The Lost Ribbon

 

Though I ache to remember details about them now, I tried in those first few months after you were born not to think of your grandparents.  What was there to think about?  They burned like everything else.  He found me sitting on the stoop of our ruined house.  I don’t know what I must’ve looked like, but he said I was so covered in soot and ash that if I hadn’t blinked, he wouldn’t have known I was there.

And so that is how I think of you, Noora:  born in the blink of an eye.

He ignored you, mostly, in those first few months.  I was grateful for that.  The hut filled with the warm, fecund scent of old milk and damp wool and he hardly seemed to notice.  Only once, when I was feeding you, did he look over and say, “They’re mine, not hers.”

 

You were six months old when the soldier knocked on the door.  It was locked, of course.  I huddled with you in the corner, hardly breathing.  But then a youthful voice called out, “Hello, hello.  Anybody there?”  There was a pause, some shuffling.  I gripped my hand over your mouth to keep you from crying.  “No need to be afraid, madam,” the voice continued, growing firmer, more assured, “My name is Gopal Das.  I’m from the Indian Army.”  I eyed the window then the door.  What if he’d sent goondas just to beat me, or to take you?  I placed you in the cradle I’d fashioned out of old blankets and a bit of straw.  Then I rose and tiptoed quietly to the slit in the window.  He was very young, hardly older than me.  But he was wearing a military uniform with red badges across his chest.  “Open the door, madam,” he said. “You’re safe with me.”

I should’ve never opened that window because you see, Noora, he said I was safe.  He never said a thing about you.

I opened it and indicated we were inside; he was delighted to see me – as if I were his long lost sister – and he grew breathless as he told me to wait, to not make a noise, and that he’d be back with his senior officer in no time at all.  He practically skipped away from the hut, his baton raised, and returned an hour later with an officer with even more red badges on his uniform and a middle-aged woman in a white sari and glasses, with a large black mole on her chin as round as her face.  “Here she is,” the young soldier proclaimed, beaming like a child.

The middle-aged woman saw you in my arms and her expression soured.  She glanced at the senior officer.  He nodded.

“The father,” she began, pointing towards you, “Is he Muslim?”

I nodded.  I held you closer.  I wanted to tell them everything, all at once – how your grandfather had herded us into one of the bedrooms and locked the door.  How they’d torched the house, smoke and then flames seeping under the cracks and through the walls.  How I’d snaked out of the window, too small to fit your grandparents.  How your grandmother, just before my head disappeared through the window, had taken my face in her tear-streaked hands and said, “You are my heart.” How he’d straggled behind the other rioters because his kurta shirt had got caught in the gate that led from the house. How that’s how I’d come to be here, with you, because of something as simple and as heartbreaking as a piece of cloth caught on an iron gate – but the words wouldn’t come.

“The child,” the woman said, “She cannot come.”

“Where?”

“Back to India, of course.”  Her voice was slow and measured, and yet I struggled to understand.

“But why?  She’s my daughter.”

“But she’s a citizen of Pakistan.  She’s a Muslim.”

I glared at the two soldiers.  They were looking at the ground.  Then I looked at her.  How could she say such a thing?  A woman, and a Hindu?  Her mole grew blacker and I stared at it and stared at it and then I spit at it.  The woman jumped back.  “Then I won’t come,” I said.

There was a silence.  A crow flew overhead and I heard it’s cawing. The older soldier finally spoke.  He took a step towards me.  His voice was low and deep like the night sky.  “You must, beti.  Now that we have found you, you must return to India.”

“I won’t,” I said, “Not without my Noora.”  By then you’d begun to whimper, as if you knew what was to come.

The woman scowled.  She pushed up her glasses:  she cupped the edge of the right lens and lifted them gingerly off of the bridge of her nose then tucked them, with great care, higher on her face.  If you can hold those with such tenderness, I wanted to say, imagine how I hold my Noora.  “You have no choice,” she said, “There are governmental treaties we must follow.”

“What treaties?  What governments?”

“Between India and Pakistan.”

“But this is my child.”

“She’s a child of Pakistan,” the old soldier said solemnly, “And you, my dear, are not.”