Summary
There is something strange happening in the servants’ quarters behind the Hindu doctor’s house that parallels Lenny’s. The courtyard has been walled off and is guarded by a Sikh. Lenny, Cousin, and Adi are able to sneak a peek and assume that it is a women’s jail. Village women wash clothes or chaff wheat in the courtyard. But the children also see smoke-filled cubicles inside and cots lines up.
The Hindu doctor’s house itself is occupied by refugees. They are scared of losing this property in which they are squatting so they hide and try not to stand out. Mother interviews one of them to be Lenny’s new ayah or nanny. She is covered with the Muslim chuddar. She is tall but hunches over. Lenny thinks there is something shifty about her but she gives rise to intense compassion and guilt in those that look at her. Imam Din also seems to pity the woman. She is hired to care for the children. They call her by her name Hamida because it is too painful to call her Ayah. Meanwhile, Mother and Electricaunt seem to be searching for Ayah. They have hushed conversations that they hide from the children. Sharbat Khan also comes down from the mountains and talks with Imam Din and Yousaf. He looks different. His eyes are angry. He stares at Lenny sometimes and says bitterly: “Children are the Devil… They only know the truth.”
Hamida slowly gets used to the household routine. She must be trained to make beds, stack clothes, and do things how Mother likes. She is from the village and is scared of electricity. She does not know how to use an iron. She also reaches out to massage anyone who is around. Others don’t like it, but Lenny sees Hamida as a “starved and grounded bird” so she lets her do what she wants.
One day Lenny comes home to realize that Imam Din has guests from Pir Pindo, which is now a part of India. She sees a very skinny boy covered with welts, wounds, and bruises. She realizes with a shock that it is Ranna. He has been badly hurt and is very unhealthy. Lenny begins sleeping in the servant quarters with Ranna and his aunt Noni and uncle Iqbal are. They describe terrible things that happened so quickly in Pir Pindo. Jagjeet Singh, the Sikh religious figure who was friendly with Dost Mohammad and the other Muslims, secretly visited the village several times. He tried to convince the Muslim villagers to leave, but they said they could not abandon their ancestors’ graves. Eventually, Jagjeet Singh stopped visiting because he was threatened by Akalis who controlled his village.
The chapter then tells what happened next under the heading “Ranna’s Story.” It begins with Dost Mohammad’s wife Chidda kneading bread when suddenly the sounds of men shouting in the distance became audible. The news comes that Sikhs have attacked nearby villages to the east. They move in massive groups of thirty or forty thousand like “swarms of locusts.” The police are not doing anything. In fact, Muslim police have been disarmed and some Hindu and Sikh police have joined the mobs. Some in the village now begin to regret not going to Pakistan. They made the decision a month before. Living deep in the Punjabi countryside they felt safe. They were unwilling to “uproot themselves from the soil of their ancestors.” Also, politicians were telling peasants that they would be safe and to remain where they are. The villagers also assumed that their Sikh friends would be able to protect them. However, the mobs were “prepared for carnage.”
The Muslim villagers come up with a plan of action. They gather whatever weapons they have and the women and girls prepare to set themselves on fire instead of being raped or tortured by the mobs. At dawn, the attack comes. The Sikhs shoot villagers or stab them with swords. Ranna hides in a dark room of thirty boys and men. They are quiet because they are trying not to be discovered, though the sounds of women and men dying outside are haunting. Finally, the mob finds them. They cut off Dost Mohammad’s head and many other villagers are also beheaded, including many of Raana’s relatives. He sees women begging for their lives. He hides in a house and finds the body of the mullah. Women are being raped in the mosque.
At night, Ranna runs off and hides in a sugarcane thicket. The next night he runs for his aunt’s village. He finds them packing their things and getting ready to board a truck. They see the filth, blood, and wounds on Ranna and think he is on the verge of dying. They leave him, thinking they are letting him die in peace. He wakes up and realizes no one is there. He leaves just as the mob reaches the village and burns it down. While hiding under hay, he is also stabbed by a sword.
Ranna makes it to the Indian city of Amritsar near the Pakistani border. He is just one of many abandoned children scavenging and stealing food. He sees people murdered, women's hair set on fire, mothers raped, and babies smashed against walls. One day he sees a group of Muslim refugees behind barbed wire. He thinks that he sees his aunt and uncle. They are not there but he joins the group. Eventually, he is sent to a refugee camp near Lahore and finds his aunt and uncle.
Analysis
While the previous chapters showed how Partition has affected the city, in this chapter the action returns to the country and specifically to Pir Pindo which Lenny previously visited. Earlier, she saw Sikhs and Muslims living as neighbors and promising to protect each other. Now the situation is very different. “No one realized the speed at which the destruction and the rampage advanced,” she notes. Peasants thought they would be safe. There were also messages from Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, and Tara Singh that minorities would be protected in both India and Pakistan.
The chapter then goes back in time to tell the story of how Ranna made it to Lahore. This is told under the heading “Ranna’s Story.” This is the first time in the book that there is a heading like this separating the action. Yet the story is not told from Ranna’s perspective. Instead, it is a first-person omniscient perspective where Lenny still speaks from the position of the “I” but also describes things in detail that were impossible for her to see. She describes how the villagers gathered to discuss whether or not to leave and how important the fact of staying on the soil of their ancestors was. Another important detail is that some of the killers were familiar to the villagers. Former friends betrayed them. The chapter is filled with graphic depictions of rape, murder, decapitation, and violence of all kinds. The Sikh mobs are shown to be particularly brutal. At the same time, coming after a chapter describing Muslim mobs taking away Ayah, the book shows how violence occurred both in Pakistan and India. Lenny’s narration drives this point home when she says “And while the old city in Lahore, crammed behind its dilapidated Mogul gates, burned, thirty miles away Amritsar also burned.” There is a border between the two cities, but similar tragedies are occurring. Ranna is lucky to survive. Lenny describes this luck with the following ironic statement: “chance—if the random queries of five million refugees seeking their kin in the chaos of mammoth camps all over West Punjab can be called anything but chance—reunited him with his Noni chachi (aunt) and Iqbal chacha (uncle).”
