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Prologue | August 1947
Two days after the birth of the nation, Chhote Nanu races toward the Lahore-Amritsar-Lahore express. But before he can shove his way inside, what he sees inside stops him dead in his tracks. He won’t be taking the train to free India. For once he is glad for his lateness. Not glad, no. For the most part, Chhote Nanu is numb. But in a small chamber of his heart, he is pleading with a fate that has spared him once to spare him one more time.
He brackets the golden-haired boy against his body, covers the boy’s eyes. But it’s too late. They have both seen a sight they will never forget. Mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, grandparents and children, especially the children, even the ones in the wombs, all undone. No one stirs. No one is left alive. The train is no longer a train, but a tidal wave of blood. In Punjab, the land of five rivers, a sixth is born.
The boy’s green-blue-green eyes demand an answer. But Chhote Nanu has no words to speak, his throat closed as though over a chicken bone.
The boy’s skin burns with fever, his body shivers like a telegraph needle poised on a piece of bad news. My little boy. Chhote Nanu buries the child’s nose in his neck. A cricket trapper, all knees, and sprightly on most occasions, the boy feels like deadweight, his bones dense with fear. Chhote Nanu feels he could crumble under the weight of a child. His own short legs, bulked from jail labor, won’t stop wobbling.
On the second night of their escape, he runs once again, abandoning the manmade routes of railway lines and roads, toward the lavender and honey predawn sky. In the distance, there are fields of wheat, corn, millet, mustard. No limbs, no cut-off noses, no wide-open eyes.
But to leave the city, they must traverse it again. The old Mall Road, the civil station, the hundred windows of Nedous Hotel. One rainy af- ternoon, under the blue awnings, the boy had heard Judy Garland on the gramophone. He presses Chhote Nanu’s finger. Do you remember? Chhote Nanu, who remembers, presses back. The city is no longer theirs—new things swallow old ones—stone colonnades disappear behind posters of the national army, which disappear behind banners of the new party that has birthed the new nation. It is best to say goodbye and move on.
A while later, they reach the refugee camp.
“We are safe now,” Chhote Nanu tells the boy. “We are among people of our sort, waiting to cross the border to the other side.” There is comfort in numbers, he tells himself, there is comfort in the thou- sand canvas tents pegged in an orderly fashion, as far as the eye can see. This is what the mountains look like up close, he tells the child. A euphemism, a lie. Rich men in cravats await their caravans of cars, haggle over jeeps for hire; the poor haggle over mules. They hear cattle wailing, utensils clanging, people everywhere.
The refugees stare at the golden-haired boy with interest. Chhote Nanu pulls up his shirt, wraps the child around his frame, hides the boy under the shirt. He fears the living more than the dead.
In the distance, he sees army trucks, six in all, each vehicle sur- rounded by crowds clamoring to get on. The fittest push through, the men haul themselves on roofs, the women press inside. On the roof of one of the vehicles, like a star in the night sky, Chhote Nanu spots two pale hands waving, his big brother’s.
“Praji!” Chhote Nanu shouts, beating through the crowds toward the trucks. “Wait for me! Don’t leave me behind.”
From across the field, Barre Nanu sees his brother, all of him intact, his wild hair, his jaunty shuffle, his rumpled oversized shirt. The sound that escapes Barre Nanu is an infinite laugh. His body laughs with the joy of an insomniac waking from a deep sleep. He is alive, the little fool with his wayward ways and his poetic disposition, and Barre Nanu aches to hold him and tell him all that is trivial and treacherous and vital in the world.
Chhote Nanu pushes through the crowd. The caravan of peasant men and women, city dwellers and merchants, heckles and shouts; but Barre Nanu’s yell shuts them up.
“Let him through, that is my brother come back from the dead, went to prison for the country while the whole lot of you slept.”
Chhote Nanu elbows his way forward, both arms wrapped around the child clinging to his body.
Barre Nanu’s hungry hands reach for his brother. “I thought the English woman swallowed you whole.”
Chhote Nanu covers the child’s ears, the only surviving memory of the woman he loved. Loves.
“Who is that?” Barre Nanu points to the boy’s golden hair poking through Chhote Nanu’s shirt.
“No one.” Chhote Nanu climbs onto the truck. He pleads with the passengers to make room.
The caravan curses even as it squeezes and coils like a boa constrictor.
Chhote Nanu lifts his shirt to reveal a boy clinging to his chest. “Hari Om,” an old man says, both in shock and as a benediction to guard their journey. Chhote Nanu settles the child between his legs, puts his hands over his golden hair. There is nothing to see here, his eyes say to the men around him. There is nothing to see, he wants to tell his brother.
But Barre Nanu isn’t easily deterred. “Whose child have you stolen?” The question causes the boy to dig his head into his protector’s chest. Chhote Nanu pats his head. “In times of worry, we pray.”
“La Ilaha,” the boy mutters, “Muhammad ur Rasul Allah.”
A young man with a nascent unibrow spits onto the ground. “Eh Bhai, this truck is headed to India,” he tells Chhote Nanu, as if he doesn’t know. “You want to get off at the next stop.”
Some of the men nod in agreement. Best if Chhote Nanu and the boy and their prayers remain on this side of the border. More men chime their displeasure. Only fair for Muslim prayers to stay in Pakistan, and Hindu ones to go on to India. They roll up their sleeves in indignation, ready to chuck Chhote Nanu and the boy off the truck.
Below them, the driver, oblivious to the quarrel on the roof, shifts the engine to a higher gear.
Barre Nanu grabs his brother’s wrist. “Who is this boy? Who are you throwing your life away for?” The boy has a nose like the nib of a pen, eyes that are blue and green, a faint, carefree brow; he bears no physical resemblance to the wide-nosed, big-lipped Chhote, his brow perpetually knotted like he’s withholding a grievance. Why, at such a time when empathy costs more than diamonds, Barre Nanu wonders, would his brother give it away to the first English child he found on the streets? “Little boy, who is your father? Where is your mother?”
The questions bring the boy to tears. In as calm a voice as he can manage, Chhote Nanu tells his brother: “This is my son. Do what you like.”
The caravan grows restless. “Are we dropping off the musalmans back in Pakistan?”
Barre Nanu’s blood curdles. He doesn’t approve of men using re- ligion as a spear. But neither does he approve of theft. “Nobody lays a finger on him,” he warns the fanatics. He yanks his brother’s ear. “Don’t lie to me. Whose child have you stolen. Tell me, or I will toss you off myself.”
Chhote Nanu blows air through his mouth to feel less afraid. “Never,” he shouts back.
“Well then. See if I care what they do to you.”
Their truck hurtles toward the new country. Yellow fields of mustard stretch as far as the eye can see. Food is days away, shelter and roof another five hundred miles southeast, and for Barre Nanu, my grandfather, empathy for my granduncle will take many years to manifest. At that moment, as he makes his way out of a new Pakistan and into a new India, all he can see is the golden-haired boy—how the child has propelled the brothers to the brink of war, and how he stands in-between their undoubtedly mottled future and their quickly evaporating past.
August 2002
I came home to Kanpur because Barre Nanu had died. I kept thinking of his last days throughout the journey, the shouting in my head getting louder as the train pulled into the station.
I sought a moment of clarity in the chaos of the platform—the handcarts piled high with grain, tea stalls selling hot breakfasts of fried bread, travelers elbowing each other to hop on. By the station master’s office, near the city’s edge, the sunshine spread clean like a river—the abundant Kanpur light could turn winters into summers. It was as though I’d arrived into mid-June, into a time instead of a place on a map.
“Zara khisakiye, step aside, please, brother.” A fellow passenger, who’d combed his hair for the past hour, waved to his wife waiting for him on the platform with a garland in hand. I stepped back to let him pass.
I almost missed her standing beside a poster advertising umbrellas—Ila, in a monochrome blue sari. She’d thinned, acquired cheekbones and collarbones and shadows. Her eyes hid behind a pair of sunglasses, the ridge secured with blue tape. She looked agitated, as though she’d been robbed or slapped or both. She wrapped the folds of a blue cotton bag around her arms. A braid snaked over her shoulder. My baby sister. She could do anything, such as packing away our grandfather’s life, wiping away every trace of him so that there remained nothing for me to do but take her word for it. One of her harried emails shouted inside my head: “Dear brother Karan, Barre Nanu died. You intend to come back ever or what?”
For the past several months, I’d hauled copious guilt, wondering how she must have handled Barre Nanu’s last days with no one to help her. My sister had stepped up, and I’d proved myself unnecessary, once again. “It’s all taken care of,” Ila replied once I’d finally surfaced. In-between the lines, I could hear her taunting me: Where was my big brother when I needed him? As usual, not around.
I receded into the vestibule, while she consulted her wristwatch, folded her judgmental arms. I contemplated taking the train back to where I’d come from, but the ticket collector hopped on and began clicking his ticket puncher.
I stepped off the train and approached my sister as a pilgrim, head bowed, heart brimming with guilt. Ila let me reach for her chin, kiss her forehead. How easily her small body disappeared into mine. It has always been this way. But she pulled away too quickly, leaving a faint black line of kajal on my collar, leaving me feeling incomplete. She was upset I’d stayed away for so long, that I hadn’t come right when Barre Nanu’s heart had started to give trouble. For six years I hadn’t returned.
She walked ahead, swinging my backpack on her shoulder, leaving me to juggle the two suitcases heavy with the books I’d packed in a fit of optimism. She found a rickshaw, the most decrepit looking of the lot, the seat broken, the driver in rags. She sat sideways, her burdened back a C-shaped accusation. A sudden azaan, a caustic call to prayer from a nearby mosque. My sister, a grievous Auden poem I longed to understand.
If Barre Nanu were alive, he’d have come to collect me, held us both like two pearls inside his benediction. Ila wouldn’t have marched ahead, and everyone would have known we belonged to each other and to him, everyone would see we were family.
Our rickshaw passed the old English dance hall, its colonnades dark from age, the interior taken over by Kashi and Sons. “For All Your Sporting Needs.” Wooden tennis rackets and a faded photo of Boris Becker still adorned the glass display. Indoors, in the dim light, the grandfather and grandson played cards. God only knew the last time they’d made a sale.
“He didn’t ask about you,” Ila said sharply. “In the last month he was alive. He didn’t ask about you. He didn’t leave you anything.”
I deserved her rage. I hadn’t shared her burden. Did Barre Nanu have much to leave? The house, yes. The bare bones of his old business, the old looms, a few woodblocks. But all that was far from my mind—
“He wasn’t coherent near the end. He wasn’t completely sane.”
The ticket stub flew out of my hand. Barre Nanu. Our Noah, no, our ark that carried us out of the floods. Had he suffered near the end? Ila was telling me this to break my heart all over again.
“But what does it matter to you?” She turned to faced me until our knees knocked. “It took you six months to book a ticket.”
“Tell me everything,” I murmured. “Tell me how it happened.”
“Very well. I suppose you should know.”
This is what Ila said:
Sometime last year, Barre Nanu complained of chest pains, and Ila took a midnight train from Delhi to Kanpur to take Barre Nanu to the doctors. She administered his pills, made sure he convalesced for the prescribed two months. But with nothing to do and his workshop folded, no workers to entertain him with gossip, his mind began to falter. He began obsessing over his teeth. Every few hours, he would grin into a mirror, bare his frightful yellowing teeth, and complain he hadn’t eaten well in a decade, had forgotten the taste of raw mangoes and meat. He wanted a new set of dentures so he’d have something to look forward to for the rest of his days. The heart surgeon gave him the go-ahead, and all of Ila’s objections were shot down.
On the morning of the appointment, Barre Nanu put on trousers over pajamas to keep out the morning chill (white hem showing) and smiled at the photo of his ex-wife. Ila followed him out the door, but he wouldn’t let her come with. Still, she trailed behind in a rickshaw.
In the dentist’s office, she watched him lie on a plastic-covered recliner and name treats he’d enjoy—unripe guavas, peanut brittle, roasted corn. The dentist administered anesthesia, and Barre Nanu’s eyelids fluttered shut. When he came to, his old teeth removed, he reassured the nurse he felt well enough to travel home. But by the time he emerged into the waiting room, he was completely changed. He looked straight past Ila, and walked out into the street.
Ila caught him staring at the grand yellow-bricked Life Insurance Corporation building with the ochre colonnades. Barre Nanu looked lost, as though all his memory had seeped out of him like tea through a sieve. He crept toward an electronics store, stared at the poster of the Murphy Radio Baby (the baby’s index finger poised by his lip as though he were advertising porridge and not radios). Barre Nanu regarded the landmark that had guided him home for half his life as though he were seeing it for the first time. He pounded his fist into his jaw, as if to pummel pain away.
Ila caught up with him, touched him lightly on the elbow.
His eyes widened with surprise, and he smiled, revealing a mouth devoid of teeth. “Child, you are very pretty,” he slurred, flirting with his granddaughter a little and pinching her cheek. Then, as though recalling something, he turned to the park.
Ila watched him cross the street toward the gregarious mynah birds and the swaying red gulmohur trees, light and airy and full of joy. She found him staring at the yellow domes of the museum, dirty and aging. They must have reminded him of his old teeth, because Barre Nanu doubled over with pain. After a minute, he clutched his jaw with both hands and approached an old plaque on the building. He read the history of the town’s founding, sounding out the names of the British generals and causing the morning joggers to stare. Once again, he left Ila pleading, and circled back to the park gates. There he ordered a butter sandwich, the butter soft and white, the rock salt purple and pungent, breakfast he’d treated us to countless times.
“We should go home,” Ila insisted. Without a word, he handed her the sandwich, remembering he had no teeth with which to chew. The sun rose higher and cars and scooters crowded the street. Barre Nanu hired a rickshaw, and when Ila climbed into the seat next to him, he did not object, only stared at the beautiful, uneaten sandwich until Ila tore out for him the softest center piece.
He was telling her a story of the British origins of the town, most of his words slurring, when he clutched his chest and crumpled onto Ila’s lap, his body heavy and warm.
“Hey Ram!” escaped his lips.
She tried to sit him straight, but failed. “Bhaiya! Ursula Housman!” she shouted at the rickshaw wallah, urging him to rush to the nearest hospital. But just then a bus disgorged its passengers, who began to cross the street, and even as she shouted, cursed, begged them to make way, they paid her no mind. An old man collapsed on a rickshaw presented no cause for alarm, a hysterical woman elicited no one’s response.
Barre Nanu began to die. Ila knew the end was near because his memory came back in jumbled bits. He pointed to things, mumbling about their significance in his life—the long road home, the trees, the buildings, the paths in the park. Ila saw his soul flying out gram by gram, rationed to the city, recognizing its beloved bits: five grams to the temple where he’d married our grandmother, two to the mosque the newlyweds visited next, two to the custodian of refugee housing, five to the telegraph office, whose truculence in locating our grandmother's family in Pakistan had brought our grandparents together in the first place. He pointed delightedly to these, his words flowing, his memory also, even as pain split him into pieces.
But then his narrative stopped. His finger paused at Gandhi’s statue. The mahatma’s message of passive noncooperation had never appealed to Barre Nanu. His hero was Bhagat Singh, the famous revolutionary of Punjab.
“Where am I?” he cried. With the last remaining strength in his dissipating body, he reached for the rickshaw wallah’s shoulder and commanded him to drive to Shahalmi.
“Sahib?”
“Go past Charing Cross and turn left.”
“Charing what?”
“La . . .” the syllable fell from Barre Nanu’s numb mouth. “La . . .” it fell again, “La,” once more until it became a song in the wind, hitting Ila’s ear like a chorus she ought to know. But Barre Nanu’s tongue never curled upon the last syllable, and it was only later that Ila understood he was trying in his last moments to return to Lahore, the city he had left behind in Pakistan more than sixty years earlier.
