Partitions: A Novel Read Online Free

happened overnight. His block is not the only one burning. The city is bleeding smoke into the sky. It’s taken the smell of smoke to prove to him he isn’t Ibrahim Masud to anyone but himself now. His profession, too, means nothing. Muslim : That’s suddenly the defining thing about him. The only detail, everything around it effaced. When did this happen? The official line is that he can stay if he wants or leave for Pakistan. His choice—stay here in India or shift west. Just over there. Like crossing the aisle on a bus.
    Masud hurries inside, skipping once from the pain in his foot. The smoke stings his eyes. His cough sounds at different points in the haze. Pants, shirt, money, glasses, shoes. These are to be expected. But he also takes his black doctor’s bag. As though he could let the house burn but must not be late to work. He will go to the clinic because the clinic is the only place he feels safe. It feels protected from further suffering because of the suffering already there. Violence would not trespass on the dominion of illness.
    His bicycle seat and pedals fit themselves as always to his body, and he cycles, his speed no different than on any other day, down his usual route. The only difference is that no one is out, and broken glass and smoking trash heaps litter the street. His pulse has just gone calm, given this pacifier of familiarity, when he rounds a corner to find vultures. At least three dozen of them crowd the street and rooftops. At regular intervals down the street, they pose atop the streetlamps the British put up fifteen years earlier. Some groom themselves, others meditate. The death here is old. This convocation is thick as seagulls along a shore.
    A dog trots past and weaves among the bodies as though to show him a way through. One shoe on the ground, one on a pedal, Masud looks back, around the corner, wondering about the smoking heaps he passed. He gets off and walks the bike. His progress is slow up a crooked runnel of limbs and wings. The chain clicks. He keeps his eyes on the passage between the bodies, not the bodies themselves. The vultures poke, shuffle to a more suitable angle, and poke. He thumbs his bell. They make way, a fluster of wings, a reluctant hop. He thumbs the bell twice more, turning the handlebars, stepping carefully. The road was never so long. It takes whole minutes of walking this way before he can get back on and pedal. He stands on the pedals because everything feels uphill now. At last, he stops before his clinic. He gets off the bike and holds it a while, hand on the seat, looking. Finally his hand slides to his side, and the bike tips away from him. He lets it fall. The rear wheel turns slowly in the air.
    *   *   *
    This is the clinic where, years earlier, we had traveled with the boys. Dr. Ibrahim Masud had a reputation that had traveled as far east as Delhi and as far west as our own city. Sonia’s midwife, Haleema bibi, who had over several visits fallen into the role of grandmother and counselor, spoke of his knowledge with the same voice such women use when speaking of their superstitions. He alone, she declared, running her ancient hand over Shankar’s head, he alone would know .
    I had heard of him from my own father, years ago. In his final year in London, my father had been introduced to this young Punjabi who was just starting his studies. Masud was, at that time, only seventeen. My father had expected to take him for a fitting at the nearest tailor’s and help him find Indian food; to warn him which instructors would be hostile to him, which ones indifferent; to speak their warm home language after a long day of anatomy Latin.
    Yet Ibrahim needed no companionship and felt, it seemed, no homesickness at all. He had gotten the year’s textbooks while still in India and was able to recite them rocking back and forth, as religious students did the Qur’an. A recording, impossible to converse with. The chapter on chronic pulmonary phthisis