In Hiding

I heard this story once, about a woman who was taken from her home because she was not of the same religion as the new settlers in her neighborhood.

Last night, I dreamt of her.

I dreamt of her with a vividness I did not think was possible considering I had never seen this woman, in real life or in photographs. I only knew her through one of my grandmother’s stories I had heard as a teenager— years ago now. I woke up unnerved by my own mind for dreaming of a woman who had both existed and ceased to exist nearly six decades before I was born.

On a December evening in Islamabad, my grandmother and I sat on the diwan in her verandah, watching the rain come down. Few things in life give me a sense of serenity more intense than observing rain. The sound of it, the gentle relentlessness with which it comes down, and the smell…oh, the smell.

My grandmother sighed.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked her.

“Did I ever tell you about the girl we found hiding in this house when we first moved in?”

I shook my head, intrigued.

My grandparents got married in 1946, in the small margin of calm before the storm ensued. War or no war, some parts of life continue to go on. If you have food, you continue to cook, to eat. If you have heart, you continue to love, my grandfather had said once. I had just begun to learn about the Partition in school. I came home one day, bursting to know the trials and tribulations my family had gone through. There wasn’t much for me to learn. My family had always lived on this side of the Indo-Pak border. Their accounts of the Partition did not involve migration, did not involve separation, and did not involve death. This is what I knew until that rainy afternoon in December.

“Only a year after we had been married, in the midst of everything, your grandfather decided he wanted a bigger house.” My grandmother scoffed, reminiscence waltzing in her eyes at the mention of her late husband. “He found this place,” she said, looking around as if she were a guest laying eyes on these walls for the first time.

“It was a rare summer day. It was hot, of course, but there was a gentleness to the sun that’s rare in the middle of July. I was glad we had chosen that day to move,” my grandmother recounted. “The house was on a street with mostly Muslim families. We figured the previous owners of our new house had been Muslim too, but they weren’t.”

“How did you find out?” I asked.

My grandmother rolled her eyes, “You and your habit of interrupting.”

I smiled sheepishly, apologetic, but not entirely.

“So, here we were,” my grandmother continued. I looked at the beauty still blatant on her face. Her lips, although thin, guarded a most brilliant, pearly smile. She had light brown eyes and they were all her son had inherited from her and, in turn, all I had inherited from the both of them. Those eyes, except for those eyes, people would say, everything about you is from your mother’s side. “The first two days I spent mostly cleaning, unpacking little by little. In those days, people used to cook every day, for every meal. There would hardly be any leftover food in the kitchen, especially in the summer.”

“On our third day in the new house, a Thursday, our neighbors from down the street sent us a plate of sweet rice. We had already had dinner by then so I just left the rice by the kitchen window, hoping the breeze would keep it from spoiling. I went into the kitchen the next morning and I was right, the rice hadn’t spoiled. It had just vanished.”

I furrowed my brows.

“Vanished?”

My grandmother nodded.

“I assumed your grandfather had woken up early and eaten it but I asked him and he said he hadn’t even stepped into the kitchen yet. The plates were just as I had left them, so I knew it wasn’t a rat or a stray cat.”

My grandmother tilted her chin upwards, emptying her cup of chai. The delicate gold chain on her neck, without which I had never seen her, bobbed up and down, reminding me of a drowsy taipan. She set the cup down in its saucer and turned to me.

“I left some more food in the kitchen the next two nights and the next morning, it would be gone. But the plates would be exactly as I had left them. On the third night, I stayed awake hoping to figure out what was going on.”

“It was an hour or so after midnight when I heard the door of that small room creaking open.” She pointed towards the storage room in the corner on the other side of the house, across the verandah from where we sat. “I was in this room.” She pointed, now, to the room directly behind us. It had a window looking out into the verandah and I could picture, vividly, my grandmother crouched down on the floor, peeking through the mesh screen that covered the window.

“It was a girl; a skinny little thing darting to the kitchen.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

“I didn’t feel any fear as I walked to the kitchen. She was sitting on the floor, eating, if it could be called that, like an animal, the food I had left by the window,” recalled my grandmother. “She dropped the plates when she saw me. It was deafening, two steel plates falling onto marble in the dead of the night.”

“Naturally, your grandfather woke up. He ran to the kitchen and stood in the doorway, both of us quiet, unsure what to do.”

It had stopped raining now and the sky was beginning to clear. When my grandmother spoke again, her voice was louder, more wistful.

“We didn’t know where to begin, really. We didn’t know what to ask her. She was the one to speak first. She put her hands together.”

As in prayer, I thought.

“As if she was asking for forgiveness. And she did. She was crying and she said, I’m sorry, I’m so hungry,” my grandmother recounted. “She spoke in Hindi.”

My grandmother sat not two feet away from me, motionless except for the small movements of her mouth as she spoke.

“She was terrified, the poor thing. Your grandfather and I didn’t know what to do. For a few minutes the only sound in the entire house was the girl’s sobs. Finally, your grandfather came to his senses. He sat down on the floor in front of her and asked her for her name. Jhanvi. A Hindu girl.”

“Your grandfather and I looked at each other, suddenly we were scared. Not of the girl but for the girl. Your grandfather told me to go lock the door, knowing it was locked. I went and checked anyway. We took Jhanvi into the small room she had come from. I was confused. I had gone into that room the first day, cleaned it out. There had been no sign anywhere of a person. I asked Jhanvi about it. She moved the wooden cupboard behind which was or had been her hiding place.” My grandmother turned to me. “There was a small opening, maybe a foot and a half on both sides, which led to a cellar where she had been hiding.”

“But…why?” I asked, despite the uneasiness in my chest.

My grandmother sighed, shaking her head.

“As soon as we got her to stop crying she began begging us to not kick her out. She said she would do anything but please, please don’t make me leave this house. Your grandfather and I knew we couldn’t. God only knows what would happen to her if we did. A young Hindu girl, alone, on this side of the border at a time like that. We couldn’t,” said my grandmother, matter-of-factly. “She was only sixteen.”

“We found out that the person who sold us the house had lied to us. The previous owners had been Hindu and had been killed; Jhanvi the youngest of her five siblings was in the cellar hiding and wasn’t found by the mob.”

“Your grandfather and I talked; there was no option other than to keep her with us and hope no one would find out. It helped that we were new to the neighborhood.”

“She just lived with you?”

“For nearly a week, yes. She had long black hair and I would braid it so it hung down her back. She liked plucking marigolds from my little garden and putting them in her braid. During those few days with her, the house felt more alive. It was like having a daughter and a younger sister at the same time. But then someone in the street caught a glimpse of her on the roof. And it was the wrong person.”

My grandmother sighed again, this time closing her eyes as she exhaled.

“The man who saw her was…anti-Hindu, I suppose, is the proper name for it. He was full of hate, masking it behind religion. He spread the news around the neighborhood.”

“But how did they know she was Hindu?”

“Would you believe me if I told you that man was a family friend of Jhanvi’s family?” Chills ran up my spine.

My grandmother nodded. Shuddered. “That is what war does to people. They came just before dawn, dressed in hatred, with hearts closed to compassion. They bore nothing but rage,” my grandmother told me. “We couldn’t deny that there was another person living in the house so we pretended that Jhanvi was our maid. She looked too different from us to pretend we were all related. We said we had brought her with us, had known her for years and yes, yes she is Muslim.” A tear rolled down my grandmother’s cheek.

“If it had been a boy in place of Jhanvi, they would have stripped him right then and there to check if he was circumcised, as if that’s all that makes a man Muslim. With Jhanvi, all we had was our word, which wasn’t enough,” my grandmother confessed.

“They took her. Ripped her from us as she tried to hold onto me for her life. She fought tooth and nail for it. Quite literally. Look.” My grandmother pulled up her right sleeve and put her arm out in front of me. On the inside of her forearm were scars I had never seen before. I had gone seventeen years of my life living with this woman and had never, not once, noticed these scars. There were three lines that ran slightly diagonal down her forearm and vanished nearing her wrist and one line, her thumbnail, my grandmother said, that ran straight down. They were faint, looked like stretch marks a hint away from fading entirely, but they were there. “Some of the men in the group held me and your grandfather so we were helpless. I can still hear her screams. They didn’t sound human. We heard her until… we couldn’t anymore. Can you imagine the fear she must have been feeling to have gripped my arm this tightly?”

We both went quiet and there was no more rain to punctuate the silence. My grandmother ran the fingertips of her left hand over her scars.

I wanted to ask more, wanted to ask what happened to Jhanvi. But I knew the answer already and knew I could not hear it out loud. I touched my grandmother’s scars hesitantly, as if they were fresh wounds, as if she could feel the pain.

“Did it hurt?”

“I didn’t feel anything. Couldn’t— not for a long time.”