For your life, my dear boy.'
'What is happening?'
'The English. They have left us. As of the stroke of midnight tonight, India is free! And all hell has broken loose, believe me.'
'Mountbatten has left us? Abandoned India? Impossible.'
'Yes, stealing away like a thief in the night is your great hero, and already the angry mobs are turning the streets red with blood. It is open religious warfare now, Tabu, everywhere. Moslem against Hindu against Sikh. A religious slaughter tearing the country apart.'
'He's done nothing to stop it, has he, Sindhu? Mountbatten was our last hope. And now he's left India to drown in a sea of blood!'
'Tabu, listen! There is no time for this now. One floor below us, a group of fifth-form Hindu boys are going from room to room, hacking Moslem students to death in their beds with swords. I heard your name mentioned. They won't be so kind to you, I fear, Little Sahib.'
Tabu leaped out of bed and started throwing his beloved books and clothing into his old leather portmanteau.
'How long have I got, Sindhu?'
'Ten minutes if you're lucky. They are still killing boys on the floor below. You'll have to go out the window. It's a ten-foot drop from the roof to the wall, five feet to the ground. Be careful not to break anything when you leap, my dear friend, or you're surely dead.'
'But where shall I go, Sindhu? I've nowhere to go!'
'Home! Your newly created homeland of Pakistan. Make your way to the central train station. There is a train for Lahore at midnight. You're the fastest boy at school. If you run as fast as ever you can, you just might make it before the clock strikes twelve.'
Tabu heaved his bulging bag out the window and, with a farewell wave to his friend, followed it. When he hit the ground, he tucked and rolled into a crouch and managed not to break any bones. He jumped to his feet and ran for his life. There were fires everywhere, flames licking into the black skies. His fury knew no bounds now. Betrayal and shame and fear were indistinguishable in his mind.
As he ran, Tabu Babar felt a lifetime of boyhood hopes and dreams slowly falling away from him, running like dirty water, sloshing along the filthy gutter and disappearing down the drain.
Tabu ran out into the thick of the screaming mobs, dodging this way and that. In his emotional fever, he ran for the station blindly, hoping for a bullet or a blade to end his agony. He was without hope, now. He wanted to leave this world. He'd lost everything; and now he felt he might be losing his mind as well.
Strangely, this was a kind of comfort. Hope had been lost and replaced by a kind of hot lust.
A fervent dream of revenge now settled into his brain and, with it, an odd sense of peace in all the madness around him. He would survive. And he would make them pay.
The streets were a nightmare, but the great black fortress called the New Delhi train terminal was a raving madhouse. He stood gasping at the scene before him. Every Moslem in the city it now seemed wanted to escape to their new homeland of Pakistan. Somehow, Tabu made it to the platform for the Lahore-bound train just as the big station clock bonged twelve. The train was still there, thanks be to Allah, huffing and puffing, billowing clouds of steam rising from beneath its great iron wheels.
This was always an obscenely noisy place. But now, the cacophony threatened to overwhelm him. The cavernous black hall, with its maze of iron girders above, was overflowing with clamor and shouting, almost drowning out the cries of the countless water and sweetmeat vendors, the useless barks of policemen, the shrill cries of women snatching up baskets and herding their children and husbands forward on the mobbed platforms.
The throngs were clambering over one another to board third-class railcars already full to overflowing. Women and children were simply flung aside by bigger, stronger refugees. Fights were breaking out and the few police stood idly by, laughing as they finally gave up and turned a blind eye to the inter-Moslem violence before them.
Tabu looked at his bag chockablock with his cherished books and knew he had no choice but to leave it behind. He flung it onto the glimmering tracks beneath the wheels, and in a sudden flash of rage, ripped off his little English schoolboy cap and hurled it onto the tracks as well. Books be damned. Mayo be damned. England be damned!
THE TRAIN CARS WERE PACKED, jammed with desperate people hanging out the windows just to breathe in the stifling night air.
He raced back to the rear of the train and clambered up the metal ladder to the roof of the very last car. There were many others already there, and a smiling family made room for him. Somehow they'd managed to get a pair of family goats up top with them and the animals were bleating in fear.
The patriarch of the family, the ancient grandfather, looked at Tabu's rumpled school uniform and said, 'English school?'
Tabu nodded.
'You like English, boy? You like this Mountbatten? This noble lord who deserts us in the middle of the night? After swearing to keep our poor country whole and at peace? Who now treats us like so many swatted flies?'
Even Tabu was surprised by the violence of his own response. He slammed his fist down on the roof of the train hard enough to dent it and screamed in anguish.
'Mountbatten is a false god, a bloody liar! A betrayer! Devil! They are all devils, these English! Let Almighty Allah take these English far, far away! May they never even smell paradise!'
The family moved away slightly, thinking him surely mad. And perhaps, he realized for the first time, he truly had gone mad.
Far ahead, a plaintive locomotive whistle blew and the old train lurched and creaked forward, slowly at first, gradually gaining momentum. There was the familiar deep chugging noise, a rattling of the couplings, and the squeak of the iron wheels, but Tabu heard a strange sound echoing off the iron roof of the great station.
A loud staccato noise.
He looked behind him at the throngs of swarming people left stranded on the platform, and understood the noise. Mobs in red turbans, a vicious Hindu sect, were firing machine guns into the helpless crowd of Moslem men, women, and children left behind. Screaming, they jumped down onto the tracks and ran for safety, but many, many died.
Bitter tears coursed down Tabu's cheeks as he looked at the sprawling dead and dying he was leaving behind. With them died his lifelong dreams, his hopes of making a fine life for himself on that cherished green island called England; the one precious ideal he had held so strongly in his young heart was now seeping into the ground with the blood of his slaughtered brothers.
The journey to Lahore was almost more than Tabu could bear. Beside the tracks, along roads twisting through the most fertile part of what was once India, the Punjab, he saw what must be millions of Moslems, most walking, the elderly or infirm in ox-drawn carts, women with babies in their arms, furniture piled high upon their backs, all bound for the newly partitioned Moslem nation of Pakistan.
Tabu learned that countless tens of thousands of these Moslem immigrants had been slaughtered by violent sects of Hindus and Sikhs waiting in ambush along the great trek north. This was the legacy that his great hero, Lord Louis Mountbatten, had left behind. And then he was home…
The Babar ancestral home, Putrajaya, was one of the great landmarks of the city of Lahore. The monumental palace was set inside a vast parkland of exquisite gardens, fountains, and beautiful flower-choked lagoons, all protected by a high wall surrounding the entire property. For some reason, no guards were on station and the entrance gate was not closed. It was flung wide open, and intuition made Tabu enter with caution.
As he started to move slowly along the drive toward the house, and then crossing open ground, everything suddenly began to make horrible sense.
He saw two men, dressed in the familiar garb of the Mahadi sect, dragging his young sister of sixteen down the white marble steps of the entrance. She was screaming and trying to twist away, but the men were huge and overpowering. Tabu, knowing any attempt at rescue would only result in the death of both him and his sister, retreated quickly into the trees before he could be seen. Three more Mahadi appeared, and they had his mother and father. Both were bruised and bleeding. And now smoke was pouring from the countless windows on the upper floors. His boyhood home was afire, his boyhood was afire.
Tabu fled, his home a funeral pyre, and ran for the main gate of Putrajaya, praying a Mahadi would put a rifle
