THE PARTED EARTH

Title Page

Dedication

In memory of my grandmothers

Dhyumani Subrahmanyam and Gertrude Angela Enzenebner Camacho

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book is a work of fiction that contains violence and extremism, as well as miscarriage and suicide.

The characters and many of the events are a figment of my imagination. But the 1947 Partition is not. After three hundred years of occupation, the British finally quit India. But before leaving, they divided the subcontinent into two nations—the Muslim-majority Pakistan on August 14, 1947, and the Hindu-majority India on August 15, 1947. More than one million people perished in the sectarian violence leading up to and following Partition. Fifteen million became refugees.

This is a tribute to those who died, those who survived, and their descendants.

Part One

CHAPTER ONE

New Delhi

June 8, 1947

The afternoon air hung heavy and thick. In the classroom, it dwelled in the aisles between desks like phantoms. Beads of sweat dripped down Deepa’s forehead and settled in the nests of her eyebrows, the curls of her sideburns. She fanned herself with her composition notebook but reaped no reward for her exertion.

Her fellow classmates scribbled the final lines of an essay on their favorite poem from Gitanjali. How unfair that she should have to choose only one to write about! Rabindranath Tagore’s words swirled in her mind, seeped into her dreams. She could reach out and touch them, imbibe them like water. She finally settled on one of her favorite verses.

But I find that thy will knows no end in me.

And when old words die out on the tongue,

new melodies break forth from the heart;

and where the old tracks are lost,

new country is revealed with its wonders.

Tagore writes about the journey of change and creation, she wrote. For Tagore, creation is life.

Literature and composition was Deepa’s favorite subject. Words spilled out of her. She loved the scratching of pen on paper, the curves and dots of letters. Oh, to write like Tagore, Kālidāsa, or Shakespeare. If only she could take in some of their gifts when she read them, pilfer just a tiny sliver of their styles, their voices, imbed them in her own writing.

Bells rang throughout the building, each one louder than the next. She pushed out her chair, dropped her notebook into her satchel, slung the bag over her shoulder. “Faseelah,” she called to her friend three desks in front of her. “Can you come over later tonight to study?”

Faseelah pushed her glasses higher on her nose, adjusted the front of her hijab. “I wish I could, Deepa.” Her gaze shifted to the floor. “Yesterday, some boys started harassing my mother and me. They said that we’d soon have to move to our prison in Pakistan and followed us all the way home. I’m not allowed to leave home anymore, except to go to school.”

“Oh, Faseelah,” Deepa said. “How terrible.”