The child stumbled after him, screaming with terror.
Fearing the danger from that noise, Qasim waited for the child to catch up. He slid his hand beneath his vest and triggered a switch. A long thin blade jumped open in his hand. His fingers were groping for the nape of her neck when the girl pressed herself to him for protection.
Qasim gasped. Was it a trick of the light? Quietly, with one hand, he closed the knife. She looked up and in the mold of her tear-stained features, he caught an uncanny flash of resemblance to his daughter thrashing in the agony of her last frenzy.
Kneeling before her, he sheltered the small face in his hands.
The girl stared at him. “You aren’t my Abba,” she said in accusing surprise.
Qasim drew her to him. “What is your name?”
“Munni.”
“Just Munni? Aren’t all little girls called Munni?”
“Just Munni.”
“You must have another name . . . Do you know your father’s name?”
“My father’s name was Sikander.”
Her use of the past tense startled him. It showed a courage and a forbearance that met the exacting standard of his own proud tribe.
“I had a little girl once. Her name was Zaitoon. You are so like her . . .”
She leaned against him, trembling, and he, close to his heart, felt her wondrously warm and fragile. A great tenderness swept over him, and recognizing how that fateful night had thrown them together, he said, “Munni, you are like the smooth, dark olive, the zaitoon, that grows near our hills . . . The name suits you . . . I shall call you Zaitoon.”
A simple man from a primitive, warring tribe, his impulses were as direct and concentrated as pinpoints of heat. No subtle concessions to reason or consequence tempered his fierce capacity to love or hate, to lavish loyalty or pity. Each emotion arose spontaneously and without complication, and was reinforced by racial tradition, tribal honor and superstition. Generations had carried it that way in his volatile Kohistani blood.
Cradling the girl in his arms, he hurried towards Lahore.
Chapter 5
A dingy, heat-hazed dawn crept down on the landscape. Shadows along the horizon turned out to be clusters of squat mud huts and Qasim could make out the faint stir of awakening rural activity. He had been on the run for two hours and was beginning to feel the weight of the child. Every little while he swept his thumb across his forehead to prevent the sweat from running into his eyes. His clothes were soaked with perspiration and his trousers stiff and black with dust. The girl had not said a word. Sensing his strain, she shifted her weight to ease him.
The sun cleared the horizon, and Qasim made out the glimmer of a canal winding to one side. The bridge spanning it, a slender sleeping funnel, lay straight ahead. Already the asphalt reflected a white heat that dazzled his eyes. They were on the outskirts of Lahore and Qasim wanted to plunge into the heart of the city, into the thicket of Muslim safety.
The uneasy city was awakening furtively, like a sick man pondering each movement lest pain recur. The slaughter of the past weeks, the exodus, and the conflagrations were almost over. Looted houses stood vacant, their gaping doors and windows glaring balefully. Men, freshly dead, their bodies pale and velvety, still lay in alleys and in open drains.
Qasim walked along a path bordering the Grand Trunk Road, and the fine talcum earth, in little puffs, rose up around his knees. He did not see the dust-covered gunnysack until he almost stumbled over it. Casually prodding it with his foot he was appalled to see a body half spill out. The youth, flat-stomached, broad-shouldered, honey-hued, lay incongruously asleep in the dust. Stemmed in its prime the body did not look vacuous—like the discarded shells of the old and sick—it still emanated vigor. His legs were in the sack and just above the lungi tied low on his hips was a wide V-shaped gash, clean as if hacked out of wood. Qasim knew the youth’s lifeblood had spilled from that innocuous-looking wound. By the amulet around his neck, by the trim of his hair and moustache, Qasim could tell that the man was of his own faith. Hindus and Sikhs had fled the area and he wondered what passion had caused a Mussalman to kill this handsome Muslim youth. Death, cheapened by the butchering of over a million people, became casual and humdrum. It was easy to kill. Taking advantage of this attitude to settle old scores, to grab someone’s property or business or woman, Hindu killed Hindu—Sikh, Sikh—and Mussalman Muslim.
“Is he sick?” the girl asked.
“No, dead.”
A man, his erect head balancing a huge bundle of firewood, walked some distance ahead. Quickening his stride, Qasim caught up with him and lightly held his arm. The man swung around, his straight neck still balancing the wood.
“What do you want?” he rasped. His chest heaved with panic.
“Am I in Lahore, brother?” Qasim asked. He felt a lessening in the man’s quivering tension.
“Yes, you are.”
“We are from Jullundur. Our train was attacked. Allah saved us and we have run all the way to Lahore.” Qasim’s grip on the man’s arm slackened. “What do I do now?”
The man relaxed completely and noticed the child for the first time. He pointed.
“Carry on straight. Then ask someone the way to the refugee camp at Badami Bagh. You will find food and shelter there.”
The girl, perched on Qasim’s shoulder, gazed excitedly at all the people grinding together like wheat kernels in a mill. Refugees sprawled on and spilled over the vast, welcoming, hospitable acres of Badami Bagh. Qasim waded into the flood of brown sweating bodies, swimming in heat and dust.
“Will we find my mother and father here?” the child asked in sudden hope at the sight of so many. A thickly turbaned head over a broad back, a tall man crouched over a hookah just that way, a village printed sari, a brown arm aglow with bangles; they all were her fathers and mothers. Riding high, she peered eagerly this way and that, expecting the loved faces to emerge at any moment. “No,” she said, shaking her head with disappointment every time she discovered instead a masquerading stranger. But her attention was easily trapped by yet another similarity and hope welled up once again.
The crowd was thickest under the trees. Qasim bullied his way through and sat down against the trunk of a shady mango. Tired out, he cradled the girl against his chest. Tugging at his shirt she cried, “Don’t you want to look for Abba?”
Qasim caught her face between his palms and looked long into her restless eyes: “I think your people are dead . . . you saw what happened last night . . . I am your father, your new father. You are my little Zaitoon bibi . . . aren’t you?”
The girl gravely regarded the strange, fair-skinned face and slanting eyes.
“You want to be my father?” she asked solemnly.
“Yes,” he said, pulling her face to his cheeks.
She twisted her neck to learn each new facet of his features.
“We won’t find my Abba?” she asked.
Qasim shook his head.
When she fell asleep, Qasim looked at his commitment speculatively. The resemblance was less than the night before, but it was there. He stroked the child’s hair and shut his eyes.
Qasim and Zaitoon slept exhausted under the tree all day. When the sun dipped the heat was still blistering, and it was oppressively humid.
As evening approached a faint breeze at last joggled the scorching mass of air, and moments later they were in the midst of a dust storm.
Wave