English Lessons and Other Stories
Read English Lessons and Other Stories Online
Authors: Shauna Singh Baldwin
Tags: #FIC029000, FIC019000
Critical Acclaim for
English Lessons and Other Stories
1996
Friends of American Writers Award
“Baldwin's prose is precise, nuanced and sensual. She threads her stories with ravishing glints of colour that explode against the pallid landscape of Canada.” â
Toronto Star
“Each of these superb short stories shuttles between the intricate threads of family, the rich sturdy fabric of ancient Indian tradition, and the somewhat more ready-to-wear culture of North America” â
The Georgia Straight
“Positions and postures are finely drawnâ¦. Every detail is for a purposeâ¦. Always present is a lively, active, questioning spirit.” â
Books in Canada
“Baldwin presents a kaleidoscope of issues: the clash of cultures, sexual, social, racial and religious chauvinism, ancient enmities, generational misunderstandings, the stressful adjustments of immigrants.” â
The Chronicle Herald
“
English Lessons and Other Stories
chronicles the vicious circle of Indian women attempting to balance traditional roles with views and lifestyles outside their inherited gender and homeland.” â
The National Post
“Singh Baldwin writes with a restrained passion which describes the friction between East and West, traditional and modern.” â
The Asian Age
“A writer from an ethnic minority who writes frankly about his or her community takes enormous risks. It is to Shauna Singh Baldwin's credit that she has been unafraid to step on a few toes⦠Baldwin's prose is precise, nuanced and sensual.
She threads her stories with ravishing glints of colour that explode against the pallid landscape of Canada.”
â Toronto Star
Other books by SHAUNA SINGH BALDWIN
We Are Not in Pakistan
(2007)
The Tiger Claw
(2004)
What the Body Remembers
(1999)
A Foreign Visitor's Survival Guide to America
(Co-author, 1992)
Reader's Guide Edition
SHAUNA SINGH BALDWIN
With an afterword by KULDIP GILL
Copyright © 1996 by Shauna Singh Baldwin.
Copyright © 2007 by Vichar.
Vichar is a division of Shauna Baldwin Associates, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright).
To contact Access Copyright, visit
www.accesscopyright.ca
or call 1-800-893-5777.
Edited by Laurel Boone.
Cover and interior page design by Julie Scriver.
Cover image: PhotosIndia Photography, copyright Veer.
Printed in Canada on 100% PCW paper.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Baldwin, Shauna Singh, 1962-
English lessons and other stories / Shauna Singh Baldwin.
â Reader's guide ed.
ISBN 978-0-86492-510-7
1. Women immigrants â Fiction. I. Title.
PS8553.A4493E53 2008Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â C813'.54Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â C2008-900169-9
Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the New Brunswick department of Wellness, Culture and Sport for its publishing activities.
Goose Lane Editions
Suite 330, 500 Beaverbrook Court
Fredericton, New Brunswick
CANADA E3B 5X4
Look not at my finger,
Look where I am pointing
â author unknown
Acknowledgements
for
English Lessons Reader's Guide Edition
This book began from
Sunno! (Listen)
, “the East-Indian American Radio Show where you don't have to be Indian to listen,” an audio magazine I produced and hosted for three years on WYMS in Milwaukee. My thanks to listeners who called and asked me to write more stories to be read on air. Among the many people who helped me with this book, my special thanks go to Dr. Marilyn M. Levine, Pegi Taylor, and my husband David Baldwin, for many hours of philosophical discussion about these stories.
My late grandfather, Sardar Bahadur Sarup Singh, was the oral storyteller behind “Rawalpindi 1919,” which first appeared in
Rosebud
magazine. My parents' experience in Canada was inspiration for “Montreal 1962,” and I thank the editors of
Hum
and
Fireweed
, where it first appeared. For their Punjabi maxims, translated and included in these stories, I thank the real Ma Dropadi, and Atma Singh. For research assistance in India, I am indebted to Ena Singh. For research assistance and hospitality in Canada, my thanks to Satinder and Bea Singh. For their encouragement, I thank writers Anjana Appachana, Bapsi Sidhwa, Robert Olen Butler and Chris Loken. Many thanks to Madhu Kishwar and her staff at
Manushi Magazine: A Journal about Women and Society in India
, where “English Lessons,” “A Pair of Ears,” and
“Simran” first appeared in print; to the editors of
Cream City Review
, who nominated “Family Ties” for a Pushcart Prize; and to
Calyx
, where “Jassie” was first published. After winning the 1995 Writers' Union of Canada Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers, “Jassie” also appeared in
Books in Canada
. For their faith in me, I am always grateful to the late Bibiji Sukhwant Kaur, Sardar Kishen Singh and Sardarni Raminder Sarup Singh. For her exact editing, my grateful appreciation to Laurel Boone at goose Lane Editions.
 Shauna Singh Baldwin
Milwaukee
Whole wheat flour and water. Not just any flour will do either, she thought. He is very particular about that. Choudhary Amir Singh would dine on simple fare, but the first chapatti must be made from the wheat of his own mills and it must come from the hands of the mother of his sons â Sardarni Sahib herself.
It seems warmer than usual, she thought, as her fingers moulded and formed the dough, knuckling into it, brown soft hands suppling it, readying it as she had made her sons ready. And for what, she thought. The elder a poet. Gentle and kind but no businessman. What would he make of the flour mill? Now the younger one, he's more worldly. Twenty-one years old and Choudhary Sahib had found no bride worthy of him â yet.
She made a ball of the dough⦠patting⦠patting⦠smoothing the wet, glistening gold-flecked ball. Now dig a small ball out of the large one. Cut it apart from the whole. Now shape it, roll it between the palms. She looked at the small ball cradled in her hand. At this stage, she could still return it to the large ball and no damage would be apparent. She could knead it back and it would blend again.
But this idea, who knows where it came from. This idea that her boy could go to Vilayat, to the white people's country, to
learn from their gurus in their dark and cloudy cities â her youngest â and then return to Rawalpindi, and his people would know no difference. She shook her head. Hai toba!
It will be different in three years, she thought. Today Choudhary Amir Singh washes his hands after shake-hand with an Angrez, the collector with the brown topi and the red face. But Sarup is a friendly boy and he will have Angrez boys as friends and he will learn the shake-hand instead of our no-polluting palms-together Sat Sri Akal.
A little flour on the ball now. Just a dusting. Enough to swirl the ball between her thumbs and the first two fingers of her hands. Round and round, faster and faster, flatter and flatter, larger and larger, thinner and thinner.
He would look thinner after three years. She tried to imagine him. They would expect him to tie his beard, his long dark beard, up under his chin. She would be sure he had enough turbans to last two months on the boat and three years in Inglaand. Some silk ones â oh, the brightest colours â so the Angrez would know he came from a bold Sikh clan. But he would be thinner, with no woman to cook chapattis. Sardar Baldev Singh had been to London, and he had told her he had eaten only boiled food with not a single chilli all the time. Perhaps he said it as an excuse for his appetite on his return, but she'd noticed even quite high-up Angrez were thin. It must be their food. Sarup would never become used to that.
She rolled the chapatti with a rolling pin, picked it up and deftly slapped it from one palm to the other. Then whoosh â onto the tava over the coal fire. She steadied the tava with one hand, and, with a small rag in the other hand, rotated the chapatti till it was almost cooked.
But perhaps there were other customs he would get used to. He had already, she knew, bought an English book to read, now it was agreed he would be studying in Vilayat. She had seen it
and it had an Englishwoman and a man in a black English suit on the outside. They were kissing, but Sarup told her it was a classic, like the story of Roop-Basant. He said all the English stories like “Roop-Basant” are written down, and in Imperial College, there were even people whose only study was to learn those stories. This one was called
Thelma,
he said. It was written by a woman called Marri Corrilli. Now how could this be, that a woman would write such a fat book. But maybe she was a poor woman who could not afford to get a munshi to write down her thoughts.
She took the chapatti off the tava. Quick, snatch the tava off the fire and replace it with the chapatti. She watched as the chapatti rose into a hot-air-filled dough balloon. Just at its peak she lifted it from the fire and set it on the ground on a steel thali to cool.
It was the thali that brought it to mind. Angrez don't use steel thalis. They use white plates. They don't use the chapatti, breaking off a small piece to scoop up their food. They use sharp forks and long knives â straight ones, not curved like our kirpans â to keep themselves distant from their food. He will have to learn that.
And as she rose from her haunches to pick up the thali and covered her head with her chunni in preparation for entering her husband's presence, she decided to talk with him about it. She moved to the doorway and stepped over the wooden threshold.
“Ay, Ji,” she said. She would not bring him misfortune by using his name.
Choudhary Amir Singh looked up from the divan and cushions on the floor.
“You will need to buy chairs for this house when he returns,” she said. “And we will need plates.”
In the dark at night you came close and your voice was a whisper though there is no one here to wake. “They said I could have the job if I take off my turban and cut my hair short.” You did not have to say it. I saw it in your face as you took off your new coat and galoshes. I heard their voices in my head as I looked at the small white envelopes I have left in the drawer, each full of one more day's precious dollars â the last of your savings and my dowry. Mentally, I converted dollars to rupees and thought how many people in India each envelope could feed for a month.