Darshan (16 page)

“Sat sri akal, Bapu,” Satnam said, bringing his arms around front. He had been holding an object and set it on the floor at his feet. Standing straight, he placed his palms together, looked up shyly and smiled. “So nice to see you.”

Noticing the object on the floor, Baba Singh cleared his throat, trying to cover a sudden rush of emotion. “Is that yours?” he asked, attempting to sound detached.

Satnam looked at it. “Desa Bhua gave it to me. Do you like it?”

Baba Singh smiled weakly. “Yes. I like it very much,” he said, pulling his eyes from Avani’s wooden elephant.

He had made it when he was still a boy, perhaps Satnam’s age, had dug out a small tree stump that Ranjit helped shape into a suitable block of wood. For several days he was not able to do anything with it, was not able to see what was inside. But Ranjit told him the answers would only reveal themselves after the first stroke, the first chink in the wood. So, with a small, stone-sharpened knife, Baba Singh finally began with the toes and the arcs of toenails, which then led to the feet as he imagined the weight of the animal upon them. He rounded out the legs and then the body, gave it wrinkles and large ears flattened against its head, like a chastened dog, and a slightly open, playful mouth. He then carefully shaped the trunk. The three-dimensional wrinkles at the bend of it had been his favorite, the highlight of his ten-year-old accomplishment. He had once thought that little bit had been the most realistic, although now it seemed trivial. When he grew bored of the elephant, he had given it to Avani.

“Would you like to see the others?” his son asked, bending to retrieve the toy.

Sada Kaur smiled encouragingly at her son and moved to the shelf. She pulled the figurines down one by one, setting them on Prem’s charpoy. Satnam took a cautious step forward toward the bed. “Do not be shy,” she said, waving him closer.

“This one,” Satnam said as he approached the charpoy, setting the elephant down and pointing to the cow, “was my first. Cows are easy.” He chuckled but would not look up to meet his father’s gaze. “People are more difficult.” With a grimace, he lifted the farmer pulling the bullock cart. “See? He looks like clay.” His face dropped. “I gave up doing people.”

Sada Kaur touched his cheek with the back of her finger. “You can try again when you are ready.”

Baba Singh picked up the farmer. “What made you interested in carving these things?” he asked.

Satnam pointed to the elephant. “This one is so good,” he said. “I thought it would be easy.”

“It is not easy.”

The boy shook his head in agreement. He finally glanced up at his father, hopeful. “But do you like them?”

Baba Singh regarded the carvings circumspectly. Truthfully, he did not like them. He did not think his son understood how to breathe life into them. Their essence was wrong. Satnam had not paid enough attention to what they really were before coaxing them out and giving them shape. But Baba Singh no longer understood how to do that either. Junjie had taught him that perhaps he had never known.

~   ~   ~

“I do not like it,” Baba Singh said, tossing his charcoal portrait on the ground in front of Junjie. “It is not right. You have made me look too much like a police officer.”

“Well, are you not?” Junjie said, brushing the portrait aside.

Baba Singh knelt. He could feel his pistol holster digging into his side. His leather jackboots creaked. “I am a farmer. I come from a village in India. That is who I truly am. You boast all the time that you see people as they truly are.”

The artist gave Baba Singh a withering look. “Baba, this is how I see you. That is not my fault.”

“Please try again.”

Junjie shrugged. “Yes, but you are expecting too much.”

They met, as they had the first time, in the artist’s one-room flat. It was a shabby space. Everything was the black-brown of grime. It was threadbare streaks and stains, the first hungry signs of nature slowly nibbling at the floor and walls. The room was dim. There was only one small window looking out into a tight shaft. There was a mat, much like those found in prison cells, on which Junjie slept. It reeked of mildew. A closed cupboard hung on a wall, which the artist opened to remove some fresh sketch paper and stubs of charcoal. There was one chair. That was for Baba Singh.

Junjie lit a candle and set it on the floor. He never bothered with better lighting, never fussed about specific angles.

Baba Singh had asked about this during his initial sitting.

“Turning one way or the other does not change who you are,” the artist had replied. “And light does not tell the story. Light distorts it.”

So this time Baba Singh did not ask where Junjie would like him. Without being directed, he sat in the chair.

Junjie positioned himself on the floor, spread his materials out around him, and began to work. Baba Singh watched him curiously, unsettled after a few minutes; the artist seldom looked up at him.

Doubt seized him like a hand clamped around his throat. The original sketch began to gnaw at Baba Singh. Perhaps Junjie would produce the same portrait and mockingly hold it up as if to say that you cannot be anyone other than who you are. Embrace it. Admit it, and then go sink yourself in the sea if you must, smash against the docks into a million pieces. When they find you and put you back together, you will not have changed. This stiff, stern policeman is what you will be.

His palms were sweaty. The first time they had done this, Baba Singh had groomed for his sitting. He had combed his beard with extra care and tucked it neatly. He had smoothed his eyebrows and fussed with his turban until it was perfect. Once in the chair, he had maintained a straight posture, had fixed an expression of pride on his face, with just the slightest hint of an amiable smile. Now he slumped in defeat. He could not hide.

Was he rigid? Was he so horribly severe? Was that
it
? Was there nothing else to balance him out? Certainly there had to be. He could recall being soft. He had a wife, whom he sometimes could not remember, but whom he had certainly adored. They had held each other. Many years before, he had whispered sweet kindnesses to her in the night. And what about Kiran and Avani? He had loved them. Love and loss ached so painfully. It was all inside. He had never let that go. So why was it missing?

“Enough,” Baba Singh said, his chest constricted.

Junjie paused, his charcoal suspended over the paper. “I am not finished.”

“I don’t care. I do not want another one. The first was enough.” He stood and swept past the candle, nearly snuffing it out.

Almost at the door, changing his mind, he spun on his heel. “Let me see it.”

Junjie wordlessly handed him the drawing.

Baba Singh gaped at it in disbelief. “What is this?”

The artist casually stood and replaced the charcoal in his cupboard. “It is you.”

But that was impossible. Baba Singh’s beard had been shaded the white of an old man. His turban was missing and he had no hair. His eyebrows were bushy tufts. He was not twenty-nine. He was old and creased, sharp wrinkles branching across his face. He was withered and exhausted. The other portrait had conveyed a sense of searching. Beneath the stiffness there was desperation for a kind of nourishment, a seeking of answers. This self, this future rendition was finished searching.

And by the look of it, he had found nothing.

~   ~   ~

 “Bebe!” another boy shouted from outside the mud hut. “He is here! Quickly, fix your hair! It looks like a nest. He is coming!”

Baba Singh tore his gaze away from the elephant in Satnam’s lap to glance outside the hut.

Satnam chortled, covering his mouth as Sada Kaur carried in a tray of tea.

The other boy, also water soaked, flew breathlessly inside, stopping short when he saw Baba Singh. Then he burst out laughing. “I am too late,” he said, slapping his knee. Assessing his mother, he nodded with satisfaction and gave her a thumbs-up.

She pursed her thin lips as she set the tray down on the small table. “Vikram, this is your bapuji.”

“Eh, Bapu, was it a good one?” Vikram asked Baba Singh, wiping a wet clump of hair out of his face and squeezing water out of his topknot.

Sada Kaur threw him a towel. “Not on the floor.”

“Good one?” Baba Singh asked.

“Your face was so shocked!” Vikram said. He nodded toward his mother. “Her hair hardly ever looks like a nest. It is the absolute truth. Look how beautiful she is.”

“Vikram,” Sada Kaur said, her voice firm.

He flung the towel over his shoulder and clapped his palms together, attempting to be more serious. “Sat sri akal, Bapu.”

Baba Singh smiled in acknowledgement.

“I meant the floor,” Sada Kaur said with raised eyebrows as she threw down several more rags.

“Oh,” Vikram said, attempting to wink at Baba Singh, but actually blinking. He chuckled to himself.

Satnam put Avani’s elephant on the table and jumped down off his chair to help his brother.

Baba Singh watched his sons, the deliberate way that Satnam cordoned off the water with a rag, the slow circular motion of his arm as he methodically wiped the floor, the way he politely gestured that Sada Kaur bring over the iron bucket that was resting by the cupboard, the way he wrung the excess water into it. It was so different from Vikram’s haphazard flinging of his rag back and forth, not cleaning it up but rather smearing the water around.

Done, Vikram plopped himself cross-legged on the floor, the wet rag flung over his topknot. Satnam wrung the last drops out of his rag and hung it over the edge of the bucket. He then sat with his brother.

Sada Kaur gave Baba Singh a cup of chai. She held the mug with both hands and leaned forward slightly, as if presenting it to him. She smelled like mint and ginger, like she had been handling the herbs before he arrived. They scented her hair. His heart quickened and he smiled at her. “Thank you,” he said, receiving the tea and taking a sip. She waited until he nodded, then sat in a chair across from him.

Swallowing another sip of tea, Baba Singh realized his sons were waiting expectantly, staring up at him. He crossed his legs and leaned forward. Mug cupped in both hands, he rested his forearms on his knee. “Are those your bikes?” he asked them.

“Yes,” Vikram said, grinning. “The rusted one is mine. I rode it into the pond once. It never recovered.”

“We will need to get him another,” Sada Kaur said. “It barely makes it all the way to Amarpur now. Sometimes he walks it home.”

“That is only because the seat is like a rock.” He rubbed his behind.

Satnam smiled. “You are too skinny.”

From where he was sitting, Vikram twisted around, trying to look at his bottom. “This whole time I thought everything else was too hard.”

Baba Singh laughed, and Vikram wink-blinked at him again.

“Vikram is in the second standard,” Satnam said. “And I am in the third. We study math, science, history, Gurumukhi, Hindi, and Urdu.”

“And we dance,” Vikram said. “We practice at the gurdwara.”

“Your Khushwant Chacha used to dance for Basant,” Baba Singh told them.

Vikram’s eyes brightened. “Maybe we can dance together.”

“I am not so good,” Satnam replied a little morosely. “I usually come home and help Bebe wash the animals.”

Baba Singh smiled. “That is also good.”

Sada Kaur looked pleased.

They heard the snort of a bullock outside and the metal clank of tools placed in a pile. Prem and a teenage young man, sweaty and dirty from an afternoon in the fields, pushed through the curtain.

Baba Singh rose in astonishment when he saw Manmohan.

Prem sat on his charpoy. “Hello Baba. It is good to see you again.”

“Sat sri akal,” Baba Singh replied, inclining his head with a reserved respect.

“Manmohan, do you remember your father?” Prem asked. “You were big enough.” He kicked off his chappals and began to massage his feet, making faces of exaggerated agony and relief. He had not aged well. His cheekbones were prominent, and his leg hair had thinned, the veins beneath purple and thick.

Manmohan nodded slightly. “Sat sri akal, Bapu.”

“You look so much like someone I knew,” Baba Singh said, thinking of Ranjit.

Vikram rolled his eyes playfully. “Manmohan is the smart man. He is finished with school. He knows everything now.”

Manmohan flashed a boyish grin, lightly shoving Vikram with his foot. He was so much like Ranjit, with that same upward tilt of the eyebrow, amused and confident, yet the world had so far left him untouched.

“You are lucky,” he told Manmohan. He glanced at Avani’s elephant then turned to the others, speaking with deliberation, enunciating his words carefully. “You all are. I hope you know that, really know it.”

Yet, as his sons all politely nodded, quizzically, like he had gone mad, he knew they could not possibly grasp the significance of what he said. They did not know what it meant to lead such fortunate lives, what it had cost to give it to them, to maintain it for them. They had not scrambled out of the valley only to discover that the world was much bigger and more frightening than they had imagined. How could they appreciate their privilege enough to protect it if they did not comprehend that it could be lost?

When the family prepared for bed that evening, Baba Singh felt empty thinking of their faces, their lack of understanding. He reclined on his old charpoy, uneasy, a guest in his own home.

Sada Kaur was in the main room with the boys, helping to get their beds ready. Baba Singh waited for her, fidgeting. He was not certain of her anymore. Earlier she had inspired in him a charge of desire. Now he was sick with anxiety. What would he say? How could he say anything, how could he
do
anything after his many nights alone with Bao Yo, who had known him longer, who knew, simply because she was there, what he had sacrificed?

~   ~   ~

Bao Yo laughed her throaty laugh. “An old man?” she asked, amused. Then noticing Baba Singh’s distress, she quieted, patting the bed with a pout.

He climbed on, the overused springs making him wobble as he crawled over to her. She languidly reached her bare arm toward him. “Do not take it so seriously,” she said. “Junjie drew you like that because he hates you, that is all.”