by Amrit Chima
His eyes lingered for a moment longer on the radio. He had not listened to one in years, although he meant to before Mohan had stolen his. Now he wished he really had taken out his gramophone during the party and spun Duke Ellington. He wished that it was not too late.
Returning his gaze to Satnam, Manmohan said, “If you think you can do better, you can have him.” And then he turned back toward the docks.
Pasteurized & Homogenized
1957
Family Tree
Manmohan recognized the neat formation of Punjabi characters, tidy and compact, on the front of the overseas mail in Baba Singh’s hand. He had gotten just enough of a glimpse to catch the April 1957 postmark across the bottom before his father folded it in half and shoved it into his trouser pocket.
“Post from Barapind,” Baba Singh said in an oddly monotone voice.
“What news?” Vikram asked from where he was bent over rinsing out several large milk pots at the water pump just outside the open door of the pasteurization shed.
“She is not coming,” Baba Singh replied tersely, finally receiving the answer to a question he had asked ten years before. The muscles around his eyes and mouth were tight.
Vikram released the handle of the pump and straightened, water spattering mud onto his ankles until the flow eased to a drip. Manmohan set down the sieve through which he had been pouring milk.
“We know, Bapu,” Vikram said gently.
“She is not coming,” Baba Singh said again.
Manmohan checked his broken watch, aware of all the passing years stored within. It gripped his wrist like an admonishing hand as he saw his mother’s lifeless body floating down the Ravi River, alight with fire, none of them there to properly send her off, to say farewell.
“Just leave it be,” Baba Singh told them. He switched on the boiler to pasteurize the milk and pulled out the temperature gauge.
He had already assessed the quantity the cows had yielded that day. He had already determined an amount for making butter, setting aside several buckets of pure, untouched milk to refrigerate. In the cold of the icebox, the cream would separate into a top layer, which they would later churn and sell in Suva’s open marketplace. The rest he would set on the double boiler for pasteurization, to be heated to one-hundred and forty-five degrees, cleansed of unhealthy microorganisms, making it safe for human consumption. “It kills the bacteria and some of the enzymes,” Baba Singh had explained in the beginning, standing on a stool, pouring a bucketful of unprocessed milk into one of the huge pots on the stove.
Manmohan never doubted that pasteurization was necessary, but he nonetheless felt the process was regrettable, loving the flavor of fresh milk just as it came, straight from the cow. Pasteurization resulted in a disappointing taste. All the fine flavor, everything about milk that made it enjoyable to drink—the creamy, thick, satisfying feel of it, especially sweetened with almond shavings—had been boiled away. One hour on the stove was all it took. One hour to destroy perfectly good-tasting milk.
Vikram passed Baba Singh several buckets until both pots were full. Steamy condensation edged its way up the outside of the aluminum receptacles in waves as the pasteurization process began.
The boiler hissed. Metallic hardware clanked as they tidied the milking shed littered with sieves and strainers. They worked without speaking, the clatter of their movement shaping barriers between them. Manmohan had not known anything about his mother since coming to Fiji, how she lived, what she dreamt about, who she talked to. He found himself now wondering what her favorite foods had been. He had once read in a science journal that a person’s palate changed every seven years. He had not seen her for nearly twenty.
Her silence had caused her to become strangely infinite in his mind, immortalized on Amarpur’s train station platform. He riffled through his memories to bring to the forefront the image of that long-ago day in 1938. He studied the memory of his mother’s eyes carefully, remembering what she had said, her jet-black irises full of regret: the ocean will swallow you whole.
Needing air, Manmohan backed away from the stove, bumping into the shed’s center counter and causing a sieve to brush across the surface, leaving behind a trail of milky droplets. He turned, searching for a towel, something with which to clean it, but the towels were on the shelf behind his father, and those he could not reach.
“She knew it,” Manmohan told Baba Singh.
The old man raised his eyebrows, heated, feeling challenged. “What did she know?”
“That we would never go back.”
His father shot Manmohan a tight, angry grin. “You should not speak further.”
Vikram placed a hand on Manmohan’s forearm, giving a squeeze. “Let it be,” he whispered.
Manmohan stared at his father for a long, stony moment, and then he let his eyes fall and went home.
The warm smell of freshly made roti with butter wafted from the main house as he approached in his truck, smoke from the stovepipe drifting upward into the sky. Manmohan wove his way into the lumber mill’s clearing, his stomach suddenly burning with need.
Pulling into the carport, he saw Mohan perched at the top of a large pile of logs, his face set in its usual expression of sardonic disdain. Something between them had broken with finality when Manmohan left him with Satnam that night. He had not really believed his son would so stringently prefer his uncle over his own father, had not really believed he would stay away for over a year. Mohan had returned sometime just after the following Diwali, which he celebrated with Satnam and Priya in what Manmohan later discovered was a rather oppressive party of Priya’s women’s group and their gutless husbands. Priya had bullied Mohan into serving snacks and drinks, excusing her own son from such duties with the assertion that it was Karam’s home and he would not be a servant in it.
When the boy had walked through the main house front door after all that time on the remote, isolated island, there was a note crumpled in his fist. Priya had written that Mohan had been a bad influence on Karam, that he was always contriving to distract her brilliant son from his studies, and that since the moment Mohan had moved into their home, his innate stupidity had been rubbing off on his cousin. Announcing his return to the mill, Mohan had slammed the note to the living room floor in a weightless, dissatisfying scuff of paper against the wooden floorboards. No words, just pent up and inexpressible rage that even now, four years later, had not been purged.
Manmohan had felt sorry for his son then, and although there were often times when he was overwhelmed by a stab of fatherly compassion, he could not help but feel uneasy and wary in Mohan’s presence, like his son was constantly pondering and perfecting a plan of vengeance, fueled by the cheap alcohol he drank.
Parking, Manmohan yanked the hand brake tight and climbed out of the cabin. “I told you not to sit up there like that,” he called out. “You are too heavy. That pile will roll out from under you.”
Mohan nimbly skipped down the pile, a gangly-legged nineteen-year-old of medium height with disproportionately wide shoulders, his thick turban and beard making him appear top heavy. Leaning against the pile of logs from which he had just scampered down, Mohan said in a controlled, intoxicated slur. “You do not look well, Bapu.”
Manmohan trudged up the stairs, wondering if somewhere in the fog of drink, there was sympathy in Mohan’s eyes, if maybe the drink made it honest. He caught another whiff of the cooking smells settling over the clearing and put the uncertain idea from his mind. Jai was waiting upstairs for him. He let thoughts of Amarpur and the train station platform loosen and ebb away. Shielding his brow with his arm, he looked skyward, as though watching the memories of Sada Kaur join the smoke from his wife’s cooking, spiraling up in tendrils until it was nothing at all. When he entered the house, his mouth was already watering for Jai’s creamy spinach with ghee, and also for a taste of her chai, fragrant with cardamom, cloves, and a hint of black pepper. Soon he would be sitting on a stool to watch her stir food in pots and slap he
r hands on her apron to clean off the flour while he sipped the warm tea from a mug. He would tell her what had happened, and then he would never talk about it again. She would serve him a plate, knowing that the best thing for him would be a bite of her food.
~ ~ ~
The beach was a twinkling landscape of trash fires. It was beautiful from afar in this half-light time of day before night. Baba Singh knew his family would be looking for him, but he wanted to stay for a while.
He had told himself he would release his sorrow, replace the dark part of him that had allowed murder with something beautiful and forgiving. Yet his whole life he had clung to his grief like a buoy in a vast and infinite sea, the choices and years behind him merely a series of dishonest attempts at making his losses, both immutable and immense, cease to feel so empty, at making his unrelenting guilt not weigh so heavily upon him. This was why he had brought his father’s chest with him to Fiji. He had waited all these years for the moment when he would be ready to open it again, dump its contents into the waves that lapped against the Fijian shores, watching as it floated to the ocean’s horizon and over the edge of the world. It now sat in his room in the shack at the dairy farm, reminding him of Sada Kaur and what she had always known, that he was lost and that he had lied to her about it, had lied to himself.
He took off his chappals and ran his toes through the sand, holding a coconut in his cupped palms. Darshan had given it to him earlier that day. Baba Singh had been sitting at the back of the mill’s main house against one of the stilts, kinking the end of a coiled black-rubber hose. He had been there for nearly an hour, staring blankly at the rushing river, listening to the muted sounds coming from upstairs: the footsteps and voices of friends and family who insisted on paying their respects even though they had never known his wife. Gazing toward the river where the crickets communed in the brush of the embankment, he had spotted Darshan skidding down the verdant hill beyond the river through the thick mass of ferns. The boy gripped a coconut in his hand, held aloft, maneuvering the narrow pathway the children had carved out with all their many footraces from the crest down to the water where they loved to swim.
Baba Singh shuddered. When Darshan had reached the base of the hill, stepping over the taro, cassava, and chilies that Manmohan recently planted, for one fearful second his grandson appeared like the faceless man in his nightmare.
“For you, Dadaji,” Darshan had said simply, stretching his arms forward to offer the coconut.
Baba Singh studied his grandson’s face, trying to erase the apprehension he felt at being reminded of his dream. The smile around Darshan’s almond-shaped eyes was gentle, and his light brown cheeks were flushed with pink. It was a nice face.
“What is it for?” Baba Singh asked.
“I thought it would make you feel better.”
“You really thought so?” Baba Singh replied. His voice carried an edge that he had not intended.
“I know it is not much.”
“Then what is the point?”
Timidly, Darshan said, “I don’t know.”
Baba Singh tried to relax, sensing the boy’s unease. He patted the ground next to him.
Encouraged, Darshan took a seat on the soft earth and explained, “When I am tired I eat a coconut. Gives me energy.”
“Someone once told me that a coconut has everything a man needs for life.”
“That must be it then.”
Baba Singh put the hose down. “Do you ever have strange dreams?”
Darshan placed the coconut between them. “I usually cannot remember my dreams.”
Baba Singh recalled the damp of the soil underneath his palms as he had sat there with his grandson. Pressing down, he had made impressions in the ground, not letting his hand get too close to the coconut. “I have dreams,” he had said.
“What about?”
“About many things. One of them was about you, before you were born.”
Darshan considered the implications of this information. Finally he asked, a little concerned, “Was it a good dream or a bad one?”
“Neither.”
Darshan squinted as though studying something down by the river, wrapping his thin arms around his ashen knees. Baba Singh wondered what his dream about the boy meant, wondered about his grandson. Darshan did not say anything, so he did not press the subject and for a time they listened to the river and the jungle sounds around them.
Regarding the coconut, Baba Singh finally asked, breaking the silence, “From the ground, or the tree?”
Darshan glanced at him, confused.
Baba Singh pointed to the coconut palms at the top of the hill. “Did you get that from the ground at the base of the tree? Or did you go up and get it from the tuft?”
Darshan shifted his eyes away guiltily. Baba Singh knew his grandson was not supposed to climb the coconut trees, especially the ones at the top of the hill. He reached out to pick up the coconut, quickly, like tearing a bandage from a wound. “It is more valuable then,” he said, “from the top of the tree. It is a gift you worked hard to give.”
“I suppose so.” Then Darshan grinned. “But it was also fun.”
Baba Singh smiled faintly. “It is good to have fun. Otherwise life will swallow you whole, Darshan. That is what your grandmother knew; it is what she told us before we left India.”
“Are you having fun?” his grandson asked.
The question had unnerved Baba Singh, shook his very core, and the whole of his life had caught in his mouth as he shook his head.
Now cupping the coconut in his hand, the grains of sand were cool on his feet. The ocean wind whistled in his ears, and the beach trash fires became brighter and more orange. Khushwant’s letter was in his trousers, folded into squares. He walked over to one of the smoldering fires and pulled the letter from his pocket. He unfolded it and placed the paper in the sand next to the smoking pile of garbage, not setting it directly into the fire. He wanted it to burn, but he could not bring himself to watch as it did. He weighed the letter down with the coconut so that it could not escape with the wind, to keep the news of his wife’s death near enough to the flames so that it would eventually burn and turn to ash, the remaining carbon compounds of it making their way into his dreams where they would shower down from the dark dome of night sky over the Punjabi plains.
It was time to go back to India.
~ ~ ~
The smell of milk permeated the shed, its faintly sweet scent pleasantly lingering in Manmohan’s beard, in his clothes, his skin, in the wooden walls and floor. He was alone now, appreciating the solitude. His friends, who had already expressed their condolences, were still concerned for him, but he lacked the energy to speak with them about it, to sort through the complicated nature of his loss, to feign sadness when all he felt was empty.
He brooded over the homogenization machine, hoping some feeling of hurt would well up deep within him so he could catch it, pull at it until it rose upward and out. Then he would be consoled by his own humanity. But after analyzing himself for a moment, searching, he discovered nothing but fury for his father, who had told him, after all these years of waiting, after a broken promise of the greatest magnitude, that he was finally returning home.
Adjusting the tubes on the homogenization machine, Manmohan slammed one against the inside edge of the aluminum tub. After an hour on the double boiler, when the milk had cooled, the machine would squeeze the pasteurized formula through small, tapered tubes in order to disperse its fat evenly throughout. As the pressure built up, the fat globules would break apart, making the milk consistent in texture, smoother on the palate. But what difference did texture make when taste had already been lost?
“I am not coming back,” Baba Singh had told him, peering outside through the open door of the empty cowshed where they had been standing, watching as several of the cattle languidly made their way across the grazing field to huddle under a tree in the shade. “We have enough employees on the farm now so that it will run itself.
I have given it to Satnam. You have always been so devoted to your own endeavors.”
Flicking on the homogenizing machine, Manmohan’s hands shook with fury. The generator revved up, humming loudly. The tubes soon grew taut, strained with the pressure of fat emulsifying. The spray of milk into the homogenization receptacle sounded like a water faucet running into an empty aluminum tub.
For as long as he could remember, it had been like this. During their first days in Fiji Baba Singh had excused Satnam from helping with the task of finding them all a place to live. Poor Satnam had been the sickest from the long voyage at sea. And when they needed to find jobs, Baba Singh had given Satnam the time to consider his options, to find something that suited him, while Manmohan’s job at Spencer’s supported the entire family. In 1944 Manmohan and Vikram had voluntarily gone with Baba Singh to help build a Sikh temple two hours northeast of Suva in Nassinu. It took a month to erect the temple and prepare it for its first prayer, but Satnam never joined them. He was too busy, or too tired, or else disinclined. Baba Singh had accepted every one of those excuses without judgment or reprimand. But only for Satnam. The rest of them had to scramble and hoist and toil and labor.
When the homogenization receptacle was full, Manmohan took a large metal pole with a masher on the end and roughly thrust it into the milk. He jabbed it in several times to break up the unwanted assembly of stubborn fat microns that insisted on clumping together even after shoved through tubes clearly meant to tear them apart.
It was dusk when he finally came out of the shed. Baba Singh and Vikram were sitting on chairs outside their shack nibbling on dried, spiced peas.
“Come sit with us,” Vikram said, standing to pull out another chair.
Manmohan shook his head. “It’s late. I am tired.”
His brother offered some peas, smiling. “Just for a moment.”