English Lessons and Other Stories

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  We didn’t have children immediately. Instead we savoured the time to be just two of us exploring a new land, freed from obedience to Duty, awed by the power and burden of this thing called Choice, collapsing every night exhausted by endless everyday decisions, decisions, decisions. Prem got a job selling health and life insurance to other expatriate Indians — exiles, he calls them.

  Prem is less adaptable than I; he has had much less practice. A few years ago he would have returned to India where there wouldn’t be so many choices, but I quickly decided it was time to have children. Mataji came to visit us for the first time when my son Nikhil was born. And ever since, she spends six months of the year visiting each brother in turn.

  Usually, she comes to visit in summer to escape the Delhi heat, the loneliness, the power cuts and the water shortages, but this time she arrived in December, wrinkling her nose as she held her sari pleats high over the grey-black slush and yanking her precious bag with its tape recorder and bhajan cassettes out of the dark hands of a helpful old porter. She unpacked quickly and we gave her a glass of sherry in a tumbler that made it look sufficiently medicinal, and then she started her assault on Prem, speaking in English, which she believes makes us pay greater attention.

  “I have decided to leave the house on Aurangzeb Road to you when I die,” she said.

  “Mataji, that is very kind and you can do as you wish, but you know we are four brothers and no one should get more than others.”

  “No, I have decided. Your father left me this house — that was his gift. I can give it to whom I like. But I have only one condition. You and she,” gesturing at me, “have to come and live with me now.”

  “Mataji, we’ll talk about it later. Now you must be tired. Finish your sherry.”

  Later, in bed, I asked him, “Are you thinking about going back to India?”

  “Of course I am. Aren’t you?”

  “I am happy here,” I said gently.

  “You can be happy there, too. Lots of people are.”

  “Lots of people are unhappy, too.”

  “They are only unhappy if they have no money. We have worked hard for ten years now — maybe it is a good time to go back.”

  “What will you do back there?”

  “I will start my own company.”

  “You could do that here.”

  “Not the same thing.”

  “You want to show your old friends, that’s all.” My throat constricted. I was afraid I would cry.

  “So what is wrong with that?”

  “It seems… it seems so silly. Just when we’ve begun doing better. I have friends here, people who listen and talk to me, and you have friends too. We just bought this house and Sheila and Nikhil would never get such attention in school in India and… and how will you pay your brothers for their share of the house?”

  “Don’t be stupid, now. You think I want my daughter to paint her face and have a boyfriend by the time she’s twelve and my son to join a gang and bring home some New Age junkie? You just leave these decisions to me.”

  I rolled over with my back to him. I have learned that when anyone wants to control me, they begin by telling me I am stupid.

  I have a degree from Boston University and I know I am not stupid. Of course, being single while I was there and fearful of damaging my reputation at home, I stayed close to the Indian students and didn’t mix with many Americans — that was how I met Prem — but I read and read, and I learned how to write my résumé and get a job. Being Prem’s secretary these few years, I know something about bookkeeping, so I decided I needed to get a job.

  Mataji and I were circling one another like two wrestlers in a ring of invisible spectators, demurely passing one another on the stairway and saying “Pehleh aap, pehleh aap” before each doorway. The politeness was excruciating. We feinted gracefully. She noticed I had placed a statue of Saraswati in Sheila’s room and lifted the huge brass piece on her tiny shoulders, saying, “What a silly thing, putting a Saraswati statue in a girl’s room. Put this Goddess where she will do some good, in the boy’s room. She’s the one who will inspire him to learn.” I said nothing, but the next day I moved Saraswati back to Sheila’s room. I refuse to apologize for wanting my daughter to be educated.

  With the tax season beginning, the temporary agency found me an office job in just a few days. I wore pants to the interview rather than a skirt — I’ve never learned to walk in a skirt anyway — just so Mataji wouldn’t suspect anything. And I said nothing to Prem until I got the call from the agency saying I had been accepted. Then I felt weak with daring.

  That night I let Mataji do the cooking and we struggled through the burned results with many “vah-vah, bhai vah” exclamations of wonder. Then I said to Prem, firmly and evenly, “I found a job at an accounting office. I have decided to take it. I start next week.”

  Prem looked at me as if I had hit him.

  “Is this how you repay me?” he said finally.

  I was silent. Mataji’s delight reared its head and oozed around us like a cobra.

  “What have I ever denied you?” he asked. He’s using lines from old Hindi movies, I thought. And to think I married him because he was an enlightened, educated Indian.

  “Nothing,” I said out loud. And in my most reasonable voice, the one I use to explain to Nikhil to be gentle with his little sister, I said, “I have just decided I need to get out during the day and allow Mataji to enjoy the children. That’s all.”

  “You have decided! Well,” he said, throwing down his napkin. “I hope you enjoy being at someone’s beck and call all day. How much is this place going to pay you?”

  “Eight dollars an hour.”

  Mataji said, “Beti, he is only thinking of you — going out to work with all those strange men.” She placed another burned chapatti before Prem.

  “Many women work there,” I said faintly. I was losing courage.

  But then Prem said, “Well, maybe it will help us to save more money so that we can go back to India sooner.” Mataji beamed and I thought furiously, Why don’t you tell her I don’t want us to go back to India. Why don’t you say no now instead of raising her hopes? But I had won this round and I knew when to be quiet.

  It was my mother who saved me from disgrace once by teaching me silence. When Mataji gave away a gold necklace that had been my mother’s to some cousin whose dowry she was trying to collect, I was so angry that I went home and told her I was never going back. But my mother wiped my tears and said, “Yes, you are going back. And you are going to be silent. No one will ever be able to say that you were raised to be troublesome. Do you want them to say that all your education only made you like some American feminist?”

  “How can you say that if you care for me?” I sobbed.

  “I say it because I care for you, little one,” said my mother. “Here, is it a gold necklace you want? I’ll give you another. But you will have to live with the family who has you now.”

  “I don’t want a gold necklace, I want them to be fair. And what is so wrong to be a feminist?”

  My mother thought for a while. Then she said, “Be careful when you use that word. Men become afraid. If you want to survive, you must always let a man believe he has you under control. Silence is an excellent instrument, beti. Use it well.”

  Then she called my old ayah and told her to escort me back to Mataji’s home.

  But there are limits to silence. I have never liked to discuss money, and I began wondering when I would receive my first paycheque. After four weeks with nothing in the mail, I called the temporary agency and they said, “Oh, didn’t you know? Your husband called and told us the account number to which we should send the money, so we’ve been doing a direct deposit every two weeks.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  That night I asked Prem, when we were in our bedroom and I could hear Mataji’s snore droning like a tambura next door, “Why did you call the agency and tell them to send my paycheque to some bank account?”r />
  “Just for convenience.” He seemed quite innocent.

  “Please, would you let me decide what is convenient for me and not convenient for me.” My voice was terse, so he started to tease me as if we were back in college.

  “Goodness me, she’s getting annoyed.”

  “Yes, I am annoyed. I would have liked to see a cheque with my name on it.”

  “Your name on it? Hardly matters, such a small amount.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “I put it in the savings account.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one for our return to India.”

  “I thought so.” I sat up in bed. “I told you, I don’t want to go back to India. Why do you not just tell Mataji that?”

  “Because I want to go back.”

  The snoring had stopped. I felt the room begin to close in on me, and Prem’s face became strange and threatening. I tried a deep breath but the air stopped short in my throat. Something else was straining outward as if to rend the seams that held my mask-face in its place, that same mask-face with which I assured friends on visits to India, “No, of course I have not changed,” as if change were some terrible catastrophe that had so far been deftly averted. And then the words took form, delicate bubbles blown in the face of a primordial wind.

  “Well, then, go back to India alone.”

  A different silence fell, as if all our years together were but a sleepy musical alaap to this juncture. If our marriage were a raag, this moment would signal tablas to enter the fray to follow the rise and fall of our heartbeats moving in opposite directions. My mother’s voice struck up in my head imploring caution, quiet, restraint.

  With Prem’s gaze piercing my shoulder blades, I put on my slippers and my housecoat — dressing gown, I mean — and went downstairs to the living room.

  Mataji’s curiosity emanated from her room as I passed, and she soon joined me on the cushions in front of the fireplace. We stared at the expressionless faces of Ganesh and Shiva together, and finally she couldn’t stand it anymore. She said, “What happened? Did you hear a cat crying?”

  I picked up her little tape recorder, popped in the right cassette, pressed a button and said, “Yes, Mataji. I was the cat who cried.”

  The thousand names of Vishnu filled the air.

  The Insult

  I was watching from the living room window as the silver-grey Oldsmobile swooped into the driveway, and, when it spread its wings, out came Uncle Harjit’s turquoise turban, Aunty Nimmi in a new lime green sari and their three little boys who can only speak English. I slipped on my spiky red sandals and smudged my kajal just a little to make my eyes look larger and waited in the hallway.

  “Aaoji, aao,” said my mother as they spilled in.

  “Sat Sri Akal, Sat Sri Akal, everyone!” shouted my father as he embraced Uncle Harjit and then, rather stiffly, for the children, “How do you do, hey?”

  Aunty Nimmi smells of the dentist’s office even on Sunday, I thought, as we embraced.

  “My, she’s becoming such a grown-up lady,” said Uncle Harjit, and he slapped me on the back as he used to when I wore a pony-tail.

  When everyone was seated with a bowl of cashews or almonds within easy reach, my father began as usual to describe all the houses for which he currently had listings to Uncle Harjit. My mother and her sister spoke low, so as not to disturb them, and the three boys wandered around the room examining my father’s ceremonial dagger collection and staring round-eyed at the tiger-skin on the wall.

  “Such a lovely sari,” said my mother, although I know she can’t abide lime green.

  “This? This is so old! I have to go to India soon — I have no clothes left to wear.”

  My mother seemed about to mention that there are more than ten sari shops on Devon Avenue, but she thought better of it. “Are you planning to go soon?” she asked.

  “Next month.”

  “Will you take the children?”

  “Nahinji — they don’t like India. They say it’s too dirty and has too many people.”

  My mother managed to smile but I could see she was upset.

  “I have never had that problem with my Neelu,” she said, speaking of me as if I were absent or deaf. “A very good girl. Now she’s getting to be of marriageable age, we will have to look for a good boy.”

  She wasn’t being quite truthful. I was past marriageable age, being close to twenty-three. I felt her waiting. Aunty Nimmi took a few more cashews.

  “Girls find their own partners now-days,” she said. “Neelu is an American girl — you won’t even have to give her a dowry if she finds a fellow here.”

  My mother sighed. She had asked a favour; she had been refused.

  She said, “We have never allowed her to go out with boys. All this dating-shating, kissing-kissing is OK in the movies, but we always wanted a nice boy from a good Sikh family. From back home, you know.”

  Aunty Nimmi laughed. “There are many nice Sikh boys in Chicago.” Again she had missed her cue.

  “So many have cut their hair and don’t wear a turban,” fretted my mother.

  “So they make more money, no?”

  My mother gave up then. “Shall I make us some tea?”

  Aunty Nimmi dusted the salt from her fingers and said, “That would be wonderful.”

  When they left later that evening my mother said, “She wanted me to ask her straight out, like a beggar. Huh!”

  And from then on, she did not speak to Aunty Nimmi.

  There were a few compromises. My parents found a “good Sikh fellow” for me to marry in Delhi a few months later, but he had no turban. He’d been driving a jeep home from college on that day in 1984 when every Hindu was licensed to kill a Sikh, and it was lucky for him that they did no more than pull him from that wobbly raft and, with his six yards of saffron billowing on the black potholed road, pull down his knot of sleek, long, curly black hair and take a scissor to it. My father says he must have fought like a tiger as the mob plucked out his beard; I have never asked my husband to tell me why he has no need to shave.

  It is easier to live in Chicago without a turban, though, and we were comfortable in an old wood-floored apartment near the El, not too far from the family. But still my mother would not hear of our visiting Uncle Harjit and Aunty Nimmi, even when I said I had a toothache.

  “Plenty of other Indian dentists,” she said, hunched over the yellow pages.

  But very few Sikh dentists. “Singh, Singh, Singh… could be a Rajput, too. I’ll just have to ask the secretary.”

  I took the phone from her. “I’m married now, I’ll do it,” I said.

  But I didn’t look for dentists. The doctor I chose was a gynecologist, and when I went to see her she said I would have a child. It was a girl, and there were telegrams and letters of sympathy from relatives. “Don’t worry. By the Guru’s grace, it will be a boy next time.” My husband threw the letters from him with surprising force, and he was gentle with the little one, singing her to sleep with a lori and, once in a while, a Simon and Garfunkel song.

  A few weeks later, without so much as a call to see if we were home, Uncle Harjit and Aunty Nimmi’s Oldsmobile found a parking spot on our street and Aunty Nimmi stood at our door in a magenta sari, saying, Hello, Neelu. My, you’re looking pale. Well, girls are always more difficult.”

  I smiled, “How would you know?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Everyone says.”

  I opened my jar of fine Darjeeling, while Uncle Harjit picked up a rattle and pretended the baby was a dancer monkey. “Taka-tak-a-tak. O naach, meri jaan, naach!” The little one started to cry, but my ears were listening for the doorbell or the phone to ring and it would be my mother finding me serving Darjeeling to Aunty Nimmi and, worse, talking with her.

  The tea leaves boiled too long before I remembered to add milk, but Aunty Nimmi took its strength without comment, so I knew she had a purpose in coming to see me. It came after a few sips.

>   “Neelu, I’m very glad you have a child now, because I know you are now able to understand this. Your mother will not talk to me. I do not know what I have done, but did you know I did not get an invitation to your wedding?”

  I knew, but I looked as if I didn’t.

  “Well, I want you to carry a message to her.” Then a dramatic pause. “Will you?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Tell her we are thinking about selling our house and, if she will not mind, we would like your father to be the broker.”

  “I’m sure you could just call Daddy and he would be delighted to list your house, Aunty.”

  “No, no. If I do that, it will seem as if I have ignored her. Please, take her this message.”

  She blinked earnestly, and I heard myself say, “All right.”

  A few minutes later, they were gone, and the baby went back to sleep.

  We were hemming chunnis on the balcony, the tall trees of Wilson Avenue dropping the last laser beams of October through the transparent folds of blue and lemon, and I spoke almost as if to the baby in her chair between us.

  “Aunty Nimmi came to visit us a few days ago.”

  “What, she thinks she is welcome?”

  “She came to congratulate me about the baby.”

  “Did she bring a gift?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “What congratulations, then? Did you not tell her she did not do her duty to find you a husband on that trip to India? And that it is her fault you are married to a man without a turban?”

  “No, I didn’t, Mummy. It would have been impolite. She gave me a message for you.”

  Not a movement.

  I tried again. “She wants a favour.”

  “What is it?”

  “They are planning to sell their house and so she told me to ask you if Daddy would like to be the sales agent.”

  “Ask me? Huh.” She rolled the chiffon edge tight and looped it over her index finger and I watched the silver needle dance faster and faster in and out.