Their Language of Love (23 page)

Again she says, ‘Oh God!’ and I realize she is afraid that the cousins, crawling forward with small movements, are resurrecting a past that is best left in whatever recesses of the mind Ammi-ji has chosen to bury it.

‘Don’t do this … please,’ protests Sikander. ‘You’re our guests …!’

But the cousins, keeping their eyes inches off the floor, say, ‘Bhai, let us be.’

The whispered comments of the guests intensify around me.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘They are begging her pardon …’

‘Who are these men?’

‘… for what the Sikhs did to her in the riots …’

‘Hai Ram. What do they want?’

‘God knows what she’s been through; she never talks about it …’

‘With their hair open like this they must remind her of the men who …’

‘You can’t beat the Punjabis when it comes to drama,’ says the supercilious guest. His wife, standing next to me, says, ‘The Sikhs have a screw loose in the head.’ She rotates a stubby thumb on her temple as if she is tightening an imaginary screw.

I turn, frowning. The sisters are glaring at them: showering the backs of their heads with withering, hostile looks.

And, in hushed tones of suitable gravity, Mrs Khan says: ‘Ammi-ji, they are asking for your forgiveness.’ Silence, save for the swish of cloth as we turn towards Ammi-ji.

Then, addressing the men on the floor, speaking on her mother-in-law’s account, she says: ‘She forgives you, Brothers.’

Azra and her older sister repeat Mrs Khan’s magnanimous gesture, and, with minor variations, also forgive Khushwant and Pratab on Ammi-ji’s behalf.

‘Ammi-ji: come here!’ Sikander has the military air of an officer determined to stop this nonsense.

We shift, clearing a narrow passage for Ammi-ji, and Vijay’s mother darts out instead looking like an agitated chick
in her puffed cotton sari. She is about to say something—and judging from her expression it has to be something indeterminate and conciliatory—when Vijay, firmly taking hold of her arm, hauls her back.

Seeing his mother has not moved, Sikander shouts, ‘Send Ammi-ji here. For God’s sake, finish it now.’

Ammi-ji takes two or three staggering steps and stands a few paces before me. I suspect one of the sisters has prodded her forward. I cannot see Ammi-ji’s face, but the head beneath the grey chaddar jerks as if she is trying to remove a crick from her neck.

All at once, her voice, an altered, fragile, high-pitched treble that bears no resemblance to the fierce voice that had demanded, ‘Who are these men?’, Ammi-ji screeches, ‘I will never forgive your fathers! Get out, shaitans! Sons and grandsons of shaitans! Never, never, never!’

She becomes absolutely still, as if she will remain there forever, rooted, the quintessence of indictment.

They raise their heads to say, ‘We will lie at your feet to our last breath!’

In a slow, deliberate gesture, Ammi-ji turns her face away and I observe her profile. Her eyes are clenched shut. The muscles in her cheeks and lower jaw are quivering in tiny, tight spasms as if charged by a current. No one dares say a word: it would be an intrusion. She has to contend with unearthed torments and private demons. The matter rests between her memories and the incarnation of the phantoms resurrected at her feet.

The men reach out to touch her slippers and they lay
their heads at her feet in the ancient gesture of surrender demanded of warriors.

‘Leave me! Let go!’ Ammi-ji shrieks, in her shaky, altered voice. She raises her arms and moves them as if she is pushing away invisible insects. But she looks exhausted and, her knees giving way, she squats before the men. She buries her face in the chaddar.

At last, with slight actions that suggest she is ready to face the world, Ammi-ji wipes her face in her chaddar, and rearranges it on her untidy head. She tucks the edges behind her ears and slowly, in a movement that is almost tender, places her shaking hands on the shaggy heads of the men who hold her feet captive. ‘My sons, I forgave your fathers long ago,’ she says in a flat, emotionless voice pitched so low that it takes some time for the words to register. ‘How else could I have lived?’

On my way home, hanging on to the red tail-lights of the cars on the Katy Freeway, my thoughts tumble through a chaos of words and images—Azra’s face, pale and drawn, her head bowed; Ammi-ji’s weary capitulation; the sisters’ frozen stares … Perhaps the surreal gestures of these young men will go some way to ease the ancient animosities … allow Azra and Khushwant to marry. During dinner I notice Khushwant’s complex contrite glances, stealthily seeking hers …

Joanne is right: living in America changes people—I can sense the changes in myself … yes …

And then fragments of a poem by the Bolivian poet Pedro
Shimose churn up to drown the images. The words throb in an endless, circular rhythm:

Defend yourself against me
against my father and the father of my father
still living in me
Against my force and shouting in schools and cathedrals
Against my camera, against my pencil
against my TV-spots.

Defend yourself against me,
please, woman,
defend yourself!

I have to admit that I am a novelist by inclination and not a short-story writer—even my short stories, as you will no doubt notice in this collection, tend to be lengthy.

My first short story, ‘Breaking It Up’ was published by Serpents Tail in Britain in the 1980s. Amanda Conquay, who was then at Heinemann, UK, liked it and persuaded me to expand it into a novel. Youth allows one to blithely undertake what one might balk at in later years, and I turned the short story into my novel
An American Brat
. In the year it took me to do this, Conquay left Heinemann and the new editor rejected the novel. The considerably changed and polished version was published by Milkweed in America in 1994.

‘Defend Yourself Against Me’ was the second story I wrote. It contained material that I wanted to include in my novel
Ice-Candy-Man
. Novels, however, determine a path all their own and it was only after I finished
ICM
that I realized there was no room in it for my fateful meeting with Mr Sikander Khan at a party in Houston. His horrific experiences as a nine-year-old, when his village was attacked during the 1947
riots, had provided the crucial chapter titled ‘Ranna’s Story’ in
ICM
. The dramatic material that I was unable to include thus shaped itself into this short story.

The two stories about Ruth were written only a few years ago. These included memories of my friendships with various American women who had lived in Lahore from the 1950s to the early 1990s. In these stories, particularly in ‘Ruth and the Hijackers’, the role I assigned Raj is interchangeable with the character of my brother, Minoo Bhandara, and the role he played in providing me with the dramatic incidents that propel the story.

‘A Gentlemanly War’ is based on the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, and my family’s experiences of it. The acquisition of the Murree Brewery by my father, P. D. Bhandara, in 1947 accurately reflects the progression of Prohibition in Pakistan. The occasion when my mother, brother and I trooped across the road to the President’s House at the beginning of the war, is a fictionalized depiction of our meeting with Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who was then the Foreign Minister of Pakistan. By this time the Brewery House, our residence in Rawalpindi, had morphed into the President’s House during the first martial law imposed by Field Martial Ayub Khan.

The remaining stories do not require any explanation so I will leave them alone.

First, as always, I thank Khushwant Singh for reading the manuscript of this collection and recommending it for publication. My affection and admiration for him have grown over the years and I regret not being able to personally express my sentiments to him. When I called him during my last visit to Lahore, he said, ‘When are you coming to see me? I am 94!’ I did not have the heart to tell him I was not well enough to travel and due to have spine surgery. I miss him sorely and if it is in the stars I will do my best to travel to Delhi solely to see my beloved friend.

I thank R. Sivapriya for publishing this collection, and Ambar Sahil Chatterjee, not only for his superb editorial wizardry but also for inspiring the stunning jacket cover for
Their Language of Love
and the designs to match it for all my other novels.

I learnt that Ravi Singh and Diya Kar Hazra are no longer with Penguin. I wish them well wherever they are.

And I thank Penguin for steadfastly publishing me over the years.

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in Viking by Penguin Books India 2013

www.penguin.co.in

Copyright © Bapsi Sidhwa 2013

Cover illustration by Alice Stevenson

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-06-7008-656-6

This digital edition published in 2013.
e-ISBN: 978-81-8475-927-3