English Lessons and Other Stories (12 page)

“I'm trying.”

“Wait till we get off the GT Road — the climb to Shimla is fabulous. You'll love it.”

A rose-silver dawn edged out the dark and Janet peered at the parched barren flatness of the north Indian plain. A slow tickle of sweat began its daily crawl at her temples. Soon, the sun knifed the sky and a fine dust jetted from the car's useless air conditioner and began to settle thick on her contact lenses. She leaned forward and turned it off. Arvind had begun another lesson in Indian history.

“We're passing through Panipat. Three battles were fought on those fields.” He pointed, but all she could see were roadside
shacks, three-wheeled tempos carrying loads cloaked in jute bags, men on bicycles, always more bicycles. She rolled down the window, unfettering the hot breath of May; it flattened her into the black vinyl.

“Want some sun screen?” She offered him the plastic tube she'd thought to buy at Shoppers Drug Mart; Arvind waved it away as he wove the car between plodding bullock carts and listing, vomit-streaked buses.

India, up close. Ugliness, dirt, poverty, people. Janet closed smarting eyes.

At the white-marbled Indira Gandhi International Airport a week ago, they had been met by Kamal and his wife, Chaya. Janet had expected the brothers to be more demonstrative after ten years apart, but they'd given one another a ritual hug, no more. She'd said to Kamal, “I didn't expect you to be taller than Arvind — he always calls you his little brother.”

She hadn't been able to tell if Kamal's reply was sarcastic or just overly formal. “Arvind is shorter only because he no longer wears a turban.”

Chaya had sparked to life briefly under that fluorescent glare — and never since. Bedecked and a-jingle with gold bracelets, gold anklets and gold chains for their 4 a.m. arrival, she had first held Arvind close and then scanned Janet with a curiosity that took in her travel-crumpled jeans, clear-plastic-rimmed spectacles and the remnant of a perm in her brown hair.

“She's very fair,” she said to Arvind.

“She'll get a tan on this trip!” he replied.

Janet found herself snapping at Arvind, “Come on, let's get going.”

Chaya still held Arvind's arm.

They followed Kamal's jeans and kurta and let his glowering intensity cut through the press of the crowds. He hailed a darting brown uniform to carry the luggage, which was full of 220-volt
appliances Arvind had bought in Little India, and took custody himself of the duty-free liquor bag, saying to Arvind, “Doctorsahib still drinks all Papaji's whisky.”

Janet could not imagine spry, gallant Papaji ever needing a doctor, but during their week in Delhi she'd realized Doctorsahib was Mumji's buddy. He dropped in punctually at seven every evening to ask about Mumji's blood pressure and to lean his coconut-oiled head on the back of her crimson velvet sofa, swirling a two-inch Patiala-peg of prohibited pleasure.

Mumji was as youthful and charming and gracious as Janet remembered her from that week in Montreal at their wedding five years ago, petite and perfumed in a starched cotton sari, her hair-netted bun of black hair firm at the nape of her neck, her Nina Ricci sunglasses and a solid silver box of sweet-smelling supari always within reach.

Really, Arvind's family had been welcoming and kind.

At the sandbagged black-and-white-striped blockade at the Punjab border, Arvind wasn't questioned after the AK-47-toting policeman looked at his brown skin and mustache through the driver's window. He didn't volunteer his Canadian passport when Janet's was requested for a check of its special visa for the state of Punjab. The policeman raked her bare legs with a lecherous eye and permitted her, finally, to return to the car. He spoke briefly to Arvind in Hindi.

“What did he say?” Janet asked.

“He said I picked up a mame.” He grinned at her.

“Aunty Mame?” Surely the policeman couldn't have seen that film.

“No. A mame is a contraction of mem-sahib.”

“Not meant as a polite term, I'm sure.”

“It's what they call all white women.”

“Why didn't you show him your passport?” Her sense of fairness was offended.

“He didn't ask.”

“Why not?”

“He took me for a Hindu, since I no longer wear a turban.”

“Why didn't you correct him?”

Arvind slowed for bright orange Escort tractors rainbowed with the turbans of farmers, but he didn't answer.

It wasn't a bit like him and it wasn't fair to her — she wasn't some ignorant tourist who'd read just one guide book; she was a woman who'd learned to make perfect samosas for him from Mrs. Yogi Bhajan's cookbook and who'd studied the art and the history of India.

“Why didn't you correct him?” she repeated.

Arvind still didn't answer.

“Look! Stop, Arvind! There's a pottery stall.”

Arvind pulled over and watched Janet bound out of the car, rupees at the ready. Those gaudy Hindu idols weren't the calibre of the artifacts she worked to restore at the Royal Ontario Museum, but they would feed her thirst for the exotic for a while. He checked the car's water level while he waited — what Janet called his engineer's tinkering was all the meditation or prayer he ever needed. Anyu, strange old Hungarian bird, had waited till Janet was ten to break the news about Santa Claus, but she'd never taught Janet to pray.

“Arvind, come see the baskets. Such beautiful baskets.”

Janet didn't wait for him anyway. She, who wouldn't trust herself to bargain with a Yonge Street junk dealer, would bargain in broken Hindi for baskets, as if a dollar here or there would make a difference to their life.

She was as excited in India as he'd been when he first arrived in Montreal. He'd met her the month after he'd bought his first Jaguar. She'd read to him from her art history textbooks while
he lay, asphalt cool at his back, under the car, and she'd trusted he'd take her someplace beautiful… eventually. He'd tried to show her the rhyme and the reason of that Jag's engine, but she couldn't find beauty under all that dirt and grease.

How could he expect her to understand why he hadn't shown the policeman his passport with the visa permitting him to enter his home state, the visa so stamped and official? There she was, aglow in that inviolable cocoon of Canadian niceness. Whereas he and the policeman were like the twigs of those baskets in the stall — woven together, yet tense with a contained rebellion. You couldn't pull one twig from those baskets without unravelling the whole. He couldn't talk about possible danger and unpleasantness if it were obvious he was a Sikh, couldn't remind her about the articles she'd clipped from the paper for him — articles on the massacre of Sikhs at the Golden Temple just two years ago, articles that referred to all Sikhs as terrorists. Honesty may be the best policy when you're faced with a Mountie, but here… nothing must spoil this visit.

“How much is pachas rupaya?” The shopkeeper's English vocabulary was proving as limited as Janet's Hindi.

“Fifty,” he said. Somewhere between Montreal and Toronto, he'd given up arguing against her belief that people all over the world are the same, just with different languages, art and music. When they'd abandoned his turbans and left long arcs of his brown-black hair on the floor of a Greek barbershop in Montreal, a city become hostile to his English, hadn't she suppressed her French, ignoring Toronto's bilingual road signs? She who spoke Hungarian on her Sunday long-distance phone calls to Anyu now called herself an anglophone.

“Can we fit these in the back seat?” Janet beamed, a basket under each arm.

In Montreal, Janet had been enchanted when he had bent his (then) turbaned head over a sitar, cross-legged on his sole item
of furniture, a mattress. It must have been Anyu who'd made her daughter this seeker of beautiful things, past and present. Anyu, who must have taken a vow on arriving in Canada to fashion her Janet's life into a procession of perfect, agreeable, beautiful experiences. Somehow, Anyu had protected her daughter's illusions through the seventies, and now he had the job.

“Move the garment bag, would you?” Janet's triumph was palpable.

But he knew Anyu still warned from Montreal, “Don't have children yet, it may not work out.” Janet hadn't told Anyu yet (and neither had he) that it wasn't a matter of choice.

Looking out at earth-tone people blending into earth-tone villages — some with TV antennae rising from thatch — Janet remembered how enthusiastic she'd been about this trip. She wanted to experience India with him, his India, the India he'd told her of so many times. As soon as they'd arrived at his parents' home, Arvind had changed from pants and a jacket and tie to a white kurta-pyjama and sandals. When she'd worn a sari, thinking to please Papaji, the whole family had applauded.

Only Chaya remarked, “She walks so funny in a sari.”

It was true, of course. Arvind tried to teach her to glide a little more gracefully, but she'd reverted to pants and a T-shirt the next day.

Mumji, always so charming, had tried to persuade her to return to the unaccustomed garb or at least try a salwar kameez, murmuring, “The best clothes for heat and modesty have been tested over centuries, dear.”

Arvind had come to her defence. “Janet comes from a young country, Mumji. Women in Canada believe in learning by experience.”

She'd seen Kamal then, looking over at Chaya as though afraid this remark was inappropriate for her ears, but Chaya sat with her vacuous smile, stroking her son's handkerchiefed topknot.

Mumji had coaxed everyone back into harmony with a teasing smile at Arvind.

“Not everything needs to be reinvented, even by engineers.” She had gone on to admire the width of Janet's hips, venturing the ever-so-gentle reminder that it was “high time” she provided Arvind's family with grandchildren. Mumji was right — like Arvind, Janet was four years away from forty — but…. Now Janet told herself she should expect Mumji's gentle intrusions, and anyway, Mumji was in Delhi, probably fanning herself in the languid dark of her air-conditioned bedroom with one of her
Femina
magazines. Janet imagined herself telling Anyu that her daughter had poured mustard-seed oil on a wood threshold and touched the feet of her husband's mother. Anyu, who had lived under Communists, would say, “You start bowing your head once, it gets easier and easier.”

Outside Chandigarh, Arvind stopped at a roadside Government Milk Bar, but Janet was wary of germs in the chilled bottles of sweetened spiced milk. At Kalka, he waded through a throng of indolent men in white kurta-pajamas to get her a bottle of Campa Cola to wash down the dust. She wiped the top of the bottle with a fastidious white tissue and shook her head when he offered to throw it from the car window when she was finished.

The car began to climb the Himalayas. Cooler air released them from the frenetic pulse of the plains. The scent of pine logs mixed with black diesel truck fumes as the little car screeched up winding roads that gripped the mountain “like a python's coils,” Arvind said, laughing at her shudder.

He pointed to the precipitous drop to the valley below.

“That drop is called the khud,” he said.

“Kud.” She could not aspirate the consonant, even after five years of marriage. And anyway, she wasn't planning to use Hindi or Punjabi in Toronto.

At Solan, he stopped to buy beer as though it were a normal adjunct to driving — he even took a swig before getting back in the car. She would not remonstrate. This trip, this pilgrimage, was too important. Nothing must spoil it. Besides, the cool peace of the terraced mountains etched against the afternoon sky, the ebbing of crowds, and the absence of Papaji, Mumji, Doctorsahib, Kamal and Chaya had lulled her to a dreamy calm. She waved at Tibetan refugee women chiselling stone from the mountain, sleeping babies slung upon their backs, and was rewarded by smiles tinged with slight puzzlement, but never a wave.

Chaya knew Kamal was pretending to be asleep as the morning preparations for Arvind and Janet's leave-taking were conducted in whispers outside the door. She left him alone long after the car had sped away up the next flyover on Ring Road; she wanted this time after Arvind was gone, this unaccustomed silence before any servants began their morning racket in the kitchen and before Papaji's Hindu tenant's wife began ringing her little bells and chanting the daily Aarti, to dream. What if, ten years ago, she had married Arvind instead, as everyone had intended?

It was planned so: Chaya would bring him a heart pure as Shimla snow, brimming with love, and he would take her to Canada, where she would bear many children.

After their engagement, she had grown suddenly shy of the boy Arvind whom she had known all her life. Everyone had permitted — expected — her to give him her love. When he left a month later, she had written him letters in her round, convent-educated hand. “How are you? By the grace of God your Mumji and Papaji and Kamal are well…” But Arvind wrote back about
the vast number of books in the library at McGill, the underground shopping malls and cars in Montreal, how he'd bought a new hair dryer to dry his long hair, how he burnt two cups of sugar to caramel trying to make parshaad for the Gurdwara… as though Chaya had been his younger sister.

Mumji hadn't returned to bed, either, and Chaya could hear her in the bathroom, filling a plastic water bucket for her morning bath. The tap sounded hollow-dry at first, then she heard a sputter, and the thin stream rose in pitch as the water began rising in the bucket. The mame had used two buckets of water yesterday and there had been none left for Chaya to bathe. Today Mumji would “forget” to leave enough water for her to wash her hair. But Chaya told herself she didn't mind; Arvind was gone with his pale, large-boned wife.

She unlocked the doli in the kitchen for the day, taking a mental inventory of the sugar and checking the level of the milk in the covered steel pan on the rack in the shaky old fridge. The cook used too much milk and sugar in his constant cups of tea till there wasn't enough left by evening for Chaya to make yoghurt. Had Mumji noticed Arvind had married a woman who didn't like yoghurt?