Karma (2 page)

Aurora

I shake my father awake.

He stirs and opens his eyes.

What is it, Jiva?

(
This
is my real name.)

Look.

I point outside.

He leans across me, presses his face to the small plastic oval.

The sky shudders in coloured waves.

It's beautiful,
he whispers.

Like a rainbow coming apart.

(Like a sari unwound.)

Peaceful.

His words brush the window.

She would have loved this.

He grips the paper-wrapped box balanced on his left knee.

What remains of
she
.

We are bringing Mata home

In a box Bapu holds under his arm.

An urn. Brass.

He held it on his lap all the way from Elsinore to Winnipeg.

One and a half hours on the bus.

On his lap in the taxi.

He can't bear to be away from her.

This is my wife
, he explains to airport security.

Be careful with her. Her name is Leela.

The blond man in uniform hikes up his blue pants.

I don't care if her name is Sally-come-lately.

They x-ray her anyway. Someone shakes the box.

Can't be too careful these days.

My father stares angrily but says nothing. His body is in pain as if it's his own heart they're tossing.

This is my wife,
he pleads with the flight attendant.

I understand
, she says.
But for everyone's safety . . .

He slides the box under the seat for takeoff.

I'm sorry,
he whispers to my mother.
You should never be at my feet.

Dear Maya,

Watch over your father.

You will need each other.

Blame

Bapu is heavy with grief and remorse.

Blame too.

Where were you? Why did you leave your mother alone?

What were you doing that was more important than her?

I am not her caretaker!
I shouted before running out of the house into the fields.

My father claims Mata lost heart while waiting for me.

(What was she playing? The Bach that I loved? Schubert? No, it must have been Beethoven.)

And where was I?

Why didn't I rush home like every other afternoon?

Because I had something to do.

I had to find out if my suspicions were right.

The piano

My father bought the piano when things got bad.

They're cheap in the country.

Every old farmhouse has one.

Always a piano for sale somewhere on the prairies.

Two hundred dollars.

And it's yours.

Mata insisted it be carried up the stairs to the yellow wallpapered bedroom on the second floor.

The railing and a piece of a wall had to be removed to make it fit.
I want it in a room with a door
, she insisted.

It helped for a while. Instead of finding Mata crying in the kitchen every afternoon, I came home to music. The second-floor window propped open. A waltz carried on the wind.

When she wasn't playing, she hummed. My father and I exchanged smiles. Maybe this would help. Forget the loneliness. Forget about going home.

But over the years, the music got louder. It was angry, weeping, beautiful, and sad. I was frightened and thrilled at the same time. She played with such passion that I couldn't believe it was my mother. This small quiet woman who sat at dinner with her hands folded like an oldfashioned schoolgirl. Refusing food. Eyes staring ahead, always open, wet with tears. Even her weeping was controlled. But on the keyboard she was possessed.

Above the kitchen the floorboards groaned with music. Some days she even forgot and called me Jiva.

The day I heard Bapu weep at my mother's declaration, I knew things wouldn't get better.

There won't be another child, Amar,
she said in English.
I have nothing to feed him.

She put her hand on her breast to show him it was flat.

My mother never spoke Punjabi again. Hindi became the language of her demise.

Beethoven

Piano Sonata no. 23 in F Minor.

Twenty-three minutes from the first to last touch of her fingers on the keys. Twenty-three minutes from the bus stop to home. Up the single-lane gravel road into Mata's music.

I hear it before I see the window propped open with a book. The melody escaping under the glass. Winding between the trees, a grove of oaks, and into the open fields. Like a scarf loosened from a woman's neck, the music floats on air.

It is always Beethoven after 3:00.

The sonatas,
Mata explains,
are my favourite. Four movements. Like the four elements or the four directions.

The bus drops me at the end of our road and I run
North
on the freshly-turned
Earth
.

But Beethoven's
Appassionata
has only three movements, Maya. The allegro assai is quick, lively and cheerful. The andante con moto–attacca is slower, hymn-like but still demanding to be listened to. But the allegro, ma non troppo–presto is to be played with passion. Like time is running out.

If I leave the road and cross the pasture, I can catch the last.

There are only three. Like the stages of a life.

I pick up the pace, my feet springing out of the field's autumn stubble. The andante con moto calls to me.
Hurry
, the piano urges.
Run, Maya, run.

When I reach the house, the last chords strike like prairie thunder and without a breath the allegro, ma non troppo begins. In the kitchen I kick my shoes into a dusty corner and take the stairs two at a time. At the top of the landing, a door swings open and I see Mata's long black braid swinging with the metronome. Arms fly out from her body, hands clawing the black and white keys. She plays as if the house might fall and only her music keeps it standing.

For the last two minutes, the sonata beats out my breaths. The music despairs. The building madness—the unhinged mind seeking order in music.

But there is something else too.

Something buried deep in the allegro, in the short melodic fragments. Is it love I hear? Not the sweet melody of early devotion when hearts cannot imagine their cracks, but a complex love: disappointments and betrayals tempered over time. Acceptance.

My parents had the most romantic love story

Like
Romeo and Juliet.
Warring families.

Montagues and Capulets. Khuranas and Dwivedis plotting against each other, discouraging the young lovers.

But Mata told me he looked like a warrior. Tall and regal. A turban of molten bronze.

And my father, when pressed to remember, says my mother glowed as if her body was the only source of light in the hall. All shadows disappeared. Then the rest of the world followed.

There was only her.

Leela.
Meaning
“play.”

They meet at a wedding

A good omen according to my Hindu mother.
Auspicious.
She is hiding behind a pillar ribboned with green vines. Jasmine blossoms fill the hall with honey sweetness.

No, it was the scent of your mother,
Bapu insists.

His turban ought to have warned her away.

The families would never allow it. A marriage between a Sikh and a Brahman would be full of conflicts.

But my mother is reckless. She rearranges her sari. Silk the colour of a sunset. She steps from behind the column and dares to look my father straight in the eye.

From that moment on, he is lost.

Drowned
, Mata had claimed.

Saved,
Bapu says.

Or was it doomed?

The Courtship

For two months Leela is not allowed to leave the house unaccompanied. Her mother warns,
You will be dead to me if you marry a Sikh.

In my father's house, his mother doesn't talk to him for six weeks.

Actually, I enjoyed the quiet.

Bapu's father is not silent. He lectures that a Sikh's duty is to God. His son's lust for the Brahman girl will bring about my father's spiritual downfall.

He quotes the poet Bullashah:

“Be content with thy circumstances,

Do not be blinded by glamour,

Fix thine attention on the seed,

Ignore the branches, leaves, and fruit.

That which comes and goes is transient,

The wise do not become attached to it.”

My father is not moved.

God is in his love for Leela.

My grandfather tries to scare my father.

My mother is an example of Maya, the world of illusion, not the true world of God.
A Sikh attached to Maya cannot escape the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Amar, you will be bound to the Wheel of Existences!

But the couple will not relent. They choose to believe that their parents' condemnation is for show. To save face, both families must express their displeasure at the union.

Three months later there is a wedding.

Leela holding his gaze.

My father rendered blind.

Amar.
Means
“immortal.”

Dear Maya,

Love is like watching the approach of one's beloved. Our hands reaching out.

A willingness to wait all eternity for the touch.

At the Occasion of Bliss

The Sikh and Hindu families both celebrate.

They can't help themselves. All are swept up in the wedding drama like a storm that blows in one direction.

The groom arrives on horseback wearing a turban of red. The couple walks around the sacred fire.

My father's scarf is tied to my mother's sari.

O God! I lovingly surrender to you.

To love each other is to love the Divine.

There are moments during the celebrations when Mata's family whispers that Sikhs are really just Hindus anyway. Just taller and a bit arrogant. And lacking in religious imagination.

Bapu's family whispers in kind that Hindus are just un-evolved Sikhs. A people who had yet to cast off their pantheon of gods and goddesses. Still too romantic in their religious philosophy.

But during the days of the wedding, they accept each other's shortcomings. Families are united.

A peace is necessary.

And since the couple is emigrating, there will be few reminders of the ill-thought marriage. They will all go on as before. Ignoring the new relatives.

Before my parents leave for Canada, advice is given:
Insist she become a Sikh
, my grandfather tells his son.
Only then will you have real peace.

Amar's answer:
I'll not step inside a temple without her.

My mother's family says nothing.

Leela is no longer their daughter.

Already dead to them.

What are you writing?

A family history.

Ah
, Bapu says, looking down at the box on his lap.

He shifts in the narrow airplane seat, moving my mother so she rests on his chest. He closes his eyes and goes back to sleep.

The sky outside the window blackens like soot.

A nightmare erasing the colours of the wind.

We begin in Elsinore

Seventy-five miles southwest of Winnipeg. A prairie town where sunflowers grow in neat, tall rows. The sun drags the yellow faces from east to west. The faithful adoration of the masses.

There are one thousand, four hundred, and seventy-two Christian-like souls living in this oddly named town. A Danish settler's choice? Or a literary scholar who saw a castle in the clouds?

(Helen thinks a spinster English teacher crafted the lofty name and then went slowly mad with small town bordeom and the lack of marriageable men.)

There are also three pagans in this community. That's us.

We rent an old farmhouse near the cemetery.

(
Just until we can buy our own piece of land, Leela
.)

Bapu runs Jack's Mechanic Shop. A lease-to-own deal negotiated with Jack's widow, Lucy, just before she moved to Florida. My father's offer for the shop was the only one.

Mata's job is to take care of the home, her husband, a yard full of chickens, and two goats.

And me

Fate

A man steps on the moon at the exact moment I am born.

July 20, 1969. 9:56 p.m. (CDT)

When my mother learns this, she puts her lips against my cheek and says,
Auspicious.

I cry as if the man is walking over me instead of the grey ash of Earth's satellite.

You will fly
, Mata whispers.

My eyes are gelled. Closed like a kitten's.

Birth day

I arrive at the Brandon Hospital. Glistening like the moon on a summer's night. Bapu says that I'm so white I must be a changeling. A switch in the womb. A fairy child. A delusion.

But Mata says,
Wait, Amar. It's just chalk dusting her skin. The chalk from her story written across the sky. The goddess Maya's hand is telling her future.

Rubbish,
Bapu says.
There is only one God.

They are both surprised to hear Amar say this. He has always been tolerant of Leela's beliefs. But today, they hear the voice of his father.

Let me clean her,
says the redheaded nurse. She wipes away the sticky vernix, the chalk dust, the story written in the clouds, and then I take my proper colour.

The nurse holds me up for inspection. Bapu nods his approval.

I am dark. Dark as Manitoban soil.

The earth he wants to own.

On the Eleventh day

Let's name her Neil
.

After the astronaut.

You're delirious, Leela.

What about Luna?

No. My daughter will not have a crazy name.

Then let's give her a Canadian-Indian name:

Strong-Arm-Swinging-at-Moon.

Are you mad? Did your brain fall out with the baby? Listen, wife.

I have chosen a name.