The Age of Shiva by Manil Suri Page B

the last person who had wanted Partition, that he had resisted it to the very end. That he had even offered the prime ministership to Jinnah, the father of the Muslim nation, to keep the country intact. It was the British who could have prevented the carnage, but decided not to, and left the country to fend for itself. Pulling their troops out a full ten months earlier than announced, so that they wouldn’t have to expend their own resources in stopping the bloodshed.
    Somehow, that day, I managed to hold my tongue. I let Babuji rant on, reminding myself that as the bahu, it was not my place to correct, to be defiant. Now, I repeated the same mantra to myself, as Babuji complained that chasing just one Muslim butcher away wasn’t sufficient. “They can say what they want about having enough jobs for everyone, but outrage doesn’t die so easily. It just bides its time, lying in wait. Mark my words, there are rivers of blood to come—the day all these buried feelings emerge, ten times as strong.”
    Babuji tightened the last of his ropes. “You probably think I’m very bigoted, don’t you? That Muslims aren’t doing anything to me, so why do I hate them?” He took a long inhalation from his hookah, and broke into a paroxysm of coughs. “See? There is a reason. This tobacco that the Mughals brought. The Muslims are going to kill me yet.”
    He drew in another breath through the hose, then pushed aside the hookah. “Come sit with me then.” He turned the charpoy right side up and indicated I was to join him on it. “I’ll tell you a story to change your mind.
    â€œHave you ever been to Kasur, Bahu? Dev must have talked about it—it’s where he was born after all. A cultured city, the size of a pomegranate, to the south of the giant watermelon that is Lahore. It’s where the poet Bulleh Shah lived, where the best leather comes from. For thirteen years I worked there as a signalman, then an assistant stationmaster, until finally, in December of 1945, they made me stationmaster. It was not a very big station, but we got a fair number of trains from both Lahore and Firozpur. Once I was promoted, I thought this was it—a job, a family, a flat, good friends—I assumed I would spend the rest of my life quite happily there.
    â€œThen the freedom movement started gaining force. All of a sudden, the Muslims, even friends and neighbors I’d known for years, started parroting what their leader Jinnah was claiming—that they couldn’t live next to Hindus anymore. They demonstrated in the streets, sometimes rioted, to get attention for this new demand of a separate country. ‘We’ll be slaves if we’re a minority among Hindus,’ they claimed, ‘we’ll be discriminated against, we’ll be killed.’ It was as if an infection had raged through their community and eaten into all their brains.
    â€œFor a few days Kasur was calm, even while horrible things were happening in the rest of Punjab. We knew we wouldn’t escape—we were much too close to the juicy watermelon that had already been hacked open above. Still, it was a shock when the gouged-out innards of Lahore finally rained down to splatter us. Arya had just brought my lunch to the station, I remember, when Hussein, the ticket seller rushed in and said it had started. We watched from behind the tiny ticket-room windows as the mob came down the road, burning all the Hindu businesses and stores.”
    I was about to interject, but Babuji held up his hand. “I know what you’ll say, Bahu—that Hindus targeted Muslims as well, that as many Muslims died as Hindus did. I can only tell you what I saw myself. They were quite methodical, these Muslims I witnessed in action that day—checking every address, leaving some stores intact, pouring kerosene through the windows of others. After they were done, they didn’t seem quite satisfied with