Free Partitions: A Novel by Amit Majmudar

inside a fortress. You can’t enter without setting off pain, and the pain weakening your arm.
    Well then, I won’t be weak , she decides. I will do what Harpreet didn’t, if I have to. I won’t let a daughter of my father’s be turned into a Muslim.
    I search her a little and realize that, at her age, this is the worst she can imagine them doing to her. Conversion: it baffles me at first, but she has no way of truly understanding what those men would want with her. She has always been a religious girl, every ardaas by heart, songs, tales of martyrs she would tell her sisters before bed, stories about the persecuted Gurus. Conversion, in her mind, is lifelong captivity in forgetfulness. Everything she is, down to her name, replaced. She can’t conceive how men can inflict worse than erasure. How the soul can suffer such a thing as defacement.
    Every method she thinks of is imperfect, dangerous without being lethal. Killing is going on everywhere, but strip a body of metal and it is curiously powerless to harm itself decisively. She must leave this perch, if only to search the aftermath for a knife. Until then she would have to trust to God. She will stay close to cliffs, she thinks. Any ledge she can bolt for and throw herself off. Rivers might work, too, if fast enough. It’s an inversion of the logic that keeps cautious sailors in sight of shore. Once she has a blade of some kind, she reasons, she will be safe, she will have an escape even if she can’t run. The branches shake to either side as she braces where she climbed and eases herself onto the dim, sloped ground.
    *   *   *
    I know her sense of futility. I want hands the way her hands want a blade. Hands would equip me well enough for the violence I wish. Because the man I want to protect my boys from is skinny enough, I could break him with half my former substance, thirty kilos would do it. (I cast no great shadows when I lived.) I see his gaunt frame and it puts me in mind of a hungry jackal, and I suspect that’s what he was in his past life or will be in his next. His name is Saif Nasir, and he is trailing my boys along the track, and has been for some time, ever since the tracks crossed Curzon Road and the boys stopped to stare at some bent bicycles and splintered carts.
    The men—Saif had not been among them; he was the sort who watched—had shouldered their way into the traffic waiting for the train to pass, identified their targets, and grouped them on the side of the road. The people not selected—who still had one foot on their bicycle pedals, one foot on the road—held their poses, stiff, as if hounds were sniffing them. The crossing bars rose. The traffic started moving. The bodies fell. Saif trotted in later and found a ring. He checked the teeth but found no fillings; for striking gold, he carried a carpenter’s chisel.
    He has been listening.
    Keshav: “What do we do once we get to the next station?”
    Shankar: “We ask the stationmaster there.”
    “Even if she did get off, how would he know?”
    “She would go to him for help.”
    “What if he doesn’t know?”
    “Then we go to the next station.”
    It isn’t hard for him to reconstruct what happened. The boys are silent for a spell, and then they talk about Delhi, how Delhi will end up being their best chance—everyone who goes to India has to get their name written down in Delhi, right? If all the stations turn up nothing, they can ask at the “big office.” That’s the phrase they hold on to, the one they heard from Sonia earlier in the morning. We are going to Delhi, she had told them, to register at the big office and live in India. The big office—in the boys’ minds, an immense building with khaki-uniformed chowkidars and gardens and fountains, where all things are recorded and addressed in permanent English; the place from which the adult world derives its order and to which it reports. Delhi: they have an image of broad paved streets and cars and safety.