Darshan (2 page)

Jai—who had noticed that Darshan was tucking his tools into the waistline of his trousers because they kept falling out of his pockets—tailored a cotton sack in which he could comfortably carry them all. This she soon regretted. Slung over the boy’s head and across his shoulders, it was difficult to pry away. Darshan wore it always: during meal times, in bed at night, and often during bath time where it would need to be forcibly removed.

His favorite game was asking Manmohan to arrange bricks one by one into a square in the backyard. Smiling, he would pound each brick with his plastic hammer as though nailing it in. When the structure was done, a piece of wood placed over the top for the roof, he would point at it and say, “Home.” The game never became tedious. Manmohan would dismantle the bricks in the evenings, but the next day Darshan would insist they rebuild. He and Jai assumed the boy would eventually tire of it, but their son continued to erect his little houses well into his third year.

Just as Jai concluded that perhaps Darshan might one day become a master architect, he became suddenly and seriously ill. His movements one morning were sluggish, his face the gray color of clouds, his forehead alarmingly hot, his body wracked by shivers.

“Get the doctor,” Jai told her husband.

The examination was brief. “His temperature is too high,” the doctor said gravely.

Jai rubbed her son’s hand as though rolling a snake of dough. “What does that mean?”

The doctor shook his head. “I do not know what else to say. There is nothing I can do. Keep his body cool and wait for the fever to break.”

Manmohan and Jai sent word to Baba Singh, who came as soon as he received the message, and they all waited, together. Most days they sat silently in Darshan’s room, wishing for some miraculous shift, for some invisible healing hand to revive the boy. Jai bathed him in cold water twice a day and tucked wet towels around his body when she put him in bed, staring at him hopefully, waiting for some tangible sign that his temperature was normalizing. Some days the waiting was too unbearable, the silence too unnerving, and they each sat with Darshan in shifts, taking time away from the sickroom to pray and reassure Mohan.

The fever had been steadily high for over a week when Baba Singh again found himself sitting alone next to Darshan’s bed while Manmohan, outside in the backyard, gazed blankly at the setting sun, and Jai slept clinging to Mohan in the other room. He looked at his grandson, the small withered body, the dark rings around the toddler’s eyes, the sack of tools hugged to his side, his arm protectively holding it close.

“Home,” Darshan said, his voice tired.

“Sleep, Darshan, so you can get well,” Baba Singh said, placing a hand over the boy’s chest. “It is time to get better. This house is falling apart. There is much to be done.”

The wet cloth on Darshan’s head dripped cold water down his temples. “I want to build my house,” he said, eyelids half shut as he pointed toward the backyard where the Toors had a view of the thick, jungly hills below.

“I understand. I think I see now,” Baba Singh said, wiping the tears dampening his thick black beard. He had also built a house once, back in India. He built it so that it would be there for him when he finally had the courage to return home. “I was always able to see things, Darshan. I have had dreams. For a long time I did not know what I was seeing.”

Later that night, after Baba Singh had gone to bed, Manmohan settled into the sickroom to read Guru Arjun’s
Psalm of Peace
to his sleeping son. Despite his worry, Manmohan smiled faintly at the tools clasped under Darshan’s arm. Then he frowned, noticing something in the crook of the boy’s other arm just beneath the hem of the blanket. Pulling back the covers, he discovered a coconut.

“Where did this come from?”

His voice was too loud. Everything was wrong, too still. Closing his eyes, beating back his fear, Manmohan already knew.

Placing his ear over Darshan’s chest, he felt and heard nothing. His son was no longer breathing.

~   ~   ~

The Toors stood around the funeral pyre on the beach. Jai had bathed and clothed Darshan. She had wanted to strap the cotton sack over her son’s shoulders, but Manmohan had grimly refused to let her.

“No,” he had told her, not knowing how else to articulate what he was feeling, but knowing he needed evidence of Darshan’s existence.

Baba Singh lit the fire. Manmohan was unable to discern any hint of grief in his father’s face; it was simply cold and unforgiving. A priest recited the
Kirtan Sohila
, the nighttime prayer, as the body burned away to ash.

The wind carried Darshan out over the Pacific as the priest sang. “
Sunneh sunn miliaa samdarsee pavan roop ho-e jaavehgae
, Meeting with the supreme soul, my soul shall become unbiased and pure like air.
Bahur ham kaahae aavehgae
, Why should I come into the world again?”

In the space between life and death, Darshan was grateful. Humming at first, he willingly moved upward. Then he joined his voice with the priest’s and sang with all his might, raising his head to the stars, “
Jot milee sang jot reh-i-aa ghaal-daa
, My light merges with the Supreme light, and my labors are over.
Sookh sehaj aanand vutthae tit ghar
, Peacefully I take abode in the house of bliss.
Aavan jaan rehae janam na tehaa mar
, My comings and goings have ended and there is no more birth or death.”

But then he stopped, his voice quieted by something absent.

Darshan peered down at his family, tiny dots on the shore. Jai was sobbing. Mohan was confused, pulling at her. Manmohan had stepped away from the funeral pyre and walked toward the ocean, following the smoke and the ashes. Baba Singh gazed unflinchingly and bleakly into the fire.

Staring hard at his family, it took him a moment, but then it was clear. Touching his side, Darshan understood.

His tools were missing.

PART I

Baba Singh

Punjab, Northern India

Hotel Toor

1910

Family Tree

Baba Singh squatted on the dusty side street of Amarpur town, the unfamiliar smells and sounds reeking of tumult and trade. He ran his hand over the loose clay grit of the earth, which began to thicken under his nails. A sizeable pebble caught beneath his palm. Closing his fist around it, he stood, pushing up on wiry, young legs. Refusing to look at his mother and father, at his siblings as they shifted uncomfortably, he flung the stone at the wall of the wretched, squat building that was to be their new residence. His father glared at him. There would be no sympathy. They had all—the whole family—been forced here.

There had once been a murder, Baba Singh’s teacher had told his class back home in the village, born of a woman’s blind jealousy and rage. At her hand, her husband had suffered a brutal and painful end, and now she roamed the earth, muttering all the time with madness. The story clung in Baba Singh’s mind now, but he willed himself not to be afraid. He was twelve, almost a man. He did not believe in such tales anymore. His teacher had only meant to terrify them into obedience, to point out the harsh realities of the world, that fury and hate were the fall of men, that misbehavior and offense had an awful price. “Remember,” the teacher had said with severity. “Do not forget. Do not lose yourselves in weakness. On that day, your lives will end.”

Someone should have told it to Mr. Grewal. Maybe then he would have thought twice about being a cheating moneylender, about stealing away people’s livelihood. Maybe the Toors would still be back in Harpind. Maybe this day would be like all the other village days. No different. Just the same. That is what Baba Singh wanted. He wanted their money back, their land that had been taken away plot by plot, their animals, the pond where he and his siblings liked to play. He wanted the taste of a red, juicy pomegranate seed popped between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. He wanted the velvety morning sun on the back of his neck, a feeling he had never really noticed while he had it, that mixture of warmth and field dust brushing his skin, telling him he was safe and young and had everything.

If the moral of his teacher’s lesson reflected even a small kernel of real justice, the brutal end to the Toors’ ancestral village life should have caused Mr. Grewal to go mad, to be pierced with guilt and remorse. But right now the moneylender was in his office on the town’s main road, peering at one of his ledgers through his thick spectacles, recording this latest victory and filing it away on his shelves. He had taken so much from so many—and nothing had ever happened to
him
. That was proof that Baba Singh’s teacher was wrong, that there was not always payment for a crime, that not
all
men suffered. Only some. Only the weak. It was a merciless lesson to learn at the age of twelve. Baba Singh glanced over at his brothers and sisters, not at Ranjit and Desa who were older, but at the younger ones, Khushwant eight, Kiran six, Avani only four. They looked confused and frightened.

Baba Singh knelt before them. He would make them understand. “There was a murder once—”

Khushwant shook his head. “Stop it, Baba. I know that story. Do not scare them.”

“What is he talking about?” Kiran asked apprehensively, her dark hair pulled back into a tight braid.

“I was going to tell it differently,” Baba Singh told his brother. “The ending would have been different.”

Kiran turned to their mother. “When are we going home?”

Harpreet smiled at her daughter. Many considered Baba Singh’s mother beautiful. She was often complimented on her thick, black hair that was frizzy on humid days, softening the angular lines of her face, and sleek and straight on cool days, giving her an air of industriousness. Today she seemed tired, like she might be sick. “Please leave them be, Baba.”

“I am only telling the truth. It is better that way. Those goats Kiran likes so much. They aren’t hers anymore. We aren’t going back. We
are
home.”

Avani gripped her hand-painted wooden elephant and leaned into Khushwant.

“What will happen to my goats?” Kiran asked.

“They are not your goats.”

“Baba,” their father said, his voice sharp; Lal had a tone that sometimes stung. “Enough.” He began to fumble for a key tied to his loose-fitting drawstring trousers.

Baba Singh tossed another pebble at the wall, this time with less force. It was a one-story building that had once served as a hotel, the façade dirty and smudged, the color of cornhusk. It was beaten and abused, as though not one person had ever loved it. He did not want to go inside. He was somehow aware that once he did, what little remained of his boyhood would be leeched out of him, like moisture evaporating from picked flowers drying in the sun, their vibrant hues fading to the color of mud. Digesting this new reality was like a too-hot chili sitting painfully in his stomach. But truthfully, though it had only been a day since the Toors packed up their belongings and trekked the several miles of dirt road on a horse tonga to this nearby town, Baba Singh was already changing. He was cross and dejected, like the men of other families he had seen, men who had, like his own father, been shoved off their land and made to lead their wives and children away from the village, sometimes much, much farther away than here.

That is what Ranjit had said. His older brother was seventeen now and had been in the fields for over a year before they were sent to Amarpur. He had overheard the men talking and knew a great deal about everything. Fertile land was more valuable than gold, and moneylenders had come up with a scheme to steal it away. Preying on the difficulties caused by dry seasons, they would offer promises of low interest they never intended to uphold, altering their books, charging double, triple, and often ten times the interest. And the price for nonpayment was high. Ranjit said that was how honest families were cut down and cast out. He told Baba Singh that they might have to go too, maybe move to Africa or Australia. None of them knew exactly where those places were, but they would need to take trains and ships to get there. They would be left with nothing except what the British felt they were worthy enough to have, perhaps merely a train ticket or passage on a ship or some old ruin of a building, dumped in new places to flounder like fish out of water.

Harpreet—their mother had always been an optimist—had said it was a blessing that they were relocated only a few miles away in Amarpur, with which they were at least somewhat familiar. They had come into town two or three times a year to trade their crops and stock up on spices, fabrics, cooking oils, and kerosene for their lamps. They knew people here, and that was something. But it made no difference to Baba Singh. They may as well have been exiled to Africa. Amarpur would never be home. There were too many bicyclists hurrying along Suraj Road, the town’s main strip, too much plodding horse-tonga traffic, arrogant Brits sometimes pulling into town in puttering motorcars, and the vegetable pushcart vendor was always shouting in his unpleasantly monotonous voice, “
Aloo, pyaj, tommatter, ghobbi! Aloo, pyaj, tommatter, ghobbi!
Potatoes, onions, tomatoes, cauliflower!”

Their rented horse snorted, and Baba Singh turned to regard the sweat-streaked animal. It was tired and pawed softly at the earth with a hoof before adjusting its weight on weary legs. Baba Singh patted its head and glanced at the load it had carried, the tonga laden with all his family’s possessions.

Lal swore under his breath, unable to free the key, his fingers too large for the knot in the string.

Harpreet gently pushed her husband’s fingers aside. “Let me help.”

“It was almost undone,” Lal said, watching her pull at the strings. “I could have gotten it.”

A flicker of flame shot through her eyes as she loosened the key. “I know you could have,” she replied.

He looked away as she pressed it into his hand. She was not angry, just tired. She never really got angry.