This was the first time out of Majra for the two of us since our wedding trip to the hot springs. The air was cold, the night black, and the sky overcast. No stars! We carried as little baggage as possible for the short stay; Tej was reluctant to keep Gian up all night to go to the station to see us off, and the cousins from Amritsar as well as Hari, who would have gladly done us the honor, had gone to attend a wedding in Dhariwal. Some relation on the cousins’ mother’s side was marrying a girl with a B.A. in economics.
We fought our way onto the crowded Delhi mail train at 2 A.M. and sat on our baggage the rest of the journey, all the two hundred miles to the city. Once we arrived, there was a hastily bolted-down breakfast at the station, a quick selection of a hotel nearby, and an even quicker bath and change. Tej put on a freshly-starched turban and his best summer suit for the occasion. I was to spend some time shopping while he attended the interview, and we planned to meet at the American Express in Connaught Place at two o’clock. We packed into that morning in Delhi a month’s worth of action, Majra time.
“You’ve got to beware of bottom-pinchers,” he warned as he left me to go to the college. “Don’t look anyone in the eye, and don’t loiter around. Just keep moving, if you want to window shop, and …”
“… And good luck!” I called after him.
Then I was on my own, for the first time since I disembarked from the Corfu. It was like stepping off a cliff and having the good luck to discover you have wings. There was this feeling of lightness: dizzying, exhilarating, frightening. I wanted to laugh, cry, hang on. I had to get reacquainted with my old self, the one that had, now I realized it, been left behind on the ship that day.
Negotiating the sunny corridors of Connaught Circus, I kept seeing myself in shop window reflections: Helen. Very pregnant. A “Western” girl in a sari. Helen, with an old Rollei. It was slung over my shoulder, and a little leather handbag I had bought in San Francisco just before leaving was tucked under one arm. Each new window offered a small shock: a familiar face? More than that; it was me. At the same time I needed to keep alert to my surroundings lest I stumble over a pavement hawker or unwittingly bump into a fellow pedestrian.
I don’t suppose tourists feel like this, I thought. I met with a few striding purposefully along, wearing sun hats and carrying the latest cameras. On the lookout. For the exotic shot; the unrepeatable moment when the snake charmer’s king cobra rises to his full height, spreads his hood and flicks his tongue, while the mongoose sizes him up. Or the one with the supercilious white cow lounging in the middle of the road, stray cars carefully steering around it. These tourist pursuers of souvenir photographs would not have left their old selves behind on the P. & O. liner to slip into new identities ashore. More than their pink complexions and pale blue eyes, their intact selves made them stand out from the crowd, and gave them the surefooted gait that got them through the busy, sun-filled verandas bordering the shops of Connaught Circus without stubbing their toes. I would not have been surprised to encounter Edith Ritchie on her return journey from visiting her brother in Penang.
By the time all the windows were shopped and presents bought for the family in Majra, it was nearing one o’clock. I had bought for myself and consumed two chocolate bars imported from England, and a cream puff from one of the pastry shops. I also bought two nineteenth century paperback novels to take back to Majra to read at my leisure and a Lucknowi kurta for Tej. There had been only one attempted bottom-pinch, and that failed because I happened to turn around at the right moment.
Only the travel section at the American Express was open by the time I got there. I found a chair to settle down in and some travel folders and international air timetables to peruse while I waited for Tej. I sank into the unfamiliar leather seat and rested my elbows on the leather-upholstered steel tube arms. The slick paper of the folders, the pure, glowing colors of the photographs made flight seem smart, easy, attractive, exciting. The names evoked visions of faraway, inaccessible places, like Los Angeles and San Francisco; Honolulu and New York. Ten thousand miles and thousands of rupees in tickets away. I remembered the International House Hungarians who had sat out their youths in Shanghai waiting for U.S. visas. Once in the United States they had to play cards to keep a grip on things. They might wake up one morning and find themselves back in Shanghai, the time in between a dream they couldn’t handle.
I wondered what if I, instead of being a seven-month pregnant, sari-clad young Western woman with hair pulled back in a bun, were like my compatriots at the counter. They were a couple of tanned girls in shorts and polo shirts and sunglasses who reminded me of Carol. Judging from the conversation they were having with the Indian clerk, they were trying to confirm their reservations back to Chicago. They spoke in loud, distinct tones, as if the unintelligibility of their American mid-western accents could be overcome the louder and slower they pronounced each word. From them getting to Chicago was a matter of confirming a previously made reservation. For me, an impossibility, even if I had wanted to go there.
The timetable was smooth and slick in my hand, the photograph on the cover unnaturally bright, to make the Golden Gate Bridge stand out against a sky of unreal, sapphire blue. A place I had been to countless times, a bridge I had crossed on all kinds of occasions without thinking about it, was now only a shiny picture on the cover of a timetable in my hands. It was as remote, for all practical purposes, as one of Saturn’s rings. I folded the brochure and put it in my purse. After ten minutes, Tej was there.
“How was it?” I asked.
“Okay,” he said. “Three interviewers on the panel. A waiting room full of applicants.” His summer suit had become wrinkled during the hours of waiting.
I could see he was worn out, but I had to ask, “Any idea of what your chances are?”
“It looked like they already had somebody picked out and this was just a tamasha, a show, to go through the motions. To say they’d held interviews. Anyway, the whole charade has made me hungry. Let’s get something to eat before I show you Delhi.”
He tried to keep it light, but I sensed he was disappointed, disheartened, and not a little relieved at the same time: no boat would need to be rocked, no drastic change made in our lives.
The rest of the afternoon was given over to sightseeing. I took a picture of Tej sitting in a clumsy carriage mounted on an old Harley Davidson motorcycle chassis that ordinarily carries six passengers on seats facing each other. Tej is negotiating for the whole vehicle just for ourselves. My shot is in black and white, but I can remember the lemon yellow oilcloth canopy of the “phut-phut.”
The driver was an old man in dirty white cotton pajamas and kurta. Tej was laughing and saying something to him. They had just struck a deal. We were to be shown as much of Delhi as possible before dark, for ten rupees. And we swung off into the broad streets. Roundabouts. Bright white bungalows set amidst dark green lawns and tall jamun trees in which brilliant green parrots perched—all these rushed by as on a movie set, while we sat stationary. Or so it seemed. New Delhi was a broad, flat city, with no skyscrapers, and open, cloud-dotted skies. An occasional car nudged its way at fifteen mph around bicycles swimming the roads like schools of fish, weaving and swaying to some hidden law that governed their progress through the city. Bullock and camel carts, prime subjects for tourist snapshots, lent their own exotic touch, and I promised myself not to photograph them for just that reason.
Here’s another shot of Tej. At India Gate, this time. A low angle to make both him and the Gate hold up the sky. Here’s still another. Of us both. At an historic site on the outskirts of the city. Taken by a tourist from Bombay whom we recruited to hold the Rollei after I’d taken the light reading and focused it. He too had come to Delhi for a job interview and also to see and be seen by the family of a Maharashtrian girl with whom, he told us, his marriage might be arranged. Taking a photograph was tricky in that fading light. The setting sun filtered through the pillars of an ancient Hindu temple, highlighting in bas relief
the curved festoons of bells suspended from long chains, the ecstatic riders on horseback flashing into eternity, and the occasional smashed nose of a river goddess. Next to it the Qutub Minar rose like a pointed finger into the sky. Tej and I had to struggle to keep from squinting as we smiled into the sun.
“Let’s keep going around on this merry-go-round!” I said to him when the picture taking was over. I was laughing, but I meant it.
“What?” He smiled uncomprehendingly.
“Let’s stay here for always,” I said. “Driving around Delhi in this ‘phut-phut.’ You and I.”
“And baby,” he reminded me.
“Yes. Baby too, of course,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be great? The three of us living here, with a little place of our own?”
“I’d need a job first,” he said.
“You’ll get one.” I stopped still and put my hand on his arm. “Tej,” I said, so serious now, it almost hurt, “I don’t want to go back to Majra.”
“We’ve got to,” Tej said.
“I know. I don’t mean right now. I mean we need to be on our own. Soon. Otherwise …”
“Otherwise what?” he said.
“I don’t know what will happen to us. To you and me. And the baby.”
The “phut-phut” driver was waiting for us to get back into the vehicle. Long stopovers were not part of the deal. But we sat down on the grass to have it out.
“It isn’t that the family, almost everybody, has not been good to me, beyond what I expected, even,” I went on. “But it’s not working out, Dilraj Kaur and I under the same roof.”
“What is there to work out?” Tej asked. “She lives her life. You live yours.”
“That’s not easy when we’re thrown together all day, everyday,” I said. “While you and Hari and Pitaji are off, busy in your own work, the women in this house make a battleground out of the kitchen.”
Tej looked as if this were something puzzling, and best left that way. He didn’t need to hear any more about it, but I went on anyway.
“All these fights take place off stage, as far as you men are concerned. When you’re around, everything’s made to look harmonious.”
“And it isn’t,” he said simply.
“Not by any means,” I said. “It’s a rough game going on in there, and I don’t seem to be able to get the hang of it. All that malice and pettiness. I’m no match for Dilraj Kaur. She’s even begun going to Veera Bai, and …”
“Veera Bai? The sweeperess?” he asked before I had a chance to go on.
“She’s the village sorceress by night,” I explained.
“Is she?” he said. “That’s news to me. Anyway, I don’t see why that should bother you. Dilraj Kaur has always been superstitious. Used to go and see fortune-tellers and so on. I don’t know what she goes there for. But it’s nothing to get excited about.”
The driver honked his horn, a manually operated device consisting of a rubber bulb attached to a brass instrument that could be heard city blocks away. Tej motioned to him to wait.
“You’ll be okay when the baby comes,” he said. “You won’t have time to brood. Don’t worry, meri jaan. Nothing’s going to ‘happen’ to us.”
“But say you’ll find a job; say we’ll move here to Delhi,” I insisted.
“It may take time.”
“And my time is running out,” I said. But I don’t think he heard me because he’d already got up and was walking back to the “phut-phut.”
The afterglow turned the city into a soundstage as the driver delivered us to our hotel door and collected his ten rupees plus a tip. Behind the hotel, the silhouettes of the Jama Masjid and the Red Fort, those other architectural dreams of Emperor Shahjehan come true, loomed like a background set for a sad ending to what might have been a happy day. We’d be going back to Majra in a couple of days. I could feel my throat tighten and my eyes smart from unshed tears when I realized I couldn’t even make a guess about when we’d see Delhi again.
19
Now that I look back on it, everything started building up as soon as Tej and I got back from Delhi, so the events of his birthday and after should not have come as a surprise. We had been gone from Majra only three days, yet there was so much tension in the air as we entered the compound of the house the noon of our return that it could have been cut with a kirpan. In spite of our unsatisfactory talk of the future and the slow train ride, we arrived flushed and cheery after our brief breath of Delhi air. Right away, an awkwardness set in as the changes sensed a few days earlier were thrown into bold relief by the short time and distance away from Majra.
Talk was unnatural; conversations died when I entered a room. Mataji was still solicitous, yet there was a watchfulness about it rather than concern. Dilraj Kaur looked lean and haunted. I was shocked to see how gaunt she had become. Goodi and Rano accepted with polite smiles and formal thank-you’s the salwar-kameez cloth pieces we had brought them as presents from the big city. Even Pitaji had turned his attention and trust in some subtle way from Tej to Hari. Only Nikku was truly glad to see us and uninhibited in expressing it. He greeted Tej with hugs and questions about Delhi, a city he had never seen.
It could not have happened in only three days, this grand shift; still it took that much time away for me to sense what ominous permutations had been set in motion. Someone was making bold moves on the chessboard, but the hand of the player was hidden.
“What’s happened to everyone?” I asked Rano several days after our return.
She and Goodi were alone in the courtyard sitting on a charpoy shelling peas into a big, brass tray. Piles of empty pods collected on the ground on either side of them, awaiting removal by the sweeperess.
“I don’t understand what you mean, Bhabi,” Rano said guardedly.
“There’s something queer in the air. Everyone is behaving as if they were in a play, or something, reciting their lines, but not sure of them.”
Rano still looked puzzled.
“What I mean is, everyone is acting in a forced, unnatural way. Ever since we got back from Delhi,” I explained.
“That’s because you and Bhaji went off alone without taking any of us along,” Goodi spoke up.
Rano gave her a hard look. “You keep quiet. That’s not it. Not the whole of it, anyway,” she said sharply.
“Go ahead, Goodi,” I said, “say what you wanted to say.”
“It’s that we felt left out, Bhabi. You hardly said a word about going, and then you were off in the middle of the night.”
It was easy enough to make Goodi understand our need to get to Delhi in time for Tej’s interview; however, she was still hurting for not being invited to go along. “Bhabiji said it would have been proper to at least ask one of us if we wanted to go, instead of running away by yourselves without saying anything.”
Later I discovered there had been talk in our absence of my having “cast a spell” over Tej to make him behave so coldly toward everyone. That I was slowly luring him away. Destroying the fabric of the close-knit family. Pulling out the threads one by one. I was, finally, a bringer of ill-luck, an avoider of duties, a spoiler of harmony. By the time we got back, we had already separated ourselves from others, in the minds of some.
Pitaji, who had always been deaf to Tej’s urgings to give Hari more to do and more money to spend, was now turning over a larger share of the profits to Hari and depending on him more.
Meanwhile life in the kitchen had become quieter. Fewer rambling, gossipy conversations. More silent work going on, at least while I was around. One afternoon when Udmi Ram was down with fever, I made Mataji a cup of tea. She protested and at the same time allowed herself to bask in this small attention. I overheard her telling Dilraj Kaur two days later how pleased she was that I had done this, and Dilraj Kaur (unaware of how much Punjabi I had picked up, or not caring if I understood or not) said, “Yes. She looks after you very well. Makes you tea sometimes. Sees to your little comforts. Fetches your things from upstairs. Goes out of h
er way. All these duties she no doubt performs.…” Here she stopped to draw out a long sigh before continuing. “What a pity it is all done without love, without any affection whatsoever!”
After dinner every night, when the family had retired to their own rooms, I could see the light in Dilraj Kaur’s room at the opposite end of the “L” and upstairs from ours. Her tall shadow loomed motionless and intent behind the curtain. I wondered if I too was for her a shadow staring back. One night I saw her come out on the veranda and go quickly down the stairs. Just as quickly, and keeping to the shadows of the house, she disappeared beyond the compound gate.
Meanwhile, the achingly short spring burnt itself out in a couple of weeks of riotously blooming flowers and fine, cirrus cloud-crossed skies. At the same time, our isolation, Tej’s and mine, from the rest of the family became more pronounced. The subtle ways, perfected over centuries of joint family living, of forcing certain members into social ostracism, for one reason or another, were at work. Without knowing how or when it happened, Tej and I became onlookers rather than partakers of the life of the family, that entity without life of its own that a family creates for itself, out of itself, and off which each member feeds. Tej, true to his reluctance to define relationships, was either unaware of it, or unwilling to talk about it.
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