© Anuradha Kumar

Chapter 1

Radcliffe's Line Makers on the Dollmakers' Island

Summer had set in early that year in 1947. In his three hundred and forty-room red sandstone and granite Viceroy's House in the capital, Louis Mountbatten felt entombed. He could not wait till 1948. If there was a way Jinnah and Nehru could be persuaded, he could bring Independence earlier, but there was the division to be settled and he, Mountbatten, had never been good at this. He sighed and looked at the map in front of him. Soon, very soon, his eyes would return to the mirror.

He was forty seven. A year more, Mountbatten felt, and he would become one of those grey haired, wrinkled, and tired viceroys, who had been his predecessors. All doddering, half-retired diplomats, who knew nothing of how to run an empire. Or even divide it.

He studied the map carefully. The west posed no problems; entire villages could be made to move if there was a problem. The east, with its many rivers and islands, always too many to be numbered accurately, and the unpredictable sea too close, was a different matter altogether.

His eyes followed the river in the east, that broke up even as he looked on at the thin rivulets mirroring the lines on his forehead. And there was the dot of an island, close to the sea, that bobbed in the waters like a dying insect. Mountbatten turned his gaze away; he looked at his watch instead. He was in the midst of the hated Indian summer, with the loo that gripped Delhi like an unrelenting fever.

If only, he thought, he could head for Simla. Mountbatten remembered the drive along the Mall Road, the cheering crowds running by his carriage, and Edwina at his side, waving to them, oblivious to his muttered warnings, 'Don't pay them too much attention or they will get carried away.'

The crowds in India unnerved Mountbatten. He preferred them through the glass windows of a railway carriage, from the windows of the Viceroyal Lodge at Simla, but never up close. And in Delhi, there was too much of everything. Too much heat, too much work, too much gossip, too many people; and now, with the map before him, too many complications.

What he had anticipated as a neat, cut and dried division, was fraught with difficulties. People could never agree on anything. It was the heat that made this land a short-tempered one. If Jinnah wanted something, the Congresswallahs were sure to disagree, and vice versa. And it was rare that he could ever get them to sit at the same table. The island bang in the middle of the river was the least of his problems. Best to let Cyril Radcliffe handle it. As a civil servant, Radcliffe knew how to draw a line or two. Mountbatten uncreased his forehead, and rang the bell for his secretary.

'Call for Radcliffe,' he ordered.

Not a word passed between the two men. From across the table, Mountbatten slid the map towards Radcliffe, impassive, imperturbable. But too soon, his brow creased yet again. He had heard the distinct noise of a squealing mouse. The kind that proliferated in these parts. But a chuchunder in the viceroy's house? Surely not. It was impossible.

Perhaps in the dashed heat, everyone (even these dratted creatures) was seeking cool interiors. As he reached for the bell, Mountbatten's glance fell on Radcliffe. The civil servant was struggling to hold back his nervous squeal-like laughter. He flushed as his eyes met Mountbatten's.

'It is beyond my wildest imaginings, Your Excellency. Among my most difficult challenges. An impossible task in the time...?'

His voice petered out. Mountbatten was looking at his watch again. It was time for his tea meeting with Gandhi. It had already been delayed. Gandhi had a new pair of spectacles that needed refitting, and Mountbatten responded more testily than he would otherwise have.

'Be that as it may, Cyril, you are the man for it. And be quick about it.'

Radcliffe could only pass on his nervousness to his officers. And the map of the east, when magnified, showed clearly that snake-like river billowing, breaking up in places, with the island set in it like an unpleasant animal dropping. It could elicit only one kind of reaction from them.

Radcliffe's men sat in stunned silence. Why were they being sent to an island, as small and as godforsaken as this one, when there was so much else to do? It seemed like a crazy, illtimed joke.

A line had to be drawn quickly, Radcliffe insisted. 'That is the island of the dollmakers, as it has been known. Find and ask them. Follow the rules. Do nothing arbitrarily.'

People had to be definitely slotted, put in place. Hindus here, Muslims there, and then the line dividing them had to be drawn.

Radcliffe's men travelled to the east, taking the train or the road, and then the weekly ferry to the island. The heat rose like mist, made the sweat rain down their faces, and they could only look longingly as they passed other islands, and boats carrying people away.

Everyone was leaving, gathering whatever lay at hand - in boats, carts, even on foot. Radcliffe's men, when at last they anchored, found a near-empty island, and only two people, who would have nothing to do with them. They were too busy carrying on an argument that had been going on for years. One had a schoolmaster-like air about him, complete with a broken pair of spectacles that he insisted had once belonged to Gandhi.

The other refused to emerge from his high tower, the mould from his flaky beard falling like a thin drizzle all the time. Radcliffe's men waited, hoping for several things to happen : to learn something about where the dollmakers had gone, for the two men to come around and arrive at an agreement about who between them had reached the island first. And the more they waited, the ground only wobbled and shifted under their feet. This island was unlike anything they had ever been to before ...an island with such a sparse population - two elderly, quarrelsome gentlemen. It was totally against the norm. There had to be more people.

They sent frantic messages to Radcliffe in faraway Delhi, where he oversaw the drawing of several lines, not just this one. Lines that would stretch to the east and the west. Spending days, counting people, putting ticks against squares where it mattered. What religion? Caste? Language? On other maps, he marked cities, towns, and villages, soon to be separated.

And he heard with only half an ear his men complaining, over and over again. 'Sir, there is really no one we can talk to here. No one.'