by Amrit Chima
Darshan
Amrit Chima
Copyright © 2010 Amrit Chima
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9897868-1-2
1. Families—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3. Community life—Fiction. 4. India—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction.
Photography and cover design by Kerry Ellis (www.kerry-ellis.com)
Manuscript copy edited by Heather Turbeville
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For my parents
Contents
Family Tree
Prologue
1942–1945 An Attempt to Escape
Part I
Baba Singh
Punjab, Northern India
1. Hotel Toor: 1910
2. Dr. Bansal’s Ladoos: 1911
3. A Coconut & a Sword: 1911–1914
4. The Mighty Champion Splash Maker: 1915–1919
5. Colonial Police Batons & Pistols: 1920–1922
6. Avani’s Wooden Elephant: 1930
7. Heaven Bound in Brown Leather: 1932
8. A Two-Story House: 1935–1937
Part II
Manmohan
Greater Suva, Fiji
1. Plastic Toy Tools: 1947–1948
2. LPs on the Gramophone & a Cabinet Radio: 1949–1952
3. Pasteurized & Homogenized: 1957
4. Malady & Mutiny: 1959
5. Ankylosing Spondylitis: 1960
6. Secrets in the Rafters: 1962
7. Psalm of Peace: 1965
8. A Shack in the Jungle: 1966
Part III
Darshan
The Bay Area, California
1. Ford Falcon Futura: 1969
2. Still Swallowed Whole: 1970–1972
3. The Hindu Pundit of Amritsar: 1974–1975
4. A Baptism & a Kirtan: 1976–1978
5. Sacramento’s Greyhound Bus Depot: 1985
6. Manmohan’s Garden: 1993–1994
7. The Return of the Moneylender: 2000
8. The Apartments on Howard Street: 2004–2005
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Prologue
1942–1945
Family Tree
Baba Singh Toor removed his shoes at the door and surveyed his son’s living room. Evidence of guests still textured the house: empty cups of chai, half-filled plates of sweets, crumpled sheets on the floor where people had been seated for the kirtan honoring the birth of his second grandson. He was sorry he had not made it to the prayer in time. He supposed he could have tried harder. The outer Fiji island where he lived was not so very far away. But the man who chartered the boat was an old friend of his from India, and he had found himself lingering to chat.
Two gifts were in his hands: a metal toy truck painted yellow and a solid gold bracelet, the size of a pocket watch or a compass. Clutching them tightly, feeling a little haggard, he turned to his son. “I cannot believe the year.”
Manmohan shut the door behind his father. “You are late,” he said.
Baba Singh listlessly noted the kitchen sink, crammed with dirty dishes. “She has missed so much,” he murmured. “It has been a very long time.” The dusty hay smell of his village in India and the memory of the last time he had seen his wife were suddenly vivid, almost tangible, the memories rushing toward him like a clunky Fijian bus.
“You can go back any time,” Manmohan said. “She is waiting for you.”
Baba Singh’s expression hardened. “I thought so once, but your mother was never waiting for me.” He glanced at his daughter-in-law, Jai.
She was seated on the couch swaddling the baby in a gray hospital blanket with a final, snug tuck. She smiled at Baba Singh and leaned back, humming absently. A young boy sat stiffly next to her, as if on guard. Baba Singh regarded him critically. His oldest grandson was a little too plump, still not grown out of his baby fat, his four-year-old face grave. He was a big brother now and appeared to take the job seriously. His name was Mohan, after his father, but he had inherited more than just a name. Manmohan and Mohan were so much alike, both sober and humorless.
Sitting beside the boy, Baba Singh put the truck on the cushion next to his knee. He reached over, firmly pressing some money and the bracelet into Jai’s hand. “For the baby.”
She accepted, squeezing his hand before letting go. “His name is Darshan,” she said. She continued to hum.
He gently touched Darshan’s cheek with a solid, thick fingertip, age worn and creased with labor. “It is a very good name,” he said, satisfied. “Sight. Visions of God.”
Manmohan brought in a chair from the kitchen. “You missed the kirtan,” he said, sitting.
“I know.” Baba Singh nodded curtly. He turned to Mohan. “You are growing up very fast.”
Mohan regarded the yellow truck with a sidelong look of exaggerated indifference.
Manmohan crossed his legs. “Must have been something very important,” he said, “to keep you away.”
Baba Singh looked at his son, not speaking for several moments until Manmohan dropped his eyes. “Darshan seems very strong,” he said. “You were much smaller when you were born.”
“I am sure I was,” Manmohan muttered.
“I was big and very, very strong,” Mohan said, his voice loud, the solemnity in his expression gone, replaced by indignation.
“Of course you were,” Manmohan said, beckoning, patting his knees. Mohan clambered off the couch and onto his father’s lap.
Baba Singh held his arms out, and Jai passed him the baby. She slouched lower into the cushions, her eyelids heavy. Settling Darshan on his legs, Baba Singh measured the smallness of the infant against his muscular forearms, feeling powerless. He began to sing under his breath in a near whisper. “Chir jeevan oupajiaa sanjog, The long-lived one has been born to this destiny…Vadhhee vael bahu peerree chaalee, The vine has grown, and shall last for many generations…” He stopped, unable to recall the rest of the words.
Manmohan pointed at the yellow truck. “Is that for Mohan?”
“Yes,” Baba Singh said with impatience. “Take it, take it.”
Mohan squirmed out of his father’s lap, dropped to the floor and reached for the truck. He began to roll it across the linoleum, making the low grumbling sounds of an engine.
Murmuring to the infant, Baba Singh said, “I am here.” Darshan woke and stared up at him.
“I hope you are not just saying it,” Manmohan said.
Baba Singh stiffened, like he had been hit.
Manmohan was angry now. Too much had been neglected for too many years. “I was a little older than Mohan when you left us.”
“I was not gone very long.”
“We were not babies anymore when you came back.”
“No,” Baba Singh said quietly. “Nearly men.”
Manmohan shook his head, remembering. “The last thing you told me before leaving was that I was spilling too much water. I was bringing it to Bebe. You told me that I was wasting it.”
“I had forgotten about that.”
“I never did.”
“Your mother needed a full pot,” Baba Singh said, gently bouncing the baby on his knees. There were things he wo
uld also never forget. He wished it could be different, but maybe they all had something like that, something that stuck, like field burs hooking into their clothes. “It was a challenge. It kept you from spilling more.”
Manmohan bit the inside of his cheek, feeling small again.
Baba Singh bent down and touched his long nose to Darshan’s. The baby’s eyelids fluttered momentarily and Darshan studied his grandfather’s looming face with unruffled intensity. Then drowsily he closed his eyes again, falling seamlessly from consciousness back into sleep.
~ ~ ~
At one year of age, before uttering his first word, Darshan took his first steps. Crawling did not come naturally to him. It was almost painful for Manmohan and Jai to watch him struggle across the floor on one knee and one foot in a crawl-limp. The motion was not only awkward, but it was very clear how much Darshan hated the slow pace. This was the only time Manmohan had seen his son’s expression, usually lively with laughter, colored red with impatience and frustration.
Walking was better suited to Darshan. It allowed him to more easily map out his environment as he peeked into rooms and drawers and closets, to more quickly traverse the space of the living room, and to carry toy blocks over to the corner where he liked to arrange them in relative neatness. Jai had great difficulty putting him to sleep at night. His legs flailed like motors long after he closed his eyes as he battled his drowsiness. The boy had a need for movement that sometimes seemed more primal than the need for even food and water.
It was not until Darshan reached two years of age and his increased dexterity allowed him to undertake more challenging activities that Manmohan thought he understood why. While polishing one of his police boots before his assigned patrol of their neighborhood in Tamavua, Darshan struggled with the other. Dipping a rag into the black polish, he clumsily imitated his father’s circular hand motions across the leather. When Manmohan was in the garden picking cucumbers, Darshan also tugged at the vegetables, holding each one up triumphantly before depositing it on his own small pile. If Manmohan opened a book, Darshan climbed onto his lap and stared patiently at it as though he too should read. He seemed to achieve a profound sense of satisfaction with each turn of the page, like living was a series of tasks requiring immediate completion, even if he did not yet comprehend the reason why those tasks needed to be accomplished. His mind was consumed with action, with always doing.
It was not surprising then that Darshan developed a particularly keen interest in tools. Though his first word was bebe for his mother, his second sounded much like the word hammer. The word was not always attributed to an actual hammer but was his term for all tools, even the rag with which Manmohan polished his boots. Darshan often stood beside his father to peer into the toolbox, carefully examining the level, the cable cutters, pliers, and manual crank hand drill. He frequently watched his father use them: a trowel to dig holes in the garden, or the hammer to replace a slat in the fence out back. Each instrument allowed for a more productive means to do things. Soon he began to participate, clutching the trowel with Manmohan’s help to dig holes for seeds and wrapping a hand over his father’s grip on the hammer, staring at the nail as it sank deeper into the wood with each blow.
So it was that when Manmohan happened across a novel set of plastic toy tools in Suva’s local general store, he brought them home. They had been quite expensive, rare, and manufactured to appear real. The handles of the hammer, shovel, and screwdrivers were painted a wood-brown grain, their heads as well as the plastic wrench, coated gray to look like carbon steel.
Delighted with his new tools, Darshan used them for every imaginable repair in and around the house. He banged the knobs on the stove with his hammer as well as the corners of linoleum flooring that had started to peel away with age. He tried to tighten bolts under the sink with his wrench while Manmohan fixed a leak, he dug holes for cucumber seeds with his shovel, and where he thought necessary attempted to adjust screws with his screwdriver.
Jai—who had noticed that Darshan was tucking his tools into the waistline of his trousers because they kept falling out of his pockets—tailored a cotton sack in which he could comfortably carry them all. This she soon regretted. Slung over the boy’s head and across his shoulders, it was difficult to pry away. Darshan wore it always: during meal times, in bed at night, and often during bath time where it would need to be forcibly removed.
His favorite game was asking Manmohan to arrange bricks one by one into a square in the backyard. Smiling, he would pound each brick with his plastic hammer as though nailing it in. When the structure was done, a piece of wood placed over the top for the roof, he would point at it and say, “Home.” The game never became tedious. Manmohan would dismantle the bricks in the evenings, but the next day Darshan would insist they rebuild. He and Jai assumed the boy would eventually tire of it, but their son continued to erect his little houses well into his third year.
Just as Jai concluded that perhaps Darshan might one day become a master architect, he became suddenly and seriously ill. His movements one morning were sluggish, his face the gray color of clouds, his forehead alarmingly hot, his body wracked by shivers.
“Get the doctor,” Jai told her husband.
The examination was brief. “His temperature is too high,” the doctor said gravely.
Jai rubbed her son’s hand as though rolling a snake of dough. “What does that mean?”
The doctor shook his head. “I do not know what else to say. There is nothing I can do. Keep his body cool and wait for the fever to break.”
Manmohan and Jai sent word to Baba Singh, who came as soon as he received the message, and they all waited, together. Most days they sat silently in Darshan’s room, wishing for some miraculous shift, for some invisible healing hand to revive the boy. Jai bathed him in cold water twice a day and tucked wet towels around his body when she put him in bed, staring at him hopefully, waiting for some tangible sign that his temperature was normalizing. Some days the waiting was too unbearable, the silence too unnerving, and they each sat with Darshan in shifts, taking time away from the sickroom to pray and reassure Mohan.
The fever had been steadily high for over a week when Baba Singh again found himself sitting alone next to Darshan’s bed while Manmohan, outside in the backyard, gazed blankly at the setting sun, and Jai slept clinging to Mohan in the other room. He looked at his grandson, the small withered body, the dark rings around the toddler’s eyes, the sack of tools hugged to his side, his arm protectively holding it close.
“Home,” Darshan said, his voice tired.
“Sleep, Darshan, so you can get well,” Baba Singh said, placing a hand over the boy’s chest. “It is time to get better. This house is falling apart. There is much to be done.”
The wet cloth on Darshan’s head dripped cold water down his temples. “I want to build my house,” he said, eyelids half shut as he pointed toward the backyard where the Toors had a view of the thick, jungly hills below.
“I understand. I think I see now,” Baba Singh said, wiping the tears dampening his thick black beard. He had also built a house once, back in India. He built it so that it would be there for him when he finally had the courage to return home. “I was always able to see things, Darshan. I have had dreams. For a long time I did not know what I was seeing.”
Later that night, after Baba Singh had gone to bed, Manmohan settled into the sickroom to read Guru Arjun’s Psalm of Peace to his sleeping son. Despite his worry, Manmohan smiled faintly at the tools clasped under Darshan’s arm. Then he frowned, noticing something in the crook of the boy’s other arm just beneath the hem of the blanket. Pulling back the covers, he discovered a coconut.
“Where did this come from?”
His voice was too loud. Everything was wrong, too still. Closing his eyes, beating back his fear, Manmohan already knew.
Placing his ear over Darshan’s chest, he felt and heard nothing. His son was no longer breathing.
~ ~ ~
The Too
rs stood around the funeral pyre on the beach. Jai had bathed and clothed Darshan. She had wanted to strap the cotton sack over her son’s shoulders, but Manmohan had grimly refused to let her.
“No,” he had told her, not knowing how else to articulate what he was feeling, but knowing he needed evidence of Darshan’s existence.
Baba Singh lit the fire. Manmohan was unable to discern any hint of grief in his father’s face; it was simply cold and unforgiving. A priest recited the Kirtan Sohila, the nighttime prayer, as the body burned away to ash.
The wind carried Darshan out over the Pacific as the priest sang. “Sunneh sunn miliaa samdarsee pavan roop ho-e jaavehgae, Meeting with the supreme soul, my soul shall become unbiased and pure like air. Bahur ham kaahae aavehgae, Why should I come into the world again?”
In the space between life and death, Darshan was grateful. Humming at first, he willingly moved upward. Then he joined his voice with the priest’s and sang with all his might, raising his head to the stars, “Jot milee sang jot reh-i-aa ghaal-daa, My light merges with the Supreme light, and my labors are over. Sookh sehaj aanand vutthae tit ghar, Peacefully I take abode in the house of bliss. Aavan jaan rehae janam na tehaa mar, My comings and goings have ended and there is no more birth or death.”
But then he stopped, his voice quieted by something absent.
Darshan peered down at his family, tiny dots on the shore. Jai was sobbing. Mohan was confused, pulling at her. Manmohan had stepped away from the funeral pyre and walked toward the ocean, following the smoke and the ashes. Baba Singh gazed unflinchingly and bleakly into the fire.
Staring hard at his family, it took him a moment, but then it was clear. Touching his side, Darshan understood.
His tools were missing.
PART I