Home To India (6 page)

“Sat Sri Akal
, Bhaji,” Hari greeted Tej as he reached out to help us with the suitcases, and then looking over Tej's shoulder, he paused an instant. The look he gave me was shy and straightforward at the same time. He wanted to see what I was like, but he had no one to compare me to. “Bhabi,
Sat Sri Akal,”
he said, looking me straight in the eye and smiling. The other three, like bearded musketeers, stepped up to greet us then, their sharp, black eyes taking me in with one brief, curious glance.

The time for meeting the rest of the family was not to be quite yet. I remember writing to Carol about how it was too hot at that time of day to walk the two miles into Majra from where the paved road of Ladopur left off and beyond which our tonga-driver refused to go. Instead, I told her, we drove into the town first, to leave the heavy luggage at Ghasitoo Ram, the Commission Agent's shop, from where it would be picked up later and taken by bullock cart to the village. No one explained this plan, but I was getting adept at piecing bits of recognizable Punjabi together to arrive at some sort of meaning … not always accurate.

I told Carol how we all went to the house of a family friend after that. We were given lunch and invited to take a nap. When I woke up, it was all confusion: Where was I? On the
Corfu
? In Bombay? On the train? Someone was sitting over me, waving a fan of woven reeds back and forth. It was the young wife of the family friend. She had sat all afternoon seeing to my comfort in a house that had no electricity.

Orange light through the drawn curtains of the room suggested that the sun was going down. It was time to go. Punjabi thank-yous and goodbyes were being said and responded to. There were smiles and gestures for me. Soon there would be no more trains to board, no more ports to disembark from, no more crowded city streets to be guided through, no more open drains to jump across.

At sunset the tonga-driver dropped off the six of us, and we started down the dirt road that Tej said led to Ambala, but had been unused by through traffic since Kipling's time. We had to turn left off it for the last mile into Majra. In the presence of Hari and the cousins from Amritsar, Tej's manner had taken on a new, hard-to-define tone. Brusque was not the word: offhand and managing were. Or it may have been that the unfamiliar sound of Punjabi on Tej's lips became aggressive and abrupt-seeming.

The sun had turned into an orange ball, bloated and obscene as it lowered itself onto the prostrate horizon. Parrots screeched and crows cawed as they headed for their nests in the
sheesham
trees by the side of the road. Deep yellow laburnum blossoms hung in languid, back-lit festoons, and the leaves of the occasional teak trees fluttered and crackled like flat fans in the dying wind. The fields stretched beyond in an unbroken plain of cracked clay where the stubble from the harvested wheat still thrust its sharp, dried shoots.

“Watch out for these, Bhabi,” Hari said, turning to me. “They can go right through heavy shoes, even.”

These were the first words that he had spoken directly to me since we stepped down from the train. His voice had the same timbre as Tej's, livened by a Punjabi rhythm superimposed on English.

When we reached the turn-off to Majra and rounded the bend, Tej and Hari, the cousins, and I found ourselves directly facing the setting sun. It threw into silhouette everything ahead of us—the tall
sheesham
tree windbreaks bordering the fields, the stray birds that hadn't reached their nests yet, the mud houses of the village as we got nearer. Presently we reached Majra pond. It was just as Tej had described it once in a letter, and I knew without being told that the building standing at its edge and mirrored darkly in it, was an abandoned mosque, crumbling at the walls, weak in the minarets. There had been no one to see to its upkeep for three years now.

There still remained a little way to go. Smoke from the fires of dried cow dung rose in the dusk, filtering the orange and diffusing whatever light was left into a soft, even glow. Its subtle fragrance, like old wood burning, or some exotic incense, filled the air.

“It's just beyond that tamarind tree,” Tej said and pointed to a spot a few yards off where great shadows had formed in the gathering darkness. In the afterglow, we proceeded past the tree, past a compound wall, and finally reached a wooden gate seven feet high.

It opened at our coming, and inside the yard was a bouquet of disembodied faces. Expressions of unself-conscious curiosity, suspicion, and shyness were held for an instant in bold relief by the light of kerosene lanterns. Family and servants had gathered for this, as had onlookers from the rooftops of nearby houses. Then out of the dusk a short, brisk, motherly figure emerged and took me in her warm, plump arms before I had a chance to go through the ritual of touching the hem of her garment. Tej had coached me to do this with older people as a mark of respect and good upbringing. The others materialized out of the deep dusk—Pitaji, a tall, heavy, military presence against the lantern light; then Goodi and Rano. Beside them was a third person.

We two must have looked at one another for a moment too long. I could feel the breaths of the others stop. They stood watching us. Tej created some business with the luggage. Hari turned to help him. Mataji, Pitaji, the girls, and the cousins from Amritsar formed a tableau in the half-dark. I took a step forward. An unanticipated question crossed my mind: was I supposed to touch the hem of
her
garment? She was, after all, older than I. Something powerful held me back. Where was Tej to advise me what to do? To get me through this moment? There was no one to give a hint. And she kept standing there, a tall, full figure in the light of the kerosene lantern that made a shadow of her features at the same time it shone through the dupatta—sheer as a dragonfly's wing—that was drawn over her head and that partially covered her face.

From behind her darted another form out of the dark. It was a child wearing a turban sizes too big for him. The occasion for breaking the impasse had presented itself. I bent down to chuck him under the chin. He slipped away, to hide behind his mother. By the time I straightened up, Dilraj Kaur had turned to order one of the servants to bring us tea, and everybody had started talking at once.

5

By the time Uncle Gurnam Singh arrived from Bikaner in the first week of July—in a jeep, with all his retinue, out of a whirl of dust and confusion, filling the village with excitement and wonder—the heat of the premonsoon summer had taken possession of our very flesh and bones.

The dry winds that whipped through the dun-colored landscape in May and June had given way to a relentless, moisture-laden, yellow dust-haze that not even the smallest breeze disturbed. There was a breathless suspension of sound, except for the drugged hum of crickets in the hibiscus hedgerows. And all conversations centered on when the rains would come. The monsoon had been drenching and flooding the streets of Bombay for over a month and was moving north in its own time. Pitaji, like farmers everywhere and always, scanned the skies morning and evening, looking for clues.

Everything was ready to pop, and the uneasy relationship that had grown between Dilraj Kaur and me since my arrival six weeks earlier, was, like the heat, locked in with the lid on. In the beginning we sometimes caught ourselves studying one another, she perhaps wondering if my pubic hair was the same color as the pale blond of my head; I trying to figure out if she shaved hers, as I had heard Indian women do. Surely she plucked her eyebrows, though; those straight lines seemed too neat to be true, too classic to be achieved without some help. Classic. Statuelike. Greek goddess-like. She was, in fact, a reminder that Alexander's soldiers had done more than fight in Punjab. They had left a veritable Juno behind in the form of this twentieth century descendant. The broad brow, the straight nose, the full jaw, the grey eyes testified to that.

She lived her life within the family occupying a couple of rooms set aside for her and Nikku. I lived mine with Tej, whose attention I shared with the sitar, farm work, the overseeing of the new house for the family going up on the village outskirts, and with all the people, friends and family, who naturally gravitated into his magnetic field.

Tej's space and mine was the mud-walled room at one end of the compound. Mataji had installed us there together from the start, in what we took to be a triumph of logic over social taboo. Tej was, after all, my only link to the new world around me. It made sense for us to be together. Our room had two small windows with heavy wooden shutters that kept out both heat and light. On the packed earthen floor was spread a Persian carpet, a possession from pre-Partition days and one of the few belongings the family had salvaged when they made the move to east Punjab in 1947. Pitaji, back from tank warfare in the North African desert, had just retired as a Major in the Indian Army, and instead of being able to settle in his home village southwest of Lahore on the Pakistan side of the border, had to start all over again in Majra, where the government had allotted him some land in compensation for the farm he'd lost in the upheaval.

The carpet, then, was a constant reminder of the past; the mud floor, present reality. And my present reality was life amongst the resettled family that was soon to become mine. Even after two months, there were the extravagant presences outside the door of our room, the watchful eyes from behind the bamboo screens in the veranda, the cautious scrutiny at close range. I was still a novelty, an exotic, potentially dangerous—and therefore beguiling—creature from another world. In the presence of others, Tej needed to make it seem that I was not (as they may have feared) yet another disruptive force dropped down in their midst, that I was not going to make everything fall apart. He was still his own man, his own boss, their son, and not my plaything. Alone with me, he insisted on taking responsibility for the whole of India, minus its splendor, and for all its mass of people. For every fly on every item of food in the bazaars, for every peanut shell littering a train compartment, there was the look in his eyes that took personal blame for it all. It belied the take-it-or-leave-it attitude he wore like a suit of armor. I wanted to tell him that all this was not his fault. That it didn't matter anyway. But I didn't know how.

On the day of Uncle Gurnam's arrival, then, lunch had been finished, and everyone was ready to draw curtains, bolt the doors and the wooden shutters, and settle down for another afternoon, amongst a whole summer of afternoons, without electricity.

But then there came the seldom sound of a car engine, of tires spinning in the dust of the unpaved road into Majra, and as the vehicle approached, the groan of the overloaded chassis. Rano and I climbed up the bamboo ladder to the roof to find out what was going on. Ram Piari was not far behind. Moti and Jim and Lal barked, and Gian, acting on the reasonable assumption that ours was the only house in the village likely to have a visitor who owned a car, flung the gate to our compound open in anticipation. A jeepload of men and boys, laughing and talking loudly, was rounding the bend beyond the Majra pond, passing the abandoned mosque and heading our way.

A moment later, Nikku and Goodi were beside us on the roof, while the yard was filling up fast with the rest of the family.

“It's Uncle Gurnam Singh!” Goodi cried.

“Who's with him?” Rano asked.

“I can't tell from here,” Goodi said.

“I want to see too,” Nikku said, getting in between the girls to have a look.

“I don't see Aunt Gursharan,” Goodi said. Her voice breathed disappointment.

The Punjabi came too fast for me to follow after that. It had to do with the other occupants of the jeep, names that were unfamiliar to me and relationships too complicated to sort out.

Before we knew it, the jeep had drawn up inside the compound, in front of the main room of the house. Welcoming shouts of
“Sat Sri Akal”
greeted the newcomers. Mataji and Pitaji came forward as Uncle alighted from behind the steering wheel and lifted a little boy (his youngest son Surinder?) down from the front seat. Rano and Nikku, Goodi and Ram Piari were already down the ladder again, while I struggled to descend the swaying bamboo contraption with some shred of dignity, aware that a misstep would find me sprawling at its base. I would end up being the center of concern, if not laughter. Already, neighbors had crowded the roofs of adjacent houses to find out what was going on. Amongst them was Veera Bai, the girl from the village who swept our yard everyday. A smile hovered on her lips ready to break into a laugh if I were to oblige them all with a spectacle.

Tej and Hari went to receive their bear hugs from Uncle and the others, and Dilraj Kaur, her face modestly veiled by her dupatta, touched Uncle's feet. By this time Nikku was by his mother's side and Uncle was patting the top of his head.

It was time for me to step down from the bamboo ladder, and face the questioning glances of the newcomers that asked what Tej's memsahib was like, what he saw in her; what their daughters would do for husbands if Jat boys should go on marrying foreign girls like this.

I came forward with my palms together in greeting and the demure expression I had perfected when meeting elders for the first time. Tej managed it so that he was at my side as Uncle gave me his blessing. He inquired about the health of my parents, asked how many sisters and brothers I had and registered sincere concern when I told him I had no brother. He wished me prosperity and happiness anyway.

It soon became clear that one of Uncle's passions, even as a guest, was taking charge and ordering others to get things done. Mataji's younger brother by two years was at his best at this, making it somehow an honor—a privilege even—to be allowed to do something for him. He issued instructions to the retinue of friends, poor relations, people who wanted favors from him, and servants, who like vassals of a maharaja, accompanied him wherever he went and who were now climbing out of the jeep. I had become familiar with the Indian habit of dispensing with introductions and knew that before long all these individuals who had come along with Uncle would get sorted out, and I would come to know in good time who each one was.