English Lessons and Other Stories (16 page)

Valerie has found an English teacher who will come to the apartment and teach me for free. But Tony and I are afraid. This English teacher is from India and we did not want to meet any people from India. Valerie said she told the teacher I am Tony's girlfriend and that Suryavir is our son. She said the English teacher was surprised. Indian couples do not usually live together, she told Valerie.

Tony says to tell Valerie we don't need this teacher. But I took her phone number to please Valerie. I may call her just to speak in Punjabi for a while.

I told Valerie I will change my name. I asked her to call me Kelly. No one here can say Kanwaljit. And Kanwaljit is left far away in Amritsar, before the fire.

Some nights I lie next to Tony, here in America where I live like a worm avoiding the sunlight, and I wonder if he knows. And is it only because it was his brother that he does not sense that another man's body has come between us, or is it that he cannot remember the fire we felt in those early days. We only had three weeks in which Suryavir was made. Then he was gone.

If I had been able to return to my parents until he told me to come to America, I would not have been so weak. But to do so would have smelled of disgrace, and I am not shameless. Nor was it a matter of a month or two, Tony told me after six months, when I was becoming big with his son; it would take him two more years.

I tell myself it is not only another man's body that invades our bed, but another woman's too. And yet, that is different. I hear her tearful voice on our answering machine. Her anger follows us from city to city — Fremont, Dallas, Houston, Miami, New York, Chicago — threatening to report us to Immigration. He lived with her for two years, shared her bed, paid her our life savings for a marriage certificate. I will ask the English teacher how to say, “Is not two years of our life enough? Is not my worm existence, my unacknowledged wifehood, enough for you? Enough that I call myself his girlfriend, my son his bastard?”

But she does not have form, no substance in our bed. I cannot imagine him with her black body — and if I can, what of it? Many men pay prostitutes. This one's price was higher and she
lasted longer. And he got his green card after two years. Thus am I here.

The other man in bed with us — he has form. He looks like Tony, only younger. And he still laughs at me, waving pictures of Tony with her. Telling me Tony left me for an untouchable, a hubshi. Threatening to tell my parents if I would not open my legs to him.

I did. Rubba-merey, I did.

I thought some force would come upon us then and tear him from my flesh before the act was done. Save me, as the virtue of Dropadi was saved. And it did. Too late for virtue but soon enough for vengeance.

The police came looking for him. Oh, not for my protection — no. They were rounding up all Sikh boys between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five for “questioning.” Tony's parent's knew what was in store and they hid him in the servant's quarter, a concrete room on the flat roof of the house.

They told the police he was with Tony in America. That made them angry. One sinewy fellow with a whisky smell took a can of gasoline and slowly, as we watched from the rooms around, and as Suryavir's eyes grew larger, poured it in a steady dribble all round the centre courtyard. They all walked to the door and, almost as an afterthought, the sinewy policeman threw a lit match and the world exploded from silence into horror.

I took no chances. I gave Suryavir to Tony's mother and they climbed out of the back window. His father was blinded by tears and I pushed him after them. Then I ran up the narrow steep staircase to the servant's quarter on the roof.

And I locked it.

And ran back through lung-searing smoke and purifying flame. I was given vengeance, and I took it as my due.

But still he comes between us — the half-dead only half a world away.
I called the English teacher today. She speaks Punjabi with a city accent. I will have to ask Tony, but I think it will be, like Americans say, “fine, fine” for her to come and teach me.

Her family on her father's side is from Rajasansi, just outside Amritsar. And she is married to a white guy so she is probably not part of the Gurdwara congregation; they have all heard of Tony's Green-Card Wife. (These matters travel faster than aeroplanes fly between cities.) I will tell Tony I will take English lessons, and that she will be my teacher.

Tony was finishing breakfast when Mrs Keogh, the English teacher, arrived. She knocked and I let her in. Then I asked her to sit down, offered her some tea and listened while she and Tony spoke English.

“Thank you very much. My girlfriend is just new from India. As soon as her green card comes we will be getting married, so till then I think English lessons will help her pass the time.”

The English teacher did not remark on “my girlfriend.” Good. Not a prying woman. She said, “I am glad to help you and your fiancée.”

Tony continued, “I will not like it if you teach her more than I know. But just enough for her to get a good-paying job at Dunkin' Donuts or maybe the Holiday Inn. She will learn quickly, but you must not teach her too many American ideas.”

The English teacher smiled at me.

Tomorrow, I will ask her where I can learn how to drive.

She stood framed by the doorway with the hall lights blazing behind her, grey hair straggling from under her sari palloo, and Prem and I started up in bed, hearts thudding.

“The children?”

“Are you sick?”

“No, no. Worse than that.” Maybe my Hindi is fading a little every year; I find it more and more difficult to understand her without her dentures.

“Then what happened?” asked Prem.

“I heard a cat crying outside.”

I glanced at the window. Snow gusts swirled over the peaked roofs of the subdivision. Strange how sloping roofs are more familiar to me now than the hot shimmer-haze concrete flatness of an Indian city view.

“Mataji, you must have imagined it,” Prem began, but I knew it would do no good.

“It's bad luck. Come, we must do puja. No one will ever say I allowed bad luck to come into this home.”

Mataji's life has been dedicated to the collection of strategies to outwit bad luck and Prem knew it, so he stifled a yawn and a
groan and led the way down to the drawing room — I mean the living room — collecting little Nikhil and his blanket from Mataji's bed and leaving baby Sheila sleeping.

We had no furniture in the living room, then. Just a large wool dhurrie we've moved to every place we've ever lived since we came to America and cushions of all colours and shapes and sizes. We bought the house because we wanted a crackling fire in the fireplace, but that would have to wait till Mataji returned to India because she'd made it her shrine, filling it with statues of Shiva and Ganesh and Vishnudevi, flowers and garlands, incense and Christmas tinsel. It was her refuge, where she began at five every morning to confide her irritation with twanging nasal syllables, the whiteness of people and the greyness of that twilight that arrived just when she was ready to face another day of strangeness.

“Mommy, what's Mataji doing?” Nikhil asked in English.

“A little puja, darling,” I said, as brightly as I could.

“Don't tell him why,” whispered Prem.

But I couldn't resist.

“Mataji heard a kitty crying,” I said, smiling sweetly at Prem. Then, remembering it's a wife's duty to keep peace, I lied. “So we're going to pray for it.”

Prem sat next to Mataji as she began slowly and deliberately to recite the thousand names of Vishnu. Outside, church bells rang to call people to Midnight Mass and Mataji's bad luck cat stayed silent. I wanted to lift myself upwards and follow the sandalwood incense curling out of our chimney.

Mataji was suspicious of me as soon as she heard that her youngest son wanted to marry a woman he had met studying in America. That I am Indian was merely an indication of his good sense. That my parents sent their daughter to study in America
was an indication of a family tendency towards wasteful spending. Mataji must have vowed to watch this trait closely for fear it should be passed along any further in her house, for as soon as we were married — in India, with all the appropriate ceremony — she made it clear that I was not to be trusted with money. Within two years, then, we had none left. My dowry distributed to Prem's family — all of whom blessed us enthusiastically — and with Prem unable to find a job where he did not have to give or take bribes to survive, we finally asked his brothers to sponsor us to America.

Mataji has been convinced ever since that I was a bad influence on the son who was to have lived with her in that huge white bungalow on Aurangzeb Road in her old age. When we decided not to have children till we could afford them, Prem began receiving piteous supplications to allow her to know her unborn grandchildren before she died and warnings that he must not be influenced by his over-educated wife. Like his three older brothers, Prem is unlikely to be influenced by anyone, least of all a woman, but he loves being the prize in a contest.

We didn't have children immediately. Instead we savoured the time to be just two of us exploring a new land, freed from obedience to Duty, awed by the power and burden of this thing called Choice, collapsing every night exhausted by endless everyday decisions, decisions, decisions. Prem got a job selling health and life insurance to other expatriate Indians — exiles, he calls them.

Prem is less adaptable than I; he has had much less practice. A few years ago he would have returned to India where there wouldn't be so many choices, but I quickly decided it was time to have children. Mataji came to visit us for the first time when my son Nikhil was born. And ever since, she spends six months of the year visiting each brother in turn.

Usually, she comes to visit in summer to escape the Delhi heat, the loneliness, the power cuts and the water shortages, but this
time she arrived in December, wrinkling her nose as she held her sari pleats high over the grey-black slush and yanking her precious bag with its tape recorder and bhajan cassettes out of the dark hands of a helpful old porter. She unpacked quickly and we gave her a glass of sherry in a tumbler that made it look sufficiently medicinal, and then she started her assault on Prem, speaking in English, which she believes makes us pay greater attention.

“I have decided to leave the house on Aurangzeb Road to you when I die,” she said.

“Mataji, that is very kind and you can do as you wish, but you know we are four brothers and no one should get more than others.”

“No, I have decided. Your father left me this house — that was his gift. I can give it to whom I like. But I have only one condition. You and she,” gesturing at me, “have to come and live with me now.”

“Mataji, we'll talk about it later. Now you must be tired. Finish your sherry.”

Later, in bed, I asked him, “Are you thinking about going back to India?”

“Of course I am. Aren't you?”

“I am happy here,” I said gently.

“You can be happy there, too. Lots of people are.”

“Lots of people are unhappy, too.”

“They are only unhappy if they have no money. We have worked hard for ten years now — maybe it is a good time to go back.”

“What will you do back there?”

“I will start my own company.”

“You could do that here.”

“Not the same thing.”

“You want to show your old friends, that's all.” My throat constricted. I was afraid I would cry.

“So what is wrong with that?”

“It seems… it seems so silly. Just when we've begun doing better. I have friends here, people who listen and talk to me, and you have friends too. We just bought this house and Sheila and Nikhil would never get such attention in school in India and… and how will you pay your brothers for their share of the house?”

“Don't be stupid, now. You think I want my daughter to paint her face and have a boyfriend by the time she's twelve and my son to join a gang and bring home some New Age junkie? You just leave these decisions to me.”

I rolled over with my back to him. I have learned that when anyone wants to control me, they begin by telling me I am stupid.

I have a degree from Boston University and I know I am not stupid. Of course, being single while I was there and fearful of damaging my reputation at home, I stayed close to the Indian students and didn't mix with many Americans — that was how I met Prem — but I read and read, and I learned how to write my résumé and get a job. Being Prem's secretary these few years, I know something about bookkeeping, so I decided I needed to get a job.

Mataji and I were circling one another like two wrestlers in a ring of invisible spectators, demurely passing one another on the stairway and saying “Pehleh aap, pehleh aap” before each doorway. The politeness was excruciating. We feinted gracefully. She noticed I had placed a statue of Saraswati in Sheila's room and lifted the huge brass piece on her tiny shoulders, saying, “What a silly thing, putting a Saraswati statue in a girl's room. Put this Goddess where she will do some good, in the boy's room. She's the one who will inspire him to learn.” I said nothing, but the next day I moved Saraswati back to Sheila's room. I refuse to apologize for wanting my daughter to be educated.

With the tax season beginning, the temporary agency found me an office job in just a few days. I wore pants to the interview rather than a skirt — I've never learned to walk in a skirt anyway — just so Mataji wouldn't suspect anything. And I said nothing to Prem until I got the call from the agency saying I had been accepted. Then I felt weak with daring.

That night I let Mataji do the cooking and we struggled through the burned results with many “vah-vah, bhai vah” exclamations of wonder. Then I said to Prem, firmly and evenly, “I found a job at an accounting office. I have decided to take it. I start next week.”