Darshan (31 page)

Manmohan cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Is Priya here?”

Satnam shook his head. “She is upset with me.”

Manmohan sat on a chair opposite the couch.

“A lot has happened in the last few days,” his brother said, gripping his knees, arms stretched out, elbows locked. “I have decided to go with Bapu.”

“I see,” Manmohan said, not surprised.

“Priya does not want to go. But it is all right. I never wanted the farm. I could stay, but…” his voice trailed off uneasily. He sighed. “I should go with him.”

“You do not have to do that anymore.”

“I think I do.”

“You were different before Bapu came back from Barapind.”

“That was a long time ago. I remember it, the images I guess, but I don’t remember how it felt. You were different, too.”

Manmohan leaned forward. “Would you like some chai?” he asked. He wanted Satnam to stay for a while.

“No, no,” his brother put up a hand. “I just came to tell you. And Vikram will come by. He has his own plans. He will stay a while in Barapind, then go to England for school. He wants to be a professor at Oxford.”

Manmohan smiled, but his smile quickly faded, realizing he would be left in Fiji, that he was never going back. “Yes, I suppose that is what he would be good at.”

“What about you?” Satnam asked.

“Will I go?”

Satnam nodded.

“No,” Manmohan said, his voice firm. “I do not think so. Not this time.”

~   ~   ~

The dairy farm was still. Manmohan was struck by the dead sound of the place without its usual generator hum. Nature sounds were more audible, the rustling palm leaves and the skulking footsteps of small animals. He had come for a look around, to retrieve anything he might need for the mill before the government reclaimed the land. He pushed open the door to Baba Singh and Vikram’s shack and went inside. It was small, with only two rooms, each with a cot. Vikram’s room had been emptied of personal possessions. But Baba Singh’s room still looked as if he would come back. His bed was neatly made, and his few belongings were still arranged as they had always been since moving here.

They had traveled by jet, departing from Nadi airport, Baba Singh boarding a plane at age fifty-three, not at all intimidated by that unknown. Manmohan had been a little envious of them, watching through the chain link fence as they accelerated down the runway. He tried to imagine what they would see from up there, how big the ocean and the earth and how small the island.

Clinging to the fence as the plane lifted into the sky, Darshan asked, “Will we see them again?”

“I don’t know,” Manmohan replied, glancing over at Mohan, who was squatting on the ground, squinting at the plane. Things were clearer now after talking with Satnam. He hoped maybe he could make it right with Mohan. He wanted to ask if his son believed that another chance was possible. But he was not able to form the words. Maybe it was enough that he had thought them. It was a start of sorts.

“I want to go to India, too,” Livleen said, smiling dreamily with a five-year-old’s imagination.

Navpreet jammed one of her loafered toes into a chain link hole. She was wearing a sundress, and her black hair had been washed that morning, slicked back into a rubber band and braided. Rolling her eyes at Darshan, she had said, “Maybe
you
will never see them again, but
I
am going to India some day.”

Standing in Baba Singh’s room, Manmohan was not sure what would happen. The reality of the Toors dispersed across the globe just as some things were beginning to be clear gave him a hollow feeling, like being hungry but not wanting to eat.

Against the wall, next to Baba Singh’s bed, Manmohan was surprised to see his father’s chest. He knelt and opened it, releasing the musty scent of things long closed in. He discovered a few items of women’s clothing and an ivory bangle, a broken-toothed wooden comb, a hand-painted wooden elephant that he recognized as Satnam’s. There was also a faded, moth-eaten red turban, an old debt ledger with pages and pages of markings in neat columns and rows, a vial made of green glass with liquid inside, chisels, a smoking pipe of some kind, and a dented tin containing all of Khushwant’s letters.

With the exception of the letters and the elephant, Manmohan knew they belonged to people who had died, important people. He tried to imagine what of his mother’s he would add, but he did not have any of her possessions, nor did he remember the things she had called hers. He knelt beside the chest, leaning heavily over it, clutching the sides. Smiling, he decided that he would place the memory of her black irises within, and also the quiet fortitude that had sustained his happy and carefree life as a child.

Something about the maroon turban was very familiar. He held it close to his nose, breathing in deeply the dulled scent of gunpowder and metal. Closing his eyes he saw a one-eyed man speaking softly to him, walking with him through the winding lanes of Barapind. Manmohan realized then that he also knew the elephant. Long before Desa had given it to Satnam, this one-eyed man had given it to him for safekeeping.

I do not think we will see them again, he thought, in answer to Darshan’s question.

Replacing the turban, Manmohan closed the lid and carried the chest to his truck. At the main house he heaved it up the ladder and into the rafters where he then slid it into place next to the old plywood box.

Malady & Mutiny

1959

Family Tree

Fevers heat the body, cells boiling into riotous, chilling shudders. They heat the mind, creating a torrent of babbling thought, brain synapses loosened and wild. Manmohan traced his finger slowly over the lines of text in his medical journal, reading, contemplating. He snapped the book shut. But they cool the spirit, he thought. To ignite the body and the mind, they drain the spirit of its warmth, leaving it cool and dark.

A quiet, wintry fear had returned as he sat vigil outside Livleen’s room, his daughter plagued by the same illness that had long ago taken his son. Odd, unintelligible murmurs escaped her, flushed out by the heat. He listened hard, his own spirit depleted, cooling with hers.

He had not been to bed in two days and slept in a chair in the hallway. He again opened the book, trying hard to focus on the medical terminology that grounded him, words he could hold and dissect, but his neck hung, his mouth went slack, and the journal slipped from his thick fingers, falling with a rustling of pages to the floor.

He woke with a start. Junker Singh was covering him with a blanket.

“I am not cold, ji,” Manmohan told him with bleary eyes, struggling to lift his head.

The mechanic insisted. “You were shivering.”

“Is she awake?”

“No, ji, not yet. Jai is with her. You should go in. Do not stay out here.”

Manmohan closed his eyes again. He could not go inside. He did not have the courage. “Who is this girl?” he heard himself say, but the house was empty and it was only him, sobbing in his chair. “Who is she? Is she mine?”

“She is yours,” someone said. “But I know you do not want her. I know you do not want any of them.”

“I want them. I am here in this chair. I want them.”

“Sitting here like this only makes you believe that you want them. Nonetheless, she will be fine. The same events cannot happen twice.”

It was his own voice in his own mind, he realized, half asleep, aware of his stiff body in the chair, aware of his aching neck. He woke again, wearily rubbing his eyes. Listening through the door, there was no sound coming from Livleen’s room, no more mumbles of distress.

His medical journal was gone, and there was a bowl of rice and spiced taro for him on the hallway floor. Someone had laid out a sleeping mat. Pushing aside the food, he thankfully crawled onto it.

Sometime later, his mind once again pulled through the tunnel of deep sleep into consciousness, he sensed movement about him, people stepping into and out of the sickroom, but he did not open his eyes. He listened, for panic, for grief, but heard only muffled speech through the door, the sloshing of water in a bucket, the snap of a sheet as someone shook it out. Then he felt a shadow hovering near, kneeling beside him, and he groggily peeled open his eyelids.

“Bapu,” Mohan whispered. “Come see. Livleen is awake.”

“Is it over?” Manmohan asked.

His son nodded, his expression a mixture of relief and a question, asking why he had never been loved this much.

“I want to see her,” Manmohan said, pushing up off the floor, shakily standing.

Mohan grabbed hold to steady him. “She will not be the same. She will have pain for a while. The doctor said she might never fully recover, that her heart has been damaged.”

Manmohan faltered.

“But she is smiling,” Mohan told him, holding open the bedroom door. “She wants to go to school.”

Livleen was sitting up in her bed, encircled by white pillows and fresh-smelling sheets, her complexion pallid. Her dark hair had been combed and hung loose about her shoulders, a young royal amongst her devoted subjects, bestowing blessings and well-wishes with her encouraging smile. Jai was beside her, cleaning out the hairbrush. Her eyes had sunk deep, were dark and haunted, but there were signs of optimism in them now. She only needed rest. Junker Singh sat at the foot of the bed, Navpreet and Darshan beside him, leaning into him, both uncertain and bewildered.

“I hear you are already determined to go to school,” Manmohan said, smoothing down the front of his beard with both hands, astonished by the resilience of youth, the bright, sharp eyes, the determined will.

Livleen nodded rigidly against the still painful rheumatoid lingering in her joints. “I missed the first days. Now everyone knows more than I do.”

Manmohan stood next to Jai, placing a hand on her shoulder. “It is a very long way to school. You are not strong enough to walk that far.”

“I will be,” she said quickly.

“We will see,” he told her, and this seemed to satisfy her. She snuggled into her pillows, her eyelids heavy, sweat glistening around her hairline. Jai squeezed a sponge into a bucket and dabbed the sweat clean.

“I can carry her,” Mohan said. He spoke with such pleading that Manmohan saw a different sort of fever, of anguish and hope churning together, of a desire to be smarter, to have made different choices, to return to school, to open books, to read with fervor, his cheeks flushed with a desperation to be important, his spirit made cold because he did not believe he was.

~   ~   ~

A squeal in the distance jerked Manmohan from his reading chair.

“Stay calm,” Junker Singh told him.

Bolting for the window, a sense of dread dropped like an iron ball in Manmohan’s stomach as he cursed his friend who had convinced him that young people recover quickly when they are happiest. “Just let the boy carry her,” the mechanic had said. “Let them enjoy it.”

But there had been small riots in recent days—short, angry bursts of indignation against the British. The
Fiji Times
made events worse with its reports, escalating fear and panic. Although there had been no incidents of violence and the riots had been contained near the docks, Manmohan worried that the children would be caught on the streets at the wrong time, swept up into a rush of protesting men and women.

The mechanic joined his friend by the window and said, “There is no reason for alarm.”

Pressing his face close to the pane of glass, Manmohan searched the curve of the wood-paved drive that turned toward the main road until he finally saw Mohan come around the bend, approaching the house with Livleen in his arms like a stack of firewood. Her legs dangled limply, and one of her arms was flung around his neck, her head thrown flaccidly back. Oh God, he thought.

But she was laughing.

Inhaling slowly with relief, Manmohan stepped out onto the porch to greet them. The aroma of cut lumber and wet earth from the river was strong. A cacophony of sounds came from the clearing in front of him and from the house behind him: the men chatting while working around the disorganized piles of plywood littered everywhere, the squabbling chickens, the roosters who seemed to think every hour was dawn, the barking dogs, the bleating goats, the clamor of steel and aluminum pots from the kitchen as Jai prepared tea and meals for the workers.

“What is the joke?” Junker Singh called down, placing his hands on stiff, sun-dried clothing hanging over the rail.

“My shoes are still shiny!” Livleen shouted up to the balcony, grinning. “All the other girls got theirs dirty.”

The staircase creaked as Mohan climbed up. “She has a personal mule,” he said playfully. Grunting, he set his sister down in a chair by the front door. “Heavier than she looks,” he smiled. “You comfortable?”

She nodded.

“How was school?” Manmohan asked. “What did you learn?”

“We have an English teacher,” she told him. “And I pet a lizard. And we had math.”

Mohan sat on the top step of the porch, placing his forearms on his knees. “We had fun, too.”

Livleen stuck out her red tongue. “See?” she showed them. “Mohan bought me a frozen juice stick on the way home. I was worried about passing Penitentiary Hill, but he told me that the men in there will never hurt me. He knows the person who keeps the keys, and that person would never open those gates without Mohan’s permission.”

Manmohan touched his daughter’s limbs, examining her elbows and ankles. “How do you feel?”

“Fine.”

He gently pressed her knee. “A little swollen,” he murmured.

She mimicked him, reaching forward to press his knee. Junker Singh nodded at her with approval.

“What is happening in town?” Manmohan asked his son.

“The streets seemed a little quiet, and the bus took longer than usual.”

“I don’t blame the oilmen,” Junker Singh said. “They know a fair wage. They know they are not getting it.”

“They are spreading their complaints, making the British angry,” Manmohan said resentfully. “Everyone is affected. People are going mad.”