Good Indian Girls: Stories (22 page)

It was in 1964 that Bikram and Harbans left India and moved to California. Bikram didn’t know why they moved, nor did she care much, but then, as a new bride and one who had presented so many difficulties during the search for a husband, she was told not to ask. For two years they lived in Oakland, by Lake Merritt. She could see the lake from the single window of their apartment. In the summer, sunsets glistened red and orange and sometimes pink. Harbans spent his days out. He was trying to start a business, though he never told her what kind. He was continually having “meetings” and “discussions,” and promised they would soon be “in the money.” Every day, Bikram walked two blocks to the grocery store where she could find nothing she wanted to buy and so bought everything she didn’t want. Once, she walked out to the lake but found people stared at her in her sari, and when she looked down at the water, it was streaked with gasoline and oil and on the surface cola bottles and tin cans bobbed like dead fish.

Soon after Harbans said they were “in the money,” they moved away from Oakland and into the hills where there were still few houses. Bikram could no longer walk to the
grocery but had to rely on Harbans or travel with him on Saturdays. It was only years later that she learned to drive, thanks to her sister-in-law, Jyoti, who had come from England after her husband died. Jyoti had two children, Ravi and Meena, and Harbans reluctantly offered them a home.

Before this unexpected arrival, the house remained unfurnished. No money yet, not for furniture, said Harbans. Bikram filled the rooms with her voice, roaming from one empty room to the next, singing or telling stories to herself. A single step led from the hallway to the living room, and this single step struck her as a great luxury. She would sit on it for hours at a time, staring at the far blank wall, standing only so as to relish the joy of once more sitting down on it.

Several years passed before she came to be on friendly terms with the neighbors. For Harbans, it happened sooner. The men approached him early on, running an admiring palm along the smooth, clean curves of his new Chevrolet. With Harbans gone, no one padded up in sneakers along the laid-stone path that bifurcated the balanced halves of the front lawn. When Bikram stepped outside, to water or plant bulbs or herbs, the neighbors made their presence known by a darkened triangle of curtain pushed back, where the shape of a face appeared, unmoving. There could be as many as five or six such triangles hiding dark moon faces peering through freshly cleaned glass.

Ravi’s appearance changed all this. His bursting energy couldn’t be contained by the low brick wall guarding the garden from the sidewalk, and his body soon found itself in neighbors’ gardens or playing in the backs of their trucks. On occasion, he was brought home, lost, confused, after wandering into a house thinking it was his own, and at such
times the neighbors stopped and briefly chatted and asked Bikram how the rose bushes were doing this year or whether she too was having trouble with gophers. This was how she learned of the new freeway, and all the new houses that were planned for the hills, on ground everyone knew to be unstable and liable to sliding.

Two years of drought, and deer started appearing in the street late at night. Harbans would come home telling of one he almost collided with while exiting the new freeway. Bikram spied them in the mottled, predawn hours, for she remained after all these years an early riser. She no longer had cows to milk or chickens to feed, but the childhood habit stayed.

The first one looked to her like an outline from one of her dreams. The last thing she expected in California, in this modern world, was to see an animal. Weren’t people and animals kept apart in the civilized West? She guessed the deer didn’t know this, and when dawn silhouetted the backs of houses now visible through the kitchen window, she saw that her roses were gone. Just the flowers, the deer had left the stems.

Bikram inspected the neatly cut stalks and the hoof prints in the soil, slight scars, indistinct chevrons, then she covered the tracks with her own hands, smudging the earth until all that was left were lines marking the passage of her fingers. In the kitchen, she washed her hands, scrubbing her fingernails, and along her forearms. Some days later, a rifle shot rang out, then another, and in the days that followed, several more. Twice, on one of her afternoon walks, she found deer carcasses, no longer shadows or dream shapes, now lying on the crisp, yellow hillside. The mouths gaped open, the bodies
swollen and ugly, expanding in the heat. The smell left her unaffected and she approached without fear or revulsion. The gums of the deer were a colony of flies and the hide already filled with holes from where it had been eaten away. An eye bulged yellow and pus leaked from the socket.

She sat with Ravi beside her on the single step that led from the hallway to the living room. The room was furnished with a sofa and a love seat, a Persian rug and a color RCA television, and on the wall was a wide-view photograph of the Golden Temple. She asked Ravi if he wanted to know the true story of how she had begun to sing, and he said sure, but to be quick, as
Lost in Space
was about to come on and it was his favorite show.

“This is how it happened,” she said, the first time she had ever made so definitive a claim about anything, even though she herself wasn’t sure if this was how it happened. How did anything happen? she asked herself. Outside the day was cool, a bright orange scarf of clouds hid the sun. Her memories had merged with songs and the different versions she had told, versions she knew to be false, but falseness seemed appropriate, for how else except through fiction could you recreate a world that had been destroyed?

“It was dawn, no, before dawn. One morning dawn broke early. That’s it. Before it should have, and that was how it all started. It broke on the west side of the village, the side where I’d take the buffalo down to the creek for her afternoon drink and where the Mantos had a house. Mrs. Manto would call me in as I walked by and hand me a glass of lassi if it was hot. It always tasted so sweet and freshening. There’s nothing like it today, you can’t make real lassi from milk you buy at Fry’s.”

In the mornings she listened to the birds and the frogs, to the scuffling of cows and the three goats, and to the soft squawks of chickens. Her favorite task was to search for freshly laid eggs and carry them back triumphant. That morning she pattered across the mud courtyard and heard the chickens protesting already against the day’s heat. The air clung to her skin and she walked to the well to douse her flaming skin. The dome covering it reminded her of the ruined temple, an ancient one that stood in a far corner of the sugarcane fields, engulfed by creepers and home to monkeys and snakes and all sorts of devilish animals.

Water splashed from the bucket as she pulled it up and in small handfuls, she chased it at her skin as the warm breeze cooled her face. Only then did she see it. Or had she sensed it first, listening to the distant scuffles in the animal pen, in a dog’s bark, in the faint smell of burning thatch? There, across the western sky, was the false dawn, spilling all over the wrong side of the world. On the horizon stood the bloodied outline of the temple, and from the fields, red fingers spidered into the engulfing bowl of night. Not far from her, houses were already on fire. She could smell it in the air.

They fled with nothing. They took their clothes, some bags of flour, and her mother carried a bag of gold jewelry close to her chest. Only later, when they joined the vast caravan, that artery pumping people across new borders, did they learn of how the world had been split in two, India and Pakistan, and there were no tunes that might link them in song.

“I began to sing on the road. Every day I sang to cheer up my mother and father. They lost many friends, so did I. As we crossed the new border I was singing, and my voice got stuck at the border and because of that I always sing. If I had
been chattering, I would always be chattering, and if I was silent, I would never have said another word. What we did at that border, that is how our lives continued, and what we didn’t do, we could never do again.”

It was time for Ravi’s show, and before she could shoo him away, he was gone and working the controls of the television. Bikram began to hum. It was an old tune from a movie she remembered watching as a young woman. “Mera joota hai Japani.” My shoes are Japanese.

Children’s Games

THE ORPHANAGE, BUILT ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF A RAJ-ERA
hill station, had originally served as a sanatorium for injured soldiers who had survived the 1857 revolt. Some years before the end of the century it was converted into a private school for children of officials of the Raj. Finally, a Presbyterian minister from New Hampshire bought the failing school and transformed it in the early decades of the twentieth century into an orphanage and dayschool primarily for Anglo-Indian children. My own arrival, like most, was unheralded, and I retained few memories of those first days, another lost child among so many lost children.

The architecture was imported: a decayed Gothic hovering in the roofs and windows giving little inkling of utility or purpose. The buildings were arrayed along a ridge and not far from the school, the roads afforded lush views of the surrounding valleys. The moldering brown or dull orange of the stone took on the colors, in the late afternoon and twilight, of the rougher, darker ground, as though the architecture, in the morning and daylight, was an illusion that fractured, giving itself up with the dying sun as it returned to the singular entropy of the dirt’s crushed brown surface. Reverend Healdstone served as principal and pastor. He was
a tall man with thick arms and in the afternoons I would hear the clack of an axe as he chopped wood, the sharp, dying rustle of branches as he scythed through encroaching brush. In the days of the hill station, an artificial lake had been dug on the far outskirts. It lived on as a swamp, filled in mostly, home to water snakes and insects of every variety, an ugly, unstable ground few dared approach, smelling of refuse and excrement, slushing underfoot if trudged across.

In the center of the courtyard a massive stone pillar lay on its side. Neither base nor top had survived and much of the decoration that had once been carved onto it had been lost or chipped away by soldiers or children. The inscription remained visible in areas and arrayed over its crumbling surface were several symbols whose menace invited attempts at interpretation: two dots became a face, a line became a knife, a circle was for us a decapitated head. There was a beauty to the decayed surface of the pillar, especially at certain hours, when the etched relief, made splendid in the slanting rays of the sun, took on the proportions of a grand history: now the dots were stars shooting through the sky, the line became a door leading to the hall of a great and glittering palace.

The teachers claimed it was erected by the great Emperor Ashoka, one of his famous pillars cut in the third century BC, inscribed with his laws and spread all across the land untold eons ago. Vines struggled up its sides and enclosed the soft grey stone under a mossy sleep while the climate nibbled at it through a slow mastication by the elements. I once discovered a history of architecture in the school library which contained a print of the pillar. In the drawing the pillar appeared much larger and no houses surrounded it yet. A man dressed in a
dhoti stood idly by for scale and behind him trees arched to fill the landscape. The author claimed that though some had counted this among Ashoka’s pillars, he was certain it was not. The inscriptions dated from several centuries later. It was perhaps an imitation, though a good one, yet clearly not the real thing.

When I showed Mr. Babcock, the English and Latin teacher, the print of the Ashokan pillar and the author’s claim that it was a forgery, he laughed. He shook his head from side to side, showing all his teeth, and snatched the book away, looking at it first upside down then right way up, telling me it didn’t matter if it was a fake or not. He tossed the book dismissively onto his desk, sending up a cloud of dust. Everything in this godforsaken country, he said, was a fake! Even I was a forgery!

Mr. Babcock was a short, balding man and in the evenings, when I found him in his room or sitting on the verandah, he would be clutching a glass of beer or gin. He never showed his drunkenness. That was the single rule of the orphanage, its last redoubt against collapse: that as long as moral deterioration remained hidden, there lived a possibility of redemption. But few of the teachers were good at dissembling their carelessness and classes were odd affairs where a teacher would stand at the front and talk, often dictating, seldom checking work for accuracy, simply ensuring we had filled pages and not made too much noise.

Such freedom was a burdensome, agoraphobic freedom. We could do almost anything, but in a world bounded by the atrophied wills of our keepers, we found ourselves unmoored and without purpose. We were afraid to leave the grounds and we created tales of all the horrors awaiting us in the old
lake, along the ridge, in the houses in the valley, the dark recesses of the town’s shops. Djinns mocked us from every gate and window. We looked to each other for structure and for boundaries to our actions and worlds and what felt like a natural hierarchy developed, or perhaps showed itself, freed of the imposed hierarchies of parents and teachers.

Those at the top were the orphans. We owned the grounds and the dayschoolers could never better our knowledge and sense of freedom among the buildings and fields. Among us orphans there were those who had been left by parents and those who had lived here since they could remember, who knew nothing or little of their past. These latter formed the apex of our hierarchy, its College of Bishops, its Senate, and here skin color, age and strength gave rise to our leaders. Those with the lightest skin, a skin almost European in tint, always occupied the highest rungs. My own skin was clearly brown, a light shade, and so though near the top (because I had no memories of any place other than the orphanage) I never found myself at the highest point of our invented mountain of souls.