Darshan (48 page)

“It is okay to rest a while,” he said. “The kitchen will be there when you are ready.”

She glanced at Manmohan. “It has been too long as it is. Your father needs me.”

“Tell her to go back to bed, Bapu,” Darshan said, desperate. “Tell her it is not time.”

Manmohan took hold of a long-handled shoehorn and forced his heel into his sneaker. “The cook you hired makes everything taste like metal.”

“She is your wife,” Darshan said bitterly.

Jai settled her patent leather handbag in the crook of her arm. “Yes, I am,” she said. “Now get your car keys. We are waiting.”

“No,” he said. “I will not take you back there.”

Jai gently rested her hand on Darshan’s chest. “There is a way of things,” she told him.

“It is not the right time. Please go back to bed.”

She pursed her lips with displeasure at her son’s choice. She allowed her husband to take her hand. Manmohan glowered spitefully at Darshan as he led her out of the apartment and down to the street.

When the door clicked shut, Darshan stood there for many minutes, the silence of the apartment oppressive until the refrigerator’s motor kicked in. Roused, he bleakly went to his sisters’ room. He pulled a ring of keys from his pocket and unhooked the set for Howard Street. Circling around the bed, he placed them on Navpreet’s pillow. Ripping a piece of ruled paper from a pad on the dresser, he scribbled down a list of his responsibilities at the apartments.
If you do this,
he wrote to his sister,
no one will thank you or help you. But if you do not, they will hate you for it.
He signed his name. Folding the note, he tucked it under the keys, then pulled out his savings from an irregular crease behind the dresser. He left half on Livleen’s pillow. The rest he took with him. He did not see his parents again that day, not even when he left the apartment with a duffle bag packed full of his things. He knew his father’s pride, knew that Manmohan had circled the block to avoid him, waiting for Navpreet to come home.

He hailed a cab and went to the hospital where Dr. Gerard was expecting him.

“I was sorry to get your call,” the doctor said when Darshan closed the door to his office.

“I know it’s sudden. I’m very sorry I wasn’t able to give you more notice.”

“Dr. Levi says you belong here in the lab, drawing blood, interacting with the live patients,” Dr. Gerard said smiling. “Such a waste on the dead, he says. I think he’s right.”

“He once told me the same thing,” Darshan replied, also smiling. “I will write to him.”

Dr. Gerard nodded. “Does your sister know?”

“I left her a note. Please tell her that my parents are waiting for her at home.”

“How long will you be gone?” the doctor asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Call me when you come back. You are always welcome here.”

“I appreciate that.”

“I mean it.”

“It’s good to know,” Darshan said, shaking the doctor’s hand on his way out.

There was a travel agency down on Geary Street. Darshan had seen the storefront every day since starting work at Kaiser, never really noticing it until now, those faded posters of faraway places, of palaces and mountain pinnacles. The bell sounded as he entered. He sat down with a travel agent, absently noting the smiling family photos on the desk, the glass paperweight containing a fossilized insect, the blue-haired troll doll. The agent offered him several brochures, which Darshan refused, asking for an open-ended plane ticket from San Francisco International to New Delhi where he would catch a train to the Punjab.

~   ~   ~

Darshan made his way through Amritsar in the back of a rickshaw, through Hindustani motorcar traffic jams and past bicyclists weaving precariously in the spaces between cars, tinging their bells. The air perhaps drier, Amritsar was a macrocosm of Suva, the closest he had come to home since he had left Fiji nearly nine years ago: the smell of food stalls; the vivaciously musical chatter; the rich, bright hues of cloth and food; the spice in the air.

“Twelve rupees,” the rickshaw wallah called back over his shoulder, narrowly avoiding a bicyclist. “No trickery,” he added heatedly.

“Of course,” Darshan agreed mildly.

It was a sunny day. Nothing stirred. No wind, no clouds. Only lucidity, a precision of angles and corners. The Golden Temple rose up before them, a brilliant auriferous yellow, its dome sharply lined against the cerulean sky. The rickshaw wallah deposited Darshan near the banks of the surrounding manmade lake where the temple reflected crisply in the mirror-like water. The tiles shone radiantly and with so much reassuring warmth that Darshan’s toes tensed in anticipation of walking barefoot along them, the skin of his soles ready to receive the soothing heat before stepping into the coolness of the lake.

“Twelve rupees,” he counted, handing them to the driver, adjusting his duffle on his shoulder. The man held his palm out, insistent on a few extra coins. When he received none, he grunted and melted back into traffic.

The sun only one hour above the horizon, the temple was relatively quiet. Darshan sat cross-legged on the tiles observing the small number of people bathing in the water, pressing their hands together in prayer. Strange to think that Ranjit had died here in a torrent of bullets. It was impossible to imagine now, the chaotic flight of men along these banks, the splatters of blood and heaps of bodies. It had taken great courage to challenge such a tyrannical system of governance, but Darshan suspected that his great uncle had also meant to escape the family, to both lose and find himself in a purpose greater than the Toors, with whom life was often a futile grappling and sputtering for air.

He lingered for several hours, taking his lunch of garbanzo bean curry and chapatis on a bench, watching as the crowds began to thicken around the temple, pilgrims exiting from the morning service. A Hindu priest with long hair sectioned into braids and dressed only in an orange loincloth sat beside him. “Spirit reading?” he asked, smiling serenely, pushing the braids back behind his shoulders. His bare chest was stained with red powder.

Darshan placed his palms together to respectfully decline. “Not now, ji.”

“You are most certainly in need of spiritual advising,” the pundit insisted, holding out his small tray of turmeric paste.

“It is a strange place for a Hindu priest,” Darshan told him.

The man nodded with the same serene smile. “I suppose that is true. But it is nonetheless God’s place.”

Knowing the priest would not leave without a few rupees, Darshan set his food aside. The pundit dipped the tip of his middle finger into the yellow paste and smeared a small circle between Darshan’s eyebrows. He placed the tray on the bench and took Darshan’s hand.

 “You are very discontent,” the pundit observed, then said with a sly twist of his head, “But I admit this is nothing new. In any case, there are always second chances. You have been here before. There is an opportunity for you.”

Something vaguely familiar alighted deep within Darshan’s mind, reawakening that same chronic dread he had battled to repress since he was ten years old and Baba Singh’s bleary eyes peered intently into his.

The pundit took a moment to study Darshan’s palm, then cleared his throat. “You had a brother.”

Darshan shook his head. “I have one.”

“Perhaps there is no difference,” the man said. “
When
is not important.”

“I do not understand,” Darshan said. His fingertips were cold.

“He will make you understand.”

“He does not know anything.”

“He knows everything,” the pundit replied. He bowed and stretched out his hand.

“Is that all?” Darshan asked, pulling ten rupees from his wallet.

“There is nothing more,” the pundit replied, taking the money. He gathered his tray, the veins in his arms thick beneath the muscle, and walked toward the lake, his bare feet painted with turmeric, his pace deliberate, supple heel to toe, heel to toe, vanishing into the crowd of Sikh men and women, humming folk songs and accosting no others.

~   ~   ~

Listening to the train’s wheels screeching along the tracks, Darshan perceived Amarpur on the horizon. Behind his head, the warm wind whipped a yellow-aged window curtain against his hair, and the smell of earth and dust brushed against his nose. A charge of anxiety—a sense of wrongdoing, of trespassing—gripped his chest as he thought of his father, who had not spoken of Amarpur or Barapind since before Baba Singh had returned there. Darshan had the impression that something horrible had happened in this place, that family secrets had been buried but not forgotten, that he himself had played a part in it.

The train slowed as it approached the town, settling to a stop next to a short platform, the engine hissing like doused fire. Amarpur looked much like the deserted gold-mining settlements of California, a single strip of dusty road lined with wood- and tin-roofed buildings. There were few people outside. They glanced dolefully at the train before retreating from the midday sun. Many shops were boarded shut.

Duffle on his shoulder, Darshan descended the staircase at the end of the platform, appraising the town, disappointed by its lack of vitality. Wiping dirt from his face with a spare shirt, he entered the telegraph office, greeted by the curious and wary stare of a middle-aged Hindu man.

“Yes?” the man asked, revealing a mouthful of rotten teeth, his gums stained by paan.

Darshan courteously inclined his head. “I sent a message. My grandfather once lived in this town. I would like to find his home.”

The young man’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, I received your message. It has been almost five years since his death. No one came.”

“Did you know him?”

“Not well, but I know it was not proper.”

“I believe he wanted to be alone,” Darshan told the operator. “He did not explain himself, but he had his reasons.”

“His brother’s family lives there, in the blacksmith shop,” the operator said, pointing down the street. “I told them you would be coming.”

“Thank you ji,” Darshan replied.

There was no name on the shop front, but through the hazy window Darshan identified shelves of farming and gardening implements, tools, hammers, boxes of nails, buckets, and cooking utensils. He knocked gently, slowly opening the door. An older woman sitting behind a desk turned to look at him. Her forehead glistened with perspiration in the warm room. Her skin was very brown and far more leathered than Jai’s. She wore a blue salwaar kameez, her chuni lined with pink trim. She pulled the shawl over her hair, rising, confusion in her furrowed brow.

“Was that today?” she asked. “I thought it was next week’s train.”

“Sat sri akal, Neena Auntiji,” Darshan said. “I am sorry. I do not want to impose.”

She smiled kindly, approaching him. “The time slips from me.” Squinting, she touched his face, a tiredness in her skin, in the tense muscles of her shoulders. “We were very glad to hear from you.”

“I was not sure anyone would be here.”

She turned toward the stairs. “Gharwala!” she called to her husband. She took Darshan’s bag. “Your grandfather spoke about you. He said you would come. I had almost forgotten. I thought he had just hoped for it.”

A man descended the stairs. “Sat sri akal,” he said, looking as if he had been slumbering, his turban askew, his clothes wrinkled.

“Shamsher Uncleji,” Darshan said, bowing his head.

“Was that this week?” his uncle asked.

Neena put Darshan’s duffle on a cot at the back of the shop. “Come,” she said then, drawing him toward her desk. She removed paraphernalia from a few spare chairs, dumping it on the floor. “Sit.”

Shamsher filled a pot with water from a bucket. He set the pot on a small corner stove and shook some tea leaves into it.

“Where is your father?” Neena asked. “We thought he would have come.”

“He cannot travel,” he told her apologetically. “And he does not know that I am here.”

“Is he angry?”

“I do not believe that is what kept him away.”

“Yes,” she murmured, sighing. “Your grandfather did not want Satnam or Vikram here either. He was infected by too much pride and darkness, like he was the only one who ever suffered, as though nothing good ever happened. My own father remembered it differently.”

“This place was his?” Darshan asked, gesturing at the shop, noticing two crossed swords with intricately carved metal hilts hanging above a door at the rear. They were oddly out of character in this sea of tools. The door appeared to have been sealed shut with mortar.

“Until his death. It once belonged to a man named Yashbir Chand.” She waited then, for some sign of recognition, then blinked sadly, sighing. “It is a shame your father never spoke of him. He was very important to this family.”

“I am sorry, Auntiji.”

“And what do you know of Desa, Ranjit, and my father?”

“I have heard some, but very little.”

Neena’s chuni dropped, revealing her high forehead and austere grey hair. “I was born later,” she said, “but I know many stories.”

“Will you tell them to me?” Darshan asked her, smelling cardamom and milk brewing on the stove.

She paused, seeming to wonder at his sincerity. “Perhaps,” she replied. “We have some time. The train will not come again for a week.”

That evening, Neena took him upstairs to a cramped one-room apartment. Three charpoys were lined along the far wall, a pipe stove in the corner, and next to it a shelf cluttered with bowls and pots. Neena’s mother, wife of Khushwant Singh Toor, was lying on one of the charpoys, staring unblinkingly up at the ceiling, a cool, wet cloth on her forehead.

“Bebe,” Neena said gently. “Someone has come to see you.”

“Who is it?” the old woman asked hoarsely.

Darshan sat beside her. “Sat sri akal, Simran Auntiji,” he said, speaking softly.

“Gharwala?” she whispered.

“No, Bebe,” Neena said, her voice soothing.

Simran’s eyes sharpened, a fog seeming to lift. “Darshan?” She stared at him a long while. “It is good to finally meet you.”

“Did you know I would come?” he asked.