Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  Three months pass. Then another.

  “Vikram wouldn’t have wanted you to give up things!” they protest. They call my husband by the name he was born with. In Toronto he’d changed to Vik so the men he worked with at his office would find his name as easy as Rod or Chris. “You know, the dead aren’t cut off from us!”

  My grandmother, the spoiled daughter of a rich zamindar, shaved her head with rusty razor blades when she was widowed at sixteen. My grandfather died of childhood diabetes when he was nineteen, and she saw herself as the harbinger of bad luck. My mother grew up without parents, raised indifferently by an uncle, while her true mother slept in a hut behind the main estate house and took her food with the servants. She grew up a rationalist. My parents abhor mindless mortification.

  The zamindar’s daughter kept stubborn faith in Vedic rituals; my parents rebelled. I am trapped between two modes of knowledge. At thirty-six, I am too old to start over and too young to give up. Like my husband’s spirit, I flutter between worlds.

  Courting aphasia, we travel. We travel with our phalanx of servants and poor relatives. To hill stations and to beach resorts. We play contract bridge in dusty gymkhana clubs. We ride stubby ponies up crumbly mountain trails. At tea dances, we let ourselves be twirled twice round the ballroom. We hit the holy spots we hadn’t made time for before. In Varanasi, Kalighat, Rishikesh, Hardwar, astrologers and palmists seek me out and for a fee offer me cosmic consolations.

  Already the widowers among us are being shown new bride candidates. They cannot resist the call of custom, the authority of their parents and older brothers. They must marry; it is the duty of a man to look after a wife. The new wives will be young widows with children, destitute but of good family. They will make loving wives, but the men will shun them. I’ve had calls from the men over crackling Indian telephone lines. “Save me,” they say, these substantial, educated, successful men of forty. “My parents are arranging a marriage for me.” In a month they will have buried one family and returned to Canada with a new bride and partial family.

  I am comparatively lucky. No one here thinks of arranging a husband for an unlucky widow.

  Then, on the third day of the sixth month into this odyssey, in an abandoned temple in a tiny Himalayan village, as I make my offering of flowers and sweetmeats to the god of a tribe of animists, my husband descends to me. He is squatting next to a scrawny sadhu in moth-eaten robes. Vikram wears the vanilla suit he wore the last time I hugged him. The sadhu tosses petals on a butter-fed flame, reciting Sanskrit mantras, and sweeps his face of flies. My husband takes my hands in his.

  You’re beautiful, he starts. Then, What are you doing here?

  Shall I stay? I ask. He only smiles, but already the image is fading. You must finish alone what we started together. No seaweed wreathes his mouth. He speaks too fast just as he used to when we were an envied family in our pink split-level. He is gone.

  In the windowless altar room, smoky with joss sticks and clarified butter lamps, a sweaty hand gropes for my blouse. I do not shriek. The sadhu arranges his robe. The lamps hiss and sputter out.

  When we come out of the temple, my mother says, “Did you feel something weird in there?”

  My mother has no patience with ghosts, prophetic dreams, holy men, and cults.

  “No,” I lie. “Nothing.”

  But she knows that she’s lost me. She knows that in days I shall be leaving.

  Kusum’s put her house up for sale. She wants to live in an ashram in Hardwar. Moving to Hardwar was her swami’s idea. Her swami runs two ashrams, the one in Hardwar and another here in Toronto.

  “Don’t run away,” I tell her.

  “I’m not running away,” she says. “I’m pursuing inner peace. You think you or that Ranganathan fellow are better off?”

  Pam’s left for California. She wants to do some modelling, she says. She says when she comes into her share of the insurance money she’ll open a yoga-cum-aerobics studio in Hollywood. She sends me postcards so naughty I daren’t leave them on the coffee table. Her mother has withdrawn from her and the world.

  The rest of us don’t lose touch, that’s the point. Talk is all we have, says Dr. Ranganathan, who has also resisted his relatives and returned to Montreal and to his job, alone. He says, whom better to talk with than other relatives? We’ve been melted down and recast as a new tribe.

  He calls me twice a week from Montreal. Every Wednesday night and every Saturday afternoon. He is changing jobs, going to Ottawa. But Ottawa is over a hundred miles away, and he is forced to drive two hundred and twenty miles a day. He can’t bring himself to sell his house. The house is a temple, he says; the king-sized bed in the master bedroom is a shrine. He sleeps on a folding cot. A devotee.

  There are still some hysterical relatives. Judith Templeton’s list of those needing help and those who’ve “accepted” is in nearly perfect balance. Acceptance means you speak of your family in the past tense and you make active plans for moving ahead with your life. There are courses at Seneca and Ryerson we could be taking. Her gleaming leather briefcase is full of college catalogues and lists of cultural societies that need our help. She has done impressive work, I tell her.

  “In the textbooks on grief management,” she replies—I am her con fidante, I realize, one of the few whose grief has not sprung bizarre obsessions—“there are stages to pass through: rejection, depression, acceptance, reconstruction.” She has compiled a chart and finds that six months after the tragedy, none of us still reject reality, but only a handful are reconstructing. “Depressed Acceptance” is the plateau we’ve reached. Remarriage is a major step in reconstruction (though she’s a little surprised, even shocked, over how quickly some of the men have taken on new families). Selling one’s house and changing jobs and cities is healthy.

  How do I tell Judith Templeton that my family surrounds me, and that like creatures in epics, they’ve changed shapes? She sees me as calm and accepting but worries that I have no job, no career. My closest friends are worse off than I. I cannot tell her my days, even my nights, are thrilling.

  She asks me to help with families she can’t reach at all. An elderly couple in Agincourt whose sons were killed just weeks after they had brought their parents over from a village in Punjab. From their names, I know they are Sikh. Judith Templeton and a translator have visited them twice with offers of money for airfare to Ireland, with bank forms, power-of-attorney forms, but they have refused to sign, or to leave their tiny apartment. Their sons’ money is frozen in the bank. Their sons’ investment apartments have been trashed by tenants, the furnishings sold off. The parents fear that anything they sign or any money they receive will end the company’s or the country’s obligations to them. They fear they are selling their sons for two airline tickets to a place they’ve never seen.

  The high-rise apartment is a tower of Indians and West Indians, with a sprinkling of Orientals. The nearest bus stop kiosk is lined with women in saris. Boys practice cricket in the parking lot. Inside the building, even I wince a bit from the ferocity of onion fumes, the distinctive and immediate Indianness of frying ghee, but Judith Templeton maintains a steady flow of information. These poor old people are in imminent danger of losing their place and all their services.

  I say to her, “They are Sikh. They will not open up to a Hindu woman.” And what I want to add is, as much as I try not to, I stiffen now at the sight of beards and turbans. I remember a time when we all trusted each other in this new country, it was only the new country we worried about.

  The two rooms are dark and stuffy. The lights are off, and an oil lamp sputters on the coffee table. The bent old lady has let us in, and her husband is wrapping a white turban over his oiled, hip-length hair. She immediately goes to the kitchen, and I hear the most familiar sound of an Indian home, tap water hitting and filling a teapot.

  They have not paid their utility bills, out of fear and the inability to write a check. The telephone is gone; electricity and gas and water
are soon to follow. They have told Judith their sons will provide. They are good boys, and they have always earned and looked after their parents.

  We converse a bit in Hindi. They do not ask about the crash and I wonder if I should bring it up. If they think I am here merely as a translator, then they may feel insulted. There are thousands of Punjabi-speakers, Sikhs, in Toronto to do a better job. And so I say to the old lady, “I too have lost my sons, and my husband, in the crash.”

  Her eyes immediately fill with tears. The man mutters a few words which sound like a blessing. “God provides and God takes away,” he says.

  I want to say, But only men destroy and give back nothing. “My boys and my husband are not coming back,” I say. “We have to understand that.”

  Now the old woman responds. “But who is to say? Man alone does not decide these things.” To this her husband adds his agreement.

  Judith asks about the bank papers, the release forms. With a stroke of the pen, they will have a provincial trustee to pay their bills, invest their money, send them a monthly pension.

  “Do you know this woman?” I ask them.

  The man raises his hand from the table, turns it over, and seems to regard each finger separately before he answers. “This young lady is always coming here, we make tea for her and she leaves papers for us to sign.” His eyes scan a pile of papers in the corner of the room. “Soon we will be out of tea, then will she go away?”

  The old lady adds, “I have asked my neighbors and no one else gets angrezi visitors. What have we done?”

  “It’s her job,” I try to explain. “The government is worried. Soon you will have no place to stay, no lights, no gas, no water.”

  “Government will get its money. Tell her not to worry, we are honorable people.”

  I try to explain the government wishes to give money, not take. He raises his hand. “Let them take,” he says. “We are accustomed to that. That is no problem.”

  “We are strong people,” says the wife. “Tell her that.”

  “Who needs all this machinery?” demands the husband. “It is unhealthy, the bright lights, the cold air on a hot day, the cold food, the four gas rings. God will provide, not government.”

  “When our boys return,” the mother says. Her husband sucks his teeth. “Enough talk,” he says.

  Judith breaks in. “Have you convinced them?” The snaps on her cordovan briefcase go off like firecrackers in that quiet apartment. She lays the sheaf of legal papers on the coffee table. “If they can’t write their names, an X will do—I’ve told them that.”

  Now the old lady has shuffled to the kitchen and soon emerges with a pot of tea and two cups. “I think my bladder will go first on a job like this,” Judith says to me, smiling. “If only there was some way of reaching them. Please thank her for the tea. Tell her she’s very kind.”

  I nod in Judith’s direction and tell them in Hindi, “She thanks you for the tea. She thinks you are being very hospitable but she doesn’t have the slightest idea what it means.”

  I want to say, Humor her. I want to say, My boys and my husband are with me too, more than ever. I look in the old man’s eyes and I can read his stubborn, peasant’s message: I have protected this woman as best I can. She is the only person I have left. Give to me or take from me what you will, but I will not sign for it. I will not pretend that I accept.

  In the car, Judith says, “You see what I’m up against? I’m sure they’re lovely people, but their stubbornness and ignorance are driving me crazy. They think signing a paper is signing their sons’ death warrants, don’t they?”

  I am looking out the window. I want to say, In our culture, it is a parent’s duty to hope.

  “Now Shaila, this next woman is a real mess. She cries day and night, and she refuses all medical help. We may have to—”

  “—Let me out at the subway,” I say.

  “I beg your pardon?” I can feel those blue eyes staring at me.

  It would not be like her to disobey. She merely disapproves, and slows at a corner to let me out. Her voice is plaintive. “Is there anything I said? Anything I did?”

  I could answer her suddenly in a dozen ways, but I choose not to. “Shaila? Let’s talk about it,” I hear, then slam the door.

  A wife and mother begins her new life in a new country, and that life is cut short. Yet her husband tells her: Complete what we have started. We who stayed out of politics and came halfway around the world to avoid religious and political feuding have been the first in the New World to die from it. I no longer know what we started, nor how to complete it. I write letters to the editors of local papers and to members of Parliament. Now at least they admit it was a bomb. One MP answers back, with sympathy, but with a challenge. You want to make a difference? Work on a campaign. Work on mine. Politicize the Indian voter.

  My husband’s old lawyer helps me set up a trust. Vikram was a saver and a careful investor. He had saved the boys’ boarding school and college fees. I sell the pink house at four times what we paid for it and take a small apartment downtown. I am looking for a charity to support.

  We are deep in the Toronto winter, gray skies, icy pavements. I stay indoors, watching television. I have tried to assess my situation, how best to live my life, to complete what we began so many years ago. Kusum has written me from Hardwar that her life is now serene. She has seen Satish and has heard her daughter sing again. Kusum was on a pilgrimage, passing through a village, when she heard a young girl’s voice, singing one of her daughter’s favorite bhajans. She followed the music through the squalor of a Himalayan village, to a hut where a young girl, an exact replica of her daughter, was fanning coals under the kitchen fire. When she appeared, the girl cried out, “Ma!” and ran away. What did I think of that?

  I think I can only envy her.

  Pam didn’t make it to California, but writes me from Vancouver. She works in a department store, giving make-up hints to Indian and Oriental girls. Dr. Ranganathan has given up his commute, given up his house and job, and accepted an academic position in Texas where no one knows his story and he has vowed not to tell it. He calls me now once a week.

  I wait, I listen, and I pray, but Vikram has not returned to me. The voices and the shapes and the nights filled with visions ended abruptly several weeks ago.

  I take it as a sign.

  One rare, beautiful, sunny day last week, returning from a small errand on Yonge Street, I was walking through the park from the subway to my apartment. I live equidistant from the Ontario Houses of Parliament and the University of Toronto. The day was not cold, but something in the bare trees caught my attention. I looked up from the gravel, into the branches and the clear blue sky beyond. I thought I heard the rustling of larger forms, and I waited a moment for voices. Nothing.

  “What?” I asked.

  Then, as I stood in the path looking north to Queen’s Park and west to the university, I heard the voices of my family one last time. Your time has come, they said. Go, be brave.

  I do not know where this voyage I have begun will end. I do not know which direction I will take. I dropped the package on a park bench and started walking.

  FOLLY

  Sabina Murray

  Kees Bouman stood alone in the sala of his house. The breeze, which had earlier bowed the tops of the palms, was suddenly quiet and the only sound was the clock as it shuddered to each tick. Middle age was making him contemplative, he thought, because with each forward step of the clock, second by second into a modern future, Bouman felt the jungle struggle forcefully against it. Here in the tropics there was one endless season that cycled on and on, then circled back onto itself like a serpent eating its tail. He felt like the first, or maybe the last, man on earth. His evening tea was not waiting on the table and his daughter, Katrina, was not ready to serve it.

  Bouman went to stand at the door. The orange sun was sinking fast behind the topmost brushes of the palms. There was a soothing hush hush of waves, out of sight from where he st
ood. A bird excited by the final moments of the day let forth a rattling cackle, beat the warm air with its wings, then followed the sinking sun into the jungle. If his wife had still been alive, she would have stood on the doorstep and started yelling. One call from her and the entire household would have leaped to attention, come running across the swept dirt of the compound. The very chickens would have cackled to life. That gnarled pony tied to the post would have raised his head in respectful attention, but Bouman could only transfer his weight from one bare foot to the other, adjust the waist of his baggy pants, and hope that someone would notice him so forlorn and bereft of tea.

  SABINA MURRAY was born in Manila in 1968 and grew up in Australia and the Philippines. The Caprices, a collection of short stories based on the Pacific campaign of World War II, was published in 2002 and awarded the PEN/Faulkner Prize in 2003. The author of the novel Slow Burn and the screenplay for Beautiful Country, her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Ontario Review, New England Review, and other magazines. She is a former Bunting Fellow at Harvard University and a recipient of a major grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Murray is currently the writer in residence at Phillips Academy, Andover.

  He smelled chicken curry. Bouman looked to the cooking shack and was surprised to see Katrina exit. She was wearing her new white kabeya, the one embroidered in a floral motif, which had been very costly; she was hurrying through the compound’s center with such speed that she lost her slipper and had to go back for it.

  “Katrina!” called Bouman.

  She stopped, stunned and seemingly guilty. “Father?”

  “Where is my tea?”

  Katrina put her slipper on and turned back in the direction of the cooking shack.

  “What is this nonsense?” he called again.

  “Father, we have a visitor.”