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.

Qasim, as far as he knew, was alone. He moved swiftly, in shadows, aware that he had to cross the border before daylight.
He had barely started when suddenly a short form hurtled out of the dark at him. He stopped, his heart pounding. That same instant he realized it was a child, a little girl.
Clinging to his legs, she sobbed, “Abba, Abba, my Abba!” For a moment Qasim lost his wits. The child was the size of his own little Zaitoon lost so long ago. Her sobs sounded an eerie, forlorn echo from his past. Then, brutally untangling her stubborn grasp, he plunged ahead.
The child stumbled after him, screaming with terror.
Fearing the danger from that noise, Qasim waited for the child to catch up. He slid his hand beneath his vest and triggered a switch. A long thin blade jumped open in his hand. His fingers were groping for the nape of her neck when the girl pressed herself to him for protection.
Qasim gasped. Was it a trick of the light? Quietly, with one hand, he closed the knife. She looked up and in the mold of her tear-stained features, he caught an uncanny flash of resemblance to his daughter thrashing in the agony of her last frenzy.
Kneeling before her, he sheltered the small face in his hands.
The girl stared at him. “You aren’t my Abba,” she said in accusing surprise.
Qasim drew her to him. “What is your name?”
“Munni.”
“Just Munni? Aren’t all little girls called Munni?”
“Just Munni.”
“You must have another name . . . Do you know your father’s name?”
“My father’s name was Sikander.”
Her use of the past tense startled him. It showed a courage and a forbearance that met the exacting standard of his own proud tribe.
“I had a little girl once. Her name was Zaitoon. You are so like her . . .”
She leaned against him, trembling, and he, close to his heart, felt her wondrously warm and fragile. A great tenderness swept over him, and recognizing how that fateful night had thrown them together, he said, “Munni, you are like the smooth, dark olive, the zaitoon, that grows near our hills . . . The name suits you . . . I shall call you Zaitoon.”
A simple man from a primitive, warring tribe, his impulses were as direct and concentrated as pinpoints of heat. No subtle concessions to reason or consequence tempered his fierce capacity to love or hate, to lavish loyalty or pity. Each emotion arose spontaneously and without complication, and was reinforced by racial tradition, tribal honor and superstition. Generations had carried it that way in his volatile Kohistani blood.
Cradling the girl in his arms, he hurried towards Lahore.

“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?

Masseur gropes for my hand. But I twist and slip away and run to the boy and he, pretending to be a steam engine, “chookchooking” and glancing my way, leads me romping to his group.
The Sikh women pull me to their laps and ask my name and the name of my religion.
“I’m Parsee,” I say.
“O kee? What’s that?” they ask: scandalized to discover a religion they’ve never heard of.