Home To India (16 page)

“You seize upon an idea and just won't let it go, will you,” Tej said. “You refuse to understand that Bhabiji Dilraj Kaur has nothing to complain about. Nothing, no one has been taken away from her by you. Besides, I wouldn't expect her to behave as you make it appear. She's an unfortunate person. I'm disappointed in you for not having more feeling, more compassion. You should be above such petty thoughts. They only spoil your looks.” He paused a moment. “And I like your looks,
missi-bawa
.” He took my face in his hands and kissed me on either cheek, then held me at arm's length for a moment.

I couldn't return his gaze. Instead, I buried my head against his shoulder. My heartbeat rattled in my ears. Rage and frustration were making my head pound.

“You are naturally disappointed because you couldn't go to the wedding. It was a silly affair. All show and bad taste, and I wished I could have got out of it,” he said, stroking my hair, holding me close to him.

A millon little suns exploded into being along my bloodstream, whirled their lifetimes out, and collapsed one by one upon themselves, as I reminded myself that when affection is truly offered—love, even—you don't turn away. I hugged him back.

Remembering that occasion was enough. I didn't need to write it down in my letter to Carol. Nor all that about how homesick I was. Instead, my thoughts went back to an earlier time when all these maneuvers and manipulations of someone like Dilraj Kaur would have seemed petty and inconsequential and not worth thinking about: back to Berkeley after that weekend in Yosemite.

It was Monday morning, and the idea of running off to India with Tej bounced off reality and got knocked about in the process. Everything in my life said
no!
Family considerations. Friends. The degree I'd worked so hard for. The photography, the technical skills mastered to the point where they were beginning to respond to the ideas I had in mind. Above everything else, the widow-mother-sister-in-law-wife occupied my head where she banged on my conscience and demanded to be taken into account. How could I do that to another woman?

I persuaded Tej that I needed to be by myself for a few days. Questions bloomed like carnivorous lilies, and I had no answers. He stayed away. Questions remained. It gradually occurred to me that what I was doing was preparing myself for saying a belated good-bye. It was just at a time when rumors of my impending flight to India with Tej started making the rounds of International House. The irony of it struck me. Everything was out of sync, like the shutter and flash of a camera working at odds. I had no energy or will to set right my friends, least of all Carol.

When the week was up, there was Tej. He'd come during the coffee break after dinner to sweep me away through the swinging doors of the Great Hall, out into the night. An effervescence in the cells, a tingling in the nuclei set in.

But I stuck to my resolve and told him we'd have to say good-bye for good when he left for India. I must have said a lot of things, all sensible and right, arrived at with effort. And he must have countered them all with his own reasonable-sounding assurances about how nobody would really be hurt by us: an idea I wasn't ever able to accept. Not even as I recalled the scene.

We stayed up talking all night under the eucalyptus trees by the Forestry Building, ignoring the cold and the campus police. By one o'clock in the morning I would have been locked out of International House anyway. Tej and I watched the dawn come up behind the football stadium and then went our separate ways, wrung out and vacant. I had stayed firm. For the first time in months, we parted without saying when we'd see each other again.

I resumed my letter to Carol. “Remember that morning I missed breakfast? I ran into you in the International House coffee shop. We had a long talk. You didn't know, but my life was falling apart, leaking away, oozing through the cracks. I didn't like the feeling. I needed a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

“I squeezed through the crowded coffee shop and found a table by the big plate glass window facing onto Bancroft, sat down opposite it, and waved you over. You were picking up an order from the counter and had turned around to find a place. There you were, a smiling reminder of the familiar amidst the phantasmagoria of the past week. But you soon started in on whether I was going to India with Tej. You didn't call him Tej; you called him my “Sikh friend,” as if by avoiding naming him, you would somehow not have to acknowledge him as a person, someone real. It appeared you wanted to say a lot, or at any rate, ask a lot of questions, all of which were designed to exclude him from my much-discussed future. I could understand why you were behaving like this, Carol. Other friends, too, had given us no support, Tej and me. Not his friends; not mine. As a pair, we were threatening. Subversive. Dangerous. We upset everyone's idea of how things were supposed to be; we were underminers of one another's cultures; wreckers of tradition and custom.

“You kept digging around the same idea. Trying to find out what in the world I was after. Adventure? Excitement? Satisfaction of curiosity? A good screw?

“I was exhausted from sleeplessness and the previous night's tug-of-war between everything I wanted and everything I thought other people wanted
for
me. I longed to be left alone before I dissolved away in a fit of hysteria. Smiling vacantly and looking out the window were my strategies for turning off your questions and avoiding a scene in which I imagined myself standing up and screaming, or alternatively, sinking into a flood of tears. Perhaps you would give up at last, but you didn't. Instead, your words were getting lost in the din of my own thoughts when, without having time to prepare myself or an opportunity to pull myself together, I happened to look out the window, past you, past the steps up to the coffee shop.

“And there was Tej, walking up Bancroft toward International House, wearing a fawn-colored Nehru jacket and light tan pants. He was still half a block away and would have been lost in the crowd to eyes other than mine. I watched him as he came up the hill. He was lovely about the neck, silky about the beard, a mover without excess motion.

“A single conviction took hold for a period of time that was briefer than a second and brighter than the sun: I had to marry that man or no one else. I had denied some loyalty deeper than family and country and culture when I had believed otherwise. Going away with Tej would be going home. I stood up. He was nearing the steps, now, in just his particular way of walking, like nobody else, not another person in the world. All I knew was that wherever I went, whatever I did henceforth, I wanted him to be in on it. I rushed out to tell him so.”

14

I took up a fresh sheet of writing paper to continue. Then stopped. The letter was getting out of hand. I was telling Carol more than she would be able to understand and much more than I wanted her to know. I went back to the part where I described the sitting around in the kitchen at night. Then I tore up the rest.

In its stead I'd have to put in something concerning our daily lives that she'd like to hear about. Things like the week-long visits from family friends, old army comrades of Pitaji's and their wives and grown-up children. The men off shooting partridge and wild buck; the women and children on long walks through the fields at sunset or into some cooking project for tea time. Very romantic. A scene from a nineteenth century Russian novel!

Not so romantic were the frequent callers from Ladopur, petty but powerful officials and their wives who were motivated more by what they needed from our farm (sugarcane, garden vegetables, flowers for garlands meant for special occasions, chickens by the dozen for wedding feasts, honey, milk, eggs—whatever was in season or available or both) than by friendship. Pitaji liked to oblige them because he was a genial, generous man, and it also made certain official transactions go more smoothly.

Hari finally got back from Bikaner in November and out of the orbit of Uncle Gurnam Singh that would have threatened to keep him going around and around for months more, if Pitaji had not written several letters saying he needed Hari at Majra. Hari came back grown up, pounds heavier, sporting a thicker beard, and full of news.

It surprised no one that Uncle was unsuccessful, for the time being at any rate, in getting a “ticket” from the party. But he had had a great deal of fun during the attempt. Hari was ready with stories of whirlwind tours of villages, Uncle's speechmaking before wildly appreciative supporters, Brother John's arguments with Santji and Shiv Kanwar Singh, and the repeated breakdowns of the jeep that driver Banwari Lai had to cope with in the middle of sand dunes and date palms, miles from the nearest village. Midnight suppers on the road became a nightly feature. Wayside meals at
dhabas
were always the same: stringy goat meat in watery, chili-peppered curry, with burnt tandoori rotis.

“It was Mamiji Gursharan Kaur who did most of the work, though,” Hari said. “She did more than any of us. There was always a bunch of people back in the village to feed and bring tea for at all hours. And she always had a smile for everybody.”

While he was saying this, an image of yet another smiling server of tea crossed my mind and for a moment I couldn't place it.

“What about that other woman?” Mataji was quick to ask.

“Oh,” Hari said. “She's moved into Uncle's house. She and her little girl.”

Mataji had her mouth open to say something further, and Dilraj Kaur shook her head in disbelief. But Hari hurried on to other stories of his stay with Uncle before he could be further grilled on that lively man's indiscretions. Hari clearly enjoyed his role as newsbringer, but found no relish in the more prurient bits so eagerly awaited by Mataji and Dilraj Kaur and Goodi.

Would I need to tell Carol all this?

In any case, I'd tell her about how, all fall, Tej had been spending less time looking up musicians and trying to find a tabla accompanist, and more time trying hard for a job. But not succeeding. Then there was this bizarre process taking place in the family all the while as I watched helplessly on. A neat magnetization: Dilraj Kaur at one end; I at the other. The rest of the family were being drawn like bits of iron filings to our opposite poles. Pitaji and Rano and Hari remained open and unself-conscious with me; but I got the impression that “people” were saying I kept to my room too much. Wasn't I feigning morning sickness, just to get out of work? Didn't I find too many excuses to visit the Mission Hospital in Ladopur for prenatal check-ups? Weren't the two Scottish nursing sisters there, Jean Campbell and Ina Mae Scott, trying to get me back into the Christian fold while pretending to deliver only professional care with their tea and scones?

These messages came more through body language and facial expressions, tones of voice, and studied silences, than from anything concrete. They also came through Goodi, who had become Dilraj Kaur's mouthpiece. Opinions, feelings, judgments were conveyed to me via Rano, who in passing them on tried to soften them for my benefit and in the interests of maintaining harmony in the household. Rano was a peacemaker. I would describe for Carol how she operated. I'd tell her about the morning Rano and I were taking Jim for a walk.

“Goodi and I were talking last night,” Rano began.

“And?”

“Before we went to sleep. You know how she is, pretty childish, really. Anyway, she was telling me what Bhabiji has been saying. And, I don't know if Goodi got it right or not, but she said Bhabiji in a kind of joking way remarked that you seem to have cast a spell over Pitaji, he spends so much time talking to you. More than anyone else in the family.”

“What?” Jim was tugging at his leash, and my exclamation as I kept him in control came out in a burst of breath that gave it more force than intended.

Rano looked at me. Is this the wrong topic to have started, she perhaps wondered. Whatever, she plunged ahead. “That's what she said,” Rano replied. “Goodi said that Mataji looked up from her knitting—she was working on that grey pullover for Hari—and gave a little laugh. Not amused, but uneasy. Maybe she didn't know what to say. Anyway, Bhabiji said, ‘Haven't you ever noticed? Every evening before dinner they sit there together listening to All-India Radio Jullundur and talking for I don't know how long'.”

“‘So,' Mataji said, ‘then what?'

“‘Nothing,' Bhabiji said.

“‘You must have something more to say,' Mataji went on.

“‘Isn't that enough?' Bhabiji asked. Then everything was quiet. Goodi said Mataji seemed to be thinking about what Bhabiji had said. Udmi Ram had been hovering around like he does, with the tea things and all, and Ram Piari and even Gian had been listening to every word. They're all terrible gossips. They must have repeated that conversation to every servant in the village by this time. Anyway, Goodi says Mataji seemed really upset then, all of them there and all. Her face got red and she put away her knitting and didn't say another word until dinner time.”

I stopped a moment to take this in and to sort out some impressions. What I came up with was as much ado about nothing as anyone could possibly imagine. Tripe and trivia and nonsense. Yet I had to give Dilraj Kaur credit for seizing upon such meager material and wrestling something sensational from it, or at least disturbing to Mataji. Plus food for the gossip-hungry. Laughable. Pathetic. Dangerous.

“So what do
you
say?” I asked Rano. “Is it another case of black magic?”

She laughed. “I should not have told you all this probably. It's so silly and stupid. Still you need to know. Bhabiji can make trouble for you.”

“Why would she want to do that?” I asked, not that I didn't know a reason or two, but I wanted Rano's ideas on the subject.

“She must be jealous, Bhabi,” Rano said.

“Of me?”

“Of course. Her position in the family was different before you came,” Rano said.