Partitions: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

from Eustace Smith’s On the Wasting Diseases of Infants and Children tumbled out fluently. Ibrahim’s own name, though, came out “Ib ib ibbbbb,” like uncontrollable hiccups.
    Years later, my father came across Masud’s study of plague deaths in the Amritsar and Kasur districts, published in the Indian Medical Archives . It was the writing my father would have expected of him: meticulous accounting, like a census taker’s, but no interpretation, no commentary. Data without an idea, more tables than words.
    I bring it before my vanished eyes and read. This is how Masud’s mind worked. Something verbal, perceptual, emotional was missing. For all that, his mind contained his field. The two best-known pediatricians in Lahore shook their heads over Shankar and pointed us east.
    *   *   *
    The boys slept well on the train. Our arms and the compartment embedded rocking motion inside rocking motion. We took the same Amritsar-bound train, at the same hour, that Sonia and the boys would try to take years later. They would be separated from their mother only four compartments over.
    At one point, the boys woke and started crying. It wasn’t that one woke up the other. Rather both boys threw out their arms as if dropped from a height and couldn’t be consoled for some minutes. Finally the breast calmed Keshav, who drank his fill and drowsed with his mouth in place. Sonia and I traded babies so she could try the same with Shankar, who sucked only a few seconds, burrowed toward her, and fell asleep. I wonder if the moment they woke was the moment we crossed the as-yet undrawn border between Pakistan and India. Did they sense something seismic there, a future rift in the earth, the way animals get skittish before a coming earthquake? Did they sense the fault line?
    *   *   *
    I can still picture Dr. Masud warming the cup of his stethoscope in his hand as he stroked my son’s head. He had trouble speaking, it was true, but only to adults. Around the children, his stammer eased. Sentences, short ones, came out whole, two sometimes in succession. And so the child became an intermediary through whom he could communicate to the parents, even if the child were Shankar’s age. He spoke facing Shankar, addressed his questions as if directly to the infant in my arms, and I answered—how often his skin went blue, whether he took small feedings frequently or none at all, whether his twin had any such troubles. When he brought up the earpieces, I noticed the gentle fringe of hairs along his ears. He listened, using the bell and the flat, to Shankar’s chest and back. My boy propped in my lap, with the blankets and clothes undone, I realized anew how tiny he was. Even the child-sized stethoscope, its bell no bigger than a coin, seemed large against his ribs. Sonia must have seen him bare like this every day when soaping, rinsing, drying him, a droplet of oil in the palm enough to rub him down. I closed my eyes and felt relieved, when his examiner sat back, to wrap his starvation-thin body.
    “Your papa is a doctor, hm?” Masud said.
    I nodded.
    He looked at Sonia and raised a finger to tell her to wait there with Keshav. Then he led me, Shankar in my arms, into his personal office and said in English, pointing at his heart, “Blue disease.” He tilted books down from a wall of them, books so thick the highest ones had to be caught on the other palm.
    Diagrams of the heart and great vessels showed the red aorta curving through the chest and sprouting branches, and the pulmonary artery, painted blue, splitting in half. He angled his fist against his chest and began to explain, the fingers of one hand splaying, the fist opening and closing. His speech became fluent as he quoted the texts laid out before me. I nodded, but I was only pretending to understand, the way I used to as a boy beside my mathematics tutor—so much passion, so much desire to communicate, that I felt ashamed it should be wasted. I wanted to reward the