English Lessons and Other Stories (2 page)

This was not how they described emigrating to Canada. I still remember them saying to you, “You're a well-qualified man. We need professional people.” And they talked about freedom and opportunity for those lucky enough to already speak English. No one said then, “You must be reborn white-skinned — and clean-shaven to show it — to survive.” Just a few months ago, they called us exotic new Canadians, new blood to build a new country.

Today I took one of my wedding saris to the neighbourhood dry-cleaner and a woman with no eyebrows held it like a dishrag as she asked me, “Is it a bed sheet?”

“No,” I said.

“Curtains?”

“No.”

I took the silk back to our basement apartment, tied my hair in a tight bun, washed the heavy folds in the metal bathtub, and hung it, gold threads glinting, on a drip-dry hanger.

When I had finished, I spread a bed sheet on the floor of the bathroom, filled my arms with the turbans you'd worn last week and knelt there surrounded by the empty soft hollows of scarlet, navy, earth brown, copper, saffron, mauve and bright parrot green. As I waited for the bathtub to fill with warm soapy water, I unravelled each turban, each precise spiral you had wound round your head, and soon the room was full of soft streams of muslin that had protected your long black hair.

I placed each turban in turn on the bubbly surface and watched them grow dark and heavy, sinking slowly, softly into the warmth. When there were no more left beside me, I leaned close and reached in, working each one in a rhythm bone-deep, as my mother and hers must have done before me, that their men might face the world proud. I drained the tub and new colours swelled — deep red, dark black mud, rust, orange, soft purple and jade green.

I filled the enamel sink with clean water and starch and lifted them as someday I will lift children. When the milky bowl had fed them, my hands massaged them free of alien red-blue water. I placed them carefully in a basin and took them out into our grey two rooms to dry.

I placed a chair by the window and climbed on it to tie the four corners of each turban length to the heavy curtain rod. Each one in turn, I drew out three yards till it was folded completely in two. I grasped it firmly at its sides and swung my hands inward. The turban furrowed before me. I arced my hands outward and it became a canopy. Again inward, again outward, hands close, hands apart, as though I was back in Delhi on a flat roof under
a hot sun or perhaps near a green field of wheat stretching far to the banks of the Beas.

As the water left the turbans, I began to see the room through muslin screens. The pallid walls, the radiator you try every day to turn up hotter for me, the small windows, unnaturally high. When the turbans were lighter, I set the dining chairs with their halfmoon backs in a row in the middle of the well-worn carpet and I draped the turbans over their tops the way Gidda dancers wear their chunnis pinned tight in the centre parting of their hair. Then I sat on the carpet before them, willing them: dance for me — dance for us. The chairs stood as stiff and wooden as ignorant Canadians, though I know maple is softer than chinar.

Soon the bands of cloth regained all their colour, filling the room with sheer lightness. Their splendour arched upwards, insisting upon notice, refusing the drabness, refusing obscurity, wielding the curtain rod like the strut of a defending champion.

From the windows over my head came the sounds of a Montreal afternoon, and the sure step of purposeful feet on the sidewalk. Somewhere on a street named in English where the workers speak joual I imagined your turban making its way in the crowds, bringing you home to me.

Once again I climbed on a chair and I let your turbans loose. One by one, I held them to me, folding in their defiance, hushing their unruly indignation, gentling them into temporary submission. Finally, I faced them as they sat before me.

Then I chose my favourite, the red one you wear less and less, and I took it to the bedroom. I unfurled the gauzy scarlet on our bed and it seemed as though I'd poured a pool of the sainted blood of all the Sikh martyrs there. So I took a corner and tied it to the doorknob just as you do in the mornings instead of waking me to help you. I took the diagonal corner to the very far end of the room just as you do, and rolled the scarlet inward as best I could within the cramped four walls. I had to untie it from the
doorknob again to roll the other half, as I used to every day for my father, then my brother and now you. Soon the scarlet rope lay ready.

I placed it before the mirror and began to tie it as a Sardar would, one end clenched between my teeth to anchor it, arms raised to sweep it up to the forehead down to the nape of the neck, around again, this time higher. I wound it swiftly, deftly, till it jutted haughtily forward, adding four inches to my stature. Only when I had pinned the free end to the peak did I let the end clenched between my teeth fall. I took the saliva-darkened cord, pulled it back where my hair bun rested low, and tucked it up over the turban, just as you do.

In the mirror I saw my father as he must have looked as a boy, my teenage brother as I remember him, you as you face Canada, myself as I need to be.

The face beneath the jaunty turban began to smile.

I raised my hands to my turban's roundness, eased it from my head and brought it before me, setting it down lightly before the mirror. It asked nothing now but that I be worthy of it.

And so, my love, I will not let you cut your strong rope of hair and go without a turban into this land of strangers. The knot my father tied between my chunni and your turban is still strong between us, and it shall not fail you now. My hands will tie a turban every day upon your head and work so we can keep it there. One day our children will say, “My father came to this country with very little but his turban and my mother learned to work because no one would hire him.”

Then we will have taught Canadians what it takes to wear a turban.

The monsoon rains curtained the windows all afternoon and Dropadi Ma held me on her lap and told me long stories. I knew them all by now and followed her toothless chant with my lips. She never said I was getting too big to sit in her lap — just covered us both in her raggedy shawl, her chocolate hands over my pale ones. Sometimes she would fall silent, thinking, remembering, and in the middle of one story would tell me a small one about the days when my mother or one of her brothers had been small enough to sit in her lap and listen. And then we would return to the story chant, smoothly re-entering webs of treachery, violence and sacrifice upon sacrifice, every story set in an age of obedience where the only conflicts lay between duty and duty. Stories to keep a child from wandering too far.

And yet my mother's brothers had all wandered far. Sukhi-mama, the uncle I knew least of all, lived in Montreal, where there is no monsoon, and had returned to be married to someone my grandfather had decreed acceptable. My parents and I would fly to Bangkok for the wedding.

Dropadi Ma wanted to be there too, I felt it, for Sukhimama was the eldest boy, the one she had taught most. But Dropadi
Ma was, at the end of it all, only a servant, and we all knew the question would not arise. So instead she oversaw every detail of the packing, holding his wedding uchkan close to her face so she could see that every gold button was threaded with gold thread, not lemon-coloured, and placing one of her own gold bangles with the jewellery our family was to give to the bride's family.

But even in the few days since Sukhimama had returned, we both felt there was more than monsoon pressure in the house. My grandfather's roar was louder, and he would come to the long dinner table at the gong and would correct my table manners all through dinner, over my mother's gentle protests. I hid in closets a lot, just to read, and heard Sukhimama talking to my grandfather.

“I tell you, she may be a very nice girl, but I do not know her. It is not 1945 anymore, Darji, it is 1966.”

My grandfather's voice came low like the growl of a tiger reaching the end of its patience. “What will come of knowing her, may I ask? And if, after this ‘knowing her,' you think you do not want her, what will we do then? By then her reputation will be ruined and I will have to pay her parents to find a lesser match. Did they addle your brain in Canada? You should have stayed in England, sir. The English understand these things.”

I was all ready to run for refuge from the wrath that would follow any reply to so logical an argument, but I heard Sukhimama sigh and I knew the storm was averted. Dropadi Ma would be glad.

But when I told her, I could not tell if she was glad. She fell silent for a long time, so I entered into the silence with her and we thought our separate thoughts together, cross-legged on the kitchen floor. She took a few handfuls of dal seeds and began to pick them over on a metal tray, looking for tiny stones that could grit in our mouths. Her eyes were right close to the tray and it took her a long time to find a few. I began to believe she had
moved on to thinking about other things. But then her leathery brown face with the big mole on the nose came around to mine and her eyes behind her Coke-bottle glasses looked into mine, and she pointed to her wrist and said, “Go. Bring my bangle back to me.”

My heart started to pound. “Maji, what if I am caught?”

“You will tell them you were obeying Dropadi Ma. Have I no rights in this house? It is my bangle, and I would have it back. Go and reclaim it for me, but quietly.”

I walked out of the cool dark kitchen into rooms of covered furniture and trunks half-filled for the month-long celebration in Bangkok. I had seen my grandmother place the bangle in the big silver-coloured trunk. Two minutes of breath-held scrabbling inside and it was in my hand. I fled back to Dropadi Ma. Her hand closed over it, but she did not place it back on her wrist. Instead, she lifted her chunni and slipped it between her comfortable breasts.

“Tell Sukhiji I would like to speak with him when he can find the time.” It was a command.

“Dropadi Ma meant right now, Uncle. When she says, ‘When You Can Find The Time,' she means, ‘Now, If You Love Me,' Uncle. Come quick. Maybe she is sick — she never commands
us
.”

He came quickly, filling the doorway of the kitchen where she sat with her head covered, his big hands folded and his turbaned head dropped to ask her blessing. I wondered if they ask a blessing from their elders in Canada, for he had not forgotten how. His laugh boomed in the small kitchen as he crouched to give her a hug and then sat on the floor next to us. “Yes, Maji?” There was a little Canadian accent in his Yes, I thought. I pretended to be invisible; they thought I was too small to understand.

Soon the gold bangle appeared and passed from her hands to his two cupped hands. Her right hand rested briefly on his
shoulder and I heard her say, “Jeeo, Beta.” Live, my son. And then, “Khushi Raho.” May you be happy.

A few days later, when all the trunks were locked and marigold garlands of farewell lay ready for preflight ceremonies in the rose-grey dawn, there was a shout and then a woman, my grandmother maybe, cried out, “We are ruined!”

He was gone. A 2:00 a.m. Air Canada flight, I heard. Direct to Montreal. Then an argument. You can't fly direct to Montreal. Perhaps Air Canada will stop in London and we can call a relative to talk to him there. Who has a relative there? Call him, call him! Tell him to talk to Sukhi at the airport. Remind him of his duty. Tell him how much money we will have to pay the girl's family. Hai, book a call to Bangkok, to the girl's father! They will be expecting us on the plane, today. We are ruined.

I ran to find Dropadi Ma, barefoot as I was. But she was not in the servant's quarter on her charpai as usual. She was already on her corner of the kitchen floor, and she was wearing yesterday's clothes. Her glasses lay on the floor beside her and she held one knee as she dozed. I shook her a little.

“Dropadi Ma — Sukhimama has taken a flight to Canada last night. There can be no wedding!”

Her toothless smile was wide and joyous. “Come, little one. Ma will tell you a story.”

Everyone says Inder is the smart one and I the steady one. I know steady means boring but it doesn't matter; he's my brother. He's the thin one, and I'm the one Mummy calls Fatty. He's the one with laughter and he always asks why. “Why?” is a question Mummy takes as a personal affront, but Inder asks it over and over. Why can't we live in Indore with Dad? Or in Darjeeling with old Bibiji and Nana? Why can't we play Gulli Danda with the big-eyed, bandy-legged jhuggi children? Why doesn't Mummy allow him to sing like Rajesh Khanna in the films — winking at girls, with his right hand twirling in time to the music?

I am ten and he is fourteen and he challenges me to play mental chess through the mosquito nets separating our beds, and I hear him whisper “check” by my fifth move. And every night he tells me stories. There is his favourite — the one about the sons of Guru Gobind Singh who were interred alive in a brick wall but who did not convert to Islam. Then there is my favourite — the one about Guru Nanak falling asleep with his feet pointing towards Mecca. I make Inder tell me how the qazis came upon him and tried to move his feet to a more respectful place, and how the Ka'aba spun till Guru Nanak awoke and suggested they
try pointing his feet at any place where God is not. Most nights, the chucka-chucka-chuck of the three-armed overhead fan lulls me to sleep and leaves him to finish his stories alone.

When winter comes, Mummy buys a TV from Nancy and Pierre, her Canadian diplomat friends. Inder and I sit on the threadbare oriental carpet, watching clips of old Hindi films and the endless agricultural shows, huddled together with our knees propping up the warm tent of a bulbous silk razzai. I gaze enthralled at the blue-grey glow for the news while Inder imitates the pompous, stilted voices of the announcers trying so hard to sound like the BBC: “THIS is the news. Today the government announced that President Mujib Rehman has asked for the support of the Indian Army's brave jawans in defence of the Muktibahini in Bangladesh.” Now the nightly stories have Dad attired as Guru Gobind Singh from two hundred years ago, wearing a saffron turban, wielding a huge kirpan — and leading the 61st Cavalry.