birds, these corpses, felt wondrous, as if from a fairy tale.
Every Hindu in the school and town, the only people I might have had a conversation with, must have known that the murders were occurring, because we hardly discussed them. India's partition into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India was only months away and most days the newspapers carried stories of massacres.
When we did speak of the murders, it was usually with one or at most two people. I think this was because, although the partition turned even reasonable people into fanatics, nearly all of us were horrified by the details of death, like the clean bone of the boy's shoulder. Rumors identified a few people as having taken part in the killings, a few students, a few teachers, a man who delivered milk to the school in large tin tanks, but even these people did not talk about what they had done.
Because we did not talk, the horror became intolerable. Each morning we woke with the day before us like some frightening and hopeless task. At night, we boys yelled in our dreams. There was one teacher who cried in class for two days in a row, till the principal scolded him in front of us.
Not a single member of the Muslim families survived. One Hindu lost a hand in an attack on a Muslim home.
The principal decided to shut the school and send all the students home, "in case of more violence." But we knew that he sent us away because he did not know how else to release the pressure under which we lived.
When I returned home, my mother had pneumonia. She had been sick for several weeks and had even broken two of her ribs because of a cough which could lift her upright in a single violent exhalation.
She died one night not long after I came back to Beri. I had gone to a farm a kilometer away to buy her biscuits, which she had asked for in her fever. The sky was bright, even though the sun had set and a bit of the moon showed. In the air there was the dry, almost sweet smell of dung burning. As I walked back from the farm, I wondered whether Ma had died while I was gone. I thought this whenever I was away from her for longer than ten minutes. Ever since the week of the corpses, my mind had fixed on the idea that God was going to punish me in some way. I did not know whether he would be punishing me for seeing the corpses, or for not doing anything to help the Muslims, or because the world had passed into Kali Yug and everyone must suffer for being born in this era. I was seventeen and there was no possibility of happiness in the future. My imagination kept conjuring terrible things that might happen. I could lose my sight; my father and brothers might drink poisonous water; Ma could die.
From the recently plowed field outside our yard I heard women crying. In my head I immediately saw my mother dead, with the village women crouched around her on the floor. But I did not really believe this until I entered the house and saw my mother's body. Then I gasped.
I gasped and, still gasping, started doing the things which must be done when someone dies. I brought the jeweler, who pried the stud out of my mother's nose with tweezers and clipped the silver ring off her toe. I helped carry my mother to the crematorium. Nothing made me cry. Not even the unbearably foul smell of hair and flesh on fire, and the way my mother twitched in the flames when her muscles contracted. In fact, everything caused my grief to burrow inward. Collecting her ashes and bones to pour into the Ganges only made the gasp more solid. I became so quiet that I could not even answer people's questions.
The madness came later. I welcomed it because it brought relief from the bang I kept hearing, which was my mother's stomach exploding in the funeral pyre, and from the image of my father shattering my mother's skull with a staff and chunks of sizzling flesh heaving out of the fire and onto the ground. For months after Ma's death, I woke at sunrise and immediately felt the hole her absence had created in the
Every Hindu in the school and town, the only people I might have had a conversation with, must have known that the murders were occurring, because we hardly discussed them. India's partition into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India was only months away and most days the newspapers carried stories of massacres.
When we did speak of the murders, it was usually with one or at most two people. I think this was because, although the partition turned even reasonable people into fanatics, nearly all of us were horrified by the details of death, like the clean bone of the boy's shoulder. Rumors identified a few people as having taken part in the killings, a few students, a few teachers, a man who delivered milk to the school in large tin tanks, but even these people did not talk about what they had done.
Because we did not talk, the horror became intolerable. Each morning we woke with the day before us like some frightening and hopeless task. At night, we boys yelled in our dreams. There was one teacher who cried in class for two days in a row, till the principal scolded him in front of us.
Not a single member of the Muslim families survived. One Hindu lost a hand in an attack on a Muslim home.
The principal decided to shut the school and send all the students home, "in case of more violence." But we knew that he sent us away because he did not know how else to release the pressure under which we lived.
When I returned home, my mother had pneumonia. She had been sick for several weeks and had even broken two of her ribs because of a cough which could lift her upright in a single violent exhalation.
She died one night not long after I came back to Beri. I had gone to a farm a kilometer away to buy her biscuits, which she had asked for in her fever. The sky was bright, even though the sun had set and a bit of the moon showed. In the air there was the dry, almost sweet smell of dung burning. As I walked back from the farm, I wondered whether Ma had died while I was gone. I thought this whenever I was away from her for longer than ten minutes. Ever since the week of the corpses, my mind had fixed on the idea that God was going to punish me in some way. I did not know whether he would be punishing me for seeing the corpses, or for not doing anything to help the Muslims, or because the world had passed into Kali Yug and everyone must suffer for being born in this era. I was seventeen and there was no possibility of happiness in the future. My imagination kept conjuring terrible things that might happen. I could lose my sight; my father and brothers might drink poisonous water; Ma could die.
From the recently plowed field outside our yard I heard women crying. In my head I immediately saw my mother dead, with the village women crouched around her on the floor. But I did not really believe this until I entered the house and saw my mother's body. Then I gasped.
I gasped and, still gasping, started doing the things which must be done when someone dies. I brought the jeweler, who pried the stud out of my mother's nose with tweezers and clipped the silver ring off her toe. I helped carry my mother to the crematorium. Nothing made me cry. Not even the unbearably foul smell of hair and flesh on fire, and the way my mother twitched in the flames when her muscles contracted. In fact, everything caused my grief to burrow inward. Collecting her ashes and bones to pour into the Ganges only made the gasp more solid. I became so quiet that I could not even answer people's questions.
The madness came later. I welcomed it because it brought relief from the bang I kept hearing, which was my mother's stomach exploding in the funeral pyre, and from the image of my father shattering my mother's skull with a staff and chunks of sizzling flesh heaving out of the fire and onto the ground. For months after Ma's death, I woke at sunrise and immediately felt the hole her absence had created in the
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