Darshan (6 page)

The smell also permeated the porous wood of the furniture, so Ranjit flipped the two charpoys on their sides and dragged them down the hallway and out of the hotel’s main door. He removed the chest and put it with the lamp and bed table at the side of the building to air. He tossed bucketfuls of water into the room to scrub down the walls and the floor. But still the odor would not lessen. Not even the smell of Desa’s cooking—which she had been doing much of in the days since Harpreet’s death, making feasts of cauliflower
subzee
, butter chicken, thick wheat roti, and blended mustard leaves with extra lumps of ghee—helped to dispel the scent of death. Finally Ranjit was forced to seal the room shut with plaster.

The days following passed in a daze. Ranjit returned to work, Desa stayed with the girls and Lal, and Khushwant and Baba Singh slumped about the hotel in stupors.

The nights were the most difficult. Kiran and Avani, usually exhausted and quiet during the day, cried pitifully for Harpreet as soon as the world became dark. They believed she was alive and that they must find her. They snuck through the hotel in a frenzied and desperate search as soon as the rest of them fell asleep. Or sometimes they remained on Desa or Ranjit’s charpoy, staying awake long into the night, Kiran telling Avani tearful stories about their mother. Baba Singh’s only hope was that they would eventually exhaust themselves into a fitful sleep.

~   ~   ~

The hotel, solid as it was, seemed instead like a skeletal frame in the middle of the sweltering desert, casting ribs of shadow in which the Toors desperately huddled, trying to catch their bearings. Lal only emerged from his room when in need of the outhouse or more opium, refusing even to eat the food Desa left at his door. When they saw him, he was a terrifying image, his face sagging pitifully like roti dough, his long, frizzy mane of hair unwashed, unturbaned and wild. They never actually caught him, but they knew he took money for his opium from the tin in Desa’s chest where they all deposited their wages. None of them spoke of it. He did not take much.

“I do not want to stay here any longer,” Desa finally announced one morning, trying to mend a hole in one of Khushwant’s shirts. “I am going back to Harpind. I can help Charan Uncle.”

“You can’t,” Baba Singh replied.

“Why not?” she asked angrily.

“Desa,” Ranjit said gently. “Ajmer is married now.”

She flushed slightly and stood, picking up the kurta and bunching it in her fist. She spread it on the table, then folded and creased it meticulously.

That evening, before bed, Baba Singh knocked on Lal’s door. There was no answer. Slowly he cracked it open. His father was sprawled stomach-down on his charpoy, arm hanging flaccidly off the side. A few feet from his hand was one of the chests Ranjit had made. Carefully folded and precisely laid within were his mother’s few items of clothing—a sari and salwaar kameez—her broken-toothed wooden comb, and one ivory wedding bangle. Beyond the chest was her charpoy, sheet neatly spread, wrinkles smoothed away.

Lal roused, lifting his head an inch off the charpoy, looking at his son through wet slits, groggy and distant.

“Ajmer is married,” Baba Singh told him. “Everything has changed.”

His father let his head fall to the sheet and again closed his eyes. “It is not what I had hoped for,” he said, licking his dry lips.

~   ~   ~

A voice caused Baba Singh to stir in the middle of the night.

“Will she be there?” the voice asked hopefully. “Can we come?”

Hot, Baba Singh kicked off his blanket and was again pulled through a dark tunnel back into sleep.

Minutes later—or so it felt—he suddenly woke in a sweat. Something was wrong. Dawn lit the room with a dull ginger glow. There was a sound. Someone calling out.

“Kiran?” he heard Desa from the hallway. “Avani?”

Khushwant woke suddenly, disoriented. “What is it?” he asked Baba Singh, flinging off his blanket.

Desa called out again. “Kiran? Avani?”

Baba Singh went to the door. “Desa, what’s wrong?”

Her eyes were big, alert with fright. “I don’t know where they are.”

Looking at her, he was also afraid. “They are probably somewhere close,” he said, trying to keep calm as Khushwant pushed past him. “They must be searching for her again.”

Desa held up Avani’s elephant as if to say,
without this
? Her eyes were red, like she had been crying, the delicate skin around them swollen. “I think Avani dropped it.”

“You didn’t hear anything?” Baba Singh asked.

“No. I was…” She hesitated and bit her lip. “I was tired and fell asleep. They are always awake, and I can never get them to close their eyes, to stop talking and walking around.”

“They cannot have gone far,” Khushwant said, pointing into Ranjit’s empty room. “They must be with him.”

Relief softened the jagged-edged worry on Desa’s face. “He didn’t tell me,” she said. “He should have woken me.”

Khushwant pulled a sweetmeat from his kurta and flicked it at his sister, smiling when it hit her directly on the nose.

Startled, she opened her mouth to speak, then clamped it shut. She gathered her loose hair and tied it back, bending to retrieve the candy before glaring at him and leaving to prepare breakfast.

“What was that for?” Baba Singh asked.

“She is too worried all the time,” Khushwant shrugged, returning to his charpoy. “It is much better if she is mad at me.”

In the washroom, Baba Singh splashed water on his face and scrubbed his armpits. He wanted to wash away his dream. That same ominous dream he could never remember. Drying his face, he went into the lobby to wait for Ranjit. He chose his mother’s reed chair, sitting in the silence of that empty room without moving, trying to feel her. He could not say how long he sat there. He was so drowsy. Perhaps he slept.

“Baba?”

Baba Singh started when he heard Ranjit’s voice. His brother was kneeling in front of him.

“Baba, you were daydreaming.”

Rubbing his eyes, Baba Singh took a deep breath, trying to orient himself. “Just a bad dream,” he mumbled.

“You need to sleep. Come.”

“Did you put Kiran and Avani to bed? Are they finally sleeping?”

Ranjit frowned. “No.”

“They must be tired.”

Desa came rushing down the hallway from where she had just delivered a plate of food to Lal. “Baba,” she called out. “Bapu is not in his room either.” She froze when she saw Ranjit. “Where are Kiran and Avani?”

“They aren’t with you?”

“We thought they were with you.”

Ranjit motioned for them to stay calm. “Then they have to be with Bapu.”

“But Bapu is in no condition to—”

“Perhaps he is finally feeling better.

“Where were you?” Baba Singh asked his brother.

“No place,” he said. “I could not sleep.”

Baba Singh was uneasy. He could almost remember something important, but the details were hazy.

“Go,” Ranjit told him. “You should not sit in here like this, afraid for nothing, staring into space.” He smiled so warmly and with such calm that Baba Singh began to relax. “Go,” he said again, “you have already missed too much work at the doctor’s.”

Amarpur was already beginning to warm in the late morning sun, and people were moving about. Baba Singh, however, did not go to work. Instead he paced the town, peeking into shops along Suraj Road to search for his father and sisters. At midday, he heard the train pull into Amarpur with a violent discharge of steam, like a beast exhaling. Peering down the road toward the station, he saw Dr. Bansal and Yashbir walking toward him, the doctor waving. He felt a sudden pang of guilt at missing so much work, and also at the thought of last week’s package, still on his bedside table.

“We were on our way to see you, Baba,” the doctor said. “I have been worried.”

“Thank you,” Baba Singh mumbled.

“We have just seen your father,” Yashbir said, laying a sympathetic hand on the boy’s shoulder and pointing to the train station platform behind them. “Nalin was delivering his package and found him up there with your sisters.”

“My sisters?” Baba Singh asked, relieved that Ranjit had been right.

Dr. Bansal nodded. “Yes, they are there. But, Baba, your father is not well, and the girls would not come with us. We were hoping they would listen to you or Desa or Ranjit.”

The train’s whistle pierced the air, and the train began to move slowly along the platform. The click clack along the tracks quickened, and they could smell black coal smoke.

Behind them, at the end of the road, a man stumbled down the station’s platform staircase. “Bapu?” Baba Singh called, sprinting past the doctor and Yashbir who quickly followed. Lal was a disheveled and forlorn mess of hair and wilted limbs. “Bapu, where are Kiran and Avani?”

“They had more courage than I,” Lal replied. “The conductor told me to go home. Get on or go home.”

“We just saw them,” the doctor said. “They were up there.”

“Get on or go home,” Lal said again. “They made their choice. Brave girls. They are brave girls.”

Lal stumbled and Yashbir caught him by the shoulder, twisted him around. “Ji, did you send them away?”

“No,” Dr. Bansal said. “Not possible. The station master would never allow it.”

“Unless he did not see,” Yashbir replied. He looked at Lal. “Tell us what happened?”

Baba Singh stared in sudden horror at the departing train receding in the distance. “What did you do?” he asked, his voice rising.

“I do not have to explain myself,” Lal said, shrugging Yashbir off and standing unsteadily.

“Ji,” Yashbir said firmly. “Where are they?”

Lal began to sob. He sank to his knees. “They are gone. I kept thinking that I should go away, too, that it was too much to look at you all every day, that it was too much to think of it all the time. But when the train finally stopped I could not get up. I just watched it. Where would I go? What would I do?” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, squinting beseechingly upward.

Baba Singh gaped at the train, now a dot on the horizon, a pencil prick. He launched up the stairs three at a time, crying out, running, waving his arms in vain.

~   ~   ~

Yashbir tore away toward the telegraph office, Baba Singh close behind, shouting for help. The blacksmith burst through the door, startling the operator. “We need to send an urgent message,” he said, “to the Amritsar train station.”

Two young girls. Stop
, the old man dictated.
Unattended, coming from Amarpur. Stop. Please hold them. Stop. We are coming. Stop.

Minutes later the operator read the grim return message:
The train station serves thousands of passengers in one day. Stop. We will try, but there is very little possibility of locating them. Stop.

“Get your brothers and sister,” the blacksmith told Baba Singh, tossing aside the message and shoving the boy outside. “Bring them here. Quickly.”

Wasting no time, Yashbir had a tonga waiting for them outside the telegraph office when Baba Singh returned with the others. “Up, up,” he said, already prodding the horse forward as they scrambled to get on.

They crossed the train tracks and Baba Singh saw his father, still weeping, leaning heavily on Dr. Bansal, who escorted him toward the hotel.

“I knew,” Desa said. “As soon as I found the elephant.”

Khushwant held her hand.

“They will search for her,” she mumbled. “They will search for Bebe everywhere.”

Ranjit had a haunted look about him and did not speak.

The afternoon was hot as they plodded through the open plains toward Amritsar. They moved too slowly. The light was already changing, their shadows moving position. Baba Singh slumped. His eyes were open, but he could not focus on his surroundings. He pictured his father stepping up to the train station platform, Kiran and Avani following closely. The hanging oil lamps were lit, dimly illuminating the uneven wooden planks in the darkness before dawn. The girls began their search, peeking behind benches, laying their little bodies down, their heads hanging over the platform to check the dark tracks where Harpreet might be hiding. They called out, “Bebeji?” There was no answer. Avani began to cry, terrified without her elephant, begging for it as Kiran dragged her to join Lal so they could wait for their mother. They waited until the sky grew less dim and the train station master came and he tipped his hat and went into his small office. And then they waited more. Avani fell asleep. She slept until the train came. Kiran pulled at her and they jumped down off the bench. They glanced at Lal, who drooled and wept and covered his face, and then they went to search without him. They boarded the train, and Kiran asked the passengers questions, pulling Avani through the cramped cars, bodies pressed against each other, fighting dog-like for space. The whistle blew a shrill blast and the train began to move.

Baba Singh jerked out of his daze.

“It’s okay, Baba,” Khushwant whispered to him. “We will find them.”

The city was dark when they arrived at Amritsar’s train station. It smelled of auto fumes and greasy, fried foods. Baba Singh looked into the crowd with a sick feeling, at the moving rickshaw and car traffic outside the main building. He had never been to the city before, and though he had imagined it larger and more bustling than Amarpur, he was not prepared for the enormity.

“Stay close,” Yashbir said.

The movement and flow of people inside the station was a gargantuan swell. Coolies in white dhotis followed the well-dressed wealthy with suitcases atop their heads. A million conversations in the chattering crowd melted into one colossal roar of activity. Families wailed and bid farewell as one of their own handed paper tickets to a conductor, who validated boarding passes with practiced efficiency. Train windows were flung open and a thousand hands waved desperately to their families.

“Excuse me!” Yashbir shouted, waving down an official. “Excuse me!”

“Yes,” the man replied, his eyes wide with impatience.

“We are looking for the train from Amarpur.”