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(excerpt)
Ayah is not on the veranda. She has disappeared.
“Where’s Ayah?” I ask. I’m hushed by a hiss of whispers. Mother communicates a quick, secret warning that is reflected on all faces. Ayah is Hindu. The situation with all its implications is clear. She must hide. We all have a part to play. My intelligence and complicity are taken for granted.
Then they are roaring and charging up our drive, wheels creaking, hooves clattering as the whipped horses stretch their scabby necks and knotted hocks to haul the load for the short gallop. Up the drive come the charioteers, feet planted firmly in shallow carts, in singlets and clinging linen lungis, shoulders gleaming in the bright sun. Calculating men, whose ideals and passions have cooled to ice.
They pour into our drive in an endless cavalry and the looters jump off in front of the kitchen as the carts make room for more carts and the portico and drive are filled with men and horses; some of the horses’ noses already in the feed bags around their necks. The men in front are quiet—tike merchants going about their business—but those stalled in the choked drive and on the road chant perfunctorily.
The men’s eyes, lined with black antimony, rake us. Note the doors behind us and assess the well-tended premises with its surfeit of pots holding ferns and palm fronds. A hesitancy sparks in their brash eyes when they look at our mother. Flanked by her cubs, her hands resting on our heads, she is the noble embodiment of theatrical motherhood. Undaunted. Endearing. Her cut-crystal lips set in a defiant pucker beneath her tinted glasses and her cropped, waved hair.
Men gather round Yousaf and Hari asking questions, peering here and there. Papoo and I, holding hands, step down into the porch. Mother doesn’t stop us.
Still beating eggs, aluminum bowl in hand, Imam Din suddenly fills the open kitchen doorway. He bellows: “What d’you haramzadas think you’re up to?” There is a lull in the processionists’ clamor. Even the men on the road hear him and suspend their desultory chanting. The door snaps shut and Imam Din stands on the kitchen steps looking bomb-bellied and magnificently goondaish—the grandfather of all the goondas milling about us—with his shaven head, hennaed beard and grimy lungi.
“Where are the Hindus?” a man shouts.
“There are no Hindus here! ... There are no Hindus here!”
“There are Hindu nameplates on the gates ... Shankar and Sethi!”
“The Shankars took off long ago... They were Hindu. The Sethis are Parsee. I serve them. Sethi is a Parsee name too, you ignorant bastards!”
The men look disappointed and shedding a little of their surety and arrogance look at Imam Din as at an elder. Imam Din’s manner changes. He descends among them, bowl and fork in hand, a Mussulman among Muslims. Imam Din’s voice is low, conversational. He goes into the kitchen and brings out a large pan of water with ice cubes floating in it. He and Yousaf hand out the water in frosted aluminum glasses.
“Where’s Hari, the gardener?” someone from the back shouts.
“Hari-the-gardener has become Himat Ali!” says Imam Din, roaring genially and glancing at the gardener.
Himat Ali’s resigned, dusky face begins to twitch nervously as some men move towards him.
“Let’s make sure,” a man says, hitching up his lungi, his swaggering gait bent on mischief. “Undo your shalwar, Himat Ali. Let’s see if you’re a proper Muslim.” He is young and very handsome.
“He’s Ramzana-the-butcher’s brother,” says Papoo, nudging me excitedly.
I notice the resemblance to the butcher. And then the men are no longer just fragmented parts of a procession: they become individual personalities whose faces I study, seeking friends.
......
The men let it pass.
“Where is the sweeper? Where’s Moti?” shouts a hoarse Punjabi voice. It sounds familiar but I can’t place it.
“He’s here,” says Yousaf, putting an arm round Moti. “He’s become a believer... A Christian. Behold... Mister David Masih!”
The men smile and joke: “O ho! He’s become a black-faced gen-tle-man! Mister sweeper David Masih! Next he’ll be sailing off to Eng-a-land and marrying a memsahib!”
And then someone asks, “Where’s the Hindu woman? The ayah!”
There is a split second’s silence before Imam Din’s reassuring voice calmly says: “She’s gone.”
“She’s gone nowhere! Where is she?”
“I told you. She left Lahore.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“He’s lying,” says the familiar voice again. “Oye, Imam Din, why are you lying?”
I recognize the voice. It is Butcher.
“Oye, Baray Mian! Don’t disgrace your venerable beard!”
“For shame, old man! And you so close to meeting your Maker!”
“Lying does not become your years, you old goat.”
The raucous voices are turning ugly.
......
I study the men’s faces in the silence that follows. Some of them still don’t believe him. Some turn away, or look at the ground. It is an oath a Muslim will not take lightly.
Something strange happened then. The whole disorderly melee dissolved and consolidated into a single face. The face, amber-eyed, spread before me: hypnotic, reassuring, blotting out the ugly frightening crowd. Ice-candy-man’s versatile face transformed into a savior’s in our hour of need.
Ice-candy-man is crouched before me. “Don’t be scared, Lenny baby,” he says. “I’m here.” And putting his arms around me he whispers, so that only I can hear: “I’ll protect Ayah with my life! You know I will... I know she’s here. Where is she?”
And dredging from some foul truthful depth in me a fragment of overheard conversation that I had not registered at the time, I say: “On the roof—or in one of the godowns... ”
Ice-candy-man’s face undergoes a subtle change before my eyes, and as he slowly uncoils his lank frame into an upright position, I know I have betrayed Ayah.
The news is swiftly transmitted. In a daze I see Mother approach, her face stricken. Adi and Papoo look at me out of stunned faces. There is no judgment in their eyes—no reproach—only stone-faced incredulity.
Imam Din and Yousaf are taking small steps back, their arms spread, as three men try to push past. “Where’re you going? You can’t go to the back! Our women are there, they observe purdah!” says Imam Din, again futilely lying. The men are not aggressive, their game is at hand. It is only a matter of minutes. And while the three men insouciantly confront Imam Din and Yousaf, other men, eyes averted, slip past them.
I cannot see Butcher. Ice-candy-man too has disappeared.
“No!” I scream. “She’s gone to Amritsar!”
I try to run after them but Mother holds me. I butt my head into her, bouncing it off her stomach, and every time I throw my head back, I see Adi and Papoo’s stunned faces.
The three men shove past Imam Din and something about their insolent and determined movements affects the proprieties that have restrained the mob so far.
They move forward from all points. They swarm into our bedrooms, search the servants’ quarters, climb to the roofs, break locks and enter our godowns and the small storerooms near the bathrooms.
They drag Ayah out. They drag her by her arms stretched taut, and her bare feet—that want to move backwards—are forced forward instead. Her lips are drawn away from her teeth, and the resisting curve of her throat opens her mouth like the dead child’s screamless mouth. Her violet sari slips off her shoulder, and her breasts strain at her sari-blouse stretching the cloth so that the white stitching at the seams shows. A sleeve tears under her arm.