Darshan (27 page)

Manmohan had built a sprawling new house in the lumber mill’s circular clearing, the entirety of it raised up on stilts to protect it from the lowland’s regular tropical flooding, with five bedrooms, a living room, as well as a room for his ever-growing book collection. The kitchen was magnificently large and sensibly arranged with abundant counter space and a walk-in pantry where Jai had already begun to store dried dhal, sundry condiments, spices, pots and pans, flour for roti, and medicines. He had even built furniture to fill the house: cabinets; tables; bed frames; chairs; shelves for curios, for his books, and for clothing.

Yet, wandering through his emptied and already-sold house in Tamavua, his sandaled heels scraping gently on the linoleum, Manmohan found that although he had so assiduously sought a means to assert his independence and successfully achieved it in every logistical sense, now living and breathing a business wholly his own, he could not help wondering if he had made a mistake.

Baba Singh seemed to believe so. Out in the jungle, removed from Tamavua’s westernized housing and lamp-lit streets, their new home in Veisari was dramatically different. In the jungle, the Toor family would now live a life more similar to that of the village in India. No central plumbing, they would instead use an outhouse. An electric generator buzzed nearby, but it only supplied electricity to the mill in order to operate the kiln and saws. The house itself had no power source. Jai would need to cook by the heat of wood-burning ovens, and when it grew dark she would need to light the grounds and rooms with candles and lanterns. After listening to Baba Singh’s disappointingly reasonable argument that they had come to Fiji for a life of modernity and opportunity, he wondered about her reaction to their changed circumstances. Despite his doubts, however, she seemed truly happy with the transition, returned to a life with which she was most familiar, an Indian life.

He let his eyes roam the nakedness of his Tamavua bedroom, stopping at the closet where he once stored his police uniform, which had collected a layer of dust in all the years he had not touched it; where he had once kept his leather boots; where he had hidden away his gramophone, his LPs, and the key to the cabinet radio. He had tried so often to shut the music out of his mind, yet he still sometimes craved it, which was why he had not thrown anything away, why it was all tucked up in the rafters of the mill house where he now stored all things forbidden: the plywood box, unlabeled bottles of alcohol used for medicinal purposes, and the old knickknacks from India that reminded him of happier times. It sometimes seemed excessive to him, to shut the music out entirely, but then he thought of Mohan’s rebellious nature, his blatant whip-like contempt these past two years, his voice full of acid, his son, who should adore him without question.

Mohan was probably somewhere with his friends now, lounging on the beach, drowning in beer or rum. That first taste he had the night he ran off with the motorcycle had not been his last. He and his friends lapped it up like dogs, tripping over themselves, hooting clownishly, listening to the transistor radio they stole from Manmohan’s truck before he had a chance to bring it inside. Manmohan had seen them once, had crept to the edge of the beach behind the mangroves to watch. He had never seen Mohan so uninhibited, his head thrown back in the throes of laughter. It looked like joy.

Manmohan had taken revenge for the stolen radio, for the hours of amusement it had afforded when at home he had prohibited such revelry. Last year when Fiji Airways had announced it would land the first jetliner on the island, marking 1951 as the first time the country had ever seen such a massive commercial airliner, Manmohan had refused to let Mohan go. He went alone on the three-hour drive across the island to Nadi airport. He stared at the apron through the chain link fence with all the other onlookers, at the whitewashed stone paths connecting the apron to the terminal, watching defiantly as the plane landed, forcing his eyes to swallow up the entirety of it, taking in the details and storing them away, remembering every second of what he had forbidden Mohan to see. But it was foolish. He discovered later that Mohan had gone with Narain.

He poked his head into the other emptied bedrooms, checking for anything left behind, and then he went to the living room where the discolored squares of paint on the walls indicated where the family portraits had once hung. The photos were the only items left unpacked in the new house. He had not allowed Jai to hang them. He was considering new pictures, the old ones imbued with too much history.

He went outside, glancing at the two tarpaulin-covered, rusted motorcycles parked across from his cucumber garden. Junker Singh had been devastated when he saw the second bike. “At least tell me it was an offering to God.
That
I can understand, ji, because God would be most impressed with her.”

The tarpaulin rustled, and a movement caught Manmohan’s eye. A small head with a topknot of hair peeked out from under the tarpaulin. “Oi!” he called. “I can see you.”

The small head quickly ducked down.

“Boy, I said that I can see you,” Manmohan called. “What are you doing out here? You are supposed to be in the truck with your mother.”

Darshan stood. He was a gangly five-year-old, too tall for his age, arms sheepishly clasped behind his back. “I was just checking, Bapu,” he said. “I don’t want to leave anything behind.”

“Is your sister with you?”

Darshan glanced guiltily down behind the canvas. “She was helping.”

Peering over, Manmohan found his two-year-old daughter Navpreet covering her head with her arms. She did not move.

Darshan tapped her shoulder. “He can see you.”

She slowly lowered her arms and looked up, her eyes wide. “No,” she said.

Manmohan squatted next to one of the wooden posts that had once held up the tarpaulin bike shop and beckoned his children over. “Come around here.”

They approached slowly, Navpreet petulant. “Do as you are told,” he said. “Get in the truck. We do not live here any longer.”

Navpreet hugged the post and began to cry. Manmohan felt that she cried quite a lot. He loosened her grip from the post, prying her fingers off, and she screamed and pounded her fists into his chest as he carried her away. “No, no, no, no.”

“Is this the only word you know?” he muttered, tucking her under his arm like a rolled-up carpet while she continued to flail. “Darshan, let’s go.”

Jai was already waiting in the truck, holding their infant daughter Livleen. Scooting over on the bench seat, she made room for them all. Released, Navpreet crawled to her mother, and without warning pinched the baby.

“Enough!” Jai said, slapping Navpreet’s hand.

Darshan squeezed in next to his sister, and she leaned against his shoulder as Manmohan steered away from the curb, his mood sour.

They arrived at the mill shortly after. As Manmohan entered the clearing and navigated his way toward the house past a row of tamarind trees, he sensed Jai stiffen. Beyond the trees he saw Mohan waiting at the top of the staircase by the house’s main entrance, wearing a turban. Manmohan wondered with a stab of regret who had taught him to tie it.

Pulling to a stop, Manmohan jumped out of the truck onto the soil, soft from the recent rain. Appraising the house momentarily, Manmohan then crossed the clearing and climbed the stairs. On his way inside, he nodded curtly at his son and said, “Come to steal something?”

“I thought I should be here today.”

“I do not see how it matters,” Manmohan replied, noticing several empty boxes stacked just inside the main entrance. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust after the bright sunshine outside, and then he saw the family photos he had not wanted to unpack. Next to the black velvet scroll map of Fiji was one of the pictures he hated most, that unsmiling image of himself standing between Satnam and Vikram who seemed so much more relaxed than he.

In another photo he was seated next to Jai on one of the wooden chairs on Tamavua’s backyard patio. In another, he was with his father, on opposites sides of a cow. Some were more recent, shots of Navpreet and Darshan in the cucumber garden, and of them playing games in the living room. The shots of him and Mohan working on the bike were missing, which fueled Manmohan’s anger. A person could not simply cancel out their wrongs by excluding them. And then he saw the one he hated most, the only photo of his dead son, hanging above the couch just like it had in Tamavua, that smiling three-year-old face.

“What is all this?” Manmohan asked, pointing at the walls.

“I thought it would make things feel more like home,” Mohan replied.

“Why aren’t you out with your friends?”

“You never told me about this place. I did not want to be left behind.”

His son appeared so sincere, Manmohan almost believed him. “I wanted to wait, to decide for myself what stays and what goes,” he said, pulling Darshan’s photo off the wall. “I did not want to see all this, all these stupid mistakes and bad memories. I did not ask you to do this.”

He abruptly left the room to go to the kitchen. There was a ladder against the far wall. He moved it under the entrance to the rafters and climbed up, pushing the door in. The plywood box was off to the left. He dragged it close, opened it and shoved the picture inside, slamming the lid down tight, pressing the latch in firmly.

Mohan was still in the living room when he returned, his head hung as he began to remove the photos from the wall.

“Leave them,” Manmohan told him. “But add the others, the ones you did not hang, the ones of us.”

Mohan stopped, his hand suspended near one of the frames he was about to take down.

“And stay,” Manmohan told him, his voice stiff, “if you mean it, if you really do not want to be left behind.”

~   ~   ~

Later that year in July, for perhaps four days, the island was suffocated by humidity unmatched in all the fourteen years Manmohan had been in Fiji. Logging slowed somewhat. He had pulled a number of employees from their lumberjack duties to haul water in the World War II trucks to the backlands to ensure no one fainted of heat exhaustion or dehydration. Conditions inside the mill were so unbearable because of the added warmth generated by the kiln that they had to shut it down. Yet, Manmohan did not want to risk halting operations entirely, so the loggers continued to log and fresh tree trunks piled up in the mill’s clearing because they could not be processed.

Bathing was pure futility. He did not have the energy to carry water from the river to the bath chamber upstairs and pour it in the aluminum tub. But this did not matter. He was always wet anyway. After bathing he could not get dry. And Jai fed everyone cold, leftover curries without roti because she refused to start the oven. During the day, the children retreated to the river to play, but in the evenings they barely moved, lounging about in the main house living room, limp like ragdolls.

“Why doesn’t it
rain
?” Mohan asked desperately, pointing at the dark clouds above the jungle while holding Livleen. She had been sleeping all morning, her head sweaty, her hair matted.

Manmohan watched as Mohan gently wiped the baby’s face before giving her to Jai. Ever since he had chosen to stay with the family, Mohan made Manmohan decidedly uncomfortable—and suspicious—with his newfound and determined loyalty, with his many contributions to the mill and his affection for Darshan and the girls.

Glancing out the window, he replied, “It should come very soon.” The sky was nearly black, but nothing stirred. He closed his eyes. Day four had undone them. He felt beaten and drowsy. There had been nothing left to do but wait, so he finally succumbed and shut everything down before midday. The family had gathered in the house for lunch, but their plates of cold food were scattered about the floor, untouched.

Now, something cool brushed Manmohan’s face. He opened his eyes and looked around. They had all felt it. The air was finally moving. He rushed out to the deck like a starved man desperate for one tiny, wayward crumb. Everyone hungrily followed.

Navpreet gripped the bars of the railing and pressed her face between two of them so that her mouth stretched clown-like.

Jai fanned herself with the hem of her salwaar.

Darshan struggled with a chair, dragging it out from the living room and setting it next to her. She smiled at him before sitting in it like a melting ice cube, Livleen in her arms.

The rest of them sank down, sprawling out on the wooden planks of the deck, focusing only on the slight movement of air that teased the tops of their sweaty bodies.

It came slowly, took nearly an hour, but finally it began to rain.

The storm hit hard. The sky had overstrained itself, and each drop was a bucketful. Mill workers scattered like insects, running toward their homes to secure their families and their possessions from the inevitable flooding. The door to the main house was only feet away from where they sat slumped on the deck, but Manmohan, Jai, and the children could not move fast enough. They were all soaked by the time they made it inside. Navpreet began to cry at the crack of thunder. She threw her little body down on the floor and lay on her stomach, spread flat like a floorboard. It was only midday, but the room was dim. Jai lit a candle. They again settled themselves on the couch, in chairs, and on the floor to wait out the storm, which to their disappointment had intensified the indoor humidity.

“Bapu, Bebe, look!” Darshan shouted urgently. He was standing on a chair by the window, watching the downpour.

Rushing over, they saw a cow float down the swollen river, its eyes wild with terror.

“Is that one of Dadaji’s?” Mohan asked.

Manmohan laughed.

“Me,” Navpreet said, holding her arms up to her father, wanting to see out the window. Manmohan absently waved her away. Navpreet reached out to her mother. “Me,” she said again.

“It is gone,” Jai told her, holding Livleen closer to the glass so that the baby could tap it with her palm.

Navpreet lowered her arms and moved away.

A mattress floated past, then more debris, mostly tree branches and pieces of broken wood, likely from houses and bridges. The river continued to rise, overflowing and rushing through Manmohan’s young garden and under the house, crashing against the stilts. The water splashed and sloshed the rest of the day and long into the night.