Partitions: A Novel
Amit Majmudar
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0805093958
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A stunning first novel, set during the violent 1947 partition of India, about uprooted children and their journeys to safety
As India is rent into two nations, communal violence breaks out on both sides of the new border and streaming hordes of refugees flee from blood and chaos.
At an overrun train station, Shankar and Keshav, twin Hindu boys, lose sight of their mother and join the human mass to go in search of her. A young Sikh girl, Simran Kaur, has run away from her father, who would rather poison his daughter than see her defiled. And Ibrahim Masud, an elderly Muslim doctor driven from the town of his birth, limps toward the new Muslim state of Pakistan, rediscovering on the way his role as a healer. As the displaced face a variety of horrors, this unlikely quartet comes together, defying every rule of self-preservation to forge a future of hope.
A dramatic, luminous story of families and nations broken and formed, Partitions introduces an extraordinary novelist who writes with the force and lyricism of poetry.
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Were a little wary of the stepcousins, who had already divided into their usual teams for cricket. One stepcousin chalked the wickets on a wall, another spun a washerwoman’s bat. So we stuck together, and my father kept up a commentary. This was a treat. I remember the day because he didn’t speak to us often. He told us how a good samosa needed more mirchi and less potato than this, how there were clouds to the east and the good weather might not last through the ceremony. And then he pointed at.
Thinly ribbed stray dog, brown with white patches and some patches of no fur at all. She hurries beside Masud, smelling somehow the brittle rotis, which are for all their staleness warm from the journey-long exposure. Her milk has swollen between her legs and swings with the trot, but no whelps trail her. A high-pitched note comes out of her throat, like the creaking of a cart. “I hardly have enough for myself,” says Masud, easily. The dog cuts across to his other side and keeps pace. He takes a.
Forward. He falls too, landing beyond her, only part of her under him, what seems to be her head under his leg. But the rest of her is free, and she bats his leg aside and scampers back. He lunges. The sugarcane stalks shake and shed. She is still getting away, her kicks startlingly strong. His head snaps away from her, his eyes flinch shut, and his shoulders shrug protectively, defending himself even as he grabs for her. A sudden panic comes over him—what kind of man does it make him if he can’t.
More of the sensation. After all, there is nothing stopping him, he’s hidden on all sides. She’s hardly going to go complain to Ayub. He feels. Damp but not wet. The mouth pursed. He had not expected so much coarse hair. She is older than he first thought. Her nails sink in his forehead and scratch down. He squinches his eyes and bucks back. One hand stays where it is; the other hand grabs one wrist and then the other and forces them to the ground. Now that she’s secured there, arms lusciously.
Addressed to her, is for her ears. He doesn’t need a translator when she is around. The surface of his tongue just isn’t as sticky anymore. The consonants that used to snag there and thrash in place come out freely, fully winged. It seems to Masud that something mechanical in his voice has fixed and oiled itself at last. In the increasingly rare instances Simran isn’t with him seeing patients, though, he’s thrown back, and has to hurry out to find Keshav or Shankar. In time, he won’t require her.