by Amrit Chima
Baba Singh
Punjab, Northern India
Hotel Toor
1910
Family Tree
Baba Singh squatted on the dusty side street of Amarpur town, the unfamiliar smells and sounds reeking of tumult and trade. He ran his hand over the loose clay grit of the earth, which began to thicken under his nails. A sizeable pebble caught beneath his palm. Closing his fist around it, he stood, pushing up on wiry, young legs. Refusing to look at his mother and father, at his siblings as they shifted uncomfortably, he flung the stone at the wall of the wretched, squat building that was to be their new residence. His father glared at him. There would be no sympathy. They had all—the whole family—been forced here.
There had once been a murder, Baba Singh’s teacher had told his class back home in the village, born of a woman’s blind jealousy and rage. At her hand, her husband had suffered a brutal and painful end, and now she roamed the earth, muttering all the time with madness. The story clung in Baba Singh’s mind now, but he willed himself not to be afraid. He was twelve, almost a man. He did not believe in such tales anymore. His teacher had only meant to terrify them into obedience, to point out the harsh realities of the world, that fury and hate were the fall of men, that misbehavior and offense had an awful price. “Remember,” the teacher had said with severity. “Do not forget. Do not lose yourselves in weakness. On that day, your lives will end.”
Someone should have told it to Mr. Grewal. Maybe then he would have thought twice about being a cheating moneylender, about stealing away people’s livelihood. Maybe the Toors would still be back in Harpind. Maybe this day would be like all the other village days. No different. Just the same. That is what Baba Singh wanted. He wanted their money back, their land that had been taken away plot by plot, their animals, the pond where he and his siblings liked to play. He wanted the taste of a red, juicy pomegranate seed popped between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. He wanted the velvety morning sun on the back of his neck, a feeling he had never really noticed while he had it, that mixture of warmth and field dust brushing his skin, telling him he was safe and young and had everything.
If the moral of his teacher’s lesson reflected even a small kernel of real justice, the brutal end to the Toors’ ancestral village life should have caused Mr. Grewal to go mad, to be pierced with guilt and remorse. But right now the moneylender was in his office on the town’s main road, peering at one of his ledgers through his thick spectacles, recording this latest victory and filing it away on his shelves. He had taken so much from so many—and nothing had ever happened to him. That was proof that Baba Singh’s teacher was wrong, that there was not always payment for a crime, that not all men suffered. Only some. Only the weak. It was a merciless lesson to learn at the age of twelve. Baba Singh glanced over at his brothers and sisters, not at Ranjit and Desa who were older, but at the younger ones, Khushwant eight, Kiran six, Avani only four. They looked confused and frightened.
Baba Singh knelt before them. He would make them understand. “There was a murder once—”
Khushwant shook his head. “Stop it, Baba. I know that story. Do not scare them.”
“What is he talking about?” Kiran asked apprehensively, her dark hair pulled back into a tight braid.
“I was going to tell it differently,” Baba Singh told his brother. “The ending would have been different.”
Kiran turned to their mother. “When are we going home?”
Harpreet smiled at her daughter. Many considered Baba Singh’s mother beautiful. She was often complimented on her thick, black hair that was frizzy on humid days, softening the angular lines of her face, and sleek and straight on cool days, giving her an air of industriousness. Today she seemed tired, like she might be sick. “Please leave them be, Baba.”
“I am only telling the truth. It is better that way. Those goats Kiran likes so much. They aren’t hers anymore. We aren’t going back. We are home.”
Avani gripped her hand-painted wooden elephant and leaned into Khushwant.
“What will happen to my goats?” Kiran asked.
“They are not your goats.”
“Baba,” their father said, his voice sharp; Lal had a tone that sometimes stung. “Enough.” He began to fumble for a key tied to his loose-fitting drawstring trousers.
Baba Singh tossed another pebble at the wall, this time with less force. It was a one-story building that had once served as a hotel, the façade dirty and smudged, the color of cornhusk. It was beaten and abused, as though not one person had ever loved it. He did not want to go inside. He was somehow aware that once he did, what little remained of his boyhood would be leeched out of him, like moisture evaporating from picked flowers drying in the sun, their vibrant hues fading to the color of mud. Digesting this new reality was like a too-hot chili sitting painfully in his stomach. But truthfully, though it had only been a day since the Toors packed up their belongings and trekked the several miles of dirt road on a horse tonga to this nearby town, Baba Singh was already changing. He was cross and dejected, like the men of other families he had seen, men who had, like his own father, been shoved off their land and made to lead their wives and children away from the village, sometimes much, much farther away than here.
That is what Ranjit had said. His older brother was seventeen now and had been in the fields for over a year before they were sent to Amarpur. He had overheard the men talking and knew a great deal about everything. Fertile land was more valuable than gold, and moneylenders had come up with a scheme to steal it away. Preying on the difficulties caused by dry seasons, they would offer promises of low interest they never intended to uphold, altering their books, charging double, triple, and often ten times the interest. And the price for nonpayment was high. Ranjit said that was how honest families were cut down and cast out. He told Baba Singh that they might have to go too, maybe move to Africa or Australia. None of them knew exactly where those places were, but they would need to take trains and ships to get there. They would be left with nothing except what the British felt they were worthy enough to have, perhaps merely a train ticket or passage on a ship or some old ruin of a building, dumped in new places to flounder like fish out of water.
Harpreet—their mother had always been an optimist—had said it was a blessing that they were relocated only a few miles away in Amarpur, with which they were at least somewhat familiar. They had come into town two or three times a year to trade their crops and stock up on spices, fabrics, cooking oils, and kerosene for their lamps. They knew people here, and that was something. But it made no difference to Baba Singh. They may as well have been exiled to Africa. Amarpur would never be home. There were too many bicyclists hurrying along Suraj Road, the town’s main strip, too much plodding horse-tonga traffic, arrogant Brits sometimes pulling into town in puttering motorcars, and the vegetable pushcart vendor was always shouting in his unpleasantly monotonous voice, “Aloo, pyaj, tommatter, ghobbi! Aloo, pyaj, tommatter, ghobbi! Potatoes, onions, tomatoes, cauliflower!”
Their rented horse snorted, and Baba Singh turned to regard the sweat-streaked animal. It was tired and pawed softly at the earth with a hoof before adjusting its weight on weary legs. Baba Singh patted its head and glanced at the load it had carried, the tonga laden with all his family’s possessions.
Lal swore under his breath, unable to free the key, his fingers too large for the knot in the string.
Harpreet gently pushed her husband’s fingers aside. “Let me help.”
“It was almost undone,” Lal said, watching her pull at the strings. “I could have gotten it.”
A flicker of flame shot through her eyes as she loosened the key. “I know you could have,” she replied.
He looked away as she pressed it into his hand. She was not angry, just tired. She never really got angry.
“Thank you,” he murmured.
“I don’t want to live here,” Kiran said, watching Lal unlock the door. She pointed at Avani. “She doesn’t either. We w
ant to go back to our goats.”
Khushwant jabbed a twig into the dirt. He had just started school in Harpind and had been excited about it. Baba Singh threw another pebble at the wall, and their older sister Desa pursed her lips. She was fourteen and had left someone behind in Harpind. There was supposed to have been a wedding next year.
Ranjit squatted on his haunches to face Kiran. He was tall, with his father’s high forehead and his mother’s almond-shaped eyes. “Don’t you like this place?” he asked her.
She tugged at her braid. “Does it have goats and a pond?”
Ranjit smiled encouragingly. The smile spread carefully across his mouth as though he did not want her to think he did not take her seriously. “Maybe not. But we should at least go inside and find out.”
Baba Singh took Avani’s hand. “Everything will be okay,” he said, looking at his brother for reassurance.
Lal pushed open the door, but quickly stepped back as the rank smell of stale urine escaped in a thick, malodorous gust. Harpreet gagged and they all turned away, covering their mouths and noses as Lal kicked the door the rest of the way open.
Feces were in nearly every corner of the closed-in space, debris scattered across the floors. To the right, Ranjit flung another door open. It led to a small outdoor courtyard where they found a cracked clay oven caked in dried grime and sticky cooking oils. At the end of the hallway, past six small sleeping quarters, the washroom’s ceramic basin was cracked. There was another door by the basin, and Baba Singh opened it, discovering the collapsed outhouse.
Harpreet clung to the doorframe of the front entrance, not able to enter. She pulled her chuni over her head with her free hand. The thin cotton shawl had fallen down around her shoulders, revealing her hair—frizzy that day—making her appear all the more exhausted. “It just needs to be cleaned,” she said, then made a face and clutched her stomach.
“What is it?” Baba Singh asked her in alarm.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just a small pain.”
Ranjit shook his head. “They told us that it was ready, that we could live here.”
“The British do not really care what happens to us,” Lal replied, defeated.
Ranjit looked at Kiran with sympathy. She was very distressed. “I am sorry about the goats and pond.”
“We should talk to Mr. Grewal,” Baba Singh said. “Maybe he—”
“That man is a liar,” Lal said, his voice rising. “There is no negotiating with liars.”
Sweat dotted Ranjit’s forehead just under the rim of his turban. He wiped it with the back of his hand. “Don’t worry, Bapu. I will find work.”
“We all will,” Desa said.
“What did Mr. Grewal do?” Kiran asked.
Lal turned to her, his expression so severe that she took a step back. He seemed to be taking her question into account, determining whether or not he should answer it. Finally, he replied, “He stole our land.”
“But isn’t land too big to steal?”
Lal frowned, a tinge of red coloring his cheeks. “Not for him.”
“Oi!” Khushwant shouted from down the hall. “Stay out of this room here!”
“What is it?” Baba Singh asked, hurrying over with Ranjit to discover a decaying dog corpse in one of the guest rooms at the back of the hotel.
~ ~ ~
That night, after a cheap meal of dhal and yellow maize chapatis from a steaming food stall on Suraj Road, the Toors slept outside on unfurled mats by the hotel’s entrance.
Ranjit removed his turban, undid his topknot, and shook out his long, wavy mane of hair. “Khushwant, Baba, come here,” he said as he briskly flicked his wrist, twisting his hair back into a bun. He shook out the yards of cloth that was his turban and held up one end.
Khushwant crawled over, and Ranjit handed him the turban. Baba Singh remained on his mat.
“Baba,” Ranjit said again, showing Khushwant how to begin wrapping the cloth in tight, layered pleats around his head.
“Later,” Baba Singh replied from his mat. Reclining, he could see the stars through holes in the murky patches of clouds. It was so dark and empty. He turned onto his side, wishing for home: the ambling storks cutting through the cluster of golden mud huts, frogs in the reeds, the scent of cattle and sweet chai tea, the distant swish of water flowing down the irrigation canals, the cawing crows in the neem trees.
His favorite time of day had been after school, in the afternoons when he escaped the rear room of the small gurdwara in search of play and fresh air, pardoned from the confining heat of the temple and the crushing, downward gaze of his teacher. He would race to the pond with Khushwant—and also Ranjit before he began working in the fields—to ride a bullock into the water. He straddled the animal’s steaming back as it stepped in, his brothers pressed up behind him, their legs tense with the thrill of anticipation for the game that was to follow. Standing on the bullock as it shifted and puffed out through its nostrils to settle itself comfortably in the cool water, one by one, the boys leapt high, balling their knees up tight, spreading their arms like wings, their palms cupped downward like steely trowels, willing their bodies to be heavy with force. The biggest splash-maker would win.
Ranjit was always the champion.
Afterwards, when the large orange sphere of the sun hovered over the horizon of potato and cotton crops, they would dry under the shade of the rosewoods. While Harpreet beat wet clothes on a slab of stone, Khushwant and Baba Singh wrapped their soaked dhotis around their heads, using the loincloths to look like grown men donning turbans. At dusk, just before the sky darkened, Harpreet would disperse with the other women, heading home to prepare the evening meal, and the boys would run to the outskirts of the village to greet Lal as he came in from the fields, taking his farming implements like proud attendants to a soldier.
From his mat, Baba Singh glanced at his father now, a shadowy figure in the darkness. Lal was leaning against the outer wall of the hotel, his forearm across his forehead, his eyes bright with moisture. Avani was there, half asleep against him, her wooden elephant hugged to her chest. Harpreet watched them, rocking Kiran in her lap.
~ ~ ~
His body sore, Baba Singh woke. He had been dreaming but could not remember his dream, only that he had been alone and his family had all gone missing, or some of them. He was not sure anymore. He looked around. They were all there. Except Ranjit. Panic hit him. “Ranjit,” he whispered, his dream once again taking shape.
The hotel door was open, and Baba Singh went inside. He should have been relieved to see his brother there but instead felt dread. “I thought you had left.”
Ranjit was tugging the leg of the dog corpse with one hand wrapped in the lower portion of his tunic and the other covering his mouth. “Why would I do that?”
Baba Singh shook his head. He did not know. It seemed so unlike Ranjit.
“You should be sleeping,” his brother said.
“Where will you take him?”
Ranjit released the leg and gazed down at the creature’s patchy hair and the snout that death had frozen into a growl. “To the back to bury it. It should not be here when they wake. I already dug a hole.”
Baba Singh nodded. The dread, and his already hazy dream, began to fade entirely. His brother would fix everything. He was brave that way and had always been like that. He once defied their teacher simply over a matter of principle. The bhaiji, who had been lecturing them on the history of the ten Sikh gurus, asked Ranjit to withdraw his statement that the caste system was still relevant to present-day Sikh society despite Guru Amar Das’s efforts to eradicate it. A thread of hostility silenced the hot, muggy schoolroom. Even the younger, usually boisterous children quieted.
“We Sikhs do not live by the caste system any longer,” the teacher said, his tone belligerent. “We have learned to be higher minded.”
“Then why is it that when I decide to marry, my parents want my wife to be a Jat?” Ranjit replied calmly. “Perhaps I might like to marry a no
n-Jat.”
“It is not a point of caste. Why would you want to marry someone not from a line of warriors?”
“I am not a warrior, so what difference would it make?”
“Because a history of warriors in the family is respectable. If you are from a line of warriors, why would you want to be husband to a potter’s daughter?”
“You have just proven my point, Bhaiji.”
The teacher snatched up a ruler from his desk. “I have done no such thing,” he said, grabbing Ranjit by the wrist and sharply whacking the back of his hand. He continued to slap the ruler down with sharp precision. Baba Singh had watched, open-mouthed, but his brother did not once flinch or move away. He absorbed the blow of each stroke as though his hand was made of cork. Only Baba Singh knew, by Ranjit’s mocking smile, that every strike had felt like fire.
His brother again grabbed the dog’s leg and dragged the animal toward the washroom. “I’ll take care of this, Baba.” And he was as good as his word.
After breakfast, Desa and Khushwant joined them inside the hotel. Lal went in search of employment, and Harpreet stayed outside with Kiran and Avani. She was feeling too nauseous and weak to help. Khushwant fetched bucketfuls of water from the pump in the center of town, and they used it to clean. Desa scrubbed down the clay stove and unpacked their pots and pans, readying the kitchen. Baba Singh scrubbed away the urine and feces in the six guest quarters, wiping down walls and tiles with old rags. He had never labored so hard. After watching Ranjit bury the dog, he had to. He had to help make it right for all of them.
The sun had set when Harpreet brought in their sleeping mats and laid them out in the lobby. She knew that none of them wanted to spread out in the rooms. They would stay together for now.
Kiran and Avani were already sleeping when Lal came home, his clothes dirty and his armpits sweat stained. “I found work,” he said stiffly.
Harpreet sadly appraised his clothing.