We sped away from the auction, Anil driving faster now than before, as though possessed of some need to get away as quickly as possible, to escape those voices offering condolences and congratulations in the same breath. On the freeway, he pressed the horn at the slightest provocation, at people fifty meters ahead changing into our lane, or at a car going seventy-five in the fast lane. I was nervous now, though not about an accident, because I began to sense something else in Anil’s face, in his almost maniacal driving. I felt, strangely, that there could be no accident. The accident had already occurred, and that’s what gave Anil the courage to drive like this. My nervousness grew, ballooning, almost reliving the accident that hadn’t happened, spinning, tumbling over and over. On the city streets of Berkeley, Anil’s driving was no better. Ahead of us, an old black woman crossed against a green light, and I was jolted by the car horn, somehow more insistent than before. Anil didn’t slow down, though now the woman was out of our lane. The horn blared on, Anil shifted the wheel, pointing the car at the woman, and we headed for her, though she refused to acknowledge the screaming horn, the screeching brakes. The car spun out of control at the intersection. The seatbelt ripped into my chest as my body rushed forward, Anil swearing beside me. We came to a stop, all turned around, facing the oncoming traffic, horns blaring around us, the old woman still ambling away, ignoring the commotion, Anil’s yells, You bitch, you bloody bitch!
In those years of Kirpal’s waning influence, as the rumors gathered around him like a mist that no power seemed able to dissipate, that led him, blind, to his murder, Anil, they said, was seen in the company of certain men. I never asked him about this. It was none of my business whether his share of the profits went to help finance the separatists, to lay the foundations of a civil war. Even before the rumors began to strangle Kirpal, before the separatists became a threat to the fabric of India, Anil, they said, was sending them money. And later, when the temple was attacked and those thousands killed, and Anil stormed into my shop, I could read on his face a mood caught between the poles of emotion, a grand anger against Indira Gandhi for what she had done, yet a joy also, for he carried a newspaper which he waved like a flag and shouted, The war is here, clapping his hands together like a magician. I looked at him. Neema stood behind the counter and shook her head. I knew she was going to shout at him, and so I had to stop her. Anil, I said, what are you talking about? This is the temple they attacked, what is there to celebrate? But he laughed, Come with me, we should go meet some men I know, and I was already following him when I glanced back to Neema and saw anger and reproach in her eyes rising like dust on an old field. Neema said nothing, and I stood there, unable to move, and prayed for someone to tell me what to do, because all I wanted was to know who I was in this world and where my place ought to be. Nothing happened. Anil laughed and walked out as though there was no question in his eyes where I stood, and it was some months later that I heard on the radio of Kirpal’s death, and I thought of Anil’s laugh that day and of myself, standing, as though I was a child waiting for Kirpal to throw me a ball. When Anil walked out, he no longer walked with a child’s self-conscious gait, and I remember this because I searched for something familiar in his retreating form and I found nothing that I knew.
Many people sent them money. We all knew that. Many were proud of it, and I wouldn’t take anything from that pride, well deserved if they were doing something for a cause they believed in. I did not finance the separatists, and neither did I speak out against Khalistan. I still remember that look of anger on Kirpal’s face, that look of defeat when I threw the ball and it landed only a few feet away, a look which said that it was this sort of failure, this specific lack of effort, that had allowed India to be split up. I don’t know if this is true. All I know is that all those around me—my father, Kirpal, Anil—they all seemed reasonable and honest men.
The car wasn’t seriously damaged and we were able to drive away before the police arrived. Anil was silent, no more swearing, and when he dropped me off at the store, he told me not to worry. With all we did today, Punjab will soon be free, a Sikh state. I placed my hand lightly on his lap and stepped out of the car feeling empty and exhausted. My heart was beating fast. The street was less crowded now, though a young man in torn jeans, no shirt, long blond and knotted hair took a meandering path toward me. I stopped. I don’t know why. I thought for some strange reason he was going to hit me, and that if he did, it would be right because that was the order of things.
Border Song
BIKRAM SANG. USUALLY OLD PUNJABI OR HINDI MOVIE tunes, but her repertoire had expanded since moving to California. She had learned the theme to M.A.S.H. and all the songs on Abba’s Greatest Hits Volume One. She sang all the time. Her voice echoed the rhythm of frogs that had invaded her childhood nights with their persistent croaking. She filled up the spaces of the house with her songs, and she let her songs breathe outside—in the garden, in the busy, cramped aisles at the Safeway, during those hours she spent alone, when everyone was out, gone to work or to school. Song was the gold jewelry she had carried with her from one country to another, across freshly painted borders. Now it seemed an heirloom, an artifact excavated from a lost world.
Ravi, her nephew, believed when he was young that she sang solely for him. Her voice was high and sharp and full of force and energy and belied her small, self-effacing frame, always covered with an old silk sari and one of the many jackets Harbans brought back for her from the store. These were 49ers, or Charlie’s Angels, or The Who tour jackets, all promos, all sent gratis to one of Harbans’ several convenience stores. Bikram almost never spoke. She expressed herself through her songs, and only reverted to English or Punjabi, or more likely a mixture, when a song couldn’t say it.
Years later, when Ravi was older, he would see how she always sang, or hummed, or muttered to herself, and it seemed a betrayal. It wasn’t for him, it never had been, and his aunt wasn’t a private songster. She was defective, he later concluded, her voice the manifestation of a person unhinged or askew.
The only time she stopped singing was to tell a story, and at such times she seemed to take substance before Ravi’s eyes, even gaining weight. His own mother never told stories, she worked late and was always gone when he fell asleep, often to the thickening night of his aunt’s voice. Speaking changed his aunt’s body. Her lips struggled against the words, as if trying to sing, to reform story into melody, and her voice, far from songlike, shuddered as if disturbed by the strange junctures that existed in speech. A word became unreal on her tongue and only lost this weight of speech when connected to a tune, when it would merge into the next word of the song.
Every story was different, mutated from the previous version, as if she had a horror of repetition. A leopard in one tale became a frog in another, a slighted crow transformed into the antagonist in the next. In one, an alligator ate the bird, in the following, the bird, like a snake, unhinged its jaw and swallowed the writhing, snapping form of the alligator, right down to the struggling tail. Ravi was never disappointed by these inconsistencies, and showed no surprise at the transubstantiation of mouse into elephant or tiger into hyena. They were no more curious than a mad aunt who sang, and one, sane, who told stories.
One day, Bikram told the story of the dying king and his three children.
The old king knew he was dying, and was unsure whom among his three children, two sons and a daughter, would succeed him. He decided to hold a contest. He gave each child one hundred pieces of gold, and the one who filled the hundred rooms and the great hall of the palace completely using only this money would be the future ruler.
The eldest son took off immediately to the market, certain of his success. He spent the money on sacks of coal and soon a procession of donkey carts meandered up the hill toward the palace gates. But the unloaded coal barely filled a quarter of the great hall, and left the remaining rooms deserted—and the mess it made took several days to clean up.
The second eldest, the other so
n, laughed at his brother’s idiocy. He also walked down the hill to the market where he spent his one hundred gold coins on something sure to fill every room of the palace from top to bottom—sacks of wool! The procession that now found its way up to the palace was like none that had ever been witnessed before. Indeed, when the first carts arrived, the last had not yet left and for some hours the road was a single organism of donkey carts wending their way ever upwards. But even all this wool, flung loosely through open doors and windows, barely filled the great hall, while the remainder, all those rooms and chambers, stood starkly empty. To the king’s annoyance, tufts of wool were being pulled from the carpets and chairs and tapestries for months after.
The youngest, the daughter, remained slumped in contemplation of her brothers’ mistakes for several weeks, silent, then without warning, disappeared, taking the gold with her. She was gone for many months, leaving the old king despondent, thinking she had given up and was living in a distant land, frittering away the gold pieces one at a time. The brothers scorned her, believing now they would share the kingdom between themselves. Then one day, after many months, the daughter reappeared, climbing the hill, and a procession of one hundred men and women followed. This was all she could muster, the brothers scoffed. Surely they had won the kingdom now! The daughter placed a single man or woman in each of the hundred rooms of the palace, and placed herself in the center of the great hall, and while the old king watched with surprise, she began to sing. The song spread from room to room, and soon the whole palace was filled with their voices. For she had traveled the countryside searching for the greatest singers in the land, and as the song stretched into the night, the old king died, and the first queen of the land took her throne.
It was in 1964 that Bikram and Harbans left India and moved to California. Bikram didn’t know why they moved, nor did she care much, but then, as a new bride and one who had presented so many difficulties during the search for a husband, she was told not to ask. For two years they lived in Oakland, by Lake Merritt. She could see the lake from the single window of their apartment. In the summer, sunsets glistened red and orange and sometimes pink. Harbans spent his days out. He was trying to start a business, though he never told her what kind. He was continually having “meetings” and “discussions,” and promised they would soon be “in the money.” Every day, Bikram walked two blocks to the grocery store where she could find nothing she wanted to buy and so bought everything she didn’t want. Once, she walked out to the lake but found people stared at her in her sari, and when she looked down at the water, it was streaked with gasoline and oil and on the surface cola bottles and tin cans bobbed like dead fish.
Soon after Harbans said they were “in the money,” they moved away from Oakland and into the hills where there were still few houses. Bikram could no longer walk to the grocery but had to rely on Harbans or travel with him on Saturdays. It was only years later that she learned to drive, thanks to her sister-in-law, Jyoti, who had come from England after her husband died. Jyoti had two children, Ravi and Meena, and Harbans reluctantly offered them a home.
Before this unexpected arrival, the house remained unfurnished. No money yet, not for furniture, said Harbans. Bikram filled the rooms with her voice, roaming from one empty room to the next, singing or telling stories to herself. A single step led from the hallway to the living room, and this single step struck her as a great luxury. She would sit on it for hours at a time, staring at the far blank wall, standing only so as to relish the joy of once more sitting down on it.
Several years passed before she came to be on friendly terms with the neighbors. For Harbans, it happened sooner. The men approached him early on, running an admiring palm along the smooth, clean curves of his new Chevrolet. With Harbans gone, no one padded up in sneakers along the laid-stone path that bifurcated the balanced halves of the front lawn. When Bikram stepped outside, to water or plant bulbs or herbs, the neighbors made their presence known by a darkened triangle of curtain pushed back, where the shape of a face appeared, unmoving. There could be as many as five or six such triangles hiding dark moon faces peering through freshly cleaned glass.
Ravi’s appearance changed all this. His bursting energy couldn’t be contained by the low brick wall guarding the garden from the sidewalk, and his body soon found itself in neighbors’ gardens or playing in the backs of their trucks. On occasion, he was brought home, lost, confused, after wandering into a house thinking it was his own, and at such times the neighbors stopped and briefly chatted and asked Bikram how the rose bushes were doing this year or whether she too was having trouble with gophers. This was how she learned of the new freeway, and all the new houses that were planned for the hills, on ground everyone knew to be unstable and liable to sliding.
Two years of drought, and deer started appearing in the street late at night. Harbans would come home telling of one he almost collided with while exiting the new freeway. Bikram spied them in the mottled, predawn hours, for she remained after all these years an early riser. She no longer had cows to milk or chickens to feed, but the childhood habit stayed.
The first one looked to her like an outline from one of her dreams. The last thing she expected in California, in this modern world, was to see an animal. Weren’t people and animals kept apart in the civilized West? She guessed the deer didn’t know this, and when dawn silhouetted the backs of houses now visible through the kitchen window, she saw that her roses were gone. Just the flowers, the deer had left the stems.
Bikram inspected the neatly cut stalks and the hoof prints in the soil, slight scars, indistinct chevrons, then she covered the tracks with her own hands, smudging the earth until all that was left were lines marking the passage of her fingers. In the kitchen, she washed her hands, scrubbing her fingernails, and along her forearms. Some days later, a rifle shot rang out, then another, and in the days that followed, several more. Twice, on one of her afternoon walks, she found deer carcasses, no longer shadows or dream shapes, now lying on the crisp, yellow hillside. The mouths gaped open, the bodies swollen and ugly, expanding in the heat. The smell left her unaffected and she approached without fear or revulsion. The gums of the deer were a colony of flies and the hide already filled with holes from where it had been eaten away. An eye bulged yellow and pus leaked from the socket.
She sat with Ravi beside her on the single step that led from the hallway to the living room. The room was furnished with a sofa and a love seat, a Persian rug and a color RCA television, and on the wall was a wide-view photograph of the Golden Temple. She asked Ravi if he wanted to know the true story of how she had begun to sing, and he said sure, but to be quick, as Lost in Space was about to come on and it was his favorite show.
“This is how it happened,” she said, the first time she had ever made so definitive a claim about anything, even though she herself wasn’t sure if this was how it happened. How did anything happen? she asked herself. Outside the day was cool, a bright orange scarf of clouds hid the sun. Her memories had merged with songs and the different versions she had told, versions she knew to be false, but falseness seemed appropriate, for how else except through fiction could you recreate a world that had been destroyed?
“It was dawn, no, before dawn. One morning dawn broke early. That’s it. Before it should have, and that was how it all started. It broke on the west side of the village, the side where I’d take the buffalo down to the creek for her afternoon drink and where the Mantos had a house. Mrs. Manto would call me in as I walked by and hand me a glass of lassi if it was hot. It always tasted so sweet and freshening. There’s nothing like it today, you can’t make real lassi from milk you buy at Fry’s.”
In the mornings she listened to the birds and the frogs, to the scuffling of cows and the three goats, and to the soft squawks of chickens. Her favorite task was to search for freshly laid eggs and carry them back triumphant. That morning she pattered across the mud courtyard and heard the chickens protesting already against the day’s heat. The air clung to
her skin and she walked to the well to douse her flaming skin. The dome covering it reminded her of the ruined temple, an ancient one that stood in a far corner of the sugarcane fields, engulfed by creepers and home to monkeys and snakes and all sorts of devilish animals.
Water splashed from the bucket as she pulled it up and in small handfuls, she chased it at her skin as the warm breeze cooled her face. Only then did she see it. Or had she sensed it first, listening to the distant scuffles in the animal pen, in a dog’s bark, in the faint smell of burning thatch? There, across the western sky, was the false dawn, spilling all over the wrong side of the world. On the horizon stood the bloodied outline of the temple, and from the fields, red fingers spidered into the engulfing bowl of night. Not far from her, houses were already on fire. She could smell it in the air.
They fled with nothing. They took their clothes, some bags of flour, and her mother carried a bag of gold jewelry close to her chest. Only later, when they joined the vast caravan, that artery pumping people across new borders, did they learn of how the world had been split in two, India and Pakistan, and there were no tunes that might link them in song.
Good Indian Girls: Stories Page 16