English Lessons and Other Stories

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  I wander into Dad’s empty room and take the key to his almirah from beneath his pillow. A few minutes later the battered old attaché case lies open before me and I look at Chandini Kaur’s face again. And at the muslin-wrapped triangular bundle. But now I see there is more. A yellowed letter with a Government of India stamp. The date on the letter: August 28, 1948 — twelve months after Partition.

  “I am the concerned social worker who has located your sister, Chandini Kaur, formerly of village Thamali, District Rawalpindi. She has recovered from her abduction and is now in good health. By the grace of God, she gave birth in Sargodha to a healthy boy. She requests you to receive her as soon as possible. The Government of India Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation will pay for her journey if you will acknowledge…,” then a post office at which to write to a woman now known as Jehanara Begum.

  I hold the letter against the slight rise of my chest in gratitude. Dad did not kill his sister. I tell myself I knew it all along. How can I have been so base, so vile, so ungrateful a daughter as to have let such a thought enter my mind? He was just preparing us, as a father must in a time of war, for all that he could foresee. And Inder: how could I have been so silly as to think he was serious when he said, “I will.” He was just playing at being a man, as he always does. I must have imagined his avoidance afterward. Mummy always says I am such a fear-filled girl, it will be difficult to find me a good family.

  I read the letter again, but this time I come away with questions. If she was in good health in 1948, what happened to her? Who would know? And who will be willing to tell me? I must know. She looks up at me as though she wants me to find out.

  Too slow for my patience, my hands fumble putting the Moonlight Princess back in her case, the case back in the almirah. I smooth Dad’s clothes inside.

  Nand Singh is washing the car in the driveway, snow-white turban bobbing over its olive green tubbiness. I hunker down and wait next to the bucket of soapy water so he knows I want his advice as my elder and do not wish to play mem-sahib today. He gives the car a final caress and joins me, asking after my health, calling me beti. I call him “Nand Singhji” to show my respect as I answer so he will understand my seriousness.

  I say, “Do you know the story of my aunt, Chandini Kaur?” I say it as though I always knew I had an aunt.

  He answers warily, “There are many stories of Chandini Kaur.”

  I prompt, “The trouble with stories is that some are true and some are not.”

  “There are people in the world who spread false stories.”

  “You are not one of them, so I have come to you.”

  “I am your servant. Command me.”

  He is humouring me. The only person I know who commands Nand Singh to do anything at all is Dad. I take a deep breath.

  “I want to know if she is alive.”

  “Her body may be alive.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her name was never to be spoken again in this house. I am surprised you know anything about her. For your father, she is dead.”

  “How did she die for my father?”

  “She was abducted by the Muslims who invaded Thamali village in 1947.”

  “This I know,” I lie. I make my breath come slower. I do not look at him. “But how did she die for my father?”

  He looks confused and repeats as though I have not heard, “She was abducted by Musalmaan.” This time, he uses the Punjabi form of the word so that even someone as slow as a girl-child may understand.

  “But she was found again.”

  “They found a woman whose name was Jehanara Begum and who said she was your father’s sister, Chandini Kaur.”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  “It was a lie, of course.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Any sister of your father’s would have died before allowing herself to be called Jehanara Begum.”

  “Then — you met her?”

  “Ji Huzoor. Your father sent me to give her money.”

  “Why did you not bring her back?”

  He seems about to lose patience. “She was dead for your father.”

  “Did he not love her?”

  “Of course. All brothers love their sisters.”

  “Then why could she not return with you?” Tears for a woman in a withered photograph are forming behind my eyes.

  “Because no woman of your father’s family would have allowed herself to become a Musalmaan and then to have a Musalmaan’s child. So I came back and agreed with your father that she must be an imposter, for she couldn’t possibly be his sister…” He shifts his weight from one shiny black shoe heel to the other. “Who knows, maybe she was mad, maybe she wanted a share of this house he got in compensation for Thamali, or who knows what she wanted…”

  “Did you not recognize her?”

  “My memory of her was a year old. I could not be sure.”

  The man whose memory is a household legend tilts his turban to the sky. I try again.

  “She had a son.”

  “Mmhmm.” The wrinkles in his forehead disappear into the line of his turban.

  “What happened to her son?”

  “The offspring of that Musalmaan bastard died, God be thanked.”

  He rises to his feet, picks up a polishing rag and begins rubbing the radiator grill. But I am not finished asking.

  “How?”

  “One day she was bathing it, and it stayed underwater too long.”

  It stayed underwater? A baby doesn’t stay underwater.

  The polishing motion stops, his brown hand stayed by memory.

  “Then again this Jehanara Begum wrote to your father, saying the baby was gone now and again asking to be taken back.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “What could he say? He sent her money, told her his sister was dead and he was sorry for her troubles and to trouble him no more.”

  “Then?”

  “She should have taken her own life when she had her wits — I heard she became mad. Completely pagal. Now… it has been many years now, no letters.”

  He walks around to the other side of the car and renews his efforts to polish its already gleaming surface. I pick up five round, smooth stones from the garden and throw a listless round of punj-gitra. With my right hand, I throw a big stone in the air and pick up one stone at a time from the remaining four. The first stone is for a woman whose name meant Moonlight, the second for the Muslim who took her by force, the third is for a baby who stayed underwater too long and the fourth… the big stone hits the ground before my hand can pick up the fourth. The fourth and fifth are for a brother and his mad sister, partitioned by family ties.

  Inder comes back from boarding school and shows me a pack of imported cigarettes. I can’t believe he is touching them with his bare hands. I am sure something terrible will happen to him; I remind him that Guru Gobind Singh forbade us to smoke. He says he no longer cares about Guru Gobind Singh because Guru Gobind Singh doesn’t care about him. He takes the cigarettes and hides them between the pages of my schoolbooks. I feel sure everyone will smell them in my schoolbag.

  I say, “If you smoke you will become an impure Sikh and then Dad will say you are not his son.”

  Inder laughs in a new way, an ugly way I have never seen before.

  “Dad won’t say that — I am his only son.” And now there is a sneer in his voice, a sneer for me. “If you tried it, you’d be dead.”

  I back away. I don’t like his tone.

  “And if you tell, I’ll kill you.” He makes it sound so simple, like the chicken-seller killing the little kukri.

  His eyes wander towards Dad’s closet and rest there ever so fleetingly. He was given permission. He was told I belong to him, that he has the power to will me to live or to die.

  I say, “Don’t talk that way, Inder. I am your sister, and I love you.” Even to my own ears my voice sounds a whine.

  “No one loves anyone else in this family. It
’s all a show.”

  “I do. I love you.”

  “What does your love matter? You’re just a girl.”

  I let the tears come as I ponder his words under the eucalyptus tree. He’s right. I’ll be twelve soon, and my love or hate, bravery or fear doesn’t matter. All that he and I have in common now is blood and honour.

  I pick up my skipping rope to begin the thousand skips a day Mummy prescribes for me to lose weight —

  Miss Lucy had a baby, she named him Tiny Tim.

  She put him in the bathtub to see if he could swim…

  If I had a Muslim baby, would I have the courage to drown it?

  Mummy says she’s had to become the family’s bootlegger because, she says, drinking Indian whiskey is too dangerous; you never know what dangerous poison is mixed in there. So she does favours for Nancy and Pierre — invites Nancy to her kitty parties, sends her the Chinese hairdresser girl before a High Commission party, orders French bread for Pierre at the Akbar Hotel bakery, and has her tailor sew Nancy’s sundresses — until she can suggest, “If you insist… a bottle of whiskey, then.” When Dad is in Delhi again, Mummy invites Nancy and Pierre to dinner and orders the cook to make western food — mushrooms and broccoli, expensive things we never usually eat.

  I wear one of Mummy’s old salwar kameezes, altered to my size so that I don’t need to hide my naked legs as I try to do in my school skirt. Nancy and Pierre arrive with a bottle of Cutty Sark, and I think they don’t notice that Dad and Mummy don’t talk directly to one another or that Inder coughs his persistent irritating cough and yawns without putting his hand to his mouth while Dad talks about wanting to send him to college in Canada. Pierre suggests the University of Montreal, but Dad says he wants Inder to go to an English-speaking university like the University of Toronto so Inder will be able to come back and continue Dad’s work, developing India. Pierre says he thinks Quebec is like Pakistan, a place that needs to be cut apart from Canada as Pakistan was carved away from India. Dad falls quiet after that. I eat very little and refuse the caramel custard.

  Mummy remarks how limp my hair is, and the next day Nancy’s chauffeur delivers two bottles of Flex Balsam shampoo and a new hair dryer, which Mummy takes and sets aside for my trousseau. I have to use the shampoo every two days to make my hair thick so that someone will marry me.

  Mummy begins to give Inder more pocket money and says it is his duty to look after her when she gets old. For me, she spends two hundred rupees on a contraption that hangs from our bedroom door and says I must swing against it every day to try and grow taller. Inder watches me with blank smoke-glazed eyes, and now he hides his slender hand-rolled cigarettes and a pill box in Dad’s attaché case in the almirah with Chandini Kaur’s picture so no one will know. He fights with Nand Singh, who will not yet let him drive the Ambassador alone, and makes friends of the now-gawky jhuggi boys Mummy always forbade him to play with. They bring him paan leaves that do not smell of the usual spices and betelnut, stuffed with things that he says melt on his tongue. Hippies come to meet him in the gully behind the house, but he says they only ask him directions to American Express. There are nights when he has bad trips: his hands are going away from him while Dad and Mummy and I are all trying to kill him. Despite the heat, I cover him with blankets to muffle his giggles and cries; Miss Shafi has to wake me in class most days. The first time he gets a beating from Dad, it’s for flunking a chemistry test. The second time, it’s for cheating. The third time, it’s for drinking all the Cutty Sark Nancy and Pierre brought.

  Miss Shafi teaches me history this year and I find out that her first name is Raza. She has a boyfriend now and he wears a Levi’s jacket and rides a black and silver Rajdoot motorcycle. After school, I see her put her arm around his waist as he kicks it into motion, her two dainty sandals dangling above the exhaust. When I tell Mummy they are in love, she slaps her forehead and says Miss Shafi must be a poor nautch-girl with parents who do not love her enough to care about her reputation.

  Miss Shafi gives us a history test and we have to write about Gandhi’s Quit India movement and Nehru and India’s Tryst with Destiny. “On the stroke of midnight when the world sleeps, India will awake…” She tells us she has relatives who escaped India and went to Pakistan and they too rode the death trains.

  I want — how I want — to tell her about the Moonlight Princess, to ask her if her relatives in Pakistan might know her. But I have learned, learned that to be part of a family you have to agree to keep its secrets. Because there are penalties to be paid by kukris who crow. After all, there is nothing in my history book about one Chandini Kaur who became Jehanara Begum and who is dead for my father and mad besides, nor any woman like her.

  Now I am thirteen. Nand Singh prepares the car for Inder to drive as though he were doing it for Mummy or Dad; it does not occur to either Inder or me to bring our friends home. Inder is old enough to have his own room and there is no one to muffle his nightmares now. We share a bathroom, where I find a sick-sweet smell, syringes hidden behind a rusty pipe, and cigarette ash like bird-droppings, but still Mummy refers to him as “Inderji” when talking to the cook and tries to tempt his nonexistent appetite with everything from imported Camembert cheese to Swiss chocolates. He keeps the large doses of pocket money coming, saying he needs it to buy imported acne cream, and she tells me daily how he will be the one to look after her when she gets old and I am finally off her hands. I watch Nand Singh let Inder bump the old car out of the driveway and drive off without me. Now he’s a seller as well as a buyer.

  Everything is blurred in school although I sit at the front of the class, and Miss Shafi sends a note to tell Mummy I may need glasses. Mummy unfolds the note slowly before me and when she has read it there are tears.

  “How will anyone marry you now, you ungrateful child.”

  She summons the car, and it is an emergency so Nand Singh drives as only a Sikh driver can, one hand on the horn, emerging victorious from a mêlée of garbage-grazing cows and bicycles and buses to park in front of a whitewashed private clinic. Mummy waits in the back seat ignoring beggars and bargaining for strawberries while my lashes catch in the doctor’s eye-tester and the judgement is made: I will need glasses. When I return to the car with the news, she is distraught. A girl with glasses is more difficult to marry off than a fatty. All the way home, she asks what she has done to deserve this. She says her family has never had weak eyes — Dad, on the other hand, she remembers, has many relatives with weak eyes.

  I ask in English so that Nand Singh will not understand, “Did Chandini Kaur have weak eyes?”

  She stops in mid-sentence.

  “That’s enough from you. Don’t give me any more back-chat.”

  But Chandini Kaur must have had weak eyes not to see when her son was drowning.

  When Mummy and Daddy and Inder return from the doctor, Dad takes Inder up to the terrace for another thrashing. They are up there a long time while Mummy and I sit in cane chairs under the eucalyptus tree and let dusk fall around us. We listen to the whop-whop of Dad’s belt and Inder’s cries, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again.”

  “He’s getting it from the hippies,” she says.

  “He’d get it anyway.” I say.

  “How do you know?” with one of her suspicious looks.

  “Everyone knows.” I shrug.

  “Don’t shrug. You’ll get round shoulders. Has he ever tried to give you some?”

  “No.”

  It doesn’t comfort her.

  “My only son,” she says. “What have I not given him? He doesn’t even talk properly anymore — he gets confused in the middle of a sentence or he laughs in the middle of any discussion. It’s impossible to take him anywhere with my friends. Who will look after me when I get old? Listen to him…”

  Inder’s cries dissolve into weeping.

  Mummy continues, “Everyone can hear our shame… we will never be able to get you married.”

  “I never want to
be married.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  Dad emerges, massaging his wrist.

  “He says he will never take it again.” False certitude reverberates in his voice. His eyes are full of tears for a son who has slipped away.

  “What did the doctor say?” I ask.

  “The doctor is a fool,” says my father. “Probably foreign-returned. Gave me some bukvaas about going to see a psychiatrist. I told him, My son is not mad. Psychiatrists are for madness.”

  A sparrow titters.

  In a moment he says, “After all, we have never had any madness in our family.”

  This is what I must remember if ever I am asked. We have never had any madness in our family.

  Above us, luminescent and reproachful, a woman-face moon dangles like a pendant on the breast of the dissipating day.

  Gayatri

  Gayatri had been cocooned in a sulk for two days now. She wove it, look by look, spinning it slowly, clenching its threads around everyone, ominous and accusing. She took it to bed with her, using its coolness to shut out the night heat instead of the new electric khus-khus cooler. She pulled a sheet up over her head and stayed sulking till the heat of a new Delhi morning panted like a waiting dog outside the chic-bamboo curtains. Now she sat at her dressing table, eying her husband like a mynah bird from under perfectly arched eyebrows.

  “Reena brought Alphonso mangoes, specially for you, from Bombay,” he coaxed.

  Mentioning Reena was a mistake. The eyebrows met in the middle, and Gayatri turned away. “She’s your sister, she brought them for you. Go eat them.”

  He sighed. “She’s come to stay and you’ve not even offered her a glass of water, Gayatri.”

  “If she needs water, she has only to ask the servant. I’m the elder by six years. Let her touch my feet first.”

  He took off his sandals and sat cross-legged on her bed. “She’s a modern girl. She doesn’t even touch my father’s feet, let alone yours. Besides, you two used to get along like true sisters before — what’s all this bad feeling, I say?”