English Lessons and Other Stories

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

Outside Chandigarh, Arvind stopped at a roadside Government Milk Bar, but Janet was wary of germs in the chilled bottles of sweetened spiced milk. At Kalka, he waded through a throng of indolent men in white kurta-pajamas to get her a bottle of Campa Cola to wash down the dust. She wiped the top of the bottle with a fastidious white tissue and shook her head when he offered to throw it from the car window when she was finished.

  The car began to climb the Himalayas. Cooler air released them from the frenetic pulse of the plains. The scent of pine logs mixed with black diesel truck fumes as the little car screeched up winding roads that gripped the mountain “like a python’s coils,” Arvind said, laughing at her shudder.

  He pointed to the precipitous drop to the valley below.

  “That drop is called the khud,” he said.

  “Kud.” She could not aspirate the consonant, even after five years of marriage. And anyway, she wasn’t planning to use Hindi or Punjabi in Toronto.

  At Solan, he stopped to buy beer as though it were a normal adjunct to driving — he even took a swig before getting back in the car. She would not remonstrate. This trip, this pilgrimage, was too important. Nothing must spoil it. Besides, the cool peace of the terraced mountains etched against the afternoon sky, the ebbing of crowds, and the absence of Papaji, Mumji, Doctorsahib, Kamal and Chaya had lulled her to a dreamy calm. She waved at Tibetan refugee women chiselling stone from the mountain, sleeping babies slung upon their backs, and was rewarded by smiles tinged with slight puzzlement, but never a wave.

  Chaya knew Kamal was pretending to be asleep as the morning preparations for Arvind and Janet’s leave-taking were conducted in whispers outside the door. She left him alone long after the car had sped away up the next flyover on Ring Road; she wanted this time after Arvind was gone, this unaccustomed silence before any servants began their morning racket in the kitchen and before Papaji’s Hindu tenant’s wife began ringing her little bells and chanting the daily Aarti, to dream. What if, ten years ago, she had married Arvind instead, as everyone had intended?

  It was planned so: Chaya would bring him a heart pure as Shimla snow, brimming with love, and he would take her to Canada, where she would bear many children.

  After their engagement, she had grown suddenly shy of the boy Arvind whom she had known all her life. Everyone had permitted — expected — her to give him her love. When he left a month later, she had written him letters in her round, convent-educated hand. “How are you? By the grace of God your Mumji and Papaji and Kamal are well…” But Arvind wrote back about the vast number of books in the library at McGill, the underground shopping malls and cars in Montreal, how he’d bought a new hair dryer to dry his long hair, how he burnt two cups of sugar to caramel trying to make parshaad for the Gurdwara… as though Chaya had been his younger sister.

  Mumji hadn’t returned to bed, either, and Chaya could hear her in the bathroom, filling a plastic water bucket for her morning bath. The tap sounded hollow-dry at first, then she heard a sputter, and the thin stream rose in pitch as the water began rising in the bucket. The mame had used two buckets of water yesterday and there had been none left for Chaya to bathe. Today Mumji would “forget” to leave enough water for her to wash her hair. But Chaya told herself she didn’t mind; Arvind was gone with his pale, large-boned wife.

  She unlocked the doli in the kitchen for the day, taking a mental inventory of the sugar and checking the level of the milk in the covered steel pan on the rack in the shaky old fridge. The cook used too much milk and sugar in his constant cups of tea till there wasn’t enough left by evening for Chaya to make yoghurt. Had Mumji noticed Arvind had married a woman who didn’t like yoghurt?

  She counted the eggs. The dishwasher boy stole at least two a day and Mumji said Chaya just wasn’t firm enough. But at least Mumji said it lovingly; her old college friends said there were worse mothers-in-law.

  As far back as she could remember, when she and Arvind and Kamal were grubby playmates in Shimla, Mumji and she had recognized one another as Destiny. Mumji had treated her like a daughter, shielding her from Arvind’s teasing and making Kamal apologize for pinching her stick-thin arms. When the time came, Mumji had taken a four-man rickshaw up the hill to her father’s home. There, over a game of rummy and in sight of the langurs from the monkey temple at Jakhoo, she had personally, though obliquely, asked her father for his motherless daughter, to be married to Arvind. Chaya could still hear her father’s belly laugh of triumph — such an honour from a good Khatri Sikh family, with land to inherit besides.

  As she entered her son’s room to wake him for school, Chaya wondered anew why Janet had denied herself and Arvind children to comfort them for all the things in life that might have been.

  A practice chukker before the sun scorches the polo field, thought Kamal. Get rid of this, this… anger. He pulled on his breeches and the T-shirt with a Ralph Lauren polo player. Copied in India, but it would maha impress the other players at the Polo Club, anyway. Image — doesn’t have to be real. None of the bloody buggers in America who wear forty-five-dollar shirts like this ever lift a polo stick. Image, yar, image. That’s all there is.

  He put a large brown finger through the brass rings on the boot trees and watched the pale wood slide from the leather. He always felt better around horses, booted and spurred, whip in left hand, mallet in right. A horse must have speed and obedience, and a mallet should be whippy. He took one from the rack in the corner of the room and centred its handle in his palm, testing its spring against the floor. This one was perfect — fifty-two inches. Better take a couple, even for practice; sometimes they broke under the force of his stroke.

  Playing polo, he was in control. No one demanded his obedience. He had bought all four horses himself (on his allowance from Papaji). He played pivot on most teams, the player ready to hurtle into the fray to change the direction of the game, unzipping the air with the cut of a backhand or an under-the-neck thwack of bamboo upon bamboo. In the thunder of hooves and the sweating, clashing, knee-to-knee ride-offs he could pretend he was Raja Ranjit Singh and forget he was Kamal.

  He heard Chaya in the kitchen and thought he would shout to her to bring him a bottle of cold water. But she would be slow and he was anxious to leave. She was always slow. It really didn’t matter — she came from good blood and she had given him a son. What more was there? At least she wasn’t like Janet, brash and talkative, asking questions as though she had a right to the answers.

  What did Arvind see in Janet? A woman who appeared not to need a man. These foreign women, though, they talk their heads off against male chauvinism, but they really like it, they like surrendering to a real man. Look at their movies — full of gaunt red-lipped women thrusting their come-hither pelvises at every eye. No sweetness, no kindness, no softness. Unbroken fillies.

  And Arvind. He was the one who’d had all the advantages. The one who’d removed himself so easily from the responsibilities of love and obedience. Sent abroad to study after acting like an idealist idiot, organizing a protest against Mrs Gandhi’s dictatorship… now he’s a hotshot engineer, come to show off his white wife. What did he want Kamal to do, fall down and admire him? Forget it, yar.

  Kamal gave a final tug at the last spiral of his partridge-coloured turban, clumped down the stairs and folded himself into Papaji’s Fiat.

  Woodville Hotel was cool, gracious and Victorian, but Arvind couldn’t wait to walk down the hill the next morning to Knolls-wood, his grandfather’s home. Janet watched him over the rim of a chipped teacup at breakfast in the wainscotted dining room; she hadn’t seen him so oblivious to his surroundings since the last time he played the sitar.

  “Are we taking the car?” she asked.

  “We can’t. Only VIP’s cars can drive from here to the Cart Road.”

  Really, Arvind looked quite exotic in his Indian costume — he’d be offended if she called it a costume out loud — but he’d be cold in that thin muslin. She put on her sneakers and a Marks and Spencer sweater over c
orduroy pants.

  He stopped her at the Cart Road above the spur. “Look for the red roof and the apple orchard beside it.” The hundred-year-old house sprawled on the knoll with the green-brown khud falling away on one side, but its red roof was peeling and the tin-sheet grey showed through. Between the columns of pines she saw only row upon row of concrete government flats cantilevered between a few sorry apple trees.

  They skittered down the steep dirt road, roots of trees offering them natural steps, pine needles crunching underfoot.

  “There are the water tanks my grandfather built in the seventies so we would have running water.”

  Then Knollswood loomed before them, Arvind’s days of playing cricket with Kamal but a moment in its memory. This house, he told her, knew solar-topeed Britishers and the mem-sahibs with their white parasols, their corsets and their pallid cheeks. And then the brown-skinned imitations of the British that followed.

  Janet said, “Wouldn’t it be beautiful if it were remodelled? I can see bay windows in place of those casements, and a driveway in place of the rickshaw circle there.”

  Arvind shook his head.

  “How about a gazebo under that weeping willow,” she went on. “And that flowerbed would look wonderful with geraniums.”

  Arvind walked away into the house, and she was left absorbed in the shushing peace of the Shimla wind in the pines.

  For Arvind, this was the house in which he grew up. He half-expected it to be unchanged, with people transfixed like the people of Pompeii, everything just as he left it when he spun westward, slick-reeled in by Promise to a science-fiction continent of chrome, plastic, manicured lawns and vast uncultivated spaces. This was the house he took with him, carrying the worn magic of every room aloft on its Persian carpets. This was the house he reassembled halfway around the world in a Toronto suburb called Scarborough — Rajasthan miniatures, silver-framed photos, Brewer’s dictionary, ivory and ebony chess set, Wedgewood dinner plates and all.

  Once a Muslim lived at Knollswood — he bought it from the Britisher who saw the end of his Victorian world coming. The Muslim broke a wall so that Knollswood would open towards Mecca; ever since it had been like a woman, with two mouths for entry.

  Arvind had told Janet’s uncle, a contractor in Scarborough, that he wanted a house with two entrances, and Janet’s uncle had said, “A front door and a back door — it is in the plans.” But no, Arvind had said, “Build me a house with two front doors, and one must face Mecca, though,” he’d hastened to add, “I am not a Muslim.” Janet’s uncle had given him a Hungarian shrug (shoulders lifted, corners of the mouth pulled downward, eyebrows raised, head shaking).

  Once, an amber monkey climbed through the skylight and found a perch atop a jangling chandelier in the main drawing room. Arvind stood in the spot where his grandfather’s old cook had stood below the wide-eyed langur, offering his bright blue turban so the jabbering mass could land.

  He had bought a chandelier just like that one in an antique shop on Cumberland Street, but it had no memory of any amber monkey.

  In the room where the apples used to be brought in from the orchard for sorting by hand, Arvind’s charpai still stood — but it sagged slightly.

  On the nightstand, a portable oblong with a 45-33-78 lever had played the songs from My Fair Lady and Kati Patang for hours. Once a parrot alighted on its felt turntable, flipped the switch with a wing and sailed round, bewildered as an immigrant on a new continent.

  He was looking for other things in this house, things he might have forgotten to recreate in the Scarborough house, “home,” as the realtors would say. He had bought cut-glass vases and Victorian figurines on Bay Street — a lady in a blue bonnet with her tiny fili-greed basket of lavender.

  Now that he looked closely, he saw that the one he bought was not as delicate as this one.

  In the dining room was the ten-foot table where his grandfather sat at one end, his grandmother at the other, and each taught him different manners: manners for eating English food and manners for eating Indian food. At this table, he and Kamal sat straight-backed with Mumji and Papaji, legs dangling as they listened to tales of India’s struggle for independence and their grandfather’s hopes for the independent Republic of India. When he was older, the men had gathered for chess every night at this table, often till two in the morning, and neither he nor Papaji nor Kamal ever beat the old man once.

  That brass samovar and sink where everyone washed their hands before eating would be impractical; neither he nor Janet would bother polishing all that elegant metal to the mirror shine he remembered.

  In the kitchen, there should have been servants who would respond to his imperious shout and there should have been jute sacks of grain in the stone-flagged storeroom. But there was only brown bow-legged Kaluram, the gardener-become-caretaker, who swatted with a rag at spiders in the mildewing cupboards.

  In his grandmother’s dressing room were the powders and creams of a woman who crimped her hair like Bette Davis and painted her lipstick over her lips to make a Cupid’s bow. Checking the dressing table drawer, he found the flaking yellow pages of one of the Georgette Heyer novels she always read in secret, and he hid it away again.

  Everyone has things that should remain private.

  He stood in the large bathroom remembering when the thunderboxes were taken away and old rickshaw men turned construction workers laid pink and white tile for his grandfather’s lavatory, the day the posters from his grandfather’s 1972 trip to England were hung on its walls and his grandmother blushed for the shame of those women. And how, after all the expense of installing a shower, the old man ordered a servant to bring in his brass basin and chowki to save water.

  Arvind strained, almost believing he could hear the lilting recitation of the Asa di Vaar punctuated by the splash of the two-cup-size garvi rising and falling from the brass basin to his grandfather’s body, but it was only the voices of the middle-class multitudes rising from the new government flats in the valley, voices carried to his ears on a gust of mountain wind.

  Kaluram doddered up behind him. Loyalty was all this old fellow had to give now and Arvind fell back into feudal superiority, ordering him to bring tea for the mem-sahib.

  Janet wandered through drawing rooms curtained in fading raw silk, touching the white cotton dust covers. The bric-a-brac was mostly reproductions, and of the several volumes she examined in the library, not one was a first edition. The huge dark paintings with their ornate gilt frames were copies or prints of European paintings. She began to examine the black and white photographs that dotted the rooms. Arvind’s grandfather, young as Arvind was now but carrying himself prouder. Wearing a meticulous turban, a custom-tailored three-piece suit and sporting a cane, he stood behind Arvind’s grandmother, seated, slender as a nymph, in a chiffon sari. Other couples, just like them. Serious-faced family poses — Papaji and Mumji, Arvind and Kamal.

  And a later one in colour, Arvind looking about twenty-five and Chaya in a sari, smiling up at him, smiling an adoring smile.

  This she took with her, footsteps creaking on the wood floors out through the double doors onto the veranda. Kaluram brought them glasses of steaming tan-coloured tea.

  Kamal and Papaji began arguing so loudly at breakfast that the cook and the dishwasher boy could hear them in the kitchen and Mumji was becoming distraught. All for nothing, she said, no reason whatsoever.

  Chaya came out of the bedroom with a housecoat over her petticoat and an untied sari on her arm. “Please. Mumji will be upset. She cannot stand this fighting.”

  Kamal rounded on her. “You stay out of this. Go shopping or something.”

  But Chaya listened anyway, retreating behind the bedroom door. She stored the little bits of themselves that people give away when they are angry; it helped her avoid causing displeasure.

  “What will Arvind do with Knollswood? He doesn’t even live in India. He’s married to a foreign woman.” Kamal was almost shouting.

  Papaji s
aid, “Beta, that’s no way to talk about your elder brother. I think it would give him some interest in coming back to India, that’s all.”

  “Give him some interest! Just give away the largest piece of property we have left. For what? So that some childless mame can live in it long-distance from Toronto? What about my son” — he paused to let the words sink in — “your grandson?”

  Papaji sidestepped the last question. “Beta, we did him a great wrong.”

  “You did. Mumji did. I didn’t.”

  “That’s not true. It was your fault.” Papaji’s fist thudded to the tablecloth; china clinked.

  Kamal hissed, “It was an innocent mistake. I pay for it every day.” Chaya knew this to be true. He pays for it and she pays for it.

  “So does he,” said his father, the shame of tainted blood-purity thickening his voice. “He ended up marrying a mame.”

  Forehead pressed to warm teak, Chaya listened. It is, she thought, a good thing to be an adjustable woman. An innocent motorcycle ride through the Shimla hills and you can end up married to a different man.

  They were sitting on the veranda before the rickshaw circle in white cane chairs, barely-sipped tea resting on a cane coffee table, the mountain slope they had descended towering before them.

  “You know, you’re sitting in my grandfather’s chair.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes. He would sit in that chair and tell me how the British Raj brought so many good things to India. Railroads and the telegraph, for instance. We would argue for hours.”

  “Who won?”

  “I did, I suppose. I was raised on history books written by Indians, and I knew all those railroads led nowhere we Indians wanted to go. Later, when he was gone and the arguments lay in the past, I saw educated people agree to dictatorship, censorship and propaganda so the trains he so admired would run on time.”

  “Aren’t you glad you protested then?” She’d told his protest story to women friends at work, basking in their admiration of his heroism.