Darshan (35 page)

One evening he could not bear the idea of moving, of bouncing along the potholed roads that only added to the odd and uncomfortable sensations coursing through him. He made Darshan stay in the parking lot, not speaking, as he waited for the buzzing in his bones to abate, to stop ringing so loudly in his ears. The mill was dark when they finally returned home, lit only by a single lantern placed at the top of the stairs next to the front door and the truck’s headlight beams as Darshan steered through the clearing.

The boy helped him up to the house and seated him on the couch. “Would you like a glass of water, Bapu?” he asked, bringing in the lantern and placing it on the floor in the middle of the living room.

“No. I am fine here.”

“Are you sure?”

“Go on to bed. You have school in the morning.”

“If you need anything—”

“Yes, I know.”

When Darshan’s shadow had disappeared down the hallway, Manmohan stretched his fingers wide, trying to shake off the residual electricity. He shook his wrists, then stood and paced the living room, making wide, quiet strides around the lantern before extinguishing it. The pictures on the walls, dark square and rectangular shadows, seemed to float about the room.

There was a sound of a doorknob click from down the hall, someone going to the outhouse. Approaching the hallway, he saw a bulky silhouette coming from Livleen’s room.

“Mohan?” Manmohan asked.

The silhouette stiffened, caught by surprise. Apprehensive, it asked, “Bapu?”

“Mohan, what were you doing in Livleen’s room?”

“I thought I heard something. I thought it was a nightmare. But she is fine.”

A cold feeling trickled slowly up Manmohan’s spine. “Mohan. Wait.”

The silhouette turned to go. “Everything is fine, Bapu. I am tired. I am going back to bed.”

Manmohan’s heart began to pound, the chambers rapidly contracting and expanding, and he no longer perceived the electric hum in his bones. He realized that he knew something terrible now, that he had known it for a long time. A suspicion too terrifying to confront or examine made him tremble with cold and fear.

Walking briskly toward his daughter’s room, he stopped outside the door, trying to slow his breathing. He placed his palm over the doorknob, turned it, and cracked it open. “Livleen?” he whispered.

He heard a whimper.

“Livleen, can’t you sleep?”

Fighting the urge to run, he slowly walked over to touch her forehead. She shrunk into the pillow. She was sweating but had no fever.

“Where does it hurt? Your wrists? Knees? Is it your heart?”

He tried to touch her chest, but she shook her head, the whites of her eyes faintly visible in the moonlight.

“Is it Mohan?” he asked, and even as he spoke he did not recognize his own voice, the flat and mechanical quality of it.

She stiffened. “He loves me. He tells me how much.”

“How much?” he whispered.

“Without me he will do awful things. He will ask to let them out. They would come for me.”

“Who?”

“The bad people, in jail.”

“But I don’t understand,” he said, the thudding of his heart drowning out all other sound as he walked away from her. As if from a great distance, he heard a deep, furious cry, dimly aware that it had come from his mouth.

“Gharwala!” Jai screamed, running down the hall as Manmohan threw open the door to Mohan’s room.

Lehna jumped from their bed in alarm, grabbing Amandev from the basinet and backing against the far wall, her eyes large with fear. The baby began to yowl and screech. Mohan was standing by the window, his shoulders bent forward, crying, tears soaking into his beard. Lunging forward, Manmohan hit the turban off his son’s head and grabbed Mohan’s topknot.

“Gharwala!” Jai screamed again. Mohan stumbled and fell, but Manmohan did not let go of the hair clenched in his fist, dragging his son down the hallway. Mohan flailed and slapped at his father’s arms, scrambling and clambering through the living room and out to the balcony where Manmohan finally released him.

“Get out!” Manmohan heard himself scream. “Get out!”

Lying prostrate, Mohan reached for his father’s ankle. “Bapuji, I am sorry!”

“What have you done?” Manmohan asked with rage and pain. “I trusted you to care for her!”

“No, Bapu,” Mohan wept. He got to his knees and pressed his hands together as if in prayer. “You pretended to trust me because Junker Uncle told you to. People always had to tell you that I was worth anything, but she loves me! She tells me how good I am!”

Manmohan raised his fist, shaking.

“Stop, please!” Jai cried. “What is this about?”

“Tell Lehna to pack a bag,” Manmohan told her, lowering his arm and unclenching his fist.

She did not move.

“You tell her to pack a bag.”

After one more moment of hesitation, she scurried away down the hall, stopping only to push Darshan and Navpreet away from the living room and back to their beds.

Mohan stood, again reaching out his hand, still sobbing. “Bapuji, I am sorry.”

Manmohan slapped his son’s hand away and shoved him backward against the rail.

Then Lehna was there, stepping outside into the chill of the night with the baby. “Bapu,” she said tearfully. “You can see he did not mean it, whatever he has done. I do not want to go.”

“Lehna, I am sorry,” Manmohan said, his voice raspy and dry.

Jai returned with a few items tucked into a burlap sack. She wordlessly handed it to her husband who tossed it onto the balcony.

Lehna moaned imploringly, stepping close to Mohan, caressing her daughter’s head.

Manmohan shut the door, leaving them out in the dark. He bolted the lock, and Mohan banged on the wood. “Bapuji! Please!”

Turning to Jai, Manmohan wiped his eyes and said, trying to reassure her, “They will go to her father.”

The lantern had tumbled over, a pool of kerosene on the floor beneath it. Jai straightened the lamp, moving it away from the spill. She found another lamp and lit it. In the light Manmohan noticed the glint of his watch near the couch. Touching his wrist he realized it had come off in the commotion. He bent to retrieve it and sank into the sofa’s cushions.

“Please go be with Livleen,” he told his wife.

She nodded, then nervously left the room.

Manmohan remained there in the living room, alone, listening to Lehna crying and Mohan banging on the door, begging forgiveness. After a time there was the creaking sound made by their bodies descending the stairs. Then silence.

Secrets in the Rafters

1962

Family Tree

Pathogens deployed and probed for weaknesses along Manmohan’s spinal column, slowly yet triumphantly conquering vertebra by vertebra. But they affected more than just his back. The disease was contagious. It transcended his body, reaching outward to infect his children, bending them forward under a great downward pressure that he himself had brought upon them.

The doctors told him to have hope, but he could sense the uselessness of his electroshock therapy sessions. The time he spent on that vinyl hospital table was wasted. It had blinded him to the catastrophes taking place within his household. Events had escaped him.

He sat now on his bed in his undershorts, slumped with an unwillingness to dress, hugging his naked shoulders, his hair loose, his turban on the dresser.

“It was an obvious place,” Junker Singh told him, holding up a pair of trousers. “Anyone searching for that sort of thing would have found it.”

“I never thought she would go up there,” Manmohan replied weakly. “I never knew she was looking.”

“What is important is that she is fine now.”

“She is not fine.”

“She is alive.”

Manmohan closed his eyes, the sound of his bare feet slapping on the wooden floorboards last night still sharp in his mind, the brush of the walls against his shoulder as he skirted down the hallway, his breath heavy and quick.

“Get a handle on yourself,” Junker Singh said firmly.

Manmohan rubbed his sore knees. “If you had been there, you would not assume things to be so easy.”

Junker Singh traversed the room to the window. He rested his elbows on the sill and cupped his cheeks in his palms, staring pensively outside. He crossed one ankle over the other so that his large body looked like it was balancing on one foot.

Manmohan flexed his toes, focusing on them, trying his best to remain calm, to put it out of his head.

“Gharwala!” Jai had called out the previous evening, tearing his attention from the book he had been reading. “She is not breathing!”

Jumping from his chair, rushing around the corner from the library and stumbling through the living room, he had fallen once, his hands slapping ape-like on the floor for balance. Running into the kitchen, he flung himself hard onto his knees next to the unmoving figure of Livleen sprawled on the floor, her head in Jai’s lap, the corners of her mouth heavy with white, foamy spittle.

A pillbox of his arthritis medication, an unmarked bottle of alcohol, and an empty tin tumbler were on the floor nearby. He remembered thinking how strange it was that those items had been so neatly placed, the pillbox positioned next to the bottle and tumbler as though she had been arranging trinkets on a dresser or flowers in a vase. The ladder had been set under the wide open door to the rafters.

Flexing his toes again, Manmohan scratched his beard, his fingernails rubbing hard against the skin underneath, trying to shake off the images. “We had to hold her upside down to get it all out,” he murmured to his friend. “We hung her by the ankles over the balcony until she threw up.” He remembered the coughing, retching sounds Livleen had made, the vomit in her hair when they pulled her back onto the deck.

Junker Singh listened, his body rigid.

“When it was over, I told her it was stupid,” Manmohan said.

“Well, it was.”

“She apologized.”

The mechanic pushed off the window, and after a moment he turned around. “Get up,” he said, handing over the trousers and a clean shirt.

“This is not a joke,” Manmohan said. “I want to stay here.”

“I love that girl, too, but being depressed and hopeless never fixed anything. It will not fix her.”

Manmohan reluctantly slipped into his trousers and put on the clean shirt. Junker Singh led him to the kitchen and picked up the pillbox and the unmarked bottle that were still on the counter, holding them out, one in each hand. “Put them back.”

Lugging the wooden ladder from the wall to set it under the rafter opening, Manmohan reluctantly complied. He was aware of how heavy the ladder was, how dense the wood, how weighty the metal bindings, and of how determined a ten-year-old girl with aching joints had to be in order to move it. He climbed the ladder and shoved up the swing door, laying it down carefully. Using his palms on the rafter floor to steady himself, he hefted his weight through the opening and sat on the edge, his feet resting lightly on the top rung of the ladder.

“Here,” Junker Singh said, extending his arms. “Take them.”

Manmohan reached down to receive the pillbox and bottle. He then held them together in his lap, scanning the crawl space. Rays of sunlight beamed through the walls, and sparkles of dust floated languidly in the dim light. He reached up to touch the hot, corrugated iron ceiling with his fingertips, already feeling the perspiration on his upper lip from the heat. He could see the chimney toward the back, the shaft running through the rafter floor and up through the ceiling, everything blanketed with cobwebs. There were tin cans scattered about, some empty, some filled with forgotten flour and spices, Jai’s old spice grinder before she got the Steinfeld, the gramophone, his box of LPs, and the broad rectangular shape of the cabinet radio farther to the rear. He momentarily lifted Duke Ellington’s LP from the box, then tiredly let it fall back.

Baba Singh’s chest and the plywood box were to his left. There was a tarnished tray to his right, another unmarked bottle of bourbon resting on it, and the remainder of his arthritis medications, the only items Livleen had disturbed. Wiping the dust from the top of the plywood box, he found himself wishing for more evidence of her presence here, that despite her mission she had been curious enough to delay it and examine the objects of his life. He wished she had seen them as he saw them now: a record of Toor history, hidden away, perhaps tragic but still powerful and passionate.

He put the empty pillbox and bottle on the tray. Spinning the screw top off the other bottle, he took one sip of bourbon—always only one—then lifted it to admire the amber color of the glass as he held it up to the muted light. Thinking of Mohan, he felt it was peculiar that the substance used to alleviate his physical aches and pains was also the thing that could damage people when they applied it to their sorrow.

“Hi Junker Uncle,” Manmohan heard Darshan say from below. He peered down between his knees to see his son curiously looking up at the open rafter door.

The mechanic extended his hand for a shake, pulling the young man into a bear hug.

Darshan laughed. “Good to see you, Uncle.”

“You are home early,” Manmohan said.

Darshan glanced up, his smile faltering. “A little.”

Setting the bottle on the tray, Manmohan descended the ladder, hands empty. “Chandan needs help,” he said. “The inventory.”

“Okay, Bapu,” Darshan said, waving as he went out. “I will take care of it.”

“He is a good boy,” Junker Singh said, watching him go. “You will make him very happy when the Falcon arrives.”

Manmohan pushed the ladder off to the side. “Yes.”

Junker Singh helped fold the ladder and lean it against the wall. “You have something to say to him, I can see it. Giving him a car is not the same as talking to him.”

“I do not have anything to say.”

The mechanic sighed. “Okay, ji.”

Manmohan wiped his dusty hands on his shirt.

“Perhaps it is inappropriate given the circumstances,” Junker Singh said wistfully, “but a tall drink of whisky would be nice. I always knew the Muslims had more willpower than us Sikhs. Islam says a man cannot drink, and so they do not drink. We are not supposed to either, but half the Punjab stumbles around like newborn calves, slurring all the time like babies.”