Moth: A Novel

by Melody Razak

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

“Both a heartbreaking and heart-warming story, Melody Razak’s debut transports the reader into the home of a Brahmin family in 1940s Delhi. . . . The character portrayal is so intricate that as the plot twists and turns, you'll truly care what happens to them.” (The Independent, UK)

Melody Razak makes her literary debut with this internationally acclaimed saga of one Indian family’s trials through the tumultuous partition—the 1947 split of Pakistan from India—exploring its impact on women, what it means to be “othered” in one’s own society, and the redemptive power of family.

Delhi, 1946. Fourteen-year-old Alma is soon to be married despite her parents’ fear that she is far too young. But times are perilous in India, where the country’s long-awaited independence from the British empire heralds a new era of hope—and danger. In its wake, political unrest ripples across the subcontinent, marked by violent confrontations between Hindus and Muslims. The conflict threatens to unravel the rich tapestry of Delhi—a city where different cultures, religions, and traditions have co-existed for centuries. The solution is partition, which will create a new, wholly Muslim, sovereign nation—Pakistan—carved from India’s northwestern shoulder. Given the uncertain times, Alma’s parents, intellectuals who teach at the local university, pray that marriage will provide Alma with stability and safety.

Precocious and headstrong, Alma’s excitement over the wedding rivals only her joy in spinning wild stories about evil spirits for her younger sister Roop. But when Alma’s grandmother—a woman determined to protect the family’s honor no matter the cost—interferes with the engagement, her meddling sets off a chain of events that will wrench the family apart, forcing its members to find new and increasingly desperate ways to survive in the wake of partition.

Set during the most tumultuous years in modern Indian history, Melody Razak recreates the painful turmoil of a rupturing nation and its reverberations across the fates of a single family. Powerfully evocative and atmospheric, Moth is a testament to survival and a celebration of the beauty and resiliency of the human spirit. 

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.  

 

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Release date: August 9, 2022

Publisher: HarperAudio

Sample

1

Delhi, early February 1947

The dogs outside are fighting and the gutters on Nankhatai Gali are overflowing.

In Pushp Vihar, the House of Flowers, Alma sits up in her Sunday dress and leans against the bedstead. From her bedroom on the first floor, she can hear the jingles on All-India Radio from the courtyard downstairs. This means that Bappu is either awake and listening, or asleep on the swing with his head fallen into his chest.

Alma is fourteen. She will be married-soon and she will be an exemplary wife. She hugs her knees tightly. To be married-soon is like snow. Alma has never actually seen snow, but has come to the conclusion—after examining the diagrams in Volume Seven of the Encyclopaedia Britannica—that snow is a miracle of nature. Snow is like putting your feet in the icebox, drinking nimbu pani as fast as you can, with the fan set on six and blowing straight into your face.

Alma has only ever had glimpses of her husband-to-be, at his house first and then at Pushp Vihar, when the two of them had mostly stared at their feet. For a minute, she had caught his eye, the ghost of a smile soft on his mouth, and of course, she had smiled back. He was so fair she could hardly believe it. It was as if Kamadev himself had stood behind her and struck her with one of his arrows. “Would you like some chai,” she had asked, averting her eyes, and “Yes,” he had replied, “yes, I would.” She was like a gopi bathing unclothed in the lake, all hot and cold at once. Glancing down she had peeked at the boy’s feet. He wore clean socks and proper shoes, chocolate-coloured and laced.

Alma’s grandmother, Daadee Ma, who had made the match in the first place and organised the horoscopes and set the date, is very keen. Questionably so in fact. Daadee Ma told Dilchain-ji, the family cook, that she had never seen such an auspicious horoscope and the quicker Alma was wed the better. That it will be a small wedding can’t be helped. A small wedding is in keeping with the climate. Alma will invite a few of the girls from school and Sister Ignatius and Mary. Mary is new and not necessarily the kind of girl that Alma would be friends with, but Mary has a secret and secrets are always interesting.

Outside the bedroom window, the night sky is thick with lilac-grey mist that Bappu says is the smoke of wood-and-mud huts burning all the way from West Punjab. Alma had asked Bappu if they would come here, those people that burnt down each other’s homes; he had reassured her they would not.

Inside, Alma leans across the tin chest of extra winter bedding and lights the stub of a candle with the one match left in the box. There has been a shortage of matches recently and Dilchain-ji has rationed each family member to two matches a day. Alma turns to prod her sister and tug her plaits. “Wake up,” she says.

Roop squirms sleepily and kicks her.

There are three long-legged beds in a row, but Roop is always in with Alma. The third bed belongs to Bappu’s dead little brother and is never slept in.

“Roop,” Alma pokes her sister, laughs quietly to herself. “Do you remember that time, when you slept in the third bed and woke up in the middle of the night and I asked you. What did you say?”

Roop giggles sleepily, her back still turned, naked but for white knickers. “I said I felt a bit pe-cu-liar.” She says the word slowly as she has been taught to do. Bappu says speaking slowly and repeating is the best way to learn. “And then we put the bowl of kheer under the bed for Bappu’s dead little brother’s ghost, in case he was hungry.”

Alma hugs her rosebud pillow. Everyone knows that spirits don’t need to eat, but the gesture of friendship had been there. “Dilchain-ji found it. It was blue-black-green, and all those ants stuck in the middle squashed in the sweet milk and rice.”

“They were dead!” says Roop, turning to face her sister. “Squashed,” she says, pressing her little palms firmly together and nodding. “A family of greedy ants. Dilchain-ji said I wasn’t allowed to cremate them and then she smacked me with the broom. On the bottom. Oh, it was so funny.”

“I’m too excited to sleep. It’s boring being excited alone,” says Alma sitting up, sucking the inside of her elbow.

“Why?”

“It’s better when you’re awake too. Sit up and I’ll tell you where the little mouse lives?”

“Where? I love little mice.”

“In the courtyard.”

“Where exactly in the courtyard?”

Roop sits up and rubs her eyes. A mouse in the courtyard will need a trap. A steel catch on a spring mechanism that will ping forwards and cut off its head. A mosquito buzzes by her ear, she claps her hands and stumbles off the bed. “Got it. Look!” she says, showing Alma the smear of juice and blood on her palm.

Alma pulls a face. “I’m getting married in this many weeks,” she says, holding up five fingers. “Look.”

On her wedding day, Alma will wear silver shoes with pearl buckles made to measure by the cobbler with the henna beard who sits on the far corner of Ballimaran Lane. Alma points her toes and slips on her imaginary shoes. The imaginary pearl buckles glow resplendent in the imaginary moonlight. At her wedding party, she will dance and dance and her husband will dance with her.

“What are you doing?” asks Roop. She is not at all impressed that her sister is getting married soon.

“Trying on my silver wedding shoes. When I’m married you can come to my house every Friday for jalebis and I’ll let you eat as many as you want, hot from the pan.”

“They won’t be as good as Dilchain-ji’s though, will they?”

Roop picks the wings off the mosquito and inspects them for translucency. She licks the mosquito pulp off her palm, wonders if “when I am married” is the most stupid thing she has ever heard her sister say. “Why are you wearing that in bed?” she asks, pointing to Alma’s frock.

Alma arranges the creamy frill of her Sunday tutu like a fountain’s spray around her. Recently, she has started to wear her best-occasion frocks—those meant for Sundays, holidays, parties, and trips to the Royal Cinema at the Queen Victoria Circle—every day. She won’t leave the house without a red apple clip in her hair.

When Bappu had teased her about it, Alma replied that you just didn’t know who would pass you in the street, and by who, she meant her husband-to-be or “the so-fair-boy” as she had started to call him. “You should always look your best because first impressions count for a lot.”

When Bappu said she was right, first impressions did count for a lot but there was more to it than that, she asked if she could start wearing lipstick. He laughed. Absolutely not.

“Lucky for me you’re such an intelligent girl,” said Bappu, tweaking her plait. “Otherwise, I would disown you.”

“I should disown you,” said Alma, putting one hand on her frilly hip and scrutinising his khadi trousers, his khadi shirt, and the thin-rimmed glasses that he cleaned so fastidiously. “Bappu, you are so beige.”

“I am, aren’t I?” he said, looking down at himself and laughing. “Too much colour terrifies me.”

Alma looks at her sister now, says in a gravelly voice, her plait held across her top lip, “I am a fierce Pathan warrior.Come down from the tallest mountains to save your humble people. See how fine my mustachios are?”

“Are you a Pathan from Kashmir?” says Roop, forgetting the whys of the Sunday dress.

Ma is from Kashmir. That means that they too are half from Kashmir. Although they have never been there, they have heard Ma talk about it. When Ma talks about Kashmir, her pale blue eyes steam as though someone has reached into her face and lit a match behind the irises.

Alma shakes her head, says in the same gravelly voice, “I am a Pathan from the Afghan mountains. I have come to put an end to the fighting in Bengal and Punjab. East and West.”

“How will you do that?”

“Jadoo. I will put a spell on the nation, bring the misplaced people to their senses.”

“Mis-pl-aced?” says Roop.

“Lost-absent-gone astray.”

“Where have they gone?”

“They haven’t gone anywhere,” Alma concedes, “not yet, but they have lost all their good sense. That’s what Bappu said.”

“What religion are you?”

“Irrelevant,” says Alma with a hand held up in protest.

“Pathans are actually Muslim, which means you can’t be one. Fatima Begum’s great uncle was a Pathan. She told me herself.”

“Pathans are Muslim. It’s true,” admits Alma, “but a real warrior is brave no matter what. It’s the bravery that counts not the colour of the god. Gandhi-ji says so and so does Bappu. Independence from the British will bring freedom, and with freedom comes equality. Pandit Nehru said it on the radio. I heard him.”

Alma touches her heart when she says the Mahatma’s name. She tries to imagine the biological diagram of the oval-shaped organ, and the muscles clenched around it. She can’t believe her heart would look like that or that it would be there, when it feels like it might be in her brain, her stomach, or even in her throat.

“Equa-li-ty,” says Roop, touching her heart in imitation of Alma. “Equality like Kwality?”

“Kwality. Purveyors of Modern Confectionery. Sweet Making for a Free India,” says Alma in her best radio announcer’s voice. “No. Not like that at all.”

“What then?”

“It’s very modern. It means that in essence, in our hearts, we are all the same.”

“But some are better than others. Does Daadee Ma know about equa-li-ty?”

“No, and you better not tell her. She won’t like it. Promise me—cross your heart, hope to die, stick a needle in your eye—and then I’ll give you a story.”

“I promise,” says Roop, making the sign of the cross as she has seen the sisters do. “Tell me the one about the man who was tied to the tramlines. That’s my favourite.”

“Lie down next to me then. Put your head on the pillow,” Alma lowers her voice. “During the riots in August last year . . .”

“Direct Action Day,” says Roop promptly and sits up. “When the Muslims killed the Hindus. They burnt them alive, didn’t they?”

Alma nods solemnly and pushes her back down. “Yes, but the Hindus did exactly the same in return. Lie down, I said.”

“Co-py-cat kill-ings. I heard Ma say so. That’s what Bappu said, and then Ma said, ‘Does fasting count if you kill a man whilst you are doing it?’ Because it was Ramadan. That’s why.”

“Do you want the story or not?”

Roop sucks on her thumb and nods.

“Hush then. In the city of Calcutta, in the East of India, in the middle of all that rioting—”

“And looting, there was looting too.”

“Shh. A man was tied to the connector box of the tramlines—”

“Because in Calcutta they have trams, don’t they?”

Alma nods. “This man had a small hole drilled right into his skull and he was left to bleed to death, drip by drip.”

“What did they make the hole with?”

“A screwdriver?”

“How long till he was dead?”

“A few days I think,” whispers Alma, her hand cupped to her sister’s ear. “It’s called torturing.”

“Tor-tur-ing?”

“To inflict pain as slowly as possible. Now go to sleep.”

“Oh,” says Roop, eyes wide. She tries to picture the pool of blood, its size and colour, spreading around the dead man’s feet. “Can you tor-ture a mouse?”

“Shh. Close your eyes. I mean it.”

“Can you torture insects?”

“Probably, but you mustn’t. Baby Jesus would not like it one bit. Let’s go to sleep.”

Alma blows out the candle and turns her back. Eventually, she falls asleep with the distant lullaby of the muezzin singing the azan. She dreams of the river Jamuna flowing the wrong way and on its sandy shores stands the so-fair-boy. He looks up at her and waves.

*  *  *

Bappu listens to the news every day. Obsessively so, in fact. The Emerson Radio Model 517 has been taken out of his study and placed on one of two teak tables in the courtyard. The tables, a low table and a dining table, are made from British Burmese teak by an Indian carpenter to European specifications, “Made-in-India” is scratched into the underbelly of each one.

When he goes to work at Delhi University, Bappu listens to his colleagues. Every day at noon, the male teachers sit down at the canteen’s communal table for a lunch of rotis-dal-sabzi. Some eat with their hands, others use a tin spoon bent out of shape. They pass round a steel pitcher of water.

Ma, also a teacher at the university, eats her lunch in a separate, windowless room with those nominal female students who are allowed, by the grace of their generously wealthy families, to attend. Both Bappu and Ma agree that the situation is unfair.

In the main canteen, the Congress-supporting Mr. Viamika, a muffler round his neck, comments one late February Monday, between mouthfuls of dal scooped up with a roti, that albeit Pandit Nehru is doing the best he can, he shouldn’t be trying to please everyone. “It is a question of loyalty,” he says, loud enough so the students will hear.

“Haan ji,” agrees his close colleague, passing the chilli, the red thread of several pujas tied to his wrist, “all this pandering to the League haramzadas, when they are butchering our brothers.”

Professor Singh stands to attention, holds up a finger, and lisps, straight from Tara Singh’s mouth: “If the Muslim League want to establish Pakistan they will have to pass through an ocean of Sikh blood first. Our people will not forfeit Punjab without a fight,” he adds, mumbling and swallowing. “Punjab is blessed land, richest agricultural soil on the subcontinent.”

“Hear, hear,” shout a few of the students, clapping and stamping their feet.

“Do not think for a minute,” says the usually calm professor of Botanical Studies, Mohammed Ghualam, now incensed, “that we will stay in a country where we are clearly a minority and treated as such. Pakistan is a holy land. It has been promised to us by Allah and it will be delivered.”

Mohammed Ghualam is one of five Muslim teachers in the predominantly Hindu—but proudly open-minded—institution.

Mr. Viamika slams his fist on the table. “All this rioting and raping,” he glowers. “Your people are butchers. Do not think for a minute we have forgotten the events in Calcutta.”

“We have not forgotten those in Noakhali,” retorts Mohammed Ghualam, standing up quickly, spilling hot chai all over his trousers.

Bappu rubs his eyes—they always sting nowadays—adjusts his glasses, and passes his handkerchief to Mohammed Ghualam. He wishes Ma was sitting next to him. “We are old friends and colleagues,” he says, looking from one teacher to the next. “We have worked together for years. We can’t fight amongst ourselves. Not now.”

“When these meat-eaters learn their place,” retorts Mr. Viamika.

The students stop eating, one or two of them smirk. A boy named Arun throws a cup of water at Mohammed Ghualam and hoots with laughter when the water splashes the teacher’s robes. “Pakistan murdabad,” Arun shouts mockingly, lighting an imported cigarette and smoking it with defiant pleasure.

Mohammed Ghualam pushes his tin thali aside. He spits and walks away. “I resign,” he shouts back.

*  *  *

Bappu, home earlier than usual, the last class of the day cancelled, sits on the swing with Ma. He tells her about the tension in the canteen and the resignation of Mohammed Ghualam. “Soon there will be no Muslim teachers left,” he says.

“I know, my love,” she replies. She takes Bappu’s hand, squeezes his fingers, and wraps her arm around him. The heat from his body is a tonic and she could lose herself in it. She presses her nose to his neck.

“Alma asked me if the troubles in Punjab would come to Delhi. I said no,” says Bappu. “Was I wrong?”

“What else could you say? How do you put into words what we feel, what we smell is coming?”

Bappu nods and cleans his glasses; they are always so dirty, the air so dusty. “Can you smell it too then?”

She nods. “Sometimes, I sit in the courtyard, I try to read but I’m distracted by the cumin frying in the kitchen, and the gutters overflowing outside, hot milk and my own sweat and all of it feels so close, and then there is the radio always in the background and the news never good. There is no peace anymore.”

“I can’t work out where the tide is swelling, but I know it’s growing faster than there is space to hold it. India will collapse and Independence will come too late.” Bappu rubs his eyes, so she takes his hand, presses it to her mouth.

Ma pushes her bare toes against the low teak table. The swing sways, backwards and forwards in a soothing, cooling rhythm. Her anklets chime and she picks star-shaped jasmine from the tree behind them, crushes the white flower between her finger and thumb. “Smell this,” she says to Bappu, and he does. “Some things will always be constant. Jasmine will always smell sweet, and when it is pushed to your nose like this, you would almost forget the gutters outside. Listen to this, my love, and tell me who wrote it: ‘If your prayers are potent, Mullah, move this mosque my way. Else have a drink or two with me and we’ll see its minarets sway.’”

“A Shayaris by Mirza Ghalib.”

“With poetry like that, how can hate prevail?” she says to reassure and reward him.

Bappu remembers the day he met her. Her rose-dipped voice. She had rubies and pearls in her ears. The stones of sorrow, his twin had said.

“I haven’t the heart to discuss wedding plans tonight,” he admits.

“Nor I. Lakshmi will be here soon. She will help.”

“Thank god for my twin,” says Bappu.

He agitates the branch behind them. Star-shaped blossoms fall across Ma’s shoulders and face and she lifts her head, laughs at the tickle on her skin.

*  *  *

Alma and Roop skip around Bappu at least once a day, pleading for his attention. Bappu, me! No me! I am the favourite. I am the eldest. They pinch each other out of the way.

Roop, who likes the jingle of the radio adverts, hears that Horlicks Overcomes Weakness and that the Lovely Leela Chitnis uses Lux soap. She runs to Dilchain-ji demanding that both be purchased at once. “Dilchain-ji, please,” she pleads, “we need them for the state of the nation. You know there might be an actual war soon—Sister Ignatius said so—with rationing! Well then, let’s go to Chandni Chowk, let’s go! That’s where all the important things are sold.” Dilchain-ji is busy and shoos her off, so Roop runs to her ayah, Fatima Begum, who always agrees.

Alma likes to listen to the news with Bappu. After school one day, wedged next to him on the swing, her leg in his, she asks outright if he is a communist.

He looks at her serious expression and tries not to laugh. “Where did you hear that?”

“At school. Ruby Patel said that her second cousin who was a communist was shot in the head.”

“I went to a few meetings. Read some pamphlets when I was a student. It was a long time ago now.”

“But why?”

“You know how I feel about the caste system?”

“It divides our society. That’s what you always said,” she says, looking up for his approval.

“It’s a cruel system. When I was a boy, older than you, communism offered an alternative.”

In Bappu’s first week at university, a student at a rally had handed him a home-printed pamphlet. Something about the tilt of the boy’s head, the red bandana across his forehead: Bappu had accepted the pamphlet at once. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to be friends with the boy, more that he had wanted to be the boy. Less sensitive. Bolder. Brighter.

“But you’re not a communist now, are you?” says Alma. “I don’t want you to get shot in the head and I don’t want the boy’s family to hear rumours that might put them off.”

“Quite right,” says Bappu laughing. “No one wants a communist in the family.”

“Seriously Bappu. It’s not funny.”

“No, it’s not and I am not.”

“Promise me?”

“Yes. Hand on my heart. To be honest, Alma, I can’t condone extreme beliefs anymore, no matter how I might try to understand them. When explosive ideas are no longer just ideas, yet they become the foundation for new political parties, they can feel quite dangerous. Do you understand, my love?”

“Do you mean like the HRWP?” asks Alma. She smoothes down the tulle layers of her lilac tutu. The so-fair-boy is standing on the shores of the Jamuna, and she can tell by the tilt of his head he’s impressed by her questions. “I’ve seen them walking round, all puffed up and slinging their guns.”

“The HRWP claim to be defending our Indian humanity, our pride and independence, but really?” He shakes his head.

“They’re modelled on fascist soldiers, aren’t they?”

“How do you know?”

Alma looks down sheepishly. “I might have read it in The Times of India: ‘cloaked in nationalism but inciting hatred,’” she quotes.

“Should I be impressed or worried that you know that?”

“Impressed, of course,” she says, looking up and smiling. “So what do you believe in now, Bappu?”

“Ahimsa.”

Ahimsa, Gandhi’s policy of non-violence, is something Alma thinks about often. Is it like turning the other cheek? She worries that if pushed too far, she would hit back. “I believe in it too,” she says now, for Bappu’s sake, and presses her body to his, rumples his beige shirt with her hands. “Bappu, when I am married, I can still come home, can’t I? Once a week? On Sundays for kheer, and Fatima Begum will still do my hair?”

“It depends,” he says slowly. “You might be needed in your new home. Your mother-in-law and husband will have lots for you to do.”

“But then you will have to come and see me?”

“You might not want us to; you’ll be so busy being a new wife.”

“Don’t be silly, Bappu, I will always want to see you.” She observes him carefully. “Bappu, you don’t seem very happy I’m getting married?”

“It’s not that.” He looks up at her with a rueful smile. ...