And the World Changed (8 page)

Sikander's replies to my questions are candid, recalled in remarkable detail, but he balks at any question of Ammijee.

I don't remember now the question that unexpectedly penetrated his reserve; but Sikander planted in my mind a fearsome seed that waxed into an ugly tree of hideous possibility, when, in a voice that was indescribably harsh, he said: “Ammijee heard street vendors cry: ‘
Zenana
for sale!
Zenana
for sale!' as if they were selling vegetables and fish. They were selling women for 50, 20, and even 10 rupees!”

Later that evening, idling on our dhurries as we watch the spectacular crimson streaks on the horizon fade, I ask Sikander how he could be close friends with Khushwant and Pratab. In his place I would not even want to meet their eye! Isn't he furious with the Sikhs for what they did? Do the cousins know what happened in his village?

“I'm sure they know . . . everybody I meet seems to know. Why quarrel with Khushwant and Pratab? They weren't even born. . . .” And, his voice again taking on the hard, harsh edge he says, “We Muslims were no better . . . we did the same . . . Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, we were all evil bastards!”

Mr. Khan calls. His mother has arrived from Pakistan. He has asked a few friends to dinner to meet her on Saturday. Can I dine with them? Ammijee remembers me as a little girl!

I get into the usual state of panic and I put off looking at the map till the last hour. It is a major trauma—this business of finding my way from place to place—missing exits, getting out
of the car to read road signs, aggravating—and often terrifying—motorists in front, behind, and on either side. Thank God for alert American reflexes: for their chastising, wise, blasphemous tooting.

I find my way to Mr. Khan's without getting irremediably lost. It is a large old frame house behind a narrow neglected yard on Harold, between Montrose and the Rothko Chapel.

Sikander ushers me into the house with elegant formality, uttering phrases in Urdu that translated into English, sound like this: “We're honored by your visit to our poor house. We can't treat you in the manner to which you are accustomed. . . .” and presents me to his mother. She is a plump, buttery-fleshed, kind-faced old woman wearing a simple
shalwar
and shirt and her dark hair, streaked with gray, is covered by a gray nylon chador. She strokes my arm several times and, peering affectionately into my face, saying, “
Mashallah
, you've grown healthier. You were such a dry little thing,” steers me to sit next to her on the sofa.

Through my polite, bashful-little-girl's smile, I search her face. There's no trace of bitterness. No melancholy. Nothing knowing or hard: just the open, acquiescent, hospitable face of a contented peasant woman who is happy to visit her son. It is difficult to believe this gentle woman was kidnapped, raped, sold.

The sisters line up opposite to us on an assortment of dining and patio chairs carried in for the party. The living room is typically furnished, Pakistani style: an assortment of small carved tables and tables with brass and ivory inlay, handwoven Pakistani carpets scattered at angles, sofas and chairs showing a lot of carved wood, onyx ashtrays and plastic flowers in brass vases. The atmosphere is permeated with the sterile odor of careful disuse.

Kishen, his mother, and Suzanne arrive. Suzanne looks langorous and sultry-eyed in a beautiful navy and gold sari. There is a loud exchange of pleasantries. Kishen notices me across the length of the entrance lobby. “You found your way okay?” he
calls from the door, teasing. “Didn't land up in Mexico or something?”

“Not even once!” I yell back.

Some faces I recognize from the picnic arrive. A Kashmiri Brahman couple joins us. They are both short, fair, plump, and smug. They talk exclusively to Suzanne (the only white American in the room), Kishen (husband of the status symbol), and Mr. Khan. The sisters, condescended to a couple of times and then ignored, drift to the kitchen and disappear into the remote and mysterious recesses of the large house. I become aware of muted children's voices, quarrelsome, demanding, and excited. The sisters return, quiet and sullen, and dragging their chairs, huddle about a lamp standing in the corner.

Dinner is late. We are waiting for Khushwant and Pratab. Mr. Khan says, “We will wait for fifteen minutes more. If they don't come, we'll start eating.”

Hungry guests with growling stomachs, we nevertheless say, “Please don't worry on our account . . . we are in no hurry.”

Conversation dwindles. The guest politely inquire after the health of those sitting next to them and the grades of their children. We hear the doorbell ring and Mr. Khan gets up from his chair saying, “I think they've come.”

Instead of dapper Sikhs, I see two huge and hirsute Indian fakirs. Their disheveled hair, parted at the center, bristles about their arms and shoulders and mingles with their spiky black beards. They are wearing white muslin kurtas over the white singlets and their broad shoulders and thick muscles show brown beneath the fine muslin. I can't be sure from where I sit, but I think they have on loose cotton pajamas. They look indescribably fierce. It is an impression quickly formed, and I have barely glimpsed the visitors, when, abruptly, their knees appear to buckle and they fall forward.

Mr. Khan steps back hastily and bends over the prostate men. He says, “What's all this? What's all this?” The disconnected tone of his voice, and the underpinning of perplexity and
fear gets us all to our feet. Moving in a bunch, displacing the chairs and small tables and crumpling the carpets, we crowd our end of the lobby.

The fakirs lie face down across the threshold, half outside the door and half in the passage, their hands flat on the floor as if they were about to do pushups. Their faces are entirely hidden by hair. Suddenly, their voices are moist and thick, they begin to cry, “
Maajee! Maajee!
Forgive us.” The blubbering, coming as it does from these fierce men, is unexpected, shocking; incongruous and melodramatic in this pragmatic and oil-rich corner of the Western world.

Sikander, in obvious confusion, looms over them, looking from one to the other. Then, squatting in front of them, he begins to stroke their pricky heads, making soothing noises as if he were cajoling children, “What's this? Tch, tch. . . . Come on! Stand up!”

“Get out of the way.” An arm swings out in a threatening gesture and the fakir lifts his head. I see the pale, ash-smeared forehead, the large, thickly fringed brown eyes, the set curve of the wide, sensous mouth, and recognize Khushwant Singh. Next to him Pratab also raises his head. Sikander shuffles out of reach of Khushwant's arm and moving to one side, his back to the wall, watches the Sikhs with an expression of incredulity. It is unreal. I think it has occurred to all of us it might be a prank, an elaborate joke. But their red eyes, and the passion distorting their faces, are not pretended.

“Who are these men?”

The voice is demanding, abrasive. I look over my shoulder, wondering which of the women has spoken so harshly. The sisters look agitated; their dusky faces are flushed.

“Throw them out. They're
badmashes! Goondas!
”

Taken aback I realize the angry, fearful voice is Sikander's mother's.

Ammijee is standing behind me, barely visible among the agitated and excited sisters, and in her face I see more than just
the traces of emotions I had looked for earlier. It is as if her features had been parodied in a hideous mask. They are all there: the bitterness, the horror, the hate: the incarnation of that tree of ugly possibilities seeded in my mind when Sikander, in a cold fury, imitating the cries of the street vendors his mother had described, said, “
Zenana
for sale!
Zenana
for sale!”

I grew up overhearing fragments of whispered conversations about the sadism and bestiality women were subjected to during the Partition: What happened to so and so—someone's sister, daughter, sister-in-law—the women Mrs. Khan categorized
the spoils of war
. The fruits of victory in the unremitting chain of wars that is man's relentless history. The vulnerability of mothers, daughters, granddaughters, and their metamorphosis into possessions; living objects on whose soft bodies victors and losers alike vent their wrath, enact fantastic vendettas, celebrate victory. All history, all these fears, all probabilities and injustices coalesce in Ammijee's terrible face and impart a dimension of tragedy that alchemises the melodrama. The behavior of the Sikhs, so incongruous and flamboyant before, is now transcendentally essential, consequential, fitting.

The men on the floor have spotted Ammijee. “
Maajee
, forgive us: Forgive the wrongs of our fathers.”

A sister behind me says, “Oh my God!” There is a buzz of questions and comments. I feel she has voiced exactly my awe of the moment—the rare, luminous instant in which two men transcend their historic intransigence to tender apologies on behalf of their species. Again she says, “Oh God!” and I realize she is afraid that the cousins, propelled forward by small movements of their shoulders and elbows like crocodiles, are resurrecting a past that is best left in whatever recesses of the mind Ammijee has chosen to bury it.

“Don't do this . . . please,” protests Sikander. “You're our guests . . . !”

But the cousins, keeping their eyes on the floor say, “
Bhai
, let us be.”

The whispered comments of the guests intensify around me.

“What's the matter?”

“They are begging her pardon . . .”

“Who are these men?”

“. . . for what the Sikhs did to her in the riots. . . .”

“
Hai Ram
. What do they want?”

“God knows what she's been through; she never talks about it. . . .”

“With their hair opened like this they must remind her of the men who . . .”

“You can't beat the Punjabis when it comes to drama,” says the supercilious Kashmiri. His wife, standing next to me, says, “The Sikhs have a screw loose in the head.” She rotates a stubby thumb on her temple as if she were tightening an imaginary screw.

I turn, frowning. The sisters are glaring at them: showering the backs of their heads with withering, hostile looks. And, in hushed tones of suitable gravity, Mrs. Khan says, “Ammijee, they are asking for your forgiveness. Forgive them.” Then, “She forgives you brothers!” says Mrs. Khan loudly, on her mother-in-law's account. The other sisters repeat Mrs. Khan's magnanimous gesture, and, with minor variations, also forgive Khushwant and Pratab on Ammijee's behalf.

“Ammijee, come here.” Sikander sounds determined to put a stop to all this.

We shift, clearing a narrow passage for Ammijee, and Kishen's mother darts out instead looking like an agitated chick in her puffed cotton sari. She is about to say something—and judging from her expression it has to be something indeterminate and conciliatory—when Kishen, firmly taking hold of her arm, hauls her back.

Seeing his mother has not moved, Sikander shouts, “Send Ammijee here. For God's sake finish it now.”

Ammijee takes two or three staggering steps and stands a few paces before me. I suspect one of the sisters has nudged her
forward. I cannot see Ammijee's face, but the head beneath the gray chador jerks as if she were trying to remove a crick from her neck.

All at once, her voice, an altered, fragile, high-pitched treble that bears no resemblance to the fierce voice that had demanded, “Who are these men?” Ammijee screeches, “I will never forgive your fathers! Or your grandfathers! Get out, shaitans! Sons and grandsons of shaitans! Never, never, never!”

She becomes absolutely still, as if she would remain there forever, rooted, the quintessence of indictment.

They advance, wiping their noses on their sleeves, tearing at their snarled hair, pleading, “We will lie at your door to our last breath! We are not fit to show our faces.”

In a slow, deliberate gesture, Ammijee turns her face away and I observe her profile. Her eyes are clenched shut. The muscles in her cheeks and lower jaw are quivering in tiny, tight spasms as if charged by a current. No one dares say a word: It would be an intrusion. She has to contend with unearthed torments, private demons. The matter rests between her memories and the incarnation of the phantoms wriggling up to her.

The men reach out to touch the hem of her
shalwar
. Grasping her ankles, they lay their heads at her feet in the ancient gesture of surrender demanded of warriors.

“Leave me! Let go!” Ammijee shrieks, in her shaky, altered voice. She raises her arms and moves them as if she were pushing away invisible insects. But she looks exhausted and, her knees giving way, she squats before the men. She buries her face in the chador.

At last, with slight actions that suggest she is ready to face the world, Ammijee wipes her face in the chador and rearranges it on her untidy head. She tucks the edges behind her ears and slowly, in a movement that is almost tender, places her shaking hands on the shaggy heads of the men who hold her feet captive. “My sons, I forgave your fathers long ago,” she says in a flat,
emotionless voice pitched so low that it takes some time for the words to register, “How else could I live?”

On my way home, hanging on to the red taillights of the cars on the Katy Freeway, my thoughts tumble through a chaos of words and images: And then the words churn madly, throwing up fragments of verse by the Bolivian poet, Pedro Shimose. The words throb in an endless, circular rhythm: