‘A fast-growing refugee problem’ was shortlisted for the 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

On the third Friday of August, a newborn arrived at our refugee camp, floating in the river. 

It happened around sunset. I was sitting at the riverbank with my daughter, Preet. She had turned six the previous week, but this time there was no kheer on her birthday.  

There were others there too, scattered along the bank in small-small groups. The clouds, the mustard fields, the silhouettes of the kachnar and kadamb trees on the horizon—everything was tinged with orange, and a light breeze was coming in from the north. 

‘Bapu,’ Preet said suddenly, ‘you have so many white hairs!’ 

I wasn’t wearing my turban then, you see. I had washed my hair some time back and had left it open to dry. 

Preet knelt behind me and dug into my hair. 

‘There are three right here…’ 

A man my age wasn’t supposed to have them. But many at the camp shared my condition. The past two weeks had aged us all.  

The premature white hairs were easy to spot on the Hindu men. On the Sikh men, they usually remained hidden under turbans. The women of both faiths kept their heads covered with either the aanchal of the sari or a ghunghat, especially nowadays, given they had to live in the constant company of strangers at the camp. 

‘…seven, eight…’ 

It was my hypothesis, backed by several observations, that the worse a person had been through on the journey from their home to our camp, the more they’d seemed to age. 

“… thirteen, fourteen…” 

Nevertheless, none of us were to age as fast as Ismail, also known as Kishen, who at that point was floating downstream and had almost reached us. 

* 

‘Bapu, what is that?’ 

Preet was pointing at something in the river. 

At first, I thought it was a piece of sheesham wood. Next, I thought it was a dead fish which was unusual because I had never seen a dead fish in that river or a live one. The river was barely a river, for it was just 20 feet wide and only reached my waist at its deepest. 

When I realised it was a newborn baby, I quickly tied my hair and ran down the sand and into the river. The current brought the baby to me. I scooped it up. It was naked and cold and had soft curly hair. It looked barely a month old. 

Once I was back on the bank, I wrapped it in my turban. 

Others at the bank had noticed what had happened, and they circled us. 

‘It’s a boy,’ Preet told them. 

I requested some of them to walk upstream and check if they could find the baby’s mother or father or anything that could explain how it ended up in the water. 

As they walked away, Preet and I took the baby to the hospital. 

The building of the Fakirganj Secondary School had been converted into a makeshift hospital. On the first floor were the male wards. On the ground floor, one classroom was reserved for surgery, and three classrooms were for new mothers and women in labour. The staff room served as the storeroom for medicines and blankets, and the headmaster’s office had been turned into the administrative office, which issued resettlement cards. When we arrived at the camp, we had to line up outside it to register as refugees. 

We found the doctor on the first floor, speaking to a young man whose leg he had amputated the previous morning. Apart from the leg, the young man had lost both his parents in the violence, and, in spite of all the painkillers he was on, could not seem to contain his rage. 

‘Doctorsaab,’ he mumbled, ‘just find me a Muslim. From anywhere. Any son-of-a-bitch will do. Old, young, crippled, blind, anything. Just get me one, and you’ll see what I do.’ 

Many of us at the camp thought likewise. 

The doctor inspected the baby as I briefed him on how we had discovered it. He held a stethoscope to its chest, flashed a torch at its eyes, its ears, its mouth. 

A baby getting abandoned usually implied there was something wrong with it. Some untreatable medical condition, perhaps, or a bad omen. Because why else would someone throw a healthy baby away? People did abandon girls, yes, but this one was a boy. 

‘It looks alright to me,’ the doctor said. ‘The wound has healed as well.’ 

‘The wound?’ 

‘The circumcision one.’ 

I checked. It was true. The baby was a Muslim. 

* 

Those were bittersweet times. But mostly bitter for people like us. 

The British had left. We had gained independence, but the country had been split. And people like us, those who found themselves on the wrong side of the line, had to pay the price. 

Many of us at the Fakirganj refugee camp had come from villages to the west of Lahore. Things had been simmering underneath the skin for months, and as August approached, the swords and sticks of our Muslim neighbours came knocking at our doors. We’d left our houses with our families, in the dead of night, carrying whatever we could. Most of us walked, and only the oldest people and the heavily pregnant women sat atop our bullock carts. 

For some of us, the journey had been 30 miles long and had taken three days; for some, it was 70 miles and took more than a week. A quarter of us did not make it across. The men died violent deaths, and the young women were violently abducted. 

On the way, we’d passed a number of caravans of Muslim refugees, coming in from the other side. We knew quite well that whatever had happened to us in western Punjab had happened to them in eastern Punjab. 

Once in Indian territory, we were directed to Fakirganj, a village some six miles south of Amritsar, where the government had set up a refugee camp. In the field adjoining the Fakirganj Secondary School, some 200 tents had been erected. 

The accommodation was not ideal. In the afternoons we melted in the heat, and at night we were kept up by the orchestra of mosquitoes, and whenever it rained, the field turned into a swamp, and so on and so on. But we had all been through worse. Nevertheless, one had to agree that the earliest refugees to arrive here had been luckier because they had occupied the houses abandoned by the Muslims. 

All the Muslims in Fakirganj had left peacefully, more or less. The last one, the old imam who had refused to leave and had been hiding in the mosque, had been butchered on Friday, an hour before we rescued the baby. 

* 

The doctor instructed a nurse to lead us to the maternity ward and ask around to find someone willing to nurse the baby. 

The women at the maternity ward had their own problems. The place was overcrowded, and a number of them had to lie outside on the verandah. The cots were limited, and the rest made their beds on the floor, some without sheets. They were all weak and tired and barely had enough milk to support their own newborns. One woman had taken the baby in her arms, but the very moment she noticed it was circumcised, she handed it back and washed her hands. 

Sunila, a low-caste Hindu woman who was resting on the verandah, agreed to nurse the baby. She was short and sunburned and looked almost malnourished. Her husband had gone missing during their journey, and about six hours back, she’d given birth to a stillborn girl. 

On Saturday morning, I went back to check on them. 

Sunila told me that the baby had given her no trouble at all. He hadn’t cried—not even once—and had slept through the night which was very unusual for babies his age. 

I was, however, more concerned about his size. He looked much bigger than he had the day before and was already crawling. 

‘That’s the thing with babies,’ Sunila told me. ‘They grow up quickly.’ 

She had given him a name. Kishen. That was what she and her husband had planned to name their baby if it had been a boy. 

I called the doctor. He couldn’t believe it either. 

‘There must have been some mistake,’ he told me in private. ‘You’re certain this is the same baby?’ 

He said the boy may have some disorder in the pituitary gland. It was certainly a rare case, and he would make some more observations in the coming weeks, before writing a report on it. 

* 

On Sunday, an hour before dawn, Sunila suddenly woke up. Kishen wasn’t lying by her side. He was standing, holding on to a pillar. Sunila pulled him to herself. She held on to him as she lay on her sheet. At around seven, she asked her neighbour, another spillover patient on the verandah, to keep an eye on him while she went to the toilet. 

By the time she came back, the secret was out. Kishen, in full view of everyone on the hospital verandah, had not only stood up on his own but had also taken his first steps. 

By afternoon, he had grown to the size of a three-year-old. His brain may not have kept up, however, for he had just started babbling. 

The news of the fast-growing boy had spread all over, and villagers from outside the refugee camp also came in to see him. 

These were strange times. And such times are often accompanied by strange events. 

For example, two families from the village of Chhachar swore that while crossing into India, they had spotted two talking heads on the ground, one of a Sikh man and the other of a Muslim man. The heads were reminiscing about good times in the past. And a Hindu woman at the camp was convinced that she was a ghost. She had died after jumping into a well after her two younger sisters and mother. They had decided collectively to commit suicide rather than fall into the hands of Muslim men attacking their village. 

Nevertheless, both of these could be explained, more or less. The thing with the disembodied heads must have been the work of rats. And as for Gita, she had actually been rescued a day later by a Sikh couple who were on their way to India and had approached that well to get some water. Since she had been the last to jump, she had fallen on top of her mother and sisters, and couldn’t drown since there wasn’t that much water in the well. 

But Kishen’s case seemed to defy all explanations. 

Most people believed something supernatural was at play here. A number of them considered him to be someone holy, possibly an avatar of some god, and they tried to touch the boy to see if that would cure them of their physical ailments. 

Others considered this ridiculous. 

‘Tell me, how can a Muslim boy be an avatar? Have some common sense.’ 

Manohar Vaidya, whom the refugees called Masterji, announced his hypothesis that Kishen was actually a cherub, one of those baby angels in Abrahamic religions. He had been carrying the souls of dead Muslims to heaven for centuries, but in these few days there had been so many of them so soon that he must have been overworked. And while descending on Friday, probably to get the soul of the old imam, he fell unconscious mid-flight and dropped into the river. 

It was an interesting idea, but I had questions. 

‘Masterji, if he’s an angel, what happened to his wings?’ 

‘The impact must have caused them to detach from his body. Or maybe they’d been nibbled away by the fishes.’ 

‘But why is he aging so quickly?’ 

‘Don’t you understand? His body is over a thousand years old, but he had not aged beyond a month. But now that his wings are gone, he is once again a mortal and is now reaching his proper age. At this rate, I give him no more than three days.’ 

He had an answer to everything, but, of course, this was too fantastic to be believed. 

The people, as people do, soon lost interest in him and went about their daily drudgery. Kishen’s growth was fast, of course, but too slow to just sit and look at.   

*

That evening, Kishen joined some of the refugee boys for a game of marbles. He wasn’t any good and soon lost his stock. 

A boy named Chhotu was an expert at the game and had amassed a great number of marbles. Some of the bigger boys did not like this. After a game, two of them accused Chhotu of cheating and pushed him to the ground. One boy sat on his chest, and just as he was about to punch Chhotu, Kishen caught his hand. After about a minute, the adults took notice and broke up the fight. 

Kishen ended up with bleeding lips and a dark spot under his left eye. 

For most of us, he had lost the battle but had won our respect. Others, however, considered this to be an early indication of his violent side which would only spread its wings as he grew up. 

There was another piece of news. With the shortage of supplies, the Camp Commandant had limited the number of rotis for lunch and dinner. Two rotis for adults and one for kids. 

One roti was clearly not enough for Kishen, and, during dinner, Sunila gave him one of her own. 

This, however, did not sit too well with some of the women. 

‘Hindus and Sikhs and their children are not getting their stomachs full, and this devil of a Mussalman boy has been hogging everything in his sight and growing one foot taller every day.’ 

One young man, who had studied till the eighth standard, showed me some calculations that night. According to him, within a month, the boy would grow up to be 10 feet tall. And in a year, he would be 82. 

‘Can you imagine what a hundred-foot giant would do to our camp? He would just casually step on us and bury us six feet deep.’ 

Of course, all that speculation about his size was utterly meaningless. His peak height, measured on Tuesday at 10 in the morning, was five feet, five inches. 

*

On Tuesday, two esteemed guests arrived at our camp. The first of them was Bhawani Kashyap, a renowned tantrik from Amritsar, whose presence had been requested by the head priest of the Fakirganj Shiv temple. He observed the boy—now resembling a 17-year-old—and performed some tests on him to conclude that he had certainly been possessed by a jinn. He had been draining the life forces from the people around him and using that to grow up so quickly. 

‘That is why all of you are feeling so old and weak.’ 

He said he couldn’t cure the boy because his mantras wouldn’t work on the Islamic jinn which only understood Arabic. 

‘You must kill him,’ he suggested. 

We certainly could not do that. 

‘Then you should send him to his people, in Pakistan. Also, you must not call him Kishen anymore,’ Bhawani Kashyap said. ‘From today, you shall call him Ismail.’ 

Sunila refused to call him by any name other than Kishen. But the rest of us shifted to the new name. 

The boy himself answered to both Kishen and Ismail. He also answered to the other names he was called by, like ‘Katua’, ‘Musalman ka baccha’, ‘Pakistani’ and so on. 

The second guest was Mr. Cecil Burnes, the deputy commissioner of the district. He visited the camp with his wife, a pucca memsahib. Mr. Burnes spoke to the camp commandant, the assistant camp commandant, the store officer, the rationing officer and the cloth and blankets distribution officers. Next, he spoke to members of the Refugee Welfare Committee, who told him about their food problems, water problems, mosquito problems and also the problem of the four-day-old Muslim teenager living in their camp. 

‘You’re telling me,’ he said, pointing at Ismail, ‘that this handsome young man was born just four days back?’ 

An hour later, as they were leaving, I overheard him telling his wife about the ‘natives and their fertile imaginations’ coming up with such fantastic inventions even in such desperate times. 

*

That day, something else had been going on as well. 

The refugee camp was hardly the appropriate setting for the blossoming of a romance, but young hearts are seldom demanding. 

Rakhi was the 19-year-old daughter of Amarnath, a cloth merchant from the town of Ghator. She was scheduled to be married in September to a tobacco merchant from Rawalpindi, a widower twice her age. Amarnath had been arranging for a dowry, and plans were underway for an extravagant wedding with over 300 guests, but they had to leave everything behind and head to India in mid-August. While at the refugee camp, they received the news that Rakhi’s fiancé and his father had been killed in a riot. 

What the girl saw in Ismail, I never really found out. Had she not understood Ismail’s ‘condition’? Had she not realized how soon everything was supposed to end? But then again, I can say from personal experiences that a person in love has a dupatta over their eyes. They just can’t see straight. 

Just like everything else with Ismail, this affair too progressed quickly. By midday they were seen talking; in the afternoon they had been spotted behind a tent, holding hands, and in the evening, displaying enormous courage and stupidity, Ismail had gone up to Rakhi’s father to ask for her hand in marriage. 

Amarnath had no time for this nonsense.  

‘I’ll cut both your hands off if I ever see you around Rakhi again,’ he told him. 

That should have been the end of it, but of course, it wasn’t. 

*  

On Wednesday morning, we came to know that Ismail had run off with Rakhi. 

‘I knew something like this would happen,’ one of my friends told me as he dipped his roti in a glass of morning chai. ‘All this time, we were rearing a snake.’ 

That morning and afternoon, we looked for the couple, unsuccessfully, all over Fakirganj. The news was sent to all the neighbouring villages as well. 

Rakhi’s father, Amarnath, lodged a complaint at the nearest police station. The police were overworked and understaffed because half of them had left for Pakistan. Still, the sub-inspector had promised to do his best. 

Upon returning to the camp, Amarnath made his way to my tent. He believed I was responsible for everything. Fortunately, Preet was playing outside because as soon as Amarnath walked into my tent, he grabbed me by the collar of my kurta. A minor scuffle broke out between him and me and then between his Hindu friends and my Sikh friends. The women were quick to get involved and managed to calm both groups down before things could escalate. 

All that worry proved to be useless, because that very evening, Rakhi and Ismail returned to the camp on their own. 

Before she was dragged away by her mother and relatives to their tent, Rakhi revealed that running away had actually been her own plan. Just two hours back, they had been at the steps of a temple, about to get married, when Ismail changed his mind. Perhaps because by now he was older and wiser and realised that their union, like all classic love stories, would just lead to heartbreak and pain. Rakhi seemed not too displeased with this perhaps because Ismail was no longer the 20-year-old she’d fallen for but a man in his early forties. He hadn’t aged particularly well either, for he had a large unkempt greying beard and the early stages of a cataract in the left eye. 

Amarnath did not follow through with his very public promise of beheading his daughter and Ismail if he ever saw them again. Later, he provided us an explanation for why it wasn’t necessary—because they hadn’t been married and had not even spent a night together. Therefore, no irreparable physical harm had been done. 

During her subsequent private interrogation, Rakhi too confirmed this. She informed her mother that nothing of ‘that’ nature had taken place between the two of them, and that she was still a virgin. She did, however, threaten to commit suicide if any harm came to Ismail, who, she stressed, was completely innocent. She insisted that regardless of however old he looked, she still loved him from the bottom of her heart. 

But just like her father, Rakhi did not follow through with her promise. While she was speaking to her mother in their tent, just a hundred feet away, the refugees had started beating Ismail up. 

* 

During the beating, Ismail lost two of his teeth—the permanent ones this time. Had Sunila not thrown herself between the sticks and his body, he would certainly have been beaten to death. 

After some first aid, he was locked up for the night in the small storeroom, till then reserved for brooms and mops and buckets, under the staircase in the school building. 

Next morning, after an hour’s meeting with the leaders of the Refugee Welfare Committee, the commandant finally agreed that it was best—for Ismail’s own safety, more than anything else—to send him to Pakistan. 

A few hours later, four policemen, including a sub-inspector, came to the camp. They were going to escort Ismail to the police station, from where he’d be put on a train leaving for Pakistan early the next morning. When the door was opened, they encountered a small old man, at least 70 years old. He could barely walk and was delirious due to his high fever. He’d shat himself and kept calling for his ‘Ma’.  

The sub-inspector didn’t seem too keen on taking that man into police custody. From what he’d heard about Ismail, he assumed he might die that night itself whilst still in police custody, and that would lead to a lot of paperwork. The police left without him, promising to come for him the next morning if he was still alive. 

Ismail had a fever the whole night. Sunila and two of her friends stayed up that night in shifts, changing the wet cloth on his forehead every 15 minutes. 

On Friday morning, his fever subsided. He seemed to have gotten better and wanted to eat. He had lost most of his teeth by then and could no longer eat rotis, so he was given some watered-down milk and rice mash. 

He sat in the school compound beside the children and watched them play marbles. Half an hour later, when he tried to stand up, he couldn’t. Someone got him a bamboo stick with which he tottered around for an hour or so, before he took to the ground again. This time, he didn’t get up. 

The doctor came to see him. He checked his pulse, held a stethoscope to his chest and flashed a torch at his eyes and mouth. 

‘How much time does he have, doctorsaab?’ 

‘Not long now, I’m afraid.’ 

Ismail’s eyes stared vacantly upwards. His breaths became laboured and noisy as if the air was not entering his lungs but some prehistoric caves. 

He parted his lips. He was trying to say something. Sunila moved her ear close to his mouth, but she heard nothing. 

*

After Ismail died, we had a new problem on our hands. What were we to do with the body? 

Sunila wanted him to be cremated with proper Hindu rights. But the rest of the refugees wouldn’t allow it. They couldn’t have a Mussalman’s body cremated among their own. 

But how were we going to bury him? No one knew the proper burial rituals, and there was no living Muslim in any of the neighbouring villages. And anyway, Sunila would never allow him to be buried. 

While this standoff continued, Ismail went on growing older. The aging seemed to have accelerated after his death. The body shrank further, the muscles evaporated, and very soon it started resembling less a corpse and more a 500-year-old fossil. 

‘We must send back the body the way it came in,’ I said. 

Both factions found this agreeable. 

Sunila wrapped Ismail’s body in a white sari donated by one of the widows. 

Four of us carried the body to the river. We walked 10 steps in and let the body go. It didn’t sink but floated away. I stood there till it reached the curve of the river and disappeared from view. While climbing up, I was about to lose a step, but Preet caught me. She made me sit on the grass and scolded me for not having eaten anything since morning. 

*

In the coming days, more and more of us were called into the headmaster’s office where we received papers for our allocation of the houses vacated by Muslims in nearby villages. These were given out only to those who could provide documents for the properties they had left behind in their old villages in Pakistan. Old faces left us, and new faces arrived to fill in their tents. 

I, too, was allocated a hut and a tiny plot of land in a village called Sakri, some three miles east of Fakirganj. 

The night before our departure, I couldn’t sleep. I wandered among the tents until dawn. 

By the time I woke up, people were having lunch. Preet had already packed our clothes and utensils into bundles. While I washed my hands and face, she rolled up our mosquito net and sheets. After lunch, I went to my friends to say goodbye. They told me not to worry too much because Preet had grown up and could take care of herself now. We promised to keep in touch regardless of wherever the world sent us. 

We didn’t, of course. 

An hour later, I followed my daughter out of the camp and towards our new lives. 

2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Shortlist