Karma (5 page)

Overheard in our kitchen

You Sikhs are just so full of pride,

Amar. Your gurus, your symbols, your one God! You believe you're better than the rest of us.

If we seem proud, Leela, it's because we have much to be proud about.

We believe in tolerance and acceptance of all faiths. We believe
all beings are equal. We believe women should have equal status. We believe in truth and justice. We believe the use of force is a last resort.

And love, Amar?

Yes, I am proud of my love for you.

See? You think you're doing me a favour!

It was God who brought us together, Leela.

Really? What was He thinking?

Mata is crying day and night

Don't you miss your homeland, Amar? The broad plains? The fields of wheat? Our Punjab of the five rivers?

No.

What about our families
?

You have no family, Leela, except mine. If we go back, we will live
with my father and mother. Do you think you can do that? My father will insist you become Sikh. There will be no altar to your goddess.

We can live alone.

As we do here, Amar.

We cannot live alone and insult my parents.

So we live here and insult me instead?

Leela, we came here to get away from my father and his narrow beliefs. You still have your
puja
.

And Jiva is learning about both religions.

But I have no one to pray with, but a daughter who won't dress Indian unless it's Halloween! I have religious freedom but no community.

So what does it matter? Perhaps it would be better to be a slave in another woman's house than be lonely in your own.

No. I worship my mother, Leela, but I love you. My mother will treat you badly. And I will be
unable to stop it. Here, at least, you are under no one's thumb.

But we're not meant to live so alone.

Perhaps even hatred is better than this isolation, Amar.

Hatred is a form of isolation,
Leela. Look around at this country. These rivers. These fields. These deep blue skies. There's peace all over this land. No blood in the soil to stain our lives. No families to tell us how to be.

It's not home.

It's better.

It's empty.

It's free.

I'll never be free here. I belong nowhere. All my gods and goddesses have disappeared.

Dear Maya,

You've never seen a man stare at the sky and earth for so long. He thought that in this country, love would be enough.

So, what's so great about being a Sikh?

I used to like this about Helen.

Never afraid to ask the tough questions. Even while Madonna rolled across the MTV stage in white tulle.

Like a virgin,
Helen sang along.
Touched for the very first time. Like a vir-r-r-r-gin. Hey, Jiva, what religion do you suppose she is?

It was the last time we laughed together.

Are you thinking of changing religions, Helen?

Yes. Either to yours or hers. The clothes are better.

Okay. Here's how it works. Sikhs believe in one God. Like you. If
you
believe in anything at all. But their goal in life is not to enter heaven through salvation but to be united with God completely. Human and divine as one.

Cosmic sex?

No. Through truth. And good behaviour.

And tell me again how many lives it takes?

Until one is willing to give up the desires of the physical world.

So forever then. But it's different for Hindus, right?

Well, same problem of rebirth. But more choice of gods and goddesses. My mother worships Munsa Devi.

Who wrote the Kama Sutra?

Helen, seriously.

Sorry. I know. Have you ever tried to imagine your parents doing it.

No! And why would you want to?

Yuck.

The break-up

Anything else you'd like to know, Helen?

Tell me about the goddesses.

I promise no more jokes.

There are hundreds of thousands of divine beings in Hindusim. But they all represent an aspect of the Supreme Being called Permatma, who is the ultimate reality.

The ultimate reality.
Very dramatic. Especially with the saris and the no-cutting-hair thing, and some of you covering your heads and faces.

It's Muslim women who cover their faces, Helen!

But there are Muslims in India?

Millions.

You know, Christianity is dreary by comparison. You get one life. There's one man on a cross who can save your soul. No colourful clothing or hidden knives or men with hair down to the ground. We are dull dull dull.

Honestly, it's not all it's cracked up to be.

Maybe. But your family looks passionate. Romantic. Like royalty.

We live with goats and chickens, like you, Helen!

But you get to wear a sari!

Well, when I'm older.

Michael still talks about it, you know. He thinks it's sexy. And
mysterious. Like a strange cult with blood and sex rituals.

You talk to Michael about my clothes?

Well, not
all
of your clothes. The regular ones you wear to school are kind of boring.

Helen, I don't want you talking to Michael about anything that has to do with me.

Fine. I've been trying to help you get together with him, but if you don't want it, that's okay.

Well, if Michael likes me so much, why doesn't he talk instead of always whispering behind my ear? He's not mute. Especially with you.

What's that supposed to mean? Michael and I are just friends! You know that! Tell you what, Jiva. Get a boyfriend your own way. God knows you're so gorgeous you shouldn't need my help.

The promise

One night Mata exacted a promise from Bapu.

All right, all right! We'll go back to India when Jiva is sixteen!

My mother smiled. My father slammed the door. I shrugged. India was far away and so was my birthday. At least a year.

But who could have predicted what would happen next?

That Punjab would become a place of turmoil and violence.

That a movement would grow: Sikhs demanding a homeland called Khalistan.

That Sikh terrorists would begin murdering anyone who wouldn't toe the line.

And that Indira Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, would send the army into the Golden Temple in Amritsar, violating the Sikh holy site.

India was unraveling along religious lines.

The Partition of 1947

It cannot happen again,
Bapu said.

More than a million died when the country split in two. Those wounds are still not healed.

I knew my history. That was the year that India and Pakistan became their own nations and created borders according to religion. More than half of the area known as Punjab went to the new Islamic state of Pakistan. The land that remained in India was eventually divided into three new Indian states: Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, and Punjab.

Punjab was for the Punjabi speakers. Half were Sikhs.

Indira Gandhi will never allow Punjab to separate,
Bapu explained.
Because it borders Pakistan.

Indira Gandhi will never be able to stop the Sikhs from trying,
Mata said.
And what will happen to all the Hindus in Punjab?

My mother then cried when she realized what it meant for her.

How will we go home now, Amar? Sikhs and Hindus being driven apart. Where does that leave us?

Our marriage is a symbol of peace, Leela. Don't forget.

Amar, we live in a country where no one knows what a Sikh is. In Canada, we symbolize nothing. In India, we just look like fools.

October 31–November 1, 1984

Madness in New Delhi

Bapu brings the news in the dark.

I open the hotel door to his frantic rapping.

His face pours sweat, the vein over his left eye throbbing like molten lava moving under the skin.

He grips my arm with one hand, but it is weak. He pushes me back from the window, and with the other hand flicks off the light. The room is lit by a streetlamp, a false moon glowing placidly.

He is breathing hard.

We're safe. This part of the city is still untouched.

Untouched from what?
I ask.

He paces the floor, touching his turban, the nervous tick of forefinger to the temple.

They're crying for vengeance, Jiva. There are stories of unspeakable things.

I feel the heat where Bapu holds me. The ligaments in his arm tighten, cling like metal clamps. The blue arched veins on the back of his hand swell like damned rivers.

What things, Bapu?

The words “blood for blood” are singing through the city. Mobs of men are pulling Sikh men out of buses, off scooters, out of their homes. They are beating the bodies, hacking off the limbs. They are burning turbans in the street, soaked in oil. They make necklaces of burning tires. And that's not all. They are raping Sikh women. They are castrating young boys. Squeezing the organs of life until they split. Like a cracked watermelon spilling seeds and red juice.

This is what happened

Halloween.

The prime minister of India is wearing an orange sari as she walks in the garden at No. 1 Safdarjung Road, in the city of New Delhi. Along the gravel path she meets two of her bodyguards.

She folds her hands in the morning light and says,
Namaste.
The two Sikh guards do not greet her in the usual fashion with a deep bow. Instead, one answers with three shots from a .38 revolver. The other with thirty rounds from a Sten automatic.

The power of the bullets lifts her body off the ground and spins her around. Twenty-seconds of pelting rain. A monsoon of certain death.

She falls when the firing stops. 9:17 a.m.

The assassins drop their weapons next to bone and flesh splattered on the ground. One of them addresses a security guard:
I've done what I had to do. You do what you have to do.
Both are shot, but only one is killed.

When the physician at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences receives the woman's body, he says:
This cannot be Indira Gandhi. She looks like a
child wrapped in a washerman's sheet. Is this really the Prime Minister of India?

A rumour begins that her heart remained intact. Not a shot on the mark.

A contrary rumour says a single bullet found its way to the muscle.

By nightfall in New Delhi, a city cries for the old woman shot thirty-three times in her garden.

In Punjab, they are dancing in the streets.

In our hotel room, Bapu moans behind a locked door knowing what will come.

His voice is the same

As the night Mata died.

The same tremor.

A stringed instrument wound too tight.

Oh my God. My God.

Bapu talks fast.

Believes he is holding down my fear.

Don't worry, Jiva.

It'll be all right.

The madness can't last long.

Or can it?

Oh, who knows with Indians.

Give them a reason to stir up their hate and off they go
.

Poking at old wounds.

Remember! Remember! They shout.

Injustice! Injustice!

His voice is the same as the night Mata died.

The quiet room. Freezing air. Piano keys stilled, bared like white teeth. Her sari whispering, fluttering in the open window.

He broke the silence with his cries.

Oh, why, Leela? Why?

We were supposed to be enough for each other!

After that Bapu didn't stop talking for two weeks.

His words strung like beads on a ribbon.

Connected by a relentless tongue. Sometimes he sang. Songs I had never heard. Prayers of grief. Sorrowful laments.

I wondered if he was afraid of his thoughts. Stop talking and you hear the other voices. The ones in your head. The ones you ignored. The ones you shushed.

I can't go on like this, Amar.

I will die from the loneliness.

And now it's the same in New Delhi.

As if talking keeps his panic at bay.

Jiva Jiva Jiva we will have to find a way out of here out of Delhi far away because we can't stay here not safe not safe but where where can we go perhaps a train a bus no no everyone will think a train a bus they will expect that wait for us no we will have to be sneaky we will have to hide but where where with Kiran yes Kiran will help us yes Kiran will help

Tonight he uses only English. Abandoning the language of his childhood. Words linking him to a murder.

After Mata died, English was banned from our house.
Canada killed her,
he said in Punjabi.

The Golden Temple

Bapu says her death is due to architecture.

Because a four-hundred- year-old temple was desecrated.

(Because of the wind that came through the cracks in an old prairie house.)

Because its doors were entered (East. West. North. South.) without respect.

(Because the back door never closed properly.)

Because the gold was tarnished with blood.

(Because the kitchen was always cold. And empty.)

Because of hate. Prejudice.

Intolerance.

(Because of love.)

Because the extremists used the temple for a sanctuary of violence.

(Because it wasn't home.)

Architecture inspires and kills.

Darkening

Rumours are becoming believed facts:

-  Sikhs are distributing sweetmeats and lighting oil lamps to celebrate Mrs. Gandhi's death.