English Lessons and Other Stories

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  “Tell her there are plenty of other Indian real-estate brokers in Chicago.”

  I said, “Are you sure? You won’t ask Daddy?”

  “Huh. For what? They don’t need a larger house. The one they have is twice the size of the one they had in Karolbagh.”

  She bit off the thread and covered her head with the chunni.

  Request and refusal. Honour was satisfied. I knew then that the two-year wound was healed.

  I hesitated a little as the envelope slipped through my fingers, and the blue box let out a cold wind whistle. Though it was only November I walked home with my teeth clenched tight so they wouldn’t chatter. Would Aunty Nimmi come?

  She did. Uncle Harjit brought the baby a stuffed tiger, slapped me on the back and said, “Don’t pin this one on the wall!” For once, she hung back, trying to seem unnoticeable in a flame-orange sari.

  My mother’s shawl brushed past my elbow as she came out of my kitchen. “Aao ji, aao,” she said.

  Aunty Nimmi grew in stature, and she rushed at my mother and the two sisters held each other fiercely. That was all.

  Then my mother led Aunty Nimmi into the spare bedroom we had converted into a prayer room. And when everyone was seated crosslegged on the sheet-covered carpeting before the holy book and it came time to name the baby, my mother said to the Granthi, “Wait, I want Nimmi to do it.”

  Then Aunty Nimmi rose and sat behind the big old tome with its large friendly writing and she opened it at random and read the Guru’s words at the top left-hand corner, so we all knew the baby’s name would start like hers, and mine, with an N.

  Jassie

  I’ll be sixty-five this month, and now I know I will die in a foreign land. The nurses are all very cheerful, and my daughter and her husband, who has blue eyes, come to visit me every day. At least, I think they come to visit me. My son-in-law’s mother shares my room and there are times when I am not certain.

  Elsie is a Christian woman, very frail, very pale. Me, I am brown and my skin is not as wrinkled. She tells me stories from her past but I have none to give her that she could understand. I only smile, and mostly we share silence and the magnolia tree outside. She calls me Jessie, though my name is Jassie, as all my teachers did, and she does not seem to know there is a difference. And in the evenings Ted, the big smiling black man whose talk I do not understand, comes to help us walk down the hall for the usual spiceless dinner.

  On Sundays, they have mass on the loudspeaker, and I say the responses with Elsie, out of habit. “The Lord be with you. And also with you. Lift up your hearts. We lift them up to the Lord.” But afterwards, I unwrap my old gutka with its handsewn cloth binding and I say the Japji. When I am bitter, I say it loud, as if I do not know the strange sounds bother her. Sometimes she asks me how it is I know the mass so well, and I answer that I went to a Christian school. Perhaps one day when she is forgetful I may tell her some of my story to bring it into words.

  We have little in common, Elsie and I. Only that we are both mothers, and our children are married. But motherhood is a word with many meanings.

  In those days, many of us had two mothers, and some had more. The more mothers you had, the more rich and powerful your father must be, for each woman — wife or concubine — was expected to be housed and clothed and jewelled. And we, their children, must be schooled in the best of schools — missionary schools, with uniforms and English lessons.

  My birth mother was a full wife, married with all the rites of the Anand Karaj ceremony, at sixteen. My other mother was the wife whose failure no one ever mentioned, out of kindness. I was raised to show respect and love for both mothers, and I did so gladly, for both women loved me as their own. This was difficult for white women who had never known the love of children to understand.

  Oh, they meant well. I would not have you think that I did not respect my teachers — but they wanted us to follow their ways. I remember most particularly how important was the filling in of forms. “Mother’s Name” was written in one box. But for this, I had devised a fair solution. I would give my mothers turns. I had only two, so this was easy.

  “Mother’s Maiden Name” was more difficult, for our custom was to change a woman’s first name to one of her husband’s choosing. But the last name of a Sikh woman remains the same, from birth to death — Kaur, meaning princess. I knew the maiden name of my birth mother (it was tattooed midway up her forearm, and she wore a watch with its face turned inward to cover the blue smudge when in the company of Europeans, out of respect for their customs and sensibilities), but I knew not the maiden name of my father’s first wife, she being married too young to remember it. So when it came her turn, I would write her married name, Krishnawanti, as her maiden name and hope she would forgive the lie. I would not have anyone believe she had kept a name not of her husband’s choosing.

  It wasn’t as if they did not know and practise our customs, for were they not the several wives of a dead and risen God? And how were they different from the thousand consorts of Krishna, the God of the Hindus? Their senior-most wife was always given most respect; she was called Mother Superior. But my senior mother could not be acknowledged. Oh, it made me angry, then and now.

  But I would not say this to Elsie, for I would not have her think I am ungrateful for the teachings of these women. I wondered often if their families had cast them out or if they, realizing their sin of barrenness, had exiled themselves in shame and penance? In later years they told me they chose their exile, but I am not convinced. Widows, even widows of Gods, are not the ones who choose.

  In their church on Sundays, with the chants that sounded all the same, burning foreign-smelling incense in the land of incense, they asked us to pray for the health of the Pope and all the bishops and archbishops, although these men were not their husbands. I felt these men were those who had power over my teachers, so I prayed — but not to their God — that they would be generous.

  I like to watch the soap operas; they are like the Ramayan and the Mahabharat — they go on and on. There are some days when I want to be sure there are stories that never end. Elsie likes classical music and says the TV bothers her; it has too much violence.

  I say, that is not the kind of violence one should fear. The kind of violence one should fear is always quiet and comes all wrapped up in words like Love until you live with it daily and you value only that which is valuable to the violator.

  We were taught to speak like proper British ladies. “No singsong,” said Mother Francis, as we chorused speeches from Shakespeare and poems by Kipling. On the streets our people sang “Bande Mataram” and the truck drivers carried explosives from roadside tea stalls to the Indian National Army. “My Lord, child. Can’t you learn to say ‘victory,’ not ‘wictory’?” Mother Mary of Grace said, while in the temples the Brahmins received a family’s lifelong savings as prayashchit — penance for having fought the white man’s war. At assembly we would sing, “Jesus loves me, this I know, For the Bible tells me so,” while the Tagore poem that was to become our national anthem was whispered by poor wretches in prison, “Jana Gana Mana.” We learned we should be grateful for the telegraph and the trains and two hundred years of civilizing rule, while Shiva danced the dance of death on trains that carried Muslims one way, Hindus and Sikhs the other. We learned ballroom dancing from Mother Agatha, the red ribbons in our long heavy black braids flying out behind us, while the British packed away their brollies and shipped home rent-free.

  Ted says he is not black, he is African-American. And slowly I am beginning to understand him. I have read about Martin Luther King and how he had a dream and then how he was killed, but Ted says his people are still fighting for their rights. I told him it would be easy if the only fight were against a conqueror, against history.

  If you believe that everything that ever happened had to happen or you wouldn’t be here, then you would believe that ballroom dancing led me to betray my husband before I met him. And then you would know that I deserve my pain and
even to die in a foreign land. Mother Agatha said we should have a “social,” to practise. And so I met Firoze. Blue-blazered, with his Eton-like school tie, a “proper gentleman,” said Mother Agatha approvingly. When she said we came from the same background, she meant we both knew English history and none of our own, that we both expected servants to have darker skin than our own. But this is not enough, even today, with which to arrange a marriage in India. The ballroom dancing stopped when Firoze’s family left for Pakistan.

  The man my father chose for me instead was a good man, slight of build, quiet and kind. He was the son of Sikh landowners, had a missionary education but no connections. I thought he had no business sense, either, when he opened a shop to sell khadi cloth. I told him no one would buy cloth made in India; everyone wanted cloth made on machines in Manchester. But he believed Gandhi had been his best salesman, and he was right. Every newly elected Indian politician came to our shop to buy khadi.

  My father gave my husband a house in old Delhi as my dowry, and my husband gave me first this daughter for my old age and then two sons. I named my daughter with a Muslim name, Yasmeen, in memory of Firoze. Yasmeen Kaur. My Sikh family blushed for me and ever after called her Minni.

  Minni comes to visit and she has brought me gulabjamuns, those big, fat, perfectly rounded light brown sweets. But my arthritis is so painful today I cannot hold them in my hands, and she has to feed me as I used to feed her. Her husband stands at his mother’s bed and jokes how he will take us both dancing next weekend. I feel pain just to think of it and Elsie smiles faintly. He reminds me of a movie star, big, white and unafraid. Minni is small and quick and dark next to him and her voice reminds me of Mother Ursula’s clipped English tones. My husband, thinking to please me, sent her to England to study, but now I am irritated when I realize it is her accent my son-in-law finds so attractive.

  Elsie was married many years but she talks very little about her husband. She says he was a policeman and she worried every day of their marriage that he would be killed. I didn’t worry about my husband, only about my sons. They were both in the army when the second war with Pakistan broke out. They were the first to be sent to the front, perhaps because they were Sikhs and not Hindus. I wonder sometimes if they fought Firoze’s sons.

  It doesn’t matter now; they are both gone.

  After we had given two sons, we sold the khadi store and came away as far as we could fly. Minni welcomed us both, as a dutiful daughter should. But it is cold in America. A coldness of the soul that my husband never became accustomed to. I was cold to him, too — I had never been otherwise. My warmth was left in India, where I earned this pain ballroom dancing to the convent’s Steinway with Firoze.

  Despite my son-in-law’s joking, Elsie is not going dancing next weekend. In fact, I had to strain to hear her breathing last night. Ted came in and helped the nurse to put an oxygen mask over her face, but it hurts her and she tries to do without it. I am able to sit up today and her voice is very faint. “Jessie, will you sit next to me? I think I am having an anxiety attack.” I have to manoeuvre my walker over to her side of the room and then lower myself into the chair next to her bed. She is “perspiring profusely,” as Mother Conrad would have put it.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Jessie,” she says.

  And then, very faintly, she says, “Jessie, will you pray with me?” I want to say, “My name is Jassie, not Jessie. You would not understand my prayers, and you don’t like to hear me speak Punjabi, and you need Christian prayers, not mine.”

  But this is not the time and she is not the women to whom I want to say the words. I take her rosary from the bedpost and say, “Our Father, who art in Heaven…”

  I wonder, could I have learned the namaaz as easily as I learned the rosary?

  Devika

  Soon it would be June. Even so, Devika pulled a shawl close and cradled a fourth cup of steaming tea against cold palms. She had spent the morning cooking mattar-panneer and almond chicken curry and then cleaned everything with the cleaning solution she could just spray and wipe away. She washed her waist-length hair and bathed when the clock told her Ratan would be getting off work, ironed a fresh melon-coloured silk salwar kameez and polished her silver anklets so she knew every chink shone as she moved.

  This is what good wives do.

  Carefully, she inserted a cassette of Hindi songs from old movies in his new stereo system; his older sisters said Baba loved Kishore Kumar’s hits. She wished they would call him Ratan instead of Baba, but all three treated him as though he were still some long-delayed reward for their parents’ years of prayers and fasting.

  It would be 45°, maybe 46°C in Delhi now and the cyclamen bougainvillea would be in valiant bloom around her parents’ veranda. It must be sunrise; her mother would be bowed in puja, chanting the aarti. Maybe the sun had already risen at home — it rises so early in summer — and then street vendors would be crying their wares with dust-parched throats, stripping tar off sun-baked streets with their worn cycle tires. There, scooter rickshaw drivers would be squinting into sun-mirages. But here, on the twenty-first floor overlooking the Don Valley Parkway, the Toronto Star sat on the coffee table and, unaware of clashing adjectives, proclaimed it a sunny and cold day.

  She unfolded a featherlight blue aerogramme with handwriting crammed corner to corner. Asha — wilful, fun-loving, irreverent Asha, the one who’d sworn never to be married — was transformed by marriage, had a son and now sounded like all the other girls from their college. “Seven pounds, two ounces. Of course, I had all the tests so we knew it was going to be a boy. My mom-in-law was so glad, she even arranged a suite for me in the hospital. And she sent the servant home and slept outside my room on the couch. Devika, this labour is the most terrible thing. No one tells you how bad it is. My mom-in-law paid a lady-doctor from England to give me training so that I would have a healthy boy. The lady-doctor told me how to breathe and to push but when I was actually on the table I didn’t remember anything she told me. All that money went to waste. But many people gave my mom-in-law shagan to welcome the boy. Your Daddy came and gave 501 rupees. You know he’s very proud to have a daughter married to someone settled in Canada, and a big stockbroker, at that.”

  Someone else must have written that letter, not Asha. Not Asha, with her “I’ll never be happy being married to some rich fellow and having babies and servants to look after them.” Not the Asha she remembered saying, “I’d never let anyone do a test on me — I’d like a little girl.” The Asha she had known had sworn with schoolgirl sincerity to shun the rewards of complicity. That Asha could never have become this woman. Why, everyone in college had thought Asha would some day scandalize Delhi with a love-marriage, be an activist or a lawyer, an engineer, an architect, a mathematician… a pioneer…

  There was nothing more Devika could straighten in the living room, so she took the teacup and went into the master bedroom.

  The bed was too large for this room, but sharing a smaller one with a stranger would have been difficult for both of them. That first moment at the airport, she had not recognized him. Husband or not, a year waiting for a visa is a long time. And the few days she had seen him in Delhi were marriage days and one mercifully brief night of pain. She remembered circling above Toronto, with the double-oval letting her see small white planes nuzzling at the terminal below, and the moment of numb panic as the plane landed. Reaching into her carry-on bag, she’d drawn out two photograph albums, proof of her marriage for the phalanx of immigration officials she knew awaited her. And afterwards she pushed her luggage on a cart and walked past crowds of white, black, yellow and brown faces, including his, until he called her name.

  Then as now, the apartment had bare white walls in the living room, two bedrooms, a couch and coffee table, a smoked glass and brass dining table with four beige-upholstered chrome-plated chairs, a small bed in the second bedroom — and this bed he told her was “king-size.” Ratan watched her unpack suitcases more than half-full of gifts f
or him from his family. A jar of sweet mango pickles, a plastic bottle full of honey from a relative’s farm, two kilos of square-granuled almost-white sugar, two kilos of basmati rice, and a large black metal Nataraj Shiva, which his mother packed using Devika’s gold-bordered wedding saris as cushioning. She was confused when he said, “Mum shouldn’t have bothered — you can get everything on Gerrard Street right here.” Was that any way to treat the love of a woman who considered herself barren till his birth?

  That first day, he had let her sleep alone on the king-size bed till her day was more attuned to his. In the evening, they set off in his new Ford Tempo with the automatic shoulder straps that startled her by whirring forward when the doors opened, to visit his sisters and their families in Malton, in Brampton, and in Mississauga. He had asked which sister she wanted to visit first. She had said, “Whatever suits you.” “You choose,” he urged, so she felt sure she was being tested. She named the eldest, “Vandana Di — it would show respect.”

  “True,” he said, expectation fulfilled. She let her eyes drift to his face without turning her head so she could judge if he was pleased or not, but it was too early for her to read him.

  That was her specialty. To read others and to know what they expected. Then to do her best to satisfy, to choose as they would have her choose. “Such a sweet girl, such a good girl,” Asha’s mother used to say, touching her cheek with a wistful glance at her own daughter. Asha would toss her bobbed head and say, “Don’t you mean docile, mama?” The reply would come certain as a Brahmin’s incantation, “Docile girls are good, Asha.” And good girls are docile.

  Ratan asked if she wanted to visit Niagara Falls, although there were no relatives there. Devika had never thought of travel except to visit relatives, seeing the occasional car trip out of Delhi as a test of endurance, a sacrifice offered to Duty. She had always agreed with her mother that it seemed appropriate that the Hindustani word for journey, safar, sounded like the English suffer.