Darshan (8 page)

“Mr. Grewal was just murdered,” Ranjit said breathlessly. He stood in the doorway, gripping both sides of the frame.

Baba Singh froze.

“The town is gathered on Suraj Road now,” his brother said. “The police have arrested Dr. Bansal.”

Stunned, Baba Singh asked, “The doctor?”

Desa sat on the charpoy next to Baba Singh. “Has everyone gone crazy?” She licked a tear from her lip. “He didn’t have to do it. We all knew it upset him, that he had some personal attachment to you.”

“What do you mean?” Baba Singh asked, his eyes flashing about the room.

“Yashji says it was because Dr. Bansal blamed Mr. Grewal for ruining our lives,” Khushwant said sadly, sitting on his own charpoy and curling his feet under his legs.

“Yashji?”

“Baba, you don’t look well,” Ranjit said, stepping forward.

“Dr. Bansal would not have done something like that,” Baba Singh said, trembling. He started to stand. “We should go tell the police before they take him away.”

“No,” Desa said, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. “Enough has happened today.”

“But I know he did not do it.”

“Yashji thinks so,” Ranjit said. “The doctor was very outspoken about his views on moneylenders.”

“The doctorji never spoke about moneylenders.”

“He often told Yashji it was the most evil of professions, and that he would like to put Mr. Grewal out of business.”

“We did not ask for this kind of help,” Desa said.

Baba Singh looked around beseechingly. “Everyone is leaving.”

“It’s okay, Baba,” Khushwant said, moving to kneel before his brother and taking his shaking hands. “Not all of us are gone. We are still here.”

~   ~   ~

Yashbir was not in his shop.

Baba Singh whirled around. He had not slept well and was groggy. He wondered if he was still sleeping. The metal objects blurred around him as though under water. His shoulder was sore. Khushwant had squeezed it, trying to wake him because he had thrashed about on his charpoy all night. His back was sticky with salty sweat.

Attempting to call out, he choked on his words. “Yashji?” he said only slightly louder than a whisper. “Yashji, I need to ask you something.”

He fumbled his way through the shop to Yashbir’s apartment, hesitating beneath the swords. There was a truth—a truth he could not decipher because of the nebulous shape of it. But the swords helped to steady his nerves because they held within their decorative hilts and polished blades the promise to protect him, to slice through his fear so that he could handle whatever it was he could not yet see.

“Yashji? Are you here?”

He leaned into the curtain, listening, but heard nothing. Pulling it aside, he saw that the room was nothing like he had imagined. No silk bedding, no hand-carved furniture, no ornate, engraved decorative metal plates. Only a simple charpoy on which was spread a thin mat and wool blanket. There was a wooden chair in the corner with no padding. And despite Yashbir’s liking for all things artistic, there was no display of artwork. It was an ascetic’s apartment, genuine and without pretence.

Not sure any longer why he had come in search of the blacksmith, Baba Singh released the curtain. On his way out, he paused in the middle of the room and lightly touched the handle of the sledgehammer that rested upside down against the anvil. It was like an object he had never touched before. It did not belong to him.

“Baba?” Yashbir said, entering the shop. He appeared harried, as though he had been running. Moisture ran down his temples from beneath his turban.

Baba Singh slowly moved his hand away from the sledgehammer. “What is it?”

Yashbir opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out.

“Something has happened,” Baba Singh said, his tone flat. “I know.”

“Yes,” Yashbir replied, moving closer. “Something has.”

Baba Singh wanted to step away but did not dare move.

“It is the doctor,” said the blacksmith. “I thought you had gone there this morning. I was looking for you.”

“They already told me, what he did to the moneylender.”

Yashbir seemed relieved. “Yes, that is right.” He took another step closer, his eyes sympathetic. “I know the doctor was your friend.”

Baba Singh nodded, then shook his head. “No, he
is
my friend.”

“You have to forget it now,” Yashbir said.

“But he didn’t do it.”

“He
did
, Baba.”

“You
know
the doctor. He is your friend, too.”

The blacksmith moved yet closer. “I spoke with him before they took him. He told me everything.”

Eyes wide, Baba Singh shuddered. “He confessed?”

Yashbir knelt and regarded the boy. “What do you remember?”

“I don’t know. I remember waiting.” That was all. He felt like he was still waiting.

“The evidence they found was strong,” Yashbir said. “There is no doubt.”

“What evidence?”

The old man’s face took on a severe quality. “Packages to his mother. A number of them.”

Baba Singh looked at Yashbir, his heart like a slingshot in his chest. “But you know that I—”

The blacksmith shook his head and reached out his hand. “You are a good boy, Baba. You always did your job. The doctor made that very clear.”

Baba Singh slumped on the edge of the anvil. “Where did they take him?”

“To a prison post in Amritsar.”

“What will happen to him there?”

“I do not know, Baba,” Yashbir said sadly. “Perhaps it is best you do not think of it.”

“I want to see him.”

“He does not want that,” the blacksmith said, wiping some dirt from Baba Singh’s cheek with a firm thumb. “He is not a bad man, Baba. Mistakes were made, and now he only wants us all to move on. We should listen to him.”

~   ~   ~

Dr. Bansal’s shop was looted. Baba Singh himself had gone inside to check under the counter in the futile hope of finding one more final ladoo-packed apology intended for Mrs. Bansal. He shoved aside papers and journals, patient logs and empty vials, but he found nothing. Perhaps someone else had taken it, had eaten every single ladoo, munching on an apology that was powerless yet nonetheless spoke of unparalleled and unrequited love.

Eventually the shop was shuttered, and after a time, fueled by gossip, the building gained a reputation for being unlucky. By 1912 the doctor’s story had acquired a tinge of myth. He was the eccentric protagonist—the fallen hero—in a fascinating tale of intrigue that residents recounted while shopping in the open market or while eating lunch at the temple. Soon, however, the growing outrage at the British taxes and racial tensions between Indians and their white oppressors overshadowed the doctor’s misfortune. And then Dr. Bansal was forgotten entirely—by everyone except Baba Singh—as new waves of protest flooded the north.

More recruiters entered town in search of potential nationalists, of desolate and outraged men willing to do anything for their freedom. They brought with them a feeling of revolution. Ranjit had been expecting them. He had been quiet in the months since his empty return, and Baba Singh later understood this was because his brother did not wish to be a presence in their lives, that he had known all along once these men came, he would leave again, that he would go with them.

“You will not go,” Desa said flatly, snatching away the empty burlap bag Ranjit opened to pack his things.

He gently pried it from her fingers and put it on the lobby table. “I’m sorry, Desa,” he said, a fanatic patriotism making his eyes flash. He began to fill the bag with items he had organized on the table: a comb for his black beard and long hair, an extra kurta from the tailor, a pair of trousers, and Avani’s hand-painted wooden elephant.

“Stop it,” she said angrily, reaching for his things.

He brushed her hands aside. “When I was away, I met a man,” he told her. “I had not eaten for several days and my clothes were torn. I had not bathed in weeks. I told him what happened to Kiran and Avani. He gave me money and told me his plans against the British, against all the horrible things that are happening here and to Indians abroad. He said that even if I could not save them I could save others, that together we can stand up and do something.”

“Fighting is for cowards,” Baba Singh said.

“Come with me, Baba,” Ranjit said, stuffing Avani’s elephant into the top of the bag. “You will see it differently. You will see what I have seen.”

Desa stood protectively beside Baba Singh and Khushwant. “If you will be stupid, then be stupid alone. They are too young.”

Baba Singh pointed at the elephant. “That is not yours.”

Ranjit cinched the bag. “It is not yours either.”

“It is more mine than yours. You know that.”

“You gave it to her. It was hers.”

Baba Singh’s voice rose. “You are just running away. It is not brave.”

“Baba, there is something terrible happening out there.” Ranjit pointed at the hotel’s entrance. “They beat us. They call us names and take our land while we try to make a life in our own country. They send us away to other places, places very far from our families so that we can farm
their
land and clean
their
buildings. But when we showed them that we were hard workers and smart people, they got scared and beat us again. Sikhs suffer the most because of our turbans and our beards. They do not understand who we are, that we are a proud people. Guru Gobind Singh fought so we could have rights and freedom. He asked us to wear turbans, not to cut our beards so that we could be seen and respected. He said that we are warriors and that we should fight when attacked. We cannot ignore this.”

“Give me the elephant, Ranjit.”

A shadow passed across his brother’s face, dampening his zeal. He threw the bag over his shoulder. “I spoke to the tailor. My job is yours.”

And then the mighty champion splash maker was gone, gone on a two-hour train ride to Amritsar and then four days to Calcutta. Calcutta, where there were coconuts and coconut wallahs lopping open hard, green shells.

After that, Baba Singh did not know.

~   ~   ~

There was a two-year lull, a time when malevolent spirits slumbered. Most of it was a glow of color, of golds and reds, of grays and greens, hues of passing seasons. Though the nights were a heavy burden of recurring nightmares, Baba Singh could nonetheless recall a measure of contentment during the period from 1912 to 1914. As the monotonous days accumulated—a cyclical sequence of work with the tailor, then with Yashbir—it seemed an end of loss, no more pieces threatening to go missing.

Silence and smoke emanated from underneath Lal Singh’s door, becoming odd comforts to Baba Singh for their regularity, their seeming permanence. It was enough, after all that had happened, to have that much. And he had Yashbir, who was a great source of selfless and dutiful reassurance, ready with a soothing word whenever Baba Singh expressed doubt and confusion, whenever his nightmares—of being alone and in danger—leaked into the daylight hours.

He and Desa spent most of their free time watching Khushwant and his friends dance bhangra, cheering when the performers spun about yelling “Brrrrrrrahhhh!” Their brother’s twelve-year-old body was lithe, his movements practiced as his troupe prepared for the annual Basant festival to celebrate the harvest. They whirled around in a blur of color, wearing the bright red, purple, green, and blue kurta pajama outfits donated by the tailor.

Baba Singh often laughed while watching them, trying to conjure a joy he did not feel. Laughter ceased the tugging in his mind, the image of Mr. Grewal’s spectacles that sliced through his thoughts and jolted him with fear, and also his intense longing for Ranjit to come home. Laughter meant he could forget, and so, for a time, he made a habit of it—both of the laughing and the forgetting.

A new moneylender had claimed Mr. Grewal’s territory, the many-headed beast unremitting and somewhat daring in the face of the increased peasant disquiet. Resentment toward the heavy-fisted British escalated. Terrorist organizations commingled with and incited the tired, abused poor; there was talk around Amarpur of regaining control of stolen farmland. But this turbulence of the outer world did not affect the Toors during those two years. They ate well, dining on subzees and rotis flavored with onions, salt, and mustard seed, and tapped their feet in time with the music, dancing and laughing, until it was no longer possible to ignore.

Reports of an incident on the
Komagata Maru
, a Japanese liner transporting Indian passengers, flooded Amarpur in 1914, a roaring swell of news that left the region staggering with rage. The passengers, many of them Sikh, were refused entry into Canada. The Canadian Prime Minister, concerned his country and culture would be suffocated by the large influx of Indian immigrants, would not allow more Indians into the country. He had dispatched the liner back to Asia where it was then declined in both Hong Kong and Singapore. The passengers disembarked in Calcutta where the British then ordered them on a train back home to the Punjab. The Sikh passengers dissented, refusing to be shuttled around like children without rights. They marched in protest, holding their holy book aloft. The police, employing no other recourse, had fired on those unarmed men, killing many.

The incident was followed not long after by another wave of recruiters, and the return, once more, of Ranjit. He had been to San Francisco in America, where a group of Indians had gathered and organized to protest the sort of global racism demonstrated during the incident of the
Komagata Maru
.

“We are trying to stop it,” he said, sipping tea Desa had made. “I will not stay long, just for a moment. A party leader named Rashbehari Bose will be coming north to Amritsar. We are organized and ready, but there is much still to do.”

“Are you expected to save the world?” Baba Singh asked, his tone mocking. “What little thing can you do?” There was still too much anger. He did not want to be so ruthlessly forced to be reminded of what had been lost. He did not want to always have to hold this constant sense of dread at bay.