English Lessons and Other Stories

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  “Asha,” she’d said. “You should be grateful. You have a loving family. You have parents who trusted you enough to send you abroad alone to visit me. You have good looks. You have a wealthy husband to take care of you. You even have a son. What more can a woman ask for?”

  “Love,” said Asha.

  “You have love,” said Devika wretchedly. “You have family who take care of you.”

  “Taking care of me is not Love,” said Asha, deep-voiced as the low string on a sitar. “I have people who love me because I am there. Not people who love me because they know me.”

  “But Asha, you are so difficult to love. I’m sure everyone would love you if you would only be nice. Is that so difficult? To just be nice?”

  And Asha had responded as though they had still been melodramatic little children in pigtails wearing candy-striped frocks to school. She had risen from the little bed and thrown the trusting, wondering, innocent, long-haired doll out of the window. Twenty-one stories.

  Devika had recoiled in fright.

  She decided Asha needed to worship more. Worship keeps you from thinking about why things are the way they are and even about why things are not the way they could be. She stood on a stepladder in the kitchen and lifted the black metal statue of dancing Lord Shiva out of obscurity in the cabinet over the refrigerator where Ratan had banished him. Contemplation of the Nataraj with his powerful foot on the neck of ignorance would bring Asha a better sense of her own insignificance. Devika carried the idol to Asha’s room, set it on the bed where the long-haired doll had lain and closed the door behind her.

  Because surely that was the real problem. Asha had become a woman who had made the mistake of believing she was somehow… significant.

  All the pictures on the first roll of film were of Ratan, and his sisters approved. Devika gave them the ones they wanted and set about hunting Ratan again, so she could take his picture unawares. He began to feel as though she were stalking him as a panther stalks a kakar in the terrai. He took two rolls in for developing and found not a single picture of the apartment, not one picture taken from the balcony. Not one picture of maple leaves turning red and gold in the Don Valley, or the CN Tower against a sunset. All pictures of Ratan, as though she wanted to have him, a piece of him, all the time. And they weren’t even nice pictures; his hair was thinning.

  In fact, his hair was falling out in patches. There were small bald spots on the back of his head, and he took himself to the emergency room at North York Hospital.

  “Stress-related,” said the doctor from Poland. But for Ratan, there was a jeer in his voice, the older immigrant’s snigger. Sissy, it was ten times more difficult when I came here. You just can’t take it. What will you do if you don’t have what it takes, can’t make it? “But,” continued the doctor, “nothing to worry about.”

  He thought of telling the doctor his stress was all Devika’s fault. Devika and her Asha friend … imaginary friend. No, he couldn’t tell the doctor that, couldn’t bother the doctor with women’s problems. And Canada was causing his stress, and so was Peter Kendall, with his return-on-investment figures and his graphs and his market statistics. The rules are simple enough: low risk, low reward; high risk, high reward. The immigrant mantra. Still, Peter Kendall pored over his LOTUS 1-2-3 spreadsheets with their what-if analyses that couldn’t beat a Turk reading tea leaves.

  And so were his family causing this stress. Letters from his parents telling him to find a Canadian company interested in a joint venture and come home with dollars in his pockets. Vandana Di’s remarks about loving sisters and their husbands who helped their only brother come to Canada so the whole family could do well. And Devika was not helping at all. Ratan was beginning to feel she was daring him every day. Daring him to prove he could make her happy, to prove that giving up her family and coming to Canada was worth it. Daring him to take Asha and make her disappear.

  He had to drive her to Loblaws, write the cheque, manage everything. She couldn’t even remember his PIN number for the cash machine. She was helpless before the simple task of cleaning the bathtub. How had she ever graduated from college? Maybe her parents had lied to his about that.

  She couldn’t even remember to press B for Basement, so they always had to stop in the lobby and look foolish as people tried to join them on the elevator. “Going down. Going down,” he would tell them, letting the closing door obliterate the mocking vanilla faces.

  He tried to teach Devika to drive, but either she was too nervous or he was too impatient. She would not remember to fasten her lap-belt even though he’d told her the police could charge him a fifty-dollar fine for her stupidity. And the simple sequence “mirror — signal — shoulder check” was enough to reduce her to tears. Vandana Di said he should get her a few driving lessons, but why should he pay for some strange man to teach her what he knew already? Besides, there was a certain power in telling her what to do and having her fail; it made him feel, well… larger.

  “Asha says her ears hurt when you shout,” said Devika, letting Her Invisible Highness out of the back seat after one such lesson.

  “Tell Asha her ears are really going to hurt when I catch them and twist them off her nasty little head,” said Ratan. The threat felt good. In fact, it needed embellishing. “Tell Asha she can go back to India because I’m ready to wring her ugly little neck.”

  And Devika stood there with that look of fragile innocence betrayed till he relented and said, “All right. Tell Asha she can stay.” Then, with a flash of inspiration, he added, “For another week.”

  But at the end of the week, Asha was “very sick with a backache” and could not be moved.

  “I’ll go in and talk with her, I’ll find out how she is,” said Ratan.

  He knocked with an elaborate flourish at the door to the spare room. The Nataraj Shiva lay like a black spider on the counterpane and the room was still. Devika watched him from the living room.

  “Asha wants a massage,” said Ratan, and closed the door.

  He sat in the little room for a long, long while, looking at the open closet with the high-heeled cowboy boots, the black patent leather shoes, the jean jacket, the motorcycle helmet, the bikini underwear, the printed socks, the lace camisole, the red velvet swing coat, the lipsticks and the rhinestone tiara and all the other trinkets she had made him buy… for Asha. And he wished Asha were a real person who would love him, Ratan.

  But she wasn’t.

  So he went back to Devika, saying, “Give her an aspirin.”

  Devika, memorizer of TV commercials, said, “Tylenol is better.”

  Why, if she were pretending, couldn’t she also pretend to be jealous? Every picture she took was of Ratan, every minute of her day was spent in cooking, cleaning and waiting for him. She listened every time he had something to tell her. Everyone knows love isn’t what’s shown in the movies, but all the same, it’s just courteous to be jealous if your husband suggests giving another woman, even an imaginary one, a massage.

  Peter Kendall said the snow had come early. He’d said that last year and probably would say it every year with that same look of glad surprise. Ratan, however, wasn’t quite as thrilled. Slippery-grey slush pocked Highway 401 for the weekly visits to Brampton, Malton or Mississauga, and he wasn’t very good at steering in the direction of the car’s slide. And Toronto was grey, grey, grey as Peter Kendall’s Establishment hair. While his was black and falling. He was leaving pieces of himself everywhere, all over Toronto, and what parts of him were left were being taken from him slowly, surreptitiously, with Devika’s damnable pictures, the flash going off from crazy angles into his sleep-dazed or blinking eyes.

  It had to stop.

  “Asha thinks you should get a life insurance policy,” Devika said on Sunday morning.

  “And what do you think?”

  “I?” She was caught unawares. It was a question he had never asked before.

  “Yes, you. I don’t see anyone else here.”

  “Asha�
��” she began.

  “No. Not Asha. You. What do you think? You think I should buy a life insurance policy?”

  “As you wish,” said Devika.

  Why could the women in his life not tell him things, tell him what they wanted, instead of hinting to him, poking at him with their sly insinuations, their arch expectations, their snide challenging, their sultry little silences and their sweet little games, as though he were a cobra with drained poison sacs and they the snake-charmers pretending to fear, pretending to worship, pretending, pretending. Women’s shakti is dangerous unless harnessed or wounded.

  “Chalo,” he said. “Vandana Di will be waiting.”

  “Asha is ready.”

  She looked so convent-girl Indian, constantly adjusting that impractical marigold-yellow silk dupatta, that he wanted to shake her. She’d forget her coat as usual; he wouldn’t remind her. Let the Canadian winter teach her the lesson it had taught him; next time she’d remember her coat.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Mmmhmm.” Again that surprise.

  They were picking up speed on the ramp to the 401 when she looked at her lap in dismay.

  “Just a minute. My dupatta is caught in the door.”

  Before he could stop her, she had pulled at the handle. The Tempo door flew open and there was a whirr as the automatic shoulder strap released her. The car slithered over an ice patch and veered away from her flying body. He saw the unused lap belt glisten in the corner of his eye as he tried to brake, tried to call, tried to stop her going away from him.

  When he reached her, she had struggled to her knees, one hand covering her naked throat. And she was crawling, sobbing, dishevelled, towards the sodden shreds of her dupatta. She was almost to it, scrabbling in the muck like a madwoman for any passing Canadian to see, and he heard himself snarl, “See what happens when you don’t listen to me.”

  That stopped her, stopped her crawling and that awful, vulnerable whimper, and she lay quiet, shocked, along the melting snowbank.

  For the first time, she suffered him to touch her in daylight. So he held her, small and shivering in the cold grey foreignness, until the ambulance came.

  A vase of plastic flowers stood, determinedly cheerful, on the night-stand. A woman doctor’s voice. “Some concussion, bruises and a broken arm. You’re very lucky you weren’t killed, but we’ll have to watch you over the next few weeks.”

  An earnest white policeman with a cold took her statement.

  “You say you opened the door —”

  “My dupatta was caught in the door,” she explained.

  The policeman sneezed. He wrote, “Scarf… caught… in… passenger… door.”

  She pointed to his pad with an effort.

  “Not my scarf, my dupatta.”

  “How do you spell that?” The policeman wiped his nose.

  “D-U-P-A-T-T-A,” she intoned.

  A dupatta is more, so much more than a scarf. It is a woman’s modesty, her goodness, to be protected, cherished by her husband. She wanted her mother, her father, and at least twenty solicitous relatives telling her what to do, how to do it, how to live, how to be good, how to be loved.

  But here there was only Ratan, Canadian Ratan, sitting in the sterile whiteness watching the green glow of digital displays on the monitor and the slow weave of the plotter recording her brain wave patterns from the greased electrodes at her temples.

  There was only Ratan, and Canada, and herself. No one else.

  Ratan loomed over her.

  “How are you, Devika?” he asked.

  She tried to smile then, but the bruises on her face were too painful. She felt him sit next to her on the bed and winced as he took her hand. How was she?

  “I am Asha,” she said, voice low and husky. “Devika was afraid of living here, so she just… flew away.”

  Ratan came closer. Asha, Devika — all the same to him. “Asha,” he said, as though testing the name. The name means hope.

  “When you look better, Asha,” he told her, “I will invite Peter Kendall and his wife to dinner.”

  “When I feel better,” said Asha, “I want…” Speaking was difficult. “I want… to go to Niagara Falls.” And because Asha could live even if Ratan were to die, she said, “I want to take pictures of the falls and send them home to India.”

  Then Asha closed her swollen eyes and felt Devika drift away as though she had never been.

  Afterword

  Apprehending the Shape of Experience — Shauna Singh Baldwin’s Stories

  by KULDIP GILL

  Opening the pages of Shauna Singh Baldwin’s English Lessons and Other Stories is like taking a pilgrimage, a journey, or even a walking tour. Along the way, one encounters many contexts where one lingers or revisits and experiences the plight of many characters, each more interesting than the last.

  The first time I sat down to read this collection, I could not start the second story until I had read “Rawalpindi, 1919” at least three times. It moved me in a very personal way — something I had not previously felt with any other story. I asked myself, “Why?” and I found that Shauna Singh Baldwin had captured my attention through details and imagery.

  In the story she describes how an Indian woman makes chapatti dough, which acts as a symbol that sheds light upon the narrative. To follow the story, we must pay attention to the chappati dough. I know how it feels to make the dough — know how once I’ve finished kneading it, I too form a ball of it and turn its rough side down, patting the top to make it shine. I’ve also taken a small piece out and gone through the steps the author describes. If the phone rings or something else interrupts the process, the small piece, exposed to air, will quickly begin to develop a looser structure and a different colour, taking on a different complexion from the main body of dough.

  As I read, my hands could feel the dough and itched to move as Baldwin gave the details of the process. She wants the reader to experience the act of making dough, and so uses all her artistry as a writer.

  The dough is a metaphor for life, family, and universal values. For the metaphor to convey the meanings intended, we must be attentive to cultural nuances. In this story, Baldwin includes compelling scenes that portray collectivist cultural values. Separated from his family, the boy Sarup will take on the individualist values of the West. His mother knows that if they refuse to let their son go to England, he may remain more true to family values.

  Despite this intuitive knowledge, the mother knows she must be prepared to let him go, but will not do so without making her husband, who wants the son to be educated in England, aware of what they can anticipate on their son’s return. She takes food to her husband in the manner of an Indian wife. As she observes the family values of service to a husband, she talks to him in culturally specific ways. She suggests to him that if the boy goes away to an English school, he will return with foreign tastes and different needs and desires. There is a hint of threat that the husband had better be prepared. In fact, they had better buy some china dinnerware (the old metal thali won’t do). When their son returns, he will not be content with pillows on the floor — a sofa had better be in the plans, as well.

  Through this first story we also learn of and adjust to the evocative language used and familiarize ourselves with Baldwin’s style and the riches of the Punjabi language.

  Baldwin uses words, images, and concepts from different languages or dialects throughout her work, and different registers within these languages. I was constantly surprised at how easy she made it appear to show the thoughts of particular individuals as well as the dialogue between them. This seeming effortlessness exists despite the breadth: stories are told about different classes of people, in diverse voices. We hear the voices of an old woman, a young girl, a young married woman, and the voice of a woman about to be engaged. The ease belies a well-honed writing style — how else could she tell of ground-level relationships, with characters emerging through confessional modes of thought? She knows each characte
r’s inner language at an intimate level and allows us to enter it. Familiar with these languages and cultures, I found the range of stories immensely credible and satisfying to read, in all their complexity.

  I can’t help but notice the details in these stories. One insightful passage from “Family Ties” illustrates Baldwin’s expertise in presenting important particulars. The story opens in the voice of the narrator — a ten-year-old girl who is “absurdly happy” with her father’s attention to her as his beti (daughter). He calls her by a pet name, his little “kukri ” (a small hen) because she is a fearful little thing. She tells us later that she is entrusted to go to the market with their driver, and to the chicken-seller to buy the meat for dinner.

  The hens all look the same to me — brownish-white with frightened eyes, silly kukris just like me. I look at the closest cage and one steps forward. She holds her head high when she crows, thrusts her breast at the cage and seems unafraid to die, so I say, “That one.” A moment later her head is severed and Nand Singh throws her in his shopping bag. Although Mummy’s frown at my plate warns that no one will marry a fatty, I eat the curried kukri that night, hoping her courage will nourish mine.

  *

  As I read, I attend to details such as pet names and words, for this is how Baldwin foreshadows the unfolding plot. These rich elements provide us with the life of the family sequentially through the teenage years of our young narrator, who tells us of the lessons she accumulates: “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.” She has imbibed what Baldwin shows us in other stories throughout this collection: that traditionally, women had to learn silence, for women who didn’t comply with traditional modes of living were severely punished.