Darshan (50 page)

Shifting his gaze from Elizabeth to Mohan, Darshan asked his brother, “How did you know where to find us?”

“I inquired, here and there,” Mohan replied, relaxing into his chair, releasing his beard. “You are doing very well here, I see.” He regarded Manmohan and Jai, the reflected streaks of light in his sunglasses like admonitions.

“Yes,” murmured Lehna.

Smiling now, Mohan opened his arms expansively. “It is good to see everyone after so much time apart.”

Manmohan rose slowly and with great effort, and then he left the room. Jai stood to follow him, as did Livleen and Elizabeth.

“Wait,” Mohan said weakly, the scorn in his expression faltering, but they were already gone. His eyes lingered on the hallway down which they had disappeared, becoming thoughtful. “A wife like that will only ever make you sandwiches,” he told Darshan.

Navpreet snickered.

“Lehna will do whatever I ask,” he said, placing a meaty hand over his wife’s knee.

Lehna lowered her eyes, and Navpreet’s smile faded.

“Why did you come?” Darshan asked. “You must have known that Bapu and Bebe would not want to see you?”

“I thought time might have erased some things.”

“What did you do to make them hate you so much?”

“I was not what they expected me to be,” Mohan said, taking off his glasses, flinching at the word
hate
, his eyes more tired than disdainful.

“I met a man in India,” Darshan told him. “A pundit. I ran away. I was unhappy.”

His brother’s eyebrows lifted with interest, and he again glanced down the hallway. “Bapu is not easy to please.”

Darshan hesitated, ashamed, then said, “The pundit told me that you could help me with something.”

Mohan polished his glasses on the hem of his shirt. Tucking them in his front pocket, he took his wife by the elbow and forced her to stand. “You should not believe him,” he replied, signaling to his children that he was ready to go. “He was a charlatan.”

A Baptism & a Kirtan

1976–1978

Family Tree

An atlas was open on the kitchen table to a map of what was now India. Two northern divisions were shaded a darker brown, illustrating what had been lost. The detached segments. Pakistan and Bangladesh. A mug of tea with too much milk and not enough ginger was getting cold beside the map. Another pot was brewing on the stove, this time to get it right, to make it taste like Jai’s.

“She will be back soon,” Darshan told his father, grating more ginger.

The tea simmered. Manmohan hunched over the map, his reading glasses pinching the tip of his wide nose. He traced his finger along the border of Pakistan and India, stopping at Amritsar where Jai and the girls were now. “Your mother has never traveled without me,” he said tersely.

“Only a few weeks more.”

“Add a little pepper. I cannot smell enough pepper.”

Darshan seasoned the water with more pepper, then returned the grinder to the cupboard where Jai kept her spices.

His mother had taken the girls to meet a young man named Sarabjit Dindral. Sarabjit was from a well-established family of North Indian politicians and lawyers on intimate terms with Manmohan and Jai’s Berkeley acquaintances, the Attwals. By the tone and tenor of Sarabjit’s letters it was clear that he was expressive, poetic, and courteous. Also well connected, of appropriate birth, and wealthy Manmohan had therefore begun negotiations with the Dindral family. Terms and conditions set, Sarabjit had then offered a proposal, and—based on such an abundance of considerably excellent criteria—Navpreet had consented to marry him.

“Why are you doing this?” Darshan had asked her, thinking it an odd and unsuitable choice for his sister, disposed to spend her life with a man she had never met, at the mercy of the unknown, prey to the conservative sentiments of Indian culture that so often held women inferior. “I know you have met others.”

“Yes, they were fun,” she admitted wistfully, forcing the zipper closed on her suitcase. “But all of them were American. That was your mistake. No one likes you anymore, Darshan. They speak unkindly about you.”

“That is not a reason to get married.”

Filling another suitcase with gifts for her betrothed’s family—American cookies, sticks of deodorant, and packets of Big Red chewing gum—she had laughed at him. “Maybe Bebe taught Elizabeth how to prepare curries and roll out perfectly circular rotis. Maybe your American wife goes to temple dressed like us. But what you did will always be an insult.”

Navpreet’s words, even after a year of marriage, rang with a very unpleasant truth. Since their wedding, Elizabeth had made generous attempts to assimilate. She helped Jai in the Lion of India’s kitchen where she could interact with family friends and relations. She drove Manmohan to his doctor’s appointments. She initiated the paperwork for the family’s United States citizenship, sharing her research on the complex bureaucratic process with others who needed assistance. In every way available to her, she had tried to learn and adopt the gradations of Sikh culture, but the caustic murmurs and contemptuous looks of disapproval were unrelenting.

“Too much pepper,” his father said, sniffing the air.

Darshan inhaled the steam. “Taste it first.”

“I do not have to.”

Sighing, Darshan dumped the pot of tea into the sink and started again, adding fresh water and sprinkling in whole, shelled cardamom and ground clove.

Manmohan swung the large atlas cover shut. “It is a different world now.” He removed his glasses, seeming to contemplate the simplicity of the notion. “No,” he said, after a moment’s reconsideration. “The world is the same. It is us who have changed in different directions.”

The water slowly began to bubble. Darshan turned down the heat and added the milk.

“Your mother has never traveled without me,” Manmohan said again, turning in his chair to watch the tea, and Darshan realized he was not worried for her. He was worried for himself. She had never once abandoned him. As the world changed, she had always gone with him. And that was everything.

~   ~   ~

A flood of color whispered and rustled throughout the ballroom of the Sir Francis Drake hotel as guests arrived in saris and turbans for the reception in honor of Navpreet and Sarabjit’s arrival to San Francisco as a newly married couple. A table at the entrance was stacked high with gifts: jewelry, kitchenware, small appliances, bedding. Navpreet was at the head table, hair coifed, makeup thick like her face had been chiseled from stone. Stiffly, she looked around the hall, unforgiving, eyes finally resting with revulsion upon her husband sitting beside her.

Sarabjit’s eyebrows were rectangular masses of thick hair, erratic and wiry wisps cased around a set of beady eyes. His shoulders were thin and weak, as was his neck, which strained to hold up both head and turban. His two front teeth were overly large, angled in opposite directions, leaving a wide gap through which he absently poked his tongue. He was grinning now, his crooked and jagged teeth adding a measure of childish joy incongruous to his currently regrettable circumstances, which were clear to everyone in the ballroom.

People deliberately looked away, discomfited by the animosity between the couple, distracting themselves with a buffet of biryani, tandoori chicken, spiced yogurt, and naan. Soon the room was full of chatter, and the hired musicians began a set of Indian love songs. To forestall further embarrassment, Darshan followed his mother to the table with an expansive and congratulatory smile.

Before he could say anything, however, Navpreet asked indignantly, “Do you see him? Look at him.”

“Navpreet!” Jai hissed quietly.

“He knows what he looks like, a hideous fresh-off-the-boat nobody.”

Darshan blocked her from view. “Stop it,” he said firmly.

“Stupid FOB.”

Sarabjit smiled feebly. Darshan wished he would at least keep his lips closed to cover his teeth. It was a smile of humiliation, but it looked as if he were idiotically in agreement with her.

Sarabjit politely tapped Navpreet’s shoulder. She spun around to face him. “What?”

“Why did you bring me here?” he asked quietly, no longer smiling. “I was happy in India.”

“Because it was too late to walk away. Because it was so obvious you needed help, and I did something for you. I brought you to America, where maybe, if someone like me helped you, you could be somebody.”

“I already am somebody,” he replied.

She violently pushed back her chair, lifting the hem of her lavender sari to reveal two-inch heels and newly manicured feet. Jai shoved her back down into her seat. “You will stay here,” she told her daughter resolutely. “You will finish this.”

Darshan looked feebly at his brother-in-law.

“She has been like this since our wedding night,” Sarabjit said. “I should not have come.”

~   ~   ~

The city was a wet, gray drizzle. People huddled under bus awnings, gloom on their faces as moisture seeped under their clothes and shivered their skin. Darshan felt sorry for them all, for their lack of spirit. He smiled at them as he and Elizabeth hiked up Terra Vista toward the studio, cheerful, his thoughts full of his future, of the wonderful life that awaited him. Shifting his bag of groceries onto his hip, he took Elizabeth’s hand and kissed her fingers.

“I can take it if it’s too heavy,” he offered, nodding at the jug of milk she carried.

“It’s only milk,” she said, smiling.

“You’re a little pale.”

“Just light-headed.”

“Then I’ll open up the bed—”

“Darshan,” she said, looking at their stoop, at the luggage sprawled up and down the length of the stairs. Navpreet sat mournfully in the center of it. She trembled against the cold, toes pointed inward, elbows digging into her knees, chin in her palms.

She rose as they approached, carefully wiping her trousers with the tissue she had laid on the cement beneath her bottom. “I forgot my umbrella,” she said.

Elizabeth warily assessed the number of bags piled on the landing. “Navpreet…”

Balling the tissue in her fist, Navpreet said, “I’m getting divorced. I moved out.”

Darshan hesitated, absorbing the implications of this latest drama. Slowly, he waded past his sister up the stairs, stepping over the luggage.

“So soon?”

“Three months too late.”

“You should have called first,” he said, unlocking the door.

“I don’t have to call first,” she said, piqued. “I’m getting a divorce.”

“You can’t stay here.”

“Of course I can—”

“There isn’t room.”

“I can’t stay with Bapu and Bebe. They will hate me when they hear. I have nowhere else to go.”

Elizabeth clutched the milk jug with both hands. “It isn’t a good time.”

“How can you say that? This is important.”

Elizabeth glanced momentarily at Darshan, her lips pinched inward. He nodded in resignation to tell her she might as well share the news. “I’m pregnant,” she said.

Navpreet’s mouth parted in astonishment, and then she groaned.

“This is a chance for you to start over,” Darshan told her. “Focus on your medical studies. You’re nearly done.”

“Don’t make me go to Bapu and Bebe,” Navpreet mumbled. “They don’t want me. They never wanted me.”

“That isn’t true.”

“Please,” she said, her head hung. “Please can I stay?”

“Just for tonight.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” Navpreet admitted morosely. “Sarabjit kicked me out. They won’t forgive that. They can’t forgive divorce. It’s much worse than what you did.” She pushed her hair back away from her face with both hands. “Forget it.” She grabbed two of her bags and heaved them down the steps.

When Elizabeth, concern creasing her brow, moved to follow her, Darshan pulled her back. “She is always carrying on. I’ll call her a cab, but the rest is her problem. For once she should sort out her own mess.”

~   ~   ~

There was a house on the coast, large and flawless, its edges tight and beautiful. Babies would be born there, an endless line of generations secured within its walls, warmed by the fire crackling in the hearth, the auburn light reflecting the curvature of tiny sleeping bodies. A mother and father would pass time in cushioned chairs, legs tucked snuggly under throws, watching these babies grow, laughter in their eyes as the little ones danced and messed about with their games and whims. The bathtubs would be playgrounds where creatures of rubber would float as the children spun stories, splashing and puddling the tiled floor. Forts made of sofa cushions would be erected in the great expanse of bedrooms and living rooms, and would then crumble under a new game, a new discovery of imagination. The smell of savories would rise from the kitchen stove, pots glowing with the warmth of nourishment. There would be gifts and parties in this house, celebrations of first teeth and first steps, graduations and farewells.

Outside, from the west, a summer fog rolled in off the Pacific in a massive, low-lying spool. It unfurled down the hills to the east, inching nearer to the house, absorbing sound and claiming sight. In the driveway a station wagon huddled underneath the oppressive, hanging mist, its rusted metal shape blurred as the fog crept nearer, thickening. Condensation seeped into the wood at the edge of the driveway, but the house was insulated against such chills, protected by the skilled hands that had built it.

This was their house.

It was slightly visible in the distance from where they stood on the beach, the fog finally dissipating for the day. Darshan regarded it, this labor of his, his back to the ocean, the setting sun warming his neck as the soft but bitter winds chilled his body. The sensations of hot and cold gave him life and made him proud. In his arms he held a baby, wrapped against the elements. His baby. He called her Sonya and kissed her wrinkled head as her face contorted in tears because the world outside the womb was harsh.

She had been baptized in the Irish Catholic tradition, anointed with the sacred oils of Christ, assurances of heaven crossed upon her forehead. Her Indian grandparents had been sobered by the experience, skeptical of Christ’s oils, of biblical prayer and blessing. Nonetheless they had risen to stand beside their Irish relatives, called upon to recognize this infant as one of their own, the progeny of their progeny to be saved in the eyes of the Lord.