by Amrit Chima
And he had hated the little shanty they all initially shared in the city the first few years: he, Jai, Baba Singh, Vikram, and Satnam and Priya. Squeezing into that tiny shack, sweltering in the humidity before saving enough money to live civilly again had been one of the hardest and longest periods of adjustment.
In the beginning, he also disliked the natives, a tall, dark-skinned, seemingly fierce people. He had been affronted by their strict unwillingness to associate with Indians, an attitude that had sharpened during World War II. Jai, however, had pointed out that the segregation worked to their advantage because they were free to maintain their cultural inclinations with little outside interference or influence. “It is hard to tell if we are in desh or pardesh,” she had once joked. Home or away from home.
In many ways, she had been right. An array of Indian-run shops stretched along Victoria Parade, comprising a commercial district of grocers and tailoring enterprises. The stores, many of them wooden structures erected in the early 1900s, were like those Manmohan had frequented in Amarpur. A chemist’s shop—much like the astrologer’s—sold painkillers and balms. Spice shops perfumed the streets with cumin and chili. The men who gathered near the seaport to watch the tall masts of ships approaching from Sydney and Auckland—a mix of Hindus with red-stained mouths from chewing betel leaves, Muslims wearing their taqiyah caps, and turbaned Sikhs—reminded Manmohan of the men in Amarpur meeting to chat at the open market.
The Indo-Fijian community was sizeable on the island, perhaps equal to that of the local Fijian’s. Although primarily Hindus, Madrassis, and Muslims, the Sikh community—established before the turn of the century—was nonetheless strong. Like the other Indian groups, the Sikhs had their place of worship, a gurdwara centrally located in Suva on a hill across the street from Mohan’s school. There were also a decent number of grocers and textile shops run by Sikhs. Despite the stark differences between the dry, flat plains of the Punjab and the rolling green abundance of an island thick with ferns and cane palms surrounded by swells of blue ocean, Manmohan had come to appreciate that at least the faces were familiar.
Though Suva was similar in some regard to Amarpur—both towns comprised of wood, iron, and corrugated tin—Suva was larger and hillier, more populated by cars, an infant metropolis. Manmohan wove through the one-way streets past the colonial wooden buildings along Victoria Parade, around the angled intersections and contorted loops that he once found confusing but now navigated with confidence, coming to a stop at Raj’s sundry shop.
“Let’s not take too long,” he called to his son, who had already jumped out without waiting, slamming the door and darting across the street toward the shop.
A bell chimed as Manmohan stepped inside the store to find Mohan already rummaging through the freezer.
“Sat sri akal, Raj,” he nodded to the shopkeeper. “A kulfi stick for him.”
“My wife says it is almost time,” Raj said, leaning his elbows on the counter.
“Yes. Almost.”
Mohan held up a cardamom-flavored ice cream bar.
“I will also have one,” Manmohan said, taking a stick from his son and pulling off the wrapper. He bit into the cold cream, his teeth aching. “Tasty,” he told Raj.
The shopkeeper smiled. “On me.”
“No, no.” Manmohan shook his head, leaving some Fijian dollar notes on the counter. “I have to pay for Jai’s shopping the past month.”
Raj momentarily checked his books. “I had almost forgotten,” he said, putting the money in his till.
“What about your wife and daughter?” Manmohan asked, taking another bite. “Are they well?”
Raj lit a beady and inhaled. “Oh yes, very well, thank you. They run my life like queens, and I always obey.”
“And the shop? Everything is good?”
“Bapu,” Mohan said, halfway through his ice cream. “Bebe is waiting.” He wiped his sticky hands on his school uniform.
“Yes, yes, we are leaving,” Manmohan replied, quickly finishing his kulfi. He waved to Raj.
“Good luck,” the shopkeeper said, taking another puff of his cigarette.
Back in the truck, Manmohan continued on toward the hospital, the ice cream heavy in his stomach.
He made a sharp turn off Victoria Parade and drove up a small hill. The terrain of the island often caused him to miss the freedom of his motorcycle cutting through the silent plains of northern India. That was the only lingering dislike he had for the island. Riding his bike had felt like he was embracing the whole landscape, gathering everything across the horizon into his arms. Here, there was no space. Something was always in the way.
He also missed his mother, particularly today. He had written to Sada Kaur to tell her about her latest grandchild, but as usual she had not replied. The last he heard from her was after Darshan died. She had sent a short note that read: I am very sorry, Manmohan. I wish I had known him. Though its brevity could have been misunderstood as curtness, he knew her. She was simply spelling out a regrettable truth, which had made him feel worse about being away.
Gripping the steering wheel, the truck hydraulics bouncing him slightly in his seat, Manmohan recalled the day they boarded the train to Calcutta nine years ago. Baba Singh told her that he would send money and occasional updates. She had looked away. Their farewell seemed like two strangers completing a business transaction. It was stiff and formal, like one of them had been swindled out of a fair price, although Manmohan had not been able to tell which of them had been cheated.
Sada Kaur had nodded to each of her children, dispassionately, without any love at all, or as he understood later, too much. Vikram bent over and pressed the back of her slack hand against his forehead before stepping onto the train and sitting beside his father. Satnam whispered something in her ear and lightly kissed her cheek before boarding. Manmohan returned her nod, attempted a reassuring smile as if to suggest the whole circumstance was absurd. “Sat sri akal,” he had said, as if he would see her the next day. “We will be back soon.”
“You do not have to go,” she had told him.
“What kind of son would I be? What will Bapu think of me if I stay?”
She had smiled weakly at him. “I know that is how you see it.”
“Why don’t you come?”
“Your grandfather needs me now. And I am not interested in chasing after your father’s phantoms.”
Then, one year after they had come to the island, World War II broke out and ship travel between India and Fiji was suspended. The Toors had been forced to accept the island as a more permanent home, and over time, settled more deeply into well-paying jobs. It became harder to leave, even when ship travel was reinstated in 1945. They had never made this much money in India, had never felt so secure. It was difficult to relinquish. It was why they had come.
Time steam-rolled forward, and earlier just this year in 1947, India gained its independence, which had grave and devastating consequences for the Punjab. The line of partition dividing the country in two had cut directly through the region. Large pieces of Manmohan’s homeland that he had once traversed on his motorcycle—now part of Muslim Pakistan—were forever closed to him.
Hindus, Muslims, and Madrassis had marched through Suva celebrating and chanting, “Jai Hind. Long live India,” waving the three-striped saffron, white, and green flag of a new nation that many Indians in Fiji had never even seen. But Manmohan, along with the other Sikhs on the island, could not celebrate. They heard stories of massacres in the Punjab. Muslims crossed over into Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs into the new India in mass migrations because none of these groups could coexist any longer. It broke Manmohan’s heart to think of his home like that, of Guru Gobind Singh’s efforts to protect that land for future Sikh generations. Manmohan often wondered about his mother, alone in a two-story house since Prem had passed away, in a region now only a sliver of its once historical greatness, no longer the home he would recognize.
“The ocean will swallow all o
f you whole,” Sada Kaur had told Manmohan. She had known all along what would happen. She had known so many things.
He should have returned to be with her, and yet—although it caused him a great deal of distress—he still cared, after all these years, what his father thought. When Baba Singh had first returned from China, Manmohan was so full of awe. Despite his father’s sometimes odd and stern manner, his experiences abroad endowed him with a mix of mystery and valor. It was Manmohan’s goal to one day embody those same qualities. He believed that following Baba Singh to Fiji would change everything. They would find common ground, bond over police patrol stories and how much they both missed India. His father would one day acknowledge that Manmohan had achieved precisely what they had all set out to accomplish on this island: a stable, wealthy lifestyle that even the British would never be able to undo.
He drove past Spencer’s department store, where his ambitions to please had taken firm root. He had started by getting a job at Spencer’s, cramped in the rear stock room. The largest business on the island, Spencer’s was two stories high with a total of five large rooms stocked with clothing, sundries, knickknacks, and lanterns. He had been responsible for organizing boxes and registering weekly inventory. His wages were decent, enough to live on for a short time while the family settled into their new life, with enough remaining to save for his own autonomous and economically successful enterprise that would certainly rouse his father’s admiration.
His savings then doubled when Baba Singh, with his history as a colonial police officer, got all three of his sons employed on the Fijian force. Yet just as Manmohan had begun to feel comfortable on the island, living in a modern, westernized house in Tamavua replete with the accoutrements of success—an electric icebox, aluminum barrels of spices and foodstuffs, running water and flushing toilets, his World War II truck parked on the well-paved and well-lit street outside, and money accumulating for that day he could start his own business and finally satisfy his father—Darshan had died.
~ ~ ~
Baba Singh was waiting for them outside the hospital as they pulled up to the parking lot. In the years Baba Singh had been in Fiji he had barely aged at all. At nearly fifty years old, he had only a handful of gray hairs, unnoticeable under his turban or in the thickness of his beard that was tucked neatly up into the black net tied around his chin. He presented well in his starched turban, khaki trousers, and blue button-down shirts, always pressed and washed. Standing outside of Jai’s ground-floor hospital room, his hands were laced together behind his back, his shoulders straight. He was a stone sentry. A statue. He never changed.
Manmohan shut his truck door and approached the hospital wall, his boots crunching on the gravel. The humidity seemed to have lessened, and the air now felt clean. He glanced through the room’s window, which had been cranked open. There was an empty space where Jai’s gurney had been earlier that morning; she had not yet returned from delivery. The yellow walls inside were peeling. An empty glass vase rested on a wooden bedside table. The tabletop was slanted slightly, and its single drawer was missing. The water inside the vase was cloudy, like it had not been changed in some time.
“What took you so long?” Baba Singh asked. “You might have missed it.”
“Hello, Dada,” Mohan said to his grandfather.
Manmohan rested his upper arm on the window frame. A splinter of wood poked into his skin. “We’re on time,” he said, bothered by the lack of conviction in his voice.
Baba Singh pointed his chin at his grandson. “You should not have brought him. He is too young for this sort of business.”
“What sort of business?” Mohan asked.
Manmohan scuffed his boot heel along the edge of the wall. “Have you gone inside at all?” he asked.
“I prefer the fresh air out here.”
“How long has she been gone?”
“Several hours. She should be back soon. Priya is with her.”
“Very good,” Manmohan muttered, trying not to seem sarcastic about it. Satnam’s wife had come to help Jai through the delivery despite missing her weekly women’s gathering with a sorority of wealthy, affluent Indian ladies. Referring to them as ladies was, in Manmohan’s view, quite generous. It was really an afternoon of tea during which they all slung thinly veiled insults at each other like barbarians, smiling viciously. Jai called them mango heads because all they had up there was pulp.
“It is a pity,” Priya had said to Manmohan when he dropped them off at the hospital that morning. “My friends will miss me terribly. But perhaps my being here will do some good. God knows I have been an exceptional mother to my little Karam.” She had pointedly stressed the word exceptional while staring down her nose at Jai, then dabbed a tissue to her eye at the mention of her son, who was only a year younger than Mohan. “Young boys need the gentleness of their mothers if they are to grow into respectable men.” She turned to Jai. “Just some friendly advice, one mother to another.”
She was probably the worst of those mango heads.
Mohan jumped up to get a better look through the window, clutching the plastic hammer, dried ice cream all over his hands. After a moment, unable to see anything, he kneeled in the mud and collected a number of rocks into a pile. He then slammed the hammer down, splattering them in all directions.
Baba Singh noticed the hammer. “It has been a while since I saw that. I had almost forgotten about those toys.”
Manmohan lowered his arm, rubbing it where the wood splinter had been digging in, trying not to feel so chastised. Leaning against the wall, he crossed his feet and adjusted the baton on his side. Down the hill in the distance, Pacific Robins were amassed and perched on Suva’s buildings, chirping in post-rain merriment. Mohan gathered more rocks into a pile, scraping them across the mud with the head of the plastic hammer.
“Last night, I had the same dream,” Baba Singh said.
“It is just a dream, Bapu. Isn’t it just a dream?”
“I have learned to listen to my dreams. It is more than a dream.”
Manmohan stared at the electroshock therapy facility across the street, saying nothing more.
Soon they heard the squeaky wheels of Jai’s gurney and quickly turned toward the window. A nurse was pushing her into the room, Priya trailing behind them.
“Gharwala?” Jai said, her voice grainy like sandpaper. She tiredly lifted her head and looked toward the open window, searching for her husband outside. The baby was cradled close to her chest, wrapped in a blanket.
“I am here,” he said.
She smiled when she saw him, resting her head back onto the pillow. The nurse pushed the gurney as close to the window as possible.
A boy?” Manmohan asked her.
She nodded sleepily.
He looked at Baba Singh, whose expression was calm, like a knowing, sage guru. But he was not a guru, just a smug old man.
Stretching his arm inside, Manmohan touched his wife’s hand. Her hair was matted to her forehead, but he could not reach far enough to wipe the sweat from her brow.
Priya sat on the edge of Jai’s bed and peered critically at the baby. “His eyes are quite close together. I think they were a bit rough with the forceps.”
“His eyes are fine,” Jai said, covering the baby’s head with the blanket.
Mohan reached up and clutched at the window frame for leverage in an attempt to jump higher. “Bapu,” he said, still unable to see anything. “It is too high.”
Manmohan lifted him.
Mohan’s hands tightened on the frame, and he nearly dropped the plastic hammer inside the room. “Hello, Bebe.”
She smiled.
“What is so important?” he asked.
She pointed at the baby. “This is your new brother.”
“Where did you get him?”
“Come,” Manmohan said, lowering his son back to the ground. “We can see more inside.”
When he was standing beside his wife’s bed, Manmohan took the baby in his arms and
gazed at the red, sleeping face, bending over momentarily so Mohan could see. “My father had that same dream again,” he told Jai.
“What dream?” Priya asked.
Manmohan ignored her.
Jai nodded. “It does not matter about the dream or the name,” she said. “Whatever we call him, he is who he is.”
Manmohan looked outside. The window framed the back of his father’s turbaned head. Baba Singh did not seem concerned with what was happening inside. He seemed only to be waiting for them to decide what he believed had already been decided. Manmohan wished he knew if doing what his father wanted would make any difference. He wished he knew if it mattered at all that he was willing to give the name of the person he had loved most to a new person who might never comprehend its importance.
Sighing, he sat on the edge of his wife’s gurney, still cradling his new son. “Maybe the name will teach this boy something important,” he said. “Maybe just by having it, he will know what it cost me to give it to him.”
~ ~ ~
“It is too hot for that,” Jai told Priya, who was kneeling over the baby. Darshan was sleeping on a mat in the center of the living room. His cheeks were pink in the heat. Although the back door had been propped open and the curtain pulled aside, the air still did not move.
“I am not hurting him,” Priya replied drearily. “I just want to see him.”
Jai bent forward in her chair and looked hard at her sister-in-law. “You are too close, and it is too hot for that. Give him space.”
Priya stretched languidly out on the linoleum-covered floor beside Darshan. “Shouldn’t you be down here with him? You are his mother.”
Jai opened her mouth, but Baba Singh put his hand up as he relaxed into the couch beside Manmohan. “Enough,” he said. “Is fighting always necessary?”
She restrained herself with difficulty. Priya tried not to smile.
Manmohan eyed Satnam, who was on the floor resting against the wall just under the window. His brother had been regarding the tense exchange with disinterest, his expression blank, like he was bored.