Darshan (5 page)

“Who do you think she is?” Baba Singh had once asked the train station master.

“The woman? Some say she is so beautiful that she is painful to behold. A man with such fortune should hide her away so as not to fall victim to her loveliness.” He shrugged then. “Others say that she is dreadfully ugly, and that is why she is painful to behold.”

“And you?”

“I think the doctor loves a woman who will not have him,” the station master had replied, gazing thoughtfully out into the empty plain beyond the train tracks. “Men like that have big hearts but never women who can appreciate them.”

Baba Singh considered the station master’s words now, still eying the package on the counter. He broke off a piece of ladoo and slowly put it in his mouth.

The doctor waved a hand in front of the boy’s face, leaning forward over the counter. “Another?” he offered.

Baba Singh pulled his eyes from the parcel and shook his head. “Doctorji?” he asked.

“Hmm?”

“Are you married?”

Laughing, Dr. Bansal wiped his mouth clean. “If I were lucky enough to have a wife, everyone would know about it. She would be the light of my life, a princess for all to see.” He nudged the ceramic plate, stacked with sweet, yellow orbs of ladoos across the counter toward Baba Singh. He shook the crumbs off his shirt, the morsels leaving behind freckled spots of oil. Reaching into his pocket he pulled out a square of
paan
and popped it in his mouth, the betel leaves mixed with areca nut and slaked lime paste instantly staining his mouth red. Relaxed now, he leaned back in his chair, which squeaked with the shift in his weight. “Why do you ask?”

“I just thought there might be someone in Calcutta.”

The doctor’s expression changed, like he was remembering something. “I left before I had the chance to think about marriage.”

Baba Singh finished his tea, swishing the last sip in his mouth, trying not to look at Dr. Bansal. He suddenly lost interest in the package, gripped by a fear that something was changing. His dream still bothered him. Not every night, but enough. He was not certain who was lost or who remained.

“Something wrong, Baba?” the doctor asked.

“Ranjit told me that something big will happen. He thinks it is only a matter of time.”

The doctor’s face turned grim. “Maybe he is right. The British are recruiting again, for the police and military. I have seen flyers at the market.”

“Will you go with them?”

Surprised, Dr. Bansal shook his head. “Not me. But others. Those wages will tempt people to the devil.”

“I will never leave,” Baba Singh said. “I am going back to Harpind.” There were memories there. They made him feel safe.

“It will not be the same as it was,” the doctor replied. “You will not be the same. You are already different. This is the reason why your father has not gone back, not even to visit.”

“Maybe
he
is different, but I am not. It has not been that long.”

“All it takes is a day. I know. It is why I cannot return to Calcutta.”

Baba Singh felt himself getting angry. “You could go back if you really wanted to.”

“No, Baba.”

“You just haven’t tried hard enough.”

“I have certainly tried,” the doctor said. “But once a thing changes, there is no reversing it.”

“You don’t know that,” Baba Singh said, his voice rising in panic.

The doctor stood abruptly. “My nephew was very little when he was hit by a car.” He raised his hand to prevent Baba Singh from interrupting. “Some rich man in a hurry drove too fast. He was not watching the road, and he crushed the boy’s leg. My family believes I am to blame for what came next. I knew the leg would have to come off, and I performed the surgery.” He pressed his finger against a crumb on the counter and lifted it to the plate. “They never forgave me.”

Baba Singh held back tears. He took a deep breath. “It is not the same.”

“It is exactly the same. It is change,” the doctor said, briskly brushing his hands together. He indicated the tray. “I’ll take that. Please get started on today’s inventory.” And he disappeared to the back with the tray of dirty dishes and leftover ladoos, leaving Baba Singh alone with the parcel.

~   ~   ~

The train was already there. Baba Singh could hear it, so foreign and powerful, its engines disturbing the country air. It whistled with reproach, telling him to hurry. But he did not. He moved slowly down Suraj Road, not entirely certain what he was doing until it was too late and the train had already begun speeding away toward Amritsar. He looked down at the package, the Calcutta address written in such a careful hand. Later, when he was old enough, he would never forget that particular package, that carefree handwriting of swirly ink on the paper. He would know a tremendous guilt that he did not feel on that day. On that day, he felt only anger because he had been told that he could never go home.

Nonetheless, he went to the train station. The station master would be expecting him, but Baba Singh already knew what the man would say. “So she will get two next week. She will not miss it. She probably throws them away. Bring it back next time.”

Still, despite feeling justified in his anger, Baba Singh had a difficult time concentrating at Yashbir’s. The old man was patient, but it was dangerous work. The moment he realized that his apprentice was not entirely focused, he took away the tools. It was not enough that Baba Singh had grown strong after several months working with the sledgehammer, or that he possessed a natural artistic talent. He had to pay attention. If the iron was hot, there were no excuses.

The blacksmith sat at the anvil, adjusted the tongs, raised the heavy sledgehammer with a sinewy arm, and began pounding the hot metal into a sickle. Baba Singh watched miserably. In the beginning Yashbir had once asked him, “Do you see the arc of the hammer? The manner with which you should hold it? This helps with the weight and allows for stronger impact.” Stranger to his own body, Baba Singh was now intensely aware of his own arms, still the size of a boy’s but now taut with muscles he could feel as he bent his elbows and flexed his fingers. He wanted to rid himself of this new, developing form. Nobody had told him that by swinging a hammer with enough force to mold metal he would also alter his own shape. Until now, nobody had told him that he was changing, that he was already too far changed.

At the end of the day, Yashbir pointed at Dr. Bansal’s package on the desk. He had seen it. He had known all along.

“Do not forget that. It was your job to deliver it.”

“Will you tell him?” Baba Singh asked.

Yashbir looked at it sadly. “It will only hurt him. As far as I know, he has never missed a week.”

“He told me I could never go home. How does he know?”

The blacksmith turned the coals in the fire, letting them cool. “I know you are upset, and you have a right to be, but not with him. He only meant to do you a kindness. He likes you.”

Confused and still angry, Baba Singh made his way home, the parcel heavy in his hand. He did not even want to know anymore what was inside. He did not want to know more about the doctor. He wanted to be done with that strange man, with his strange packages and false wisdom. At the hotel he set it on his bedside table.

The table, too, was different. Adjusting to this new life, Ranjit had been slowly furnishing the rooms with charpoys and bed sheets, end tables and lamps, chests for their belongings. The family had dispersed, had spread out to settle in several of the sleeping quarters, he and Khushwant together, his parents in another room, the girls with Desa, Ranjit on his own. As he joined his family in the lobby, sitting against the wall next to Khushwant, Baba Singh felt burdened by all these new possessions and arrangements. He willed himself to remember Harpind. He did not want to forget what it had been like, and he worried that he was already forgetting.

“How is Yashji?” Harpreet asked him. “Did you thank him for the thali plates and tumblers?”

“Yes, Bebe.”

“And Dr. Bansal?”

Baba Singh pulled a vial of mint extract from his pocket. “He sent this for your stomach pains. He said it would help.”

“So much kindness here,” she murmured, adjusting in her reed chair. She did not look well.

“We had kindness at home,” Baba Singh muttered.

“Has anyone heard from Ajmer?” Desa asked. Their parents had been trying to discourage her, but she still hoped for a wedding.

None of them responded, but Lal, who had been half asleep in his chair, opened his eyes. His opium pipe sent up thin tendrils of smoke.

“What about my goats?” Kiran demanded. “No one ever tells me about them.”

“Enough about your goats,” Khushwant said. “They were never yours.”

“Is it so difficult for you to be nice to each other?” Harpreet asked. She seemed about to launch into a scolding, but instead exhaled with frustration. She flicked her wrist, giving up. “Just be nice.”

“Bebeji,” Ranjit said, his eyes widening.

“Hmm?” She rested her hand over her abdomen and leaned her head back.

“Bebe,” Ranjit said again, staring at the floor.

She leaned her head over the arm of her chair and saw what he was looking at. “I did not even feel that,” she said quietly, her face suddenly twisting in pain as she dropped the doctor’s vial.

Moisture had soaked her
kameez
pantaloons, and a puddle of water mixed with something deeply red had formed beneath her chair.

~   ~   ~

The mood was hushed in the aftermath. It was over now. The children were still in the lobby, huddled together, helpless. Even Ranjit. Lal had moved more quickly than any of them could have hoped. He got Harpreet to a charpoy in one of the farthest back rooms and then summoned the midwife, who arrived not an hour later from her village. Even then, it had not been enough.

“I thought she was just getting a little fat,” Khushwant said miserably.

“Where did the baby come from?” Kiran asked, frightened. Avani sat silently beside her, elephant in hand.

“From God,” Desa replied, her face wet with tears.

“Where did the baby go?”

“Back to God. With Bebe.”

“Where is God?”

“Bebeji said that he is everywhere.”

Kiran’s expression turned fierce. “Then we should look for them. We should look everywhere.”

Desa pulled her sister close and again began to cry.

Lal had taken the bodies away. He had not spoken much since the night before when the sound of his wife’s screams had drained the color from his face. And in the morning, when it was over, he had lifted Harpreet and the baby off the bloodied bed, wrapped them in a clean sheet, and carried them to Harpind, his cloak pulled tightly around him as much for the brisk morning air as for the chill of anguish, his knees bent under the weight of his burden.

Baba Singh had watched his father leave town, unable to follow.

Lal returned the next morning with family. Aunts, uncles, and cousins made the pilgrimage from Harpind to Amarpur, holding aloft the two bodies, now cleansed and purified, arranged on a pyre. In a procession down Suraj Road, wearing the white color of mourning, Lal somberly led the way to the hotel. They set Harpreet and the baby down in the lobby to pray over them. They spread out on the floor like newborn puppies, wailing, blinded by heartache, snuggling against one another for comfort.

When the priests arrived for the prayer, Lal had refused to allow them into the hotel as would have been customary, forcing everyone to seek solace from God in the temple. “God cannot enter here,” he told the priests. “Take Him elsewhere.” And when the family left for the gurdwara, Lal did not go with them.

The entryway of Amarpur’s gurdwara was littered with chappals and shoes. Baba Singh hesitated, not wanting to enter. He looked up at the building, at the small golden dome above the door, a Sikh flag draped beneath on which was printed the image of a circular disc and two swords crossed beneath, like Yashji’s swords. Finally, about to kick off his own sandals, he was stopped by two of his cousins who had come from Harpind.

“Do not go in there,” one of them said. “Come with us.” It was Ishwar, faithful and always serious. He was Baba Singh’s age, but he looked older now.

“Where?”

“Just come,” said the other, Tejinder with the missing front tooth. He looked different, too.

Baba Singh followed them around the side of the building toward the back where Ranjit was already waiting for them. The muffled sound of prayer came from inside as the priest read from the holy book. They could hear people crying.

“What are we doing here?” Baba Singh asked.

“Ask them,” Ranjit said.

Ishwar shrugged. “Too much crying inside, don’t you think so? It is better here.” He suddenly grinned. “We have not seen you both in ages. I was just thinking, do you remember when Tejinder fell after running from that ghost in the cotton field.”

“Oi!” Tejinder pointed at Baba Singh, pressing his tongue through the gap in his teeth. “You were the one making those noises.”

Ranjit smiled. “You should have seen how scared you were.”

Baba Singh also smiled. “Bebeji was so mad when she found out. Apparently, Sharan Uncle heard me, too, and ran off for a day thinking he was cursed.”

They laughed.

“Bebe was only pretending anger,” Ranjit said. “She was trying not to laugh.”

“Your mother was good that way,” Ishwar replied, leaving them all silent.

The last time Baba Singh saw his mother, Lal was pushing her pyre into the Ravi River. She was a white, undulating sheet of curves, angles, and shadows, the shape of a baby at her breast. And then his father set fire to her with a torch, and she was consumed by flames. Baba Singh watched her speed away with the current, dusk changing the light into tongued streaks of pink and orange.

In the silence at the hotel, after their family had returned to Harpind, the smell of death crept under the door from the room where Harpreet died. In the confusion and grief, no one had gone to clear it out and wash it down. Lal now ignored it. He took his opium pipe and retreated to his own room, the one he had once shared with his wife. The children were made queasy by the odor and looked desperately to Ranjit. Baba Singh would never know how his brother was able to do it, how he gathered the sheets in a single sweep of his arms, how he bunched up the white material caked with blood and rushed them outside to bury next to the dead dog.