Darshan (21 page)

They were all fond of Jai, particularly her poised and unruffled gentleness in the face of Prem’s constant diatribes about the delicacy of his age and condition and the disrespect of being forced to live in such uncomfortable circumstances. She was quiet and unassuming, but provided strong and certain reassurance, her presence easing tensions that had long ago affixed themselves to the heart of the family.

By the time she settled in, spring was well underway, and although the season was warm and fresh, they had only until June before the monsoons arrived again, which did not allow much time to work on the new house. Row upon row of crops needed harvesting, after which the ground needed to be plowed and seeded. Baba Singh made small steps in the evenings by the light of hurricane lamps. By the end of spring he had managed to tear down the mud hut’s last remaining room, lay the rest of the foundation, and finish erecting the house’s frame.

“What will happen after this?” Sada Kaur asked him as he secured a tarp over the roof.

“We will have a house,” Baba Singh said as he climbed down.

“It is too big. We will be separated by all these rooms.”

He sat on one of the charpoys Jai had set near the future pantry. “It will be beautiful.”

“You can stop any time,” she told him. She spoke softly, tapering her usually stern tone.

He gestured around him. “We cannot live like this.”

“There has never been a problem with the way we live.”

“This is not what I want for you,” he replied, lying down, exhausted.

She lit a flame under her cooking pot. “Do you know what I want?”

But he had already turned over, pretending to be half asleep because he was not able to answer her.

By 1936, the house, supported by beams of blue pine, had finally developed flesh of Punjabi mud brick and mortar. Several months later, at the turn of another year, Baba Singh finally gave the house a roof and doors and filled it with furniture. He used his wife’s old spinning wheel as a decorative piece in the main sitting room and bought Sada Kaur and Jai an imported sewing machine for their needlework. Opposite the spinning wheel was an empty trunk carved ornately with panels of Sikh battle stories, reminding Baba Singh of his many losses, but also suggesting a glorious future victory. Sada Kaur and Jai spread several chairs across the main sitting room for receiving guests, including a comfortable, cushioned reed one for Prem outside his ground-floor bedroom, above which hung his tattered, old picture of the ten gurus.

Vessels filled with flour and spices flanked the door leading to the foodstuffs pantry where there was a large, loose pile of red maize flour on the floor and stacked burlap sacks of rice along the walls. The kitchen had ample counter space and open shelves for plates and cooking utensils that led to an enclosed courtyard in the back where Sada Kaur made flatbread in her new clay tandoor. In the center of the courtyard Manmohan planted a mango tree and a garden of jasmine, chilies, and herbs.

Upstairs the two sleeping quarters were furnished with cotton mattresses in lieu of charpoys, both leading to an expansive balcony that overlooked the entire northern side of Barapind, the ring of mud huts thick around the center, the hint of the well beyond the neem trees.

Baba Singh stood on the balcony facing his village, his clothes splattered with paint, his hands calloused, his nails broken and frayed, like this land that was still being ravaged by the British, by their mongrel moneylenders, their recruiters, their soldiers who soaked the soil in so much death and anguish. He was sorry for all of it because he loved his village so much.

The sun struck the newly lime-washed house with brilliant force, and his face felt hot as he gazed out into the distant fields, knowing that when he was out there he would never lose his way back.

Satisfied, he went inside to the room he shared with Sada Kaur. He was alone. Lal’s old chest was shoved to the corner, still covered with a dhurrie rug. He threw the rug off, thinking that he might look inside. But seeing it now, he realized he had no desire to sift through the items within. It was enough to possess them, to have them here with him.

He removed the doctor’s letter from his pocket. It was still sealed, but the envelope had been softened over the years, the edges torn, the paper thinned.

“Is the elephant in that chest?” Satnam asked his father from the bedroom doorway. “Is that where you keep it?”

Baba Singh turned and saw his son—that poor, subdued young man too soft and meek to survive this village—and a mighty wave of resignation, like the giant stormy swells breaking against the Hong Kong ports, flooded his bones. He had the compulsion to speak candidly to Satnam, to confess something important. “How did you know I kept that one?”

“Desa Bhua told me about it.”

“It was never supposed to be yours. It was not hers to give.”

Satnam hesitated, and then he said in a timid voice that he no doubt intended to sound brave, “What happened to your sisters?”

“I would rather not talk about them,” Baba Singh replied, folding the letter and again putting it in his pocket. He could not start at the beginning. Instead, he gestured that Satnam join him on the balcony and pointed at one of the village huts. “A girl is interested in you. Her father would like to have us over for tea.”

Eyes set uneasily on the potato crop beyond the village, Satnam stepped close to the balcony’s rail and rested his forearms on the warm wood.

“Kuldeep’s daughter, Priya,” Baba Singh told him. “She likes you, and Kuldeep seems to think that you like her.”

“I am not sure about marriage.”

“Marriage was my best chance to start over.”

“Did it work?”

Baba Singh thoughtfully pulled on his lower lip, suddenly wary, now worried that he might betray too much. “For a time it did,” he said. He regarded the view, the sky a hazy blue, patches of clouds on the horizon. “But now I think it is time again for something else.”

Satnam nodded behind him at the house. “Is that why you built this?”

Baba Singh regarded his son carefully, searching the boy’s eyes for something, and then he said, “I built this house so that it would always be here, even if I was not.”

~   ~   ~

“I will not go with you,” Sada Kaur said flatly. She looked stunning in her purple and green sari, but she was tired after the tonga ride from Amarpur’s gurdwara where they had just celebrated Satnam’s wedding. And she was angry.

She unwound the yards of fabric, tossed the sari aside, and stood before him in her tunic and petticoat. Baba Singh led her to a chair in the corner of their bedroom and kneeled beside her. “Fiji has a large community of Indians. We will be very comfortable. Onkar went. He is there. Families are starting businesses and trading.”

She shook her head. “You do not even truly want me to come, or expect me to. You only ask because you hope to disguise the fact that you do not want to be near the things that could possibly make you happy.” She pulled her hand from his. “What were your reasons for leaving the first time? Was it to give me what I wanted, to give your sons what they wanted, to give us something that you did not have?”

“Yes, of course.”

“No. It is what you have always told yourself, that it was about me and about them, but it is not the truth, and I can see that you know that now, that you are not lying to yourself anymore. It was always for you, to make up for some loss of your own.”

“I wanted to give you all safety so that you could avoid my losses.”

“But you wanted us to do it your way. There was no room to exist outside your losses. We have always existed within them.” There was reproach in the cut of her single eyebrow. “What is so wrong with the life we have here?”

He stood and strode across the room, pacing. “Everything is wrong with it. Nothing is right. There is so much bad feeling.”

“That is not our fault.”

“I do not want to be here and farm and have this life, acting like none of it ever happened.”

“Like
what
never happened?” she asked, standing to face him, the toes of her bare feet peeking out from under her petticoat. “Would having a life elsewhere change anything that has ever happened?”

Feeling hot, he removed his turban and tossed it on the bed. The air was cool on his scalp through his thick hair. “I do not know,” he replied.

“I know you will ask them to go with you for the same reason you have asked me,” she said, lowering her voice. “I will not, but they will go.”

This surprised him.

“They would do anything for you,” she said. “I know them, each one of them. They think that if they go, they will finally hear that you approve.”

“They hate me,” he said quietly.

She glared at him. “You want them to hate you. But where there is hate, there is a need for love.”

She then shoved his turban off the bed and climbed in. He did not move for a while, and she lay there with her eyes wide open, staring up at the ceiling. Finally, looking regretfully at his wife, Baba Singh dragged a chair out onto the balcony. Lighting an oil lamp, he thought that if someone were observing him from a mile away, he might appear to be a star hovering close to the earth.

He pulled out Dr. Bansal’s letter from his pocket and stared at it for a moment before finally tearing it open in frustration.

My dear friend Yashbir,

It has been a while since I have been able to write. I am sending my best wishes from Calcutta prison. It seems that after so much moving around, I have made it home after all. My circumstances have been ironically fortuitous. My mother has come to see me. I never stopped writing to her, and once she knew that I was home, she finally came to make peace. It was not easy to move beyond our regrets and unhappiness, but she is sorry for all the years we have lost. I am very happy.

I will not write again. It is time to let go of Amarpur, but I am grateful to have known you. Please, if Baba remembers anything about what happened, tell him that this life works so strangely. I do not want to be found, and he does not need to worry. There have been very difficult periods, but my choices have also given me so many blessings. Guilt is a waste. He should know that we are only able to bear so much, that sometimes things are so heavy that we burst. But even what seems like the worst can be forgiven. He should do everything possible to release his guilt. Tell him to eat a ladoo. It always helps.

A happy life Yashji,

Nalin

Refolding the letter and reinserting it in the envelope, Baba Singh was flooded with a rush of relief. He smiled faintly, remembering the animated, brimming spirit of his friend.

Stepping inside, he glanced at Lal’s chest under the dhurrie rug, thinking that this time he would take it with him. When he was ready, he would abandon it out in the world where the history inside could no longer touch him. He would do as the doctor had said and release his ghosts, returning unburdened to his village.

Sada Kaur had fallen asleep. He approached the bed and moved a strand of loose hair from her face. Bending, he whispered with conviction into her ear, “I will come back.”

PART II

Manmohan

Greater Suva, Fiji

Plastic Toy Tools

1947–1948

Family Tree

The kitchen cupboard was a portal, an entry to a black hole, like the ones Manmohan had read about, that sucked even light into its vacuumous mouth. He stared helplessly up at it, gathering his courage, one hand gripping the kitchen counter, the other poised on the knob of the cupboard door, until finally, in spite of himself, he pulled it open. A store of memories flooded forth when he saw, there on the top shelf, the handmade plywood box that he had not opened since 1945, just after Darshan died, and which contained the few trinkets of his son’s short life. That was how black holes operated. They dredged up even the most deeply buried feelings until there was nothing left but emptiness.

“Let’s fix, Bapu,” his son used to say. “Let’s go. Let’s play.” Let’s. As in, let
us
. Manmohan missed that.

He still had Mohan, but his oldest son did not seem to need him the same way. Manmohan had hoped losing Darshan would bring them closer, but even now, at nine years of age, Mohan possessed a clear sense of self-sufficiency, an ability to cope that Manmohan never had and greatly envied.

This was particularly evident on the one-year anniversary of Darshan’s death, after they returned home from the memorial service at the Sikh temple in Suva. Manmohan had thought it would help to spend some time with Mohan after the service. But the moment they arrived home, his son scooped up his soccer ball and headed toward the front door.

“Wait,” Manmohan said. “Where are you going?”

“To play a game with Narain,” the boy replied.

Manmohan sighed. “I thought we could sit together for a while.”

Mohan glanced impatiently at the front door. “Sit?”

“We saw a lot of sad people at the temple today. Maybe you want to talk about it.”

“About what?”

“Don’t you miss your brother?”

Manmohan would never forget his son’s expression then, the perplexity, the discomfort and confusion. But they had both lost someone. They were supposed to be mourning together. “Well, don’t you?” he asked again.

He could not recall his son’s answer, only that Mohan had gone to play his game of soccer.

Now, staring up at the top shelf, the loss of togetherness Manmohan used to share with Darshan pinched his heart. His hand tensed, ready to shut the cupboard, intending to leave the box there for eternity, or at least until the solar system had reached its end and the box would be disintegrated in a roar of planetary collisions.

But it was, however, necessary to open it. Jai had gone into labor that morning. He had already checked her into Colonial War Memorial Hospital. He could not imagine meeting this new person, welcoming him or her into the family without at least trying, after all this time, to say goodbye.