Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  She awoke to quarrelling. Mani was arguing that Ram Pari must be allowed to stay. ‘She has nowhere to go,’ she said, and Prabhjot Kaur could hear the effort it cost her to keep her voice low and reasonable, how it thickened her throat.

  ‘That’s all very sad,’ Mata-ji said. ‘But since when has she become my mausi that I should take care of her? Let her go to her relatives.’

  ‘Mata-ji, I told you already, she has nobody here. Her husband brought her here from her village. Do you want her to sleep on the streets, with all of those children?’

  ‘When did I say I want her to do anything?’ Mata-ji was sitting cross-legged near the kitchen, with a big thal in her lap piled high on one side with wheat. The grains skittered across the metal to the other side under her rapid fingers, without cease, and on the floor next to her there was a small pile of black pebbles and husks and stubble. ‘I don’t want her to do anything at all.’

  Prabhjot Kaur ran through the courtyard, out to the front gate. Ram Pari was squatting just inside the gate, her wrists resting on a rolled-up blue mattress. She was surrounded by children, an incredible sprawl of them. A toddler naked but for a black thread tied around its waist clambered over ankles and shins, its fat legs pedalling rapidly. When he had almost escaped the circle of bodies, a girl of Prabhjot Kaur’s age bent and reached for his arm and dragged him back.

  ‘Ram Pari,’ Prabhjot Kaur said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘What to say, Nikki?’ Ram Pari said. ‘What to say? My man, he came back.’ She spread her hands wide, taking in not only the children and Prabhjot Kaur but the world itself.

  ‘But he can’t just drive you out. That’s not right.’ Now Ram Pari was quiet, and Prabhjot Kaur had the uncomfortable feeling that they were all looking at her, even the baby, all these hot black eyes, quite expressionless but still making her shift about and look for somewhere else to go. She made herself back away, and then turned and ran into the house. In her chest there was a panic, a biting dread that was coloured black and crimson, that tasted like a rotten apple she had bit into once, all spongy and brown under the crisp skin. She flung herself at Mata-ji’s shoulder. With her face in Mata-ji’s hair, she panted, ‘Oh Mata-ji, let her stay.’

  ‘You also?’ Mata-ji rolled her eyes. ‘Saints and social workers my daughters have become.’

  Navneet-bhenji laughed. She was sitting at the hall table, a little cup of oil in front of her, and she was combing it through her hair with long, slow strokes that lifted up the black lengths and let them fall like undulating waves. In the new light the heart-shape of her face was glowing, and her lips curled red, and Prabhjot Kaur had never seen her so beautiful.

  ‘Navneet-bhenji,’ Prabhjot Kaur cried, close to tears. ‘Tell Mata-ji to let her stay.’

  ‘Mixing up in these people’s quarrels will only lead to trouble,’ Mata-ji said. ‘Do you want that man walking about in the lane outside, and in and out of this house? And that dirty brood of hers…’

  ‘Mata-ji,’ Navneet-bhenji said, ‘you can wash them all, three times.’

  ‘Don’t you start, Navneet,’ Mata-ji said. ‘And you two, get dressed for school.’

  When she got that swollen look about her face, Mata-ji was as unmovable as a full canister of desi ghee. Prabhjot Kaur buttoned her uniform with trembling fingers, and all day at school was completely distracted by visions of Ram Pari walking through an endless thorny wasteland, her children whimpering from thirst and dropping one by one. Manjeet and Asha watched Prabhjot Kaur quizzically as she struggled to take notes. At recess she told them about Ram Pari’s plight, but they were unmoved, or at least only half as, or quarter as, moved as she was. If that. ‘These people keep fighting like that only,’ Asha said. Prabhjot Kaur heard the words, and saw the prim little twist to Asha’s mouth, and fought down a surge of tears. Manjeet just shrugged. Then they both turned to more urgent matters, to the question of whether it would be possible to persuade Manjeet’s father to sponsor an outing over the next weekend. Their heads were close together, and Prabhjot Kaur saw their bright plaits and the clean white of their dupattas, and she wanted to speak, but her feeling for Ram Pari belonged in some dim interior fold, in a turn in a cave, and it was impossible to drag it out squirming and scared into the hard summery light. So Prabhjot Kaur took a deep breath, and was quiet. She was quiet all day, and quiet on Daraq Ali’s tanga, all the way home.

  The children were still outside, still scrambling in the patch of shade, which had moved across the courtyard and narrowed. Ram Pari was inside the house, scrubbing the last of the pots. Navneet-bhenji was dozing with a book spread over her belly, flapping a fan lazily. Without opening her eyes, she told Prabhjot Kaur the tale of the day’s struggle: Ram Pari had come in, without asking, and had started sweeping the courtyard, just as usual; she had gone about her tasks, and Mata-ji watched her, and the two women passed each other in silence. They had not said a word to each other the whole day. Even now, as Prabhjot Kaur watched, Mata-ji came diagonally across the baking bricks, holding a wet knot of clothes in her hand, and she passed within a foot of Ram Pari as she went to the staircase leading to the roof, but both of them swept their eyes away from each other, as if clothes and pots left no attention available for anything else.

  ‘She didn’t look at her, yes?’ Navneet-bhenji said, still with her eyes closed.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mata-ji. She didn’t even look at Ram Pari?’

  ‘No, she didn’t.’

  ‘That’s what she’s been doing all day. Oof, Nikki, she drives me crazy. All these silences full of meaning, and everyone else is supposed to understand them and do what she wants. And she’s very good at it. Everyone does do what she wants.’

  Prabhjot Kaur was silent herself now. She had felt, herself, little stabs of resentment at her mother, when she wasn’t allowed to go on a school picnic, when she was served last from the bowl of kheer and less than her brothers, but all of these small angers vanished daily under the vast presence of her mother’s warm influence, under the damp, all-enfolding embrace of her motherly arms, which you could feel as soon as you entered the main gate, in the half-bricks painted white with which she had lined the walkway, in the lacy trimmings on the table cloths on the tables in the baithak. But to hear this strange, tinny edge of contempt in Navneet-bhenji’s voice was to suddenly know a separation between mother and daughter, between Mata-ji and herself, that Prabhjot Kaur had never imagined before. It made her feel queasy and very alone.

  Navneet-bhenji opened her eyes. She looked full into Prabhjot Kaur’s face, her eyes still hazy and abstracted. Then she blinked twice. ‘Arre, why’re you looking like that, bachcha?’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. She can be infuriating, but you’ll go away from this house also.’

  Prabhjot Kaur had to swallow twice before she could speak. ‘Away?’

  ‘Yes,’ Navneet-bhenji said, and drew her close. She nestled her in the bend of an elbow and whispered into her hair. ‘Haven’t you heard? A girl is born into a house, but her home is somewhere else. This house doesn’t belong to you. Your home is elsewhere.’

  Saying this, Navneet-bhenji stretched and sighed luxuriously, and Prabhjot Kaur felt, through her own head and into her toes, her sister’s pleasure in life, her eagerness for the future, her happiness at leaving, at being gone, and yet Prabhjot Kaur felt only an inexplicable loss, and foreboding. And the rough, ashy sound of the pot being scrubbed mingled with her sister’s pulse, which throbbed under her ear.

  She covered her head with Navneet-bhenji’s dupatta and tried to sleep. When Mani came in an hour and a half later, and flung her bag full of books on the floor, Prabhjot Kaur understood that she had seen Ram Pari and the children, who were still camped by the gate, and that she was incensed and ready for battle. But Mata-ji gave Mani such a look, all twisted brow and bulging eyes, that even she quailed, and quietly came and sat down next to Prabhjot Kaur. She picked furiously at a toenail. Then she said, ‘We’ll have to wait for Papa-ji.’

/>   But Papa-ji was in no mood for struggles. He was exhausted, and he lay back against a masnad and combed his fingers through his beard, and Prabhjot Kaur could see that even though Mani had put her case squarely before him, and had done it well, in a few short, precise sentences, he was thinking of something else. ‘That’s difficult,’ he said. And then he cupped his eyes. Mani was leaning forward, her fingers twisted and twisting in a kind of net. ‘That’s difficult,’ he said, and then got up. He walked towards his room, and had already forgotten about Ram Pari and her difficulties, this was clear. Mani threw back her shoulders and raised her hands in defeat. Prabhjot Kaur drummed her heels on the floor. What to do, what to do? The silence continued, widened. Ram Pari came in at dinner time to make the phulkas, and the only thing that Prabhjot Kaur could hear were the slap-slaps of her hands on the atta. Her brothers were home, but even they ate quietly. Everyone looked worried, except for Navneet-bhenji. Finally, when the dishes had been cleared away, Mata-ji was nibbling on a little thimble of gur, which she held in two fingers above a cupped left hand. Ram Pari came and stood by the wall, leaning against it. She had a hand cocked on a hip, and one ankle crossed behind the other. ‘Bibi-ji,’ she said. ‘I’m going.’

  ‘Go,’ Mata-ji said, and Prabhjot Kaur felt something twist and give in the exact middle of her chest.

  Ram Pari was half-way across the courtyard when Mata-ji spoke again. ‘Where will you go?’

  Prabhjot Kaur could see how still Ram Pari was. Her shoulders were thin, dark rectangles, pinned against the moonlit white of the wall behind, against the sharp edge of the roof. She said nothing.

  Mata-ji was looking at the tiny piece of gur left on her finger, as if she were weighing it, considering its possibilities. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You can stay for one night, behind the house.’

  ‘Yes, Bibi-ji.’

  ‘But only one night. Hear me?’

  ‘Yes, Bibi-ji. One night.’

  Ram Pari left quickly. Prabhjot Kaur knew that she was hurrying to get out of earshot before anything more could be said, and she herself couldn’t bear the thought of any more talk. She felt suddenly limp, tired, as if she had walked all the way to school and back with a great bag hanging on her shoulders. She settled forward, slumped for a moment against Mata-ji’s knees, then got up herself without being told to and got ready for bed. But in spite of wobbly knees and dragging eyes, she clambered up on a stool in the corner of the room where she slept with Mani, and craned her neck out of the window at an angle, so that she could see the busy crowd of dark figures bustling about at the back of the house. There was broken light from two windows, that was all, but Prabhjot Kaur saw how Ram Pari and her children were making their home. They had bundles, none of which Prabhjot Kaur could remember seeing during the long day, but from these bundles they now pulled sheets and rags, strips and tatters, which, arranged on the ground close to the house in a rough, jagged circle, became a habitation. Prabhjot Kaur saw how the shadow of a wall alone could be a shelter. She went to sleep filled to the brim with this new knowledge. She remembered all the drawings she had made of ‘My Home’ in her long life, and now she knew that all those simple boxy houses she had drawn were somehow a lie, and there was some satisfaction in looking back and thinking what a silly-silly child she had been.

  The next afternoon, when Prabhjot Kaur got back from school, she went straight around to the back of the house, and there were two thick sheets nailed to the back wall at the upper end and weighted with broken bricks at the other, forming a kind of half-tent, under which the baby dozed. The other children were scattered in disarray around the garden, which wasn’t quite a garden yet but mostly dusty earth, two forlorn trees and a wall at the far end. Prabhjot Kaur stepped close to the mouth of the tent and leaned in. Two poking-out bricks had been made into a little shelf, on which sat a bright picture of Sheran-walli-Ma resplendent on her tiger. From a nail hung a cloth bag which contained clothes. Another two nails held a gunny sack with grain in it. In the furthest recess, in the shadiest part of the tent, there was a small mountain of little bags, and against it the baby slept. Prabhjot Kaur thrilled violently, in the little green world behind the sheet, feeling newness jump up her arms in ecstatic little leaps. She was filled with admiration. How competently so little had been made into so much! How brave it was, all of it! She looked down at the baby. He had a thin bracelet on his right wrist, and a black string around his left arm with a taveez hanging from it, and a penis exactly like a little downturned water-tap. Prabhjot Kaur resisted the urge to pick him up and cradle him, and turned around instead. From a foot away the oldest of the girls was watching her, her hands behind her back. She had a dirty and very long plait that came down over her shoulder and hung in front of her, and alert black eyes, and one protruding tooth on the left side of her mouth. Prabhjot Kaur thought she must be about fourteen, but felt – instantly and without question – older than her. ‘What’s your name, girl?’ she said.

  ‘Nimmo,’ the girl said.

  ‘Do you know how to read, Nimmo?’

  Nimmo shook her head. In half an hour Prabhjot Kaur had learnt, by heart, all their names – Nimmo, Natwar, Yashpal, Balraj, Ramshri, Meeta, Bimla, Nirmala, Gurnaam, in that order – and that none of them knew how to read, that not one of them, not even one of the boys, had ever seen the inside of a schoolroom. Prabhjot Kaur was horrified, because here was the illiteracy of our country, literally in her back veranda, but she was also secretly pleasured, because here was clear direction, a necessary task. She knew what she had to do. She would set about teaching them. But there was the question of how long they would be allowed to stay, whether or not Mata-ji would stick to her one-night policy and ruthlessly force them out into the wide world. Inside the house, Ram Pari was cutting onions, and Mata-ji had her hands slathered in besan, and there were pakoras sizzling madly in the karhai. They were gossiping about the widowed neighbour four plots down, who had a son given to bad ways and alcohol. They seemed quite content together. Prabhjot Kaur tiptoed around all evening, terrified, unable to bring up the one-night question for fear of reminding Mata-ji of it, and unable to forget it. But when bedtime came, and she stuck her head out of the window, the other family was still there, that round cluster of shiny heads in the dark. It was all quite baffling, Prabhjot Kaur thought as she waited for sleep, her head full of plans. People had stances, they threw out opinions, they made ferocious noises, but decisions were often made in a flurry of competing silences, and what was not said mattered more than what was. The world grew more complicated every day, she thought.

  The next afternoon, which was Friday, Prabhjot Kaur lined the children in three columns of three, smallest to largest at the back, and started on the Punjabi alphabet. ‘Ooda, aida,’ she had them chant. For a blackboard she used the bottom half of a broken old carrom board. She drew the letters across the faded lines of the old game, precise as always, looking not just for correctness but also beauty. She immediately discovered that the younger ones were easier to teach. Meeta and Bimla eagerly took to the letters, and bent low over their pieces of paper, tongues curled between lips, and drew clumsy but correct shapes. Nimmo, on the other hand, mooned about, stared into the distance, lay down on her side and put her head down on her arm and drew letters that looked more like smashed kites or tangles of grass than the elegant, swooping, swan-like constructions Prabhjot Kaur wanted. As soon as Nimmo learnt the third letter, she forgot the first one, and when Prabhjot Kaur urged her to try again – ‘Ooda, aida, Nimmo, ooda, aida’ – she stuck out her tooth and twisted her face into a grin of such happy stupidity that Prabhjot Kaur felt her patience leaving her and wished she had the authority to give her one tight, biting slap on the ear, like the cracky ones the drawing mistress at school flung out with bloodcurdling suddenness. But Nimmo remained as thick as ever, as stubbornly gooey as old cartwheel grease. And Natwar disappeared altogether. On that very first Friday, Prabhjot Kaur turned from her carrom board, and her middle column was missing one
student at the very rear. She stamped her foot, and ran to the corner of the building, but he was already outside the gate, running fast, and he didn’t turn his head at her call. He never came back for lessons, but appeared regularly just when they finished.

  ‘Never mind about Natwar. He’s another one like his father,’ Ram Pari said. ‘You put something in their heads.’ She appeared every afternoon, late, after she had finished the afternoon dishes and there was still time before chai, and she sat cross-legged with her back against the wall to watch the children being drilled. Prabhjot Kaur watched her watching, and after a week decided that she wasn’t nearly grateful enough. Yes, Ram Pari rattled at the kids – ‘Learn something, you ganwars!’ – but she seemed to think it was a kind of game, and when she needed help with some task that Mata-ji had set her, she would march everyone away except the baby, as if hanging a set of dhurries and beating them free of dust was vastly more important than the three-times-table. Prabhjot Kaur’s two brothers pretended serious admiration, but when they started calling her ‘Adhyapika-ji’, she understood that they were mainly amused and gave them a pert shoulder. Navneet-bhenji was too dreamy to care, and Mani didn’t have time to discuss it, the exams were coming on. Only Papa-ji understood how important it was. By the time Prabhjot Kaur had got her class, or at least a part of it, to the nine-times-table, he was regularly drinking his evening chai while sitting on a high-backed chair set at an angle to her classroom, so that it squarely faced the garden, where there would be trees some time soon.