A Moment Comes Read online

  All the same, they wait until I’m out of sight to continue.

  “Where is the house?” Biji asks.

  “Near the magistrate.”

  “The yellow one?”

  “Haan,” he replies.

  “That’s a thirty- or forty-minute walk—”

  “She’ll stay during the week. They will have a room for her. And when Manvinder and his family come, we will need the space,” he says, adding quietly, “and the money. Until he finds work.”

  “But she’ll still have to get there—”

  “Manvir will fetch her back and forth.”

  “What will she do for these people?” Biji asks, her resolve weakening.

  “A bit of everything. She might work in the kitchen some. Bennet said there is a wife who will need a ladies’ maid of sorts. And a daughter who will need Anu’s help as well.”

  Biji sucks air past her teeth. “British girls—they are a bad influence. Not at all respectable—”

  I enter on this note and stand perfectly still. There is no more food to bring to the table.

  Papaji looks at me and winks. Biji shakes her head as if she knows she is already beaten. I hear the front door open and slam back shut. Manvir is home.

  “Go and tell your brother to wash for table,” Biji orders me. But I don’t go yet. I have to see what Biji says. A job? A fine big house? A girl all the way from England?

  “Please, Biji,” I beg. “Please let me.”

  She turns to my papaji. “And what will I do without her here?”

  Papaji winks at me. “You’ll put my brother’s wife to work, I expect.”

  Biji rolls her eyes, Papaji laughs, and I disappear into the house, the smile breaking across my face, the scar pulling thin across the surface of my cheek.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  TARIQ

  The stink of the smoke follows me home.

  I can’t stop shaking, can’t stop looking behind me, can’t stop seeing the face of that man as the bat connected with his jaw.

  My fingers won’t stop trembling and I can’t get them to open the damn latch on the gate. It’s as if my hands don’t belong to me. Don’t fit with the rest of me.

  I finally manage to pry the latch free and get inside the yard. I’m so keyed up, I slam the gate shut without meaning to. It clangs hard and loud like a bell.

  “Tariq,” I hear my brother call from the rooftop. “Get up here.”

  I can’t face my parents now, anyway. I go to the drainpipe that Arish showed me how to climb when I was little and shimmy up, hand over hand, my toes finding holds in the brackets bolted to the wall. When I pull myself onto the roof, my brother is there, leaning forward on the bench, both hands resting on the top of his cane, his chin on his hands, looking out over the city. Like always.

  I join Arish on the bench. He exhales slowly, holds a cigarette out to me without taking his eyes off the smoke billowing in the distance. I don’t smoke much—too expensive when I’m trying to put money aside. But I’m glad for the offer now, pulling deep on the sigarata, letting it settle me down. I hold the smoke in my lungs, slow my heart down before I exhale slowly, and hand the cigarette back to Arish.

  “They’ve only just told us that there will be separate states,” he says, “and already it’s getting worse.”

  “Haan,” I agree, but I’m in no mood to hear his diatribe on how India will be ripped apart to create a second country, to be called Pakistan. I can’t stop seeing that man’s face snapping back . . . how quickly he fell.

  “I have seen war, little brother,” Arish says. He is only three years older than me, and I am taller, but he has earned the right to call me what he likes. “And that”—he jabs the cigarette at the fire—“that is the promise of things just starting.”

  Arish fought for the British in Africa, chasing down Germans in Tunisia. He enlisted in the special corps of Indian soldiers when he was the same age I am now, eighteen. Most of them were Sikhs—but my brother didn’t care. Nobody cared much back then.

  He came back two years later, half his right leg chewed off in the caterpillar tracks of the German panzer his commanding officer ordered him to attack with his battalion.

  I reach for the cigarette and take another drag. I’m not sure if it’s the smoke or just listening to my brother, but I’m starting to settle down. “It’s going to get worse,” he warns, and of course he is right. Our mosque is always full now, not just at prayer times. Men sit and work themselves up over the injustices Muslims suffer, or speak reverently about how wonderful it will be when Pakistan is born, when we have a Muslim state.

  I’ve sat on the fringes of these meetings. Many times. And it’s awful to say, but I can’t get myself worked up like the others do. I don’t care the way I’m supposed to.

  I feel guilty for it, but here it is all the same. I don’t feel a part of it, don’t feel like I belong. Not when what I want is in England. At least in the short term.

  “Already they worry whether Lahore will go to Pakistan or stay with India,” Arish says, shaking his head, finishing off the cigarette. “As if worrying will change what the budhoo British decide.”

  “Amritsar, too,” I add.

  He hisses, flicks the butt off the rooftop. “The viceroy promises all will be settled as soon as August.” He scratches at the stump of his leg. “Two months to divide a country and move how many lakhs of people . . . ”

  The Sikhs to India, the Muslims to Pakistan. But I will not go to Pakistan. Not until I’m ready.

  “So . . . ,” Arish begins, turning toward me, “what did the schoolmaster—?” He stops, grabs my wrist. “Is that blood?” He rubs at the dried flecks with his thumb. “What happened?”

  I nod at the fire in the distance.

  “You were there?” he asks. I avoid his eyes. I don’t want to tell him. Telling him would only make it more real.

  “I left Master Ahmed and the school.” I fight to keep my voice even. “A mob caught me up. Sameer was there.”

  “Are you hurt?” he asks.

  I stare at the rooftop a long time before answering.

  “Nahi.”

  “Sameer?” he asks.

  I study our feet. My two, dusty from the road, his one, the toes curling around the end of his cane. “I left before it finished.”

  “Before what finished?” he demands. But I can’t talk about it. Can’t think about it.

  “Master Ahmed has a job for me,” I blurt out.

  Arish hesitates before he gives in. “Job?” he asks, adding, “now?”

  “A new Englishman has come to Jalandhar.”

  He curses. “Just what we need. More British in India.”

  “He is a cartographer. Making maps of the boundary award. He needs help.”

  “What kind of help?” he asks.

  “Translating, courier duties, things like that.”

  He snorts. “My little brother playing Batman to a sahib.”

  I can’t tell if he’s serious or not. But I don’t care. I need this job.

  “Will Abbu let me do it?” I ask, careful not to sound too eager.

  “Abbu will allow it,” Arish says, smirking. “Daadaa would have loved it.”

  I thought the same when Master Ahmed told me he’d put me forward for the job. Our great-grandfather had been a member of the viceroy’s staff in his day, and Daadaa liked to go on about the proud tradition of “fine Muslim families serving as the wise right hand to the British Raj.” It was Daadaa who first told me about the place that to him was almost as holy as Mecca.

  Oxford.

  All the great men his father worked for, and who he himself worked for later as a civil servant, were educated at Oxford. It was Daadaa who made me believe that I could go there. He’d once tried to persuade my father to consider going himself, but Abbu was too practical for it. He was happy to take the shops that came his way when he married my mother and get busy making his fortune. And then when Arish showed no talent for
school and enlisted in the army, Daadaa transferred his hopes to me. I was glad to oblige him.

  Before his death, he told Abbu to take a portion of the inheritance he would be leaving behind and set it aside for my education. The rest was up to me.

  I did my part. I was the best student the school had ever seen. I stayed out of trouble. It was easy.

  But somewhere along the way, what began as a way to please my daadaa, and then to honor his memory after he died, shifted into something else.

  It started when Arish came home wounded.

  I was angry for my brother. And angry at him for letting himself be used, letting himself be shot up in a war that had nothing to do with us in the first place.

  I swore I’d never let anything like it happen to me.

  And going to Oxford would help make sure it didn’t.

  After all, the men who’d finally convinced the British to leave—Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah—all of them were educated in England. No one told them what to do. No one told them to throw themselves on top of German tanks. No—Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah—they told an empire to quit India, and it did.

  Everyone listened to them. Everyone listens to the men who have the right education from the right places.

  I would be one of those men.

  But Daadaa had been wrong about one thing. Being smart wasn’t enough. Hard work and not getting in trouble and impressing everybody wasn’t enough. I found that out after my first six letters to the school went unanswered. Nobody cared about my nearly perfect marks or how my maths teacher kept having to send away for more calculus books because I’d already mastered all the ones he owned.

  None of that mattered without connections.

  I couldn’t simply turn up on the campus and expect to be let in. Not without someone who would give a reference for me. I had to have the right person—someone who’d been there—to convince them to give me a chance. And I didn’t have anybody like that. All the men Daadaa used to work with and admire had left India years ago. I was out of luck.

  Until now.

  “You’ll be finished working for him before we have to shift west?” my brother asks.

  I hesitate. It’s too soon to tell Arish what I’m hoping the job might lead to. “I should. He is only coming to do something with the partition.”

  He studies me carefully. I start to panic that he’s guessed why I’m so game to take the job at a time when I should be helping us get ready to move. What if he tells Abbu before I’m ready? Before I’ve had a chance to work it all out?

  But he surprises me.

  “You should take the position . . . ,” he begins, but the door leading to the stairs opens abruptly. Abbu appears there, wheezing as he leans heavily against the block wall.

  “Sons,” he says, gasping, winded by the climb, “come down for prayers.”

  Arish and I exchange a look. Father often skipped the midday prayer, but the day’s events—and maybe Ammi’s badgering—must have convinced him that today is a good day to be devout.

  “Chalo,” he orders, heading back down, one hand trailing on the wall as he disappears. The servant boy, Ajay, steps silently into view, waiting. Arish rages against the way Ammi treats him like a cripple and refuses to allow himself to be carried up and down the stairs as she wishes. But she makes Ajay walk two steps in front of my brother, ready to catch him should he miss a step.

  “Wash your hands before you come down.” Arish nods toward the inch or two of rainwater standing in an empty flower pot near our feet. “I’ll go extra slow to give you time.” He reaches out and touches my shoulder lightly before starting his long hobble-swing across the roof to the stairs.

  I pour some of the water from the pot onto my hands and scrub away the bits of dried blood. I roll my sleeves up to cover the stains of the drops that landed on the cuffs. Then I cup the water in my hands and scrub at my face, my eyes, the back of my neck.

  When my eyes shut, I see him, see his head snap back, see the blood spray up again.

  I might have killed a man. Me. Killed a man. It doesn’t seem possible.

  Maybe I am just like everybody else. Another Muslim killing another Sikh?

  Allah, how did this happen? Why?

  But then another thought strikes me.

  What if he isn’t dead? What if he comes looking for me? Jalandhar isn’t so large a city. Not big enough to hide in forever. If he’s still out there . . .

  I don’t know which possibility is worse. That I accidentally killed him, or that I didn’t.

  And I realize that now I have another reason to leave India to add to my list.

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  MARGARET

  It’s ruddy hot.

  The car bumps along through what passes here for a street, dipping and jostling every few feet with whatever hole catches a wheel. And that’s when we’re moving at all. Most of the time we sit here idling as we wait for the road to clear out some so we can inch forward a bit. Sometimes we’re waiting for a skinny rat of a dog or even a cow to clear out. Cows. Back home if there had been a cow on the loose in London, I reckon half the coppers would have been after it, but here nobody pays them any mind.

  And when we’re not waiting for the animals to decide to shove off, there are the packs and packs of people. They walk up the middle of the lanes as though they aren’t expecting cars to come along, or crash into one another with their bicycles and motorbikes, and stand there having a row about it like we aren’t even waiting to get by. Of course, the longer we sit, the longer people have to gather and stare into the car, pointing at us, smiling to one another.

  At least the cows and the dogs don’t stare.

  The heat inside the car is oppressive, but it’s nothing compared to all those brown faces, the inkwell eyes staring at me through the glass of the windows. Mouths hanging open, baskets tilting off their heads, grips slackening on parcels. But I don’t dare roll down my window for the little hands of the beggar children that tap on the glass.

  Only the driver has his window down, so he can lean out and shout at the people or animals ignoring the blaring of his horn. I’ve been in Jalandhar half an hour and already he’s used the blasted instrument more times than I’ve heard it total at home in England.

  And it’s just as well the other windows are up. Opening them might bring some fresh air, but most certainly would mean more of that smell.

  Like a barn and a latrine all at once. But oilier. Spicier.

  Hotter.

  “You shouldn’t have made me come,” I say to Mother for the hundredth time.

  She sighs, breathing out slowly, like an actress preparing to step on stage. We both know this script. But this time she doesn’t rise to the bait.

  She doesn’t remind me again what an opportunity India represents for all of us. Mummy likes to make it sound as if Daddy’s saving the world down here, one of the only cartographers the viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, brought down to help break India into pieces so the Muslims can have their separate state. I’m sure Daddy’s work is very important and all, but it’s got nothing to do with me, that part.

  It was the newspapers that did me in. All the papers back in London with those photographs of Lady Mountbatten and her daughter, Pamela, hoofing it around refugee camps, dining with dignitaries on both sides, even Gandhi himself, the man everybody said almost single-handedly got the British to agree to quit India in the first place.

  Before they came to India, and started turning up in the dailies back home, the Mountbattens weren’t much. Lord Mountbatten was a cousin or something of the king, and they were great pals in the bargain, but he was just an admiral in the Royal Navy. And by all accounts, he wasn’t much of an officer, either. Churchill apparently thought him a complete duffer, but the king decided when it was time for the empire to wash its hands of the crown jewel and that Lord Mountbatten was just the man for the job. Most of the world reckoned the king had just picked a suitable scapegoat, someone Jinnah, the Muslim firebrand, and Ne
hru, the Congress Party leader of India, could railroad. That way, when everything went south, they’d have no one to blame but themselves.

  But Mountbatten had other ideas. He took the job of dividing India so seriously that he became something of a hero, even if the job itself was next to impossible.

  The fact that he brought his glamorous wife and his nineteen-year-old daughter along with him for the job only made him more popular. Lady Mountbatten and Pamela were always about helping, looking useful. They’d become even more popular at home than before. Perfect celebrities, really.

  And as soon as they became so dead famous, Mummy took to calling on some terribly convoluted connection between our families to anyone who cared to listen. I’m not sure how distantly related we are to the Mountbattens—far enough that Mother doesn’t bother trying to explain to people the connection, preferring instead that they imagine we’re twin branches on the same tree rather than an acorn that fell away and grew into its own scraggly oak. But to hear Mother speak of it, we’re great chums, Pamela and I, though I’ve never met her and Mother’s certainly never met Lord or Lady Mountbatten. And we’re not likely to while we’re here. Daddy’s working here in Jalandhar, hours north of Delhi, where Mountbatten is set up. And we won’t exactly be rubbing elbows with Lady E. and Cousin Pammie, I expect.

  But to Mother, that detail is totally unimportant. The fact that we’ll return to England with the same sun on our skin, the same glow of importance . . . that’s what she’s after.

  “The experience will elevate us,” Mother says coolly, breaking her silence as the driver swerves to avoid a bicycle with a basket of live chickens mounted behind the seat.

  I snort. “If you wanted me elevated, I could have stayed home and ridden the lift in Harrods all day.” But I know what she really means.

  What she means is it will make them all forget.