by M G Vassanji
“No. But I think she did—your mother did. That’s not why I talk to her. I just feel good doing that. I just feel I’m remembering her more genuinely.”
“That’s nice.”
“And you get used to talking to a person.”
She laughed. “Don’t I know that!” She turned to him: “Tell me more about her, Dad.”
“You know about your mom.”
“I mean her. That woman.”
“Her name is Mohini,” he said quickly. “I think I told you that.”
“You didn’t. I’m sorry. Tell me about Mohini, then.”
He told her how they had met and how she had shown him around Delhi. He told her about the great mosque and the Dariba Kalan jewellery market—that was where his grandfather probably came from, and where he bought the earrings for her the last time—and he described the eighty-four-bell modest little temple that had intrigued him. Yes, she was younger than him, ten years, perhaps. She had a husband and two daughters.
There was a look of amazement on her face as he’d gone on. When he finished, she was giving him an intense look and he could imagine the questions still playing on her mind. But she looked away.
“It’s not like you plan such a thing,” he said.
“No.”
She became thoughtful, and then abruptly, with a soft smile, she stood up. “I have to go up and talk to my philosopher now. Goodnight, Dad. I love you very much.”
His hands lingered over hers as she left. After a while he could hear her voice on the phone. It was a long call. Young love.
* * *
—
The next morning she was up before him, packed and ready to call her Uber. He gave her coffee and fried her an egg first.
“I feel ravenous. I could eat an ox, but an egg is fine.”
She had on the mischievous look of a child bursting with a secret. They had not spent much time together, but they had been close. She had not been hurt or scolded him about Mohini, his recklessness. When she was here, her presence was everywhere. She brought life back to the house. She had cooked a dinner for him, and they had had lunch at the heated patio of a bistro on Yonge Street. She wouldn’t have beer or wine, and he’d given her a stare.
“I’d like to come and visit you in New York,” he said. “I won’t interfere in your life…just to see you. I can go to a museum, catch a play.”
“You can come whenever, Dad. But there’s a special occasion I’d like you to come for. I’ll let you know when. In the fall.”
“Yes? What occasion? Or is it a secret?”
“I’m having a baby.”
He paused, not quite surprised, yet still taken aback. Then he stood up and went round to embrace her.
When her car came, she gave him a tight hug on the sidewalk.
“We should talk more about Delhi,” she said, and left.
Mohini
ONCE A MONTH ON Tuesdays she went to her parents’ house in Gurgaon to help them house-clean and sort things out. There was decades-old stuff to dispose of—what was not claimed by the two daughters was gradually, and sometimes reluctantly, junked.
When Mohini arrived, a girl was there, already on her fours, cleaning the floors, and Mohini made sure she reached the corners and replaced the water in the bucket. These migrant girls, who came from villages in Bihar or UP, had to be taught the ways of the modern city household, and you had to watch them constantly until they learned. Then, inevitably, they left. Six months ago Ma had slipped on a spot of soap residue. Luckily, there was only a minor wrist injury and it received a small cast. This girl was called Sivani, with striking features—small and thin, skin dark and smooth as chocolate, and proudly wearing a chameli in her hair and a stud in her nose. She was going places. When she was done, she scrubbed the pots and pans, and together they cleaned the kitchen counters and the cabinet doors. Mohini gave the girl some food and sent her off. She would be back in the afternoon. Then, while Mohini herself was doing the glass dishes, the other girl came, Damayanti, similarly featured but without the flower in her hair, who cleaned the bathroom and toilet. The girls were fed on their own separate plates, which Ma brought out twice a week when they came. Caste habits die hard.
Sivani had given notice that she was getting married next month, but would send someone else from her village in her stead.
When the house was sparkling clean, Mohini served her father a cup of tea with a brown-bread toast at the table, to which he had brought his copy of the Express Times.
“Let’s go,” Ma said, all dressed up, and Mohini replied, “Let’s,” and they set off for the Hanuman temple at the nearby corner. It had grown, from a small Sankatmochan temple into a yellow-and-white building with a golden spire, and there were flower vendors and fruit stalls and one chai stall outside, and a Sher-e-Punjab dhaba across the street, a sardarji doling out fresh jalebis, samosas and pakodas, and chana.
Ma was huffing, though they had gone only halfway down the block, and Mohini was concerned. “Ma, are you all right? Did you get your checkup done?”
“I’m all right, it’s your bau-ji you should worry about…”
“I worry about him, but did you get your checkup done?”
She stopped for an answer, which didn’t come.
“Next time I’m going to take you to Dr. Panwakar myself for the checkup.”
She wished Aarti, always the favourite, would shoulder some responsibility for their parents. Show some anxiety. But Aarti was in Bangalore and hardly had time to look up from her conferences and meetings. Always in the fast lane, and poor Mohini bringing up the rear.
The temple visit took a short time. Mohini and Ma joined the queue, walked up to the pandit with flowers and some money, joined their hands and received the blessings. In a few minutes they were out, but already there was a pleasant glow on Ma’s face. They crossed the street and had parathas at the dhaba.
These Tuesday visits kept them close. Although Mohini sometimes got weary and complained about the distance and traffic, it was a privilege. It filled her heart, made her feel like a worthy human being. Aarti might be in the fast lane and earn a hundred thousand or more dollars, but she would regret later not having had these moments.
Ma asked her about the children.
“They are all right, Ma, they are good girls. But Asha just does not have her head in her studies. I am worried.”
“And Priya?”
“All right too, I think. At least she is in university. But she made sure she was far from us, in Hyderabad.”
“You make sure they study. Girls need education. Your father insisted you both got educated, and see how far Aarti has gone. President. You too, though you could have gone further.”
“Then I wouldn’t have been able to be close to you and Bau-ji, Ma.”
Her mother gave the tiniest smile and squeezed her hand. “You were always my good girl.”
“But Aarti was the favourite.”
“She only demanded more. You were always steady. We could depend on you, our Mohini. We called her Aarti as a prayer…”
Mohini often wondered about her mother’s background. She was from a little town outside Sargodha where, she once said, nothing exciting happened except the daily round to the local water tap and the monthly visit to the cinema in the city, where her in-laws noticed her. She did not finish her education but taught herself to read in English when Mohini and Aarti started school. Now she could read the dailies. It was she who had preserved that photo, air-brushed and painted, two brothers in blazer and shirt against a darkened studio background, smiling. What could go wrong? Everything. And every day she prayed before the gods at home and at temples and shrines for Mohan’s return, though he would be almost as old as Bau-ji, so what did she pray for? That an old man would walk in after fifty years and say, Here I am, it is I, Mohan? Mohini had asked her mother slyly onc
e, Were you in love with Mohan? Ma had smiled. “The husband’s younger brother is always special.” Then she had looked up into the distance, still with that smile, and said, “He wanted to marry me. He was the one who saw me first, at the cinema. But the older brother always comes first. And he has been good.” The second “he” was Bau-ji, whose given name, Chand, she had never spoken after her marriage.
When they reached home, Bau-ji was stretched out on the floor, receiving his massage, groaning his satisfaction. The masseur was a strong, stocky girl from somewhere in the east called Bala. When she had finished, Bau-ji sat down at the dining table and had his meal, which Ma had laid out for him. Then Ma herself received a massage, on the couch, and finally Mohini on the floor.
Mohini stretched out on the couch and instantly fell asleep. When she awoke, from a bad dream, it was due to the reassuring clatter of tea things on the table. Sivani had returned for her afternoon one hour, to prepare tea and fry some pakodas. Ma and Bau-ji were already up from their naps.
“Bau-ji, Ma, I have to go,” Mohini said, having washed and briefly fixed her face and hair. “Bahadur should be here any minute, we have to beat the traffic.”
Even then, it would take at least an hour to get home. There was a text from Asha, meanwhile, saying she was already back and with her tutor. And another one. From Munir. Her face lit up, her heart beat faster. How are you today?
Her eye met her mother’s, who said, “Come. Come inside for a moment. I want to show you something.”
Mohini got up and with her tea cup in her hand followed her mother to the bedroom. Ma went straight to the great almirah which stood against the wall, put a key into the lock and opened it; stooping down, from the back of the drawer at the bottom she withdrew a package wrapped in an old bandhni.
“What is it, Ma?” Mohini asked.
“It’s what you gave me to keep. It’s not good, what you are doing. What’s inside.”
“You looked inside, Ma?”
“Yes, I had to find out. Why are you doing this, a good girl like you?”
“You read…the letter?”
“No, I didn’t. But I saw the earrings. And that newspaper clipping—about Khan. The author you were telling us about.”
“Just let it be, Ma.” She wrapped the package again and gave it back. “Keep it with you. And don’t tell Bau-ji.”
“I only pray you’ll come to your senses. What has come over you? Are you possessed?”
Yes, she wanted to say. Something has happened to me and I can’t help it.
“Your father too was infatuated with a Muslim once.”
That came out quietly.
“He was? You never told me! When?”
“Before he met me. A Muslim neighbour’s girl. They rejected him, only because he was a Hindu. He came to his senses. We are different, Hindu and Muslim, like day and night…But whether Hindu or Muslim, you are a married woman with a home, Mohini!”
“Ma…”
She sat down on the bed and cried. Her mother let her, and then said quietly, “Whatever he is, he is your husband. You are tied to him. And he is a good man, Ravi. So come to your senses.”
“Can such feelings be controlled, Ma?”
“They had better be.”
* * *
—
She dreamed that she had gone to Canada on some assignment. When she emerged from the arrivals gate at the airport, pent up with excitement, looking left and right to see his face again, he stepped forward and shook her hand formally with, “Welcome to Toronto.” Shook her hand! And let her roll her own bag to the car. He escorted her to her hotel, waited for her to check in, and left her at the elevator to go up. He was embarrassed to be seen with her—she in her sari and long plait, weary after a nineteen-hour journey, with her Indian accent. She flew back home the next day, crying, “Ravi, take me back! I am home!” She awoke in a sweat.
Munir
YOUR GRANDSON WILL BE born an American, Aileen.
Proud of her Scottish roots, she had also been a good Canadian, impatient of any qualification to the goodness. He used to say that he had to meet fifty HR managers (rounding off conveniently) before one arranged an interview for him. “But that’s not racism,” she would say sharply. He agreed, there was no proof. It could have been his accent at the time, or his manner of dressing (overdone, initially) that turned them off. Wasn’t that racism? He had to agree, though, where in the world did people not discriminate? They had arrived close to his initial proposition, but that small gap prevented a quarrel.
Now her grandson would be an American. Like most Canadians of her class, Aileen did not much care for America. That neighbour was recognized as a cousin and ally, a giant of a trading partner, but not liked very much. Canada was better in every way. No arguing. When Munir arrived in the country as a student, Canadian had meant “white.” She had not much cared for that label either. “Didn’t I marry you?” “And I you.” But that distinction mattered less and less, and Toronto grew easier; incidents such as the local butcher asking her, “Who is your husband?” when he was standing right next to her not only vanished, but became laughable when recalled. The butcher shop closed, unable to compete with the A&P.
In all their twenty-five years of marriage, they’d visited the U.S. exactly twice. The second time was following 9/11, and she, a solid McKellar, was quizzed at some length by U.S. immigration (this was the weekend following the shoe-bomber incident), while he, a veritable Khan, was asked only two questions: Where? and How long? This became a joke to be relayed among friends.
And then Razia, at the end of grade eleven, made the treasonable statement, “I would like to go to university in the U.S.”
Aileen objected, threatened: There will be no money from us. Munir cajoled: What’s the need to go there, we have perfectly good universities in Canada. But she was admitted to Yale, and what could either parent say then?
Aileen was right in her fear: they lost their girl, in a manner of speaking. If she had stayed in Canada, she would likely have remained closer to them and in Toronto. But that prospect, of losing a child, was exactly what Munir’s own parents had been warned against when he dropped his own bombshell, his desire to finish his studies in England: You will lose your son if he goes abroad. And they lost him. That’s how it went. Children were to lose. We were a community of immigrants in Kenya, he reflected; we came to a country of immigrants. Rootless; ahistorical; and then he saw that young Indian couple move in a few houses away with their daughter and he thought, I should go to India. Delhi. My grandfather’s city. A full circle.
* * *
—
Aileen would remind him, fondly, of how she had disliked him the moment she first saw him. It was at his job interview at the corporate finance division of the Bank of Montreal. He was too obviously foreign—his hair too neat, his pinstriped suit and brogues not quite right; and his accent—well. She would smile. He was odd. Hers had been the lone vote against him. He was hired because the bank needed to look diverse, and he was qualified. Gradually she began to look past his strangeness, she said, and appreciated his honesty and openness, his respect for women, when other men were loud and obvious with their innuendoes. He began to act less oddly too. His clothes looked normal (he took a colleague from work to shop with him once) and the abominations in his accent wore away—no longer cock for Coke.
She was proud and white with a certain restraint, reminding him of some of his British teachers at school. He asked her out the first time because he was scared of her; he dared himself to tame her. And he did. Underneath that waspish veneer he uncovered a person, a woman, as he expected, attractive and often tender. She began to laugh with him, at his jokes about Nairobi, his foibles as an immigrant. The first time they had sex she had to guide him; it was in the back of his car, the way he had wanted to ever since his teens, having seen it done in a movie. His only previous experi
ence had been a visit to a prostitute in Mombasa in the company of friends. After that time in the car they’d gone to his room and done it again. There was no holding him back, and she enjoyed him, decided he was the one for her despite his difference. It had helped, she would admit, that he had a fair skin for an Indian. They had different habits, and in their life together, since he was the immigrant and a male, she often had her way and decided what was proper.
Was it love? A kind of love. There were moments when he adored her, watching her sleeping, looking helpless, her mouth slightly open, the stiffness drained away and the body radiating the night’s preserved warmth and she was irresistibly sexy. He was proud of her, her trim looks, her sense of propriety, her animated expressions that were controlled—she was not loud, never embarrassing. There were moments of doubt, initially. Was his a case of the colonized male asserting his manhood? Caliban getting his revenge? That had come out in a quarrel, and she seemed irreparably wounded. It had taken a few days for him to redeem himself, for them to pull away from failure. But they settled down. You have to know someone intimately to become aware of those tender moments, those special attributes, those unstated but very real qualities. You learn the feel of their skin, the smell of their breath, those vulnerable moments of nakedness. They were what made you a couple; in the older expression, man and wife. They are the steady fuel that keeps a marriage going through the years and decades of routine, and over those rocky periods and past impending calamities. They never crashed.
One day his widowed sister Khadija came to visit them. When he had allowed himself enough time to mull over that visit, he admitted to himself that he had been embarrassed by her. She had seemed crude. What a word, for someone who had looked after him when he was young, into whose arms he would run when there was no other recourse. He could hardly recognize her. Her face was jowly and spotted, there were dark shadows under the eyes, and she had grown heavy in the hips, in the manner of Punjabi matrons. Far from the slim and pretty young woman he had left back in Nairobi with a tearful goodbye. Thankfully for her figure, she still wore the salwar-kameez. Her English was barely understandable—or did Aileen exaggerate incomprehension? She did speak loudly and her movements were awkward. She asked them how much their house had cost, how much money they made. She could not hide her suspicion of Aileen, having harboured the belief of many Asians that white people were immoral and dirty. She had only recently come to Canada with a son and lived in the immigrant suburb of Rosecliffe Park. She told him she was sick, and he had sympathized. She begged him to visit her, said she would make him paratha; but he never did, and he did not invite her back. There were always excuses. Aileen wanted nothing to do with her. Once, over the phone, Khadija told him, “I realize it is hard to live two lives; you go ahead and live yours, Brother. Be happy. Jité raho.”