Darshan (14 page)

“I will send money,” Baba Singh told him, keeping his voice even.

Satnam began to cry louder.

“When do you leave?” Sada Kaur asked.

“Next month.”

“Where will you go?”

“Hong Kong.”

Looking at him in astonishment, she gave Satnam her finger to suckle. The room was suddenly quiet.

“For how long?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

She stood and left the room. He quickly went after her. She put the baby on a sleeping mat, sat on the charpoy, and pinched the bridge of her nose. Satnam began to cry again. “How is this different from Ranjit?” she asked quietly. “You hated him for leaving. You cannot guarantee we will be safe. You cannot prevent bad things from happening. At least with you here we can face those things together. I do not want you to go.”

“I would like you to understand my reasons.”

“I understand that you are running. I don’t know from what, but you do not have to.”

He sat beside her, reaching his hand under her salwaar. Angry now, she tried to shove away his arm, but he held it there. He found the bare skin of her soft back and caressed her softly. His face was only inches from hers, but he was acutely aware of the many future miles and years between them, separating their bodies by inconceivable distances of space and time. Even as Satnam was crying, she let him hold her, let him kiss her mouth, keeping her eyes open, seeing everything.

~   ~   ~

The month had passed so quickly, like the snap of freshly picked beans. Baba Singh packed a small sack of personal items: a wooden comb, an extra net to tuck his beard, an extra turban Sada Kaur had given him, a pair of sandals, and a small wad of rupee notes. His belt as well as his pistol and lathi were lying next to the sack on a small table. He smoothed the front of his overcoat, glancing around the room at the several chairs in the corner that had always seemed to crowd the small space, at Prem’s charpoy against the left wall, at the drawing of the ten gurus on the wall opposite, at the open shelves jammed with pots and earthenware dishes, at the water jug by the door, at Sada Kaur’s low stool where she made roti dough. He breathed deeply, inhaling the aroma of neem and dusty livestock.

The front door curtain was hooked open. Manmohan was outside, struggling with a clay pot of water.

“Where are you taking it?” Baba Singh asked him.

“Bebeji needs to clean the baby,” his son said, panting and sloshing water over the sides, inching the pot through the doorway.

“Did she ask you for it?”

Manmohan looked up as though he had not thought of that. He frowned, two little wrinkles of confusion on his young six-year-old face. “No.”

“You are wasting it,” Baba Singh told him.

Manmohan stopped to catch his breath. He placed his hands on his hips and assessed the pot.

Baba Singh smiled. “Leave it for now. Are you ready to go?”

Manmohan shook his head.

Baba Singh strapped on his belt and inserted the pistol into the holster. “Let’s get Bebe and your brother,” he said, picking up the lathi and sliding it into the loop on his trousers.

“Are you going away?” Manmohan asked.

“I am.”

Abandoning the pot, Manmohan approached his father. “Did I do something wrong?”

Baba Singh knelt down. “I don’t know why you think that.”

“Nanaji thinks you should stay here.”

“Your grandfather will be fine.”

“Are you ever coming back?”

Baba Singh stared at his son, at the cautious yet hopeful expression of one too young to grasp life’s many cruelties. “Get your mother,” he said, sending the boy away.

They stopped at Hotel Toor on their way to the train. Baba Singh knelt on the floor beside his father’s charpoy. “Bapu,” he said gently. “I am leaving.”

Lal mumbled something.

“I will think of you,” Baba Singh murmured, kissing his father.

The train was there when the entire family, including Yashbir, gathered on the station platform. The engine was quiet as the crew unloaded supplies.

Khushwant stepped aside with Simran. They were holding hands. Her head was down, and Baba Singh thought he saw tears.

“Good luck, Baba,” Yashbir said, taking the young man’s hand.

Baba Singh put an arm around his friend. Yashbir’s body was bony, muscles deflated by age. “Will you be fine without Khushwant? Who will help you with the shop?”

“I will,” Desa said, taking the old man’s hand. Her light, cotton chuni billowed out behind her as a breeze cut across the platform.

“I do not think I will wait here,” Yashbir said, smiling at Baba Singh. “You can get on board without me.”

Desa nodded in agreement. “I will go with you.” She gave each of her brothers a quick embrace, not lingering long enough for them to say goodbye, then took the blacksmith’s elbow.

Baba Singh watched them walk away down the platform. From behind, they looked like two people simply out for an afternoon stroll. Then the sky blue of Yashbir’s turban disappeared as they descended the small staircase onto Suraj Road.

Avani’s Wooden Elephant

1930

Family Tree

Junjie had the run of downtown Hong Kong, or so he made it seem.

“They love me,” he often told Baba Singh with that crooked, mocking smile that thinned his pointy eyes into slits and showcased the top row of his uneven front teeth. “They love me for what I have and what they do not.”

“What do you have?” Baba Singh asked him once.

“A purpose.”

He was a street corner artist, his workplace a paved corner along Des Veoux Road at the narrow mouth of a dead-end alleyway. About the same age as Baba Singh, but unmarried with no children—at least none that were legitimate—he made remarkable use of his considerably unique talents. He painted animals and grass, but with such piercing strokes and fitting hues, his productions were magical. He also created impromptu charcoal portraits of curious passersby, smudges of life on paper. It was the shades of truth in their sooty eyes that brought these people back. They were stripped naked by his drawings. They were rendered vulnerable. They walked away confused at how he managed to see within them what they labored so hard to hide.

That was why Junjie was wrong. People did not love him. They hated him. Inevitably he would peer too deeply. He would expose too gratuitously. He had shamed them.

“What
is
your purpose?” Baba Singh wanted to know after Junjie had drawn him, upset by his own charcoal portrait, disappointed by his depiction. It was too melancholy. Everything was drawn downward, the corners of his eyes and mouth tipped not just in sadness, but in a severity that seemed foreign to him. His black beard was a series of downward strokes that spoke of rigidity, as could also be said of the length of his nose. Only his turban ascended, in gray, curvy smears of wrapped cloth, but it served to make everything else appear that much more elongated
down
. It was unfair. Baba Singh had felt a genuine hopefulness during those first months—even years—in Hong Kong. He had not felt as cold and as hard as he had been illustrated.

“
This
is my purpose,” Junjie replied simply, holding up his brushes and charcoals. “I was brave enough to do it.”

It took more encounters with the artist to determine his meaning, but Baba Singh eventually learned that Junjie’s parents were members of China’s wealthy upper crust. They had thumbed their noses at their son’s obvious talent. And he did have it, undeniably.

Other artists faced with similar scorn might have drowned in alcohol or jumped into the sea to drown themselves that way. But not Junjie. He had taken what he interpreted to be a higher road. He had chosen to elevate himself, to regard his parents as simpletons, as he would come to regard everyone. According to Junjie, he had yet to meet his equal. He maintained this outlook even though it had sunk him down low, even though it had taken him into the void with everyone else who had ever gone missing.

~   ~   ~

Baba Singh looked over at Khushwant. They were walking side by side, their sandaled feet clapping hollowly on Amarpur’s train station planks. His brother was smiling.

“Why are you so happy?” Baba Singh asked.

“Today?” Khushwant looked surprised, inhaling the Indian spring earth of the Punjab. “Why wouldn’t I be? Why wouldn’t we both be? We are home.”

“It is so strange. It has been a long time. Much has happened.”

“True. But some of it was fun, I think,” Khushwant chuckled. “Remember the man in the alley?”

Baba Singh laughed ruefully, with both amusement and regret. He scratched his bearded cheek and shook his head, thinking of the year 1922. They had only been on patrol in Hong Kong for a few months.

It was the first time Baba Singh met Junjie.

~   ~   ~

Baba Singh stared hard through the mouth of the narrow alley to get a better look at the Chinaman standing in the middle of it. The air was cold as usual and had the tang of fish and sea. He hoped he would grow accustomed to these strange, unpleasant smells, sometimes wondering if he reeked of his new surroundings. He thought he could perceive it in his turban when he undid it at night. But it was hard to tell if it was his turban or if the odor had dulled his sense of smell.

The man in the alley was making deep guttural noises, but the two six-story tenement buildings that flanked the corridor and blocked the light made it difficult to see. “What is he doing?” Baba Singh asked Khushwant. “Is he drunk?”

“Singing?” Khushwant asked, dubious. “I was hoping to catch a drunk man singing today. What is that? It is definitely not Cantonese.”

Baba Singh laughed.

Several feet away, a street artist, sitting cross-legged on the corner, stopped his work to look at them.

Baba Singh asked the artist, his Cantonese halted and broken, “You know that man?”

The artist regarded him seriously for several moments, then smiled broadly, almost stupidly. “No,” he finally said, his smile instantly vanishing. He bent his head over his painting and continued to work.

Baba Singh stepped closer to the artist, who sat comfortably amid a collection of his paintings and drawings, a palette and brushes to his left, charcoal pencils scattered to his right. The artist was painting a woman reaching up to pluck a peach from a tree. Baba Singh was impressed by the intimate details, the elegant smallness of the woman’s pale hand touching her fingertips to a fruit ripe with reds and oranges, a cascade of two green leaves pouring from the fruit’s stem. The woman was desperate for the fruit, her face shaded pink with anticipation.

“Who is she?” Baba Singh asked.

The artist tapped his brush on the edge of his palette. “How do you know she is real?”

“Isn’t she?”

“She is not.”

Dipping the brush in black, the artist scrawled his signature in the bottom corner and placed the painting off to the side to dry.

“Junjie,” Baba Singh said, reading the name. “It is a very beautiful painting.”

“I know,” Junjie said, pulling out a fresh canvas from a small portfolio.

Slightly affronted, Baba Singh glanced a final time at the painting, then moved away. There was no warmth or pleasure in Junjie’s confidence. It was cold like a fact, sharp and painful.

Baba Singh again turned his attention toward the alley. Squinting at the drunkard, he said to Khushwant, “It does not look like anything illegal.”

“Yes, but they are not supposed to be in there,” Khushwant sighed, stepping into the dim corridor. “They always make a mess. We have to get him.”

Closer, they heard the man make one final, remarkably impressive, guttural sound, low and rumbling.

“Hey,” Khushwant said, but the man still did not notice them.

Taking a huge breath, the drunkard leaned back in an exaggerated arc. Like a bow releasing an arrow, with a
thwoo
, he shot a large gob of yellow mucus that smacked against the tenement wall in front of him. So awestruck by his own phlegm, he studied his spit closely, tilting his head to one side, then the other as though gauging the magnificence of its shine and amber tint.

Still not noticing the click of Baba Singh and Khushwant’s boots on the cobblestones, the man then wiped his mouth on his sleeve and untied his pants to urinate.

“Oi!” Baba Singh shouted.

The man whirled around in astonishment, his genitalia hanging loosely over the hem of his pants. He stepped back, was startled when he hit the wall, jumped forward, and then fled down the alley and around a corner.

Baba Singh observed the smear of phlegm on the tenement wall, disgusted. “He backed into it.”

Khushwant began to laugh.

~   ~   ~

“Was that when you first talked to Junjie?” his brother asked, still smiling as they descended the platform staircase onto Suraj Road.

Baba Singh nodded.

“What do you think happened to him?”

“I don’t know,” Baba Singh murmured as they stopped in front of Yashbir’s.

“Things were a little wild at the end,” Khushwant said, no longer smiling. “But I am sure he made it out.”

Using the sleeve of his kurta to wipe clean a small section of the blacksmith’s shop window, Baba Singh peered inside, but it was too dim to see much of anything.

Khushwant stepped back slightly and regarded the building. He shook his head sadly. “I still have all of Yashji’s letters.”

The old blacksmith had died five years before in 1925. Before that he had written constantly. He shared news of the entire family, made everyone real when the long days away had begun to flatten them into two-dimensional entities. He created scenes, built on moods, facial expressions, colors, and all the things left unsaid in Sada Kaur and Desa’s letters.

The most memorable correspondence was news of Baba Singh’s third son Vikram, born about eight months after his deployment.
This boy smiles at everything
, Yashbir had written.
I almost feel sorry for him because he cannot laugh yet as big as he wants to.
Even now, Baba Singh still had parts of that particular letter memorized. It made him remember how he had made love to his wife before he left. They had gone to the canal. She was angry, but she let him lift her sari, insert his hands within the folds of cloth until he found her. He wondered if he had been too rough with her. He had not meant to be, had always been so vigilantly tender, but despite her willingness she was so removed. He panicked, pulling at her, terrified that she was already too far from him. Thinking of it had often kept him awake at night, particularly in the early years.