sikander Khan, and not Mrs. Khan, to provide the knowledge. His emotions and perceptions will, I feel, charge my writing with the detail, emotion, and veracity I am striving for.