English Lessons and Other Stories (3 page)

Mummy orders Dad's old driver, Nand Singh, to paint the upper half of the headlights of our Ambassador black, in preparation for blackouts. And Dad comes home the night we hear the first sirens wail their warning.

Dad doesn't wear a saffron turban or carry a big kirpan. He isn't even as large as I remembered, and he looks a little worn. Mummy and he use a servant as their messenger when they need to talk — or me, because I can say the English name of Dad's department in the government as he speculates about his next posting. And all the time Inder asks, “Aren't you going to be in the war?”

“No,” Dad replies. “I lost enough in '47.”

It's true, I know, because Nand Singh has told me the story of Partition. He has told me how Dad and my Dada and my Dadi
locked their haveli near Rawalpindi before the Muslims came and how they fled on a death train and only twenty-one-year-old Dad arrived in the new India because Nand Singh and he used their turbans to rope themselves to the belly of the railcar and hid beneath it with a revolver as their only weapon while Dada and Dadi's screams filled the mad swirling darkness. I know Dad is thinking of his parents when he wanders off to a quiet spot, takes off his shoes, sits cross-legged before the Granth Sahib and says the words of the Gurus, chanting low. I stand behind him keeping the flies away with his special silver-handled yak's-hair tail, white and rough as my Dada's beard might have been, and when he nods I turn the pages of the tome for him.

“Beti.” I am absurdly happy when he looks up and his teeth flash white in the dark cloud of his beard.

On television they begin in monotones to tell children how to take shelter in concrete pipes placed along the roadsides. Dad smells my fear and jokes that I am a silly little kukri, a hen instead of a Sikhni of our family of whom he can be proud.

Inder tells me Gnat is a name for a baby fly and also a new Indian aeroplane that Pakistani General Yahya Khan won't be able to get away from. But now a small bomb has fallen on the outskirts of Delhi and the streets are deserted at midday. Even the street vendor who spins white sugar clouds he calls Old Women's Hair doesn't ring his bicycle bell at our gate, although I am home because school is closed for the war. Only the sparrows in our eucalyptus tree are undaunted, so I give them crumbs of the bread that Mummy complains is so expensive.

Nand Singh takes me to the market with him, opening the back seat door for me as though I were Mummy and shooing away the poor jhuggi boys with their oversized empty coolie baskets. Though he cannot read or write, he knows what the ration cards say and he has such a good memory he never forgets even
one item Mummy tells him to buy. We pick our way through shady gullies between the jute-bag-roofed shops of corrugated tin, and the disappointed cries of fishmongers follow us to the stall of the chicken-seller.

The chicken-seller sits before a stack of metal cages and his brown belly spills over a blood-flecked once-white dhoti. He spits betelnut juice at a gutter at our feet and offers me a red-gummed smile. Nand Singh points to the hens, four to each tiny cage, and says graciously, “Which one would mem-sahib like?” He's complimenting my judgement in advance, letting me know I have grown up enough to be trusted with some household decisions. The hens all look the same to me — brownish-white with frightened eyes, silly kukris just like me. I look at the closest cage and one steps forward. She holds her head high when she crows, thrusts her breast at the cage and seems unafraid to die, so I say, “That one.” A moment later, her head is severed and Nand Singh throws her in his shopping bag. Although Mummy's frown at my plate warns that no one will marry a fatty, I eat the curried kukri that night, hoping her courage will nourish mine.

When Inder says he wants to run away to join the jawans, Dad and Mummy don't even notice. They're fighting again over money. Always money. She says Dad should be like every other government employee — take a favour here, a perk there, a bribe here, have a little consideration for his family. Try to get a Delhi posting — she says it's the only place a government servant can make better money. He says she should not want foreign-made goods; he is working hard so that Indians can make all the things she wants. She says he is making her do without the things he can well afford. I run back and forth with messages until Mummy tells me to tell Dad she agreed to marry him only to save Nana the price of a dowry because Dad had said he didn't want one. I take that message outside and tell it to my sparrows instead. When I go into my father's room, he looks at my frightened face
and says to tell her all right, she can buy us an air conditioner and pay Nancy and Pierre three thousand rupees.

When I return, he pats the air with a cupped right hand, so I sink to the floor before him.

“You have a faint heart, beti, a faint heart that can bring dishonour to those who love you. You are becoming just like my sister.”

He rises, takes a battered attaché case from his steel almirah, places it carefully beside him and removes a woman's picture. I crane my neck over his knees to see it.

The woman in the picture looks kind though she has no smile. A pale chunni covers her head and her face is fair and round as a winter moon. An artist's brush has retouched the photo so her eyes are gold-flecked brown like mine. I say, “I did not know you had a sister.”

Inder stands watching at the door, his legs two long cylinders above the bell-bottoms of the imported blue jeans Mummy just bought from Nancy.

Dad's lips vanish into his beard as he surveys his son's attire, but then he says, “Come in.”

We stand before the open case, our unknown aunt looking up at us.

“What was her name?” I ask.

“Whose name?”

“Your sister's. My aunt's.”

“Chandini Kaur.”

Moonlight Princess. Of course that should be her name.

“How old is she in this picture?”

“She was eighteen in 1947.”

But Dad is lifting something else from the attaché case — a triangular muslin bundle. He unwraps it slowly before us until a black thing is exposed. A revolver. Sleek, slender-muzzled. Outside, a siren shrieks and then subsides.

To my brother he says, “Beta, I do not know if you will ever need this. But there is a war now, and I want you to know how to use it to defend this little kukri.”

Our faces solemn, we follow him upstairs to the sun-swathed concrete terrace, so high the leaves of our eucalyptus tree are close against the parapet. Our eyes never leave the weapon.

He makes us stand five paces behind him. The bullets clink as he loads them into the chamber. He takes aim and fires.

Leaves and feathers explode from the eucalyptus. I must not cry.

“Now you try.” He gives my brother the gun, shows him how to close one eye, take the safety catch off, aim. Fire. When he misses, Dad shrugs, “If you need to use it, you will not miss. Marksmanship is in your blood.”

We descend to Dad's room again and help him wrap the weapon away. It is smooth and cool to the touch, as death must be.

Then, with his hand on my head, he tells my brother, “If the Muslims come and your sister is in danger, you must shoot her rather than let her fall into their hands.”

My breath comes fast when I hear this, and I feel his hand on my head like the kukri must have felt the chicken-seller's pudgy gentle hand reaching into her cage. I look to my brother.

But my brother looks only at my father and he says, “I will.”

I want to shout at them — I am your daughter. I am your sister. But my tongue has turned slow, slow as a monsoon slug I once saw Inder flick from our scrap of garden into the dust of the street. I look at my aunt Chandini's miniature face and then at my father's. The small face of a woman whose name is never mentioned, and the set face of a man who has upheld his family's honour. A plane roars over the house and, for the first time, I feel no rush of fear; far more is the danger from those within. Dad locks the Moonlight Princess away again in his steel almirah.

My brother does not look at me again that day. At night, he
does not whisper heroic tales of the Gurus to send me to sleep but lies on his other side, face averted. We are rice saplings separated for transplanting. I lie on my creaky string bed gazing at the latent vortex of the ceiling fan and wonder if he will have the courage to kill me to defend me, and where will I find the courage to die as Chandini Kaur must have, soft heart offered at eighteen to her brother's bullet? My father's bullet. Is it worse to be caught, converted, killed or raped by Muslims than to be killed by a brother? A brother — my brother — who said “I will” in the voice of his warrior ancestors without once asking his usual everyday everlasting “Why?”

The Moonlight Princess comes to me in my dreams that night, telling me I can trust no one. Especially if he says he loves me.

The twenty-five days of war are long, and when school opens again my new teacher is a Muslim — Miss Shafi, who wears a sleeveless sari blouse and ties her petticoat low below her navel so her midriff swivels through the corridors. She asks us to turn to the map of the subcontinent in our geography books and write “Bangladesh” in place of “East Pakistan.”

Now I am eleven. My brother is sent away to a boarding school because Dad says he needs to be taught some more what it means to be a man. He writes me only one letter to tell me he has fought with the Hindu boys who teased him about his turban, and that the Drama Master made him take the woman's part in a school play. I think of him, forced to dress as a woman and paraded before an audience without the turban that would protect his waist-length hair, but I can do nothing for him. I stay in Delhi because I have begun to know what pain it means to be a woman. Mummy says I matured so early because she must have fed me too much meat — I am forbidden to eat any more kukris, or to go alone in the car with Nand Singh. She says I complain too much
every month and Nancy's chauffeur delivers a box of imported Kotex after Dad is posted away again, this time to Bangalore.

I think our eucalyptus must be a girl-tree; it takes too much from the soil and leaves everything around it parched and angry. The sparrows mate and push their young to fly. I wonder if the one Dad shot had a mate, and did he miss her? Did she have a young sparrow?

I wander into Dad's empty room and take the key to his almirah from beneath his pillow. A few minutes later the battered old attaché case lies open before me and I look at Chandini Kaur's face again. And at the muslin-wrapped triangular bundle. But now I see there is more. A yellowed letter with a Government of India stamp. The date on the letter: August 28, 1948 — twelve months after Partition.

“I am the concerned social worker who has located your sister, Chandini Kaur, formerly of village Thamali, District Rawalpindi. She has recovered from her abduction and is now in good health. By the grace of God, she gave birth in Sargodha to a healthy boy. She requests you to receive her as soon as possible. The Government of India Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation will pay for her journey if you will acknowledge…,” then a post office at which to write to a woman now known as Jehanara Begum.

I hold the letter against the slight rise of my chest in gratitude. Dad did not kill his sister. I tell myself I knew it all along. How can I have been so base, so vile, so ungrateful a daughter as to have let such a thought enter my mind? He was just preparing us, as a father must in a time of war, for all that he could foresee. And Inder: how could I have been so silly as to think he was serious when he said, “I will.” He was just playing at being a man, as he always does. I must have imagined his avoidance afterward. Mummy always says I am such a fear-filled girl, it will be difficult to find me a good family.

I read the letter again, but this time I come away with questions. If she was in good health in 1948, what happened to her? Who would know? And who will be willing to tell me? I must know. She looks up at me as though she wants me to find out.

Too slow for my patience, my hands fumble putting the Moonlight Princess back in her case, the case back in the almirah. I smooth Dad's clothes inside.

Nand Singh is washing the car in the driveway, snow-white turban bobbing over its olive green tubbiness. I hunker down and wait next to the bucket of soapy water so he knows I want his advice as my elder and do not wish to play mem-sahib today. He gives the car a final caress and joins me, asking after my health, calling me beti. I call him “Nand Singhji” to show my respect as I answer so he will understand my seriousness.

I say, “Do you know the story of my aunt, Chandini Kaur?” I say it as though I always knew I had an aunt.

He answers warily, “There are many stories of Chandini Kaur.”

I prompt, “The trouble with stories is that some are true and some are not.”

“There are people in the world who spread false stories.”

“You are not one of them, so I have come to you.”

“I am your servant. Command me.”

He is humouring me. The only person I know who commands Nand Singh to do anything at all is Dad. I take a deep breath.

“I want to know if she is alive.”

“Her body may be alive.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her name was never to be spoken again in this house. I am surprised you know anything about her. For your father, she is dead.”

“How did she die for my father?”

“She was abducted by the Muslims who invaded Thamali village in 1947.”

“This I know,” I lie. I make my breath come slower. I do not look at him. “But how did she die for my father?”

He looks confused and repeats as though I have not heard, “She was abducted by Musalmaan.” This time, he uses the Punjabi form of the word so that even someone as slow as a girl-child may understand.

“But she was found again.”

“They found a woman whose name was Jehanara Begum and who said she was your father's sister, Chandini Kaur.”