Darshan

by Amrit Chima

  “Why aren’t you angry?” Manmohan asked him. “Hasn’t he told you?”

  “I told him,” Baba Singh said, raising his head from his bowl of peas.

  “Manmohan, please sit,” Vikram said. “We have a lot to discuss.”

  “You should be angry,” Manmohan told him fiercely.

  “I am going with him,” his brother said. “I am going back.”

  Manmohan stood frozen for several moments. Then he tersely turned to go.

  Vikram threw up his hands. “Do not leave,” he called. “Let’s talk.”

  Climbing into his truck, Manmohan started the engine. He adjusted the rearview mirror, moving it slightly so that his father came into view. He watched Baba Singh eating his peas and Vikram standing there, defeated. Then he pressed his foot to the gas pedal, steering down the dusty drive toward the main road.

  He watched them recede in the mirror, getting smaller and smaller, further irritated when he saw Baba Singh finish his peas, stand, and step into his shack without any satisfying indications of regret. No long gaze as his son drove away, no hand on his forehead lamenting his mistake and the inequity of his decision. Nothing at all but stepping out of sight into his shack where he was likely beginning preparations for dinner, firing up the stove out back, pulling aside the tarps and tying them with string so the smoke could escape, then heating food that Jai had sent over. After dinner he would stretch out on his mattress and fall asleep.

  Manmohan slammed down on the brake, causing the truck to skid and jerk sharply forward. A cloud of dust gusted up from under the tires. Slipping the gearshift into reverse, twisting his body around, gripping the bench seat, he made his way back to the shack, which now loomed larger in his rear window as he sped nearer. Again stepping firmly on the brake, he shoved the gear into neutral and jumped out, leaving the truck running. He walked purposefully toward a stack of corrugated iron panels he had purchased for their plans to expand the milk shed. The panels had lain untouched for several weeks, and they were beginning to rust.

  From the corner of his eye, Manmohan saw Vikram signal him to stop, then give up as if knowing it would not help.

  Rushing outside and following Manmohan to the panels, Baba Singh said sharply, “Enough!”

  Ignoring him, Manmohan lifted the edge of two panels and dragged them toward the back of his truck, the corrugated iron making a trail of crimped furrows in the ground.

  “Put them back,” his father said.

  Manmohan hoisted the panels awkwardly into the truck and went back for the last two.

  Spitting his words through clenched teeth, Baba Singh said, “You are behaving like a child.”

  “Should I behave like you, Bapu?” Manmohan asked, his voice loud, the edges of the other two panels digging into his palms. “You who abandoned his wife? Like Satnam who is lazy and who stole my son, only to let his wife treat him like a slave and then send him back to me like garbage?”

  “You know nothing about your brother, or about me.”

  Manmohan shoved the two remaining panels into the truck. Catching his breath, he asked, “Why did you wait until after she died?”

  “Why did you?” Baba Singh asked, his voice powerful and quiet, ruthlessly intimidating.

  A sudden rush of love and regret came upon Manmohan, weakening his anger. “I wanted to stay with you, for as long as you were here.” He shook his head. “Why did you even come to Fiji?”

  “Put the panels in their place, Manmohan.”

  “Why should Satnam have them?”

  “He needs them more than you do. He has always needed more.”

  “Because he is weaker?” Manmohan asked, incredulous, finally understanding.

  Baba Singh’s fists tightened. “Do not call him that.”

  Manmohan climbed into his truck. “You have made him worse, Bapu. Not better.”

  The panels vibrated against each other as the diesel engine rumbled down the road toward the mill. A memory surfaced as he drove, guilt as always beginning to prod at him. The rich smell of soil stimulated his nostrils as he remembered the canal on the outskirts of Barapind. He was eleven years old. He had fallen and his knees were bloody. Rolling over, he wiped the mud from his face, blew on his scrapes, flapping his hands in an effort not to feel the sting.

  “Are you hurt?” Satnam shouted, running toward him, crashing through the reeds.

  “No,” Manmohan said, but it was a lie, and he was afraid.

  His brother grinned then. “You are too fast, not looking in front of you.”

  “I know. I wanted to win.”

  “Can you walk?”

  Manmohan winced. “In a minute.”

  Satnam pulled a cloth from his pocket and wrapped it around one of his brother’s knees.

  “Why do you have that?” Manmohan asked him.

  His brother shrugged. “I always have one with me, just in case.”

  “In case you get hurt?”

  “In case you do, or Vikram,” Satnam replied. He had only been six years old.

  The truck hit a hole in the ground and the panels jumped and slammed down into the bed. Manmohan turned to look at them, sighing with pity for his brother.

  ~ ~ ~

  “That is impossible,” Manmohan said loudly, waving the document in the British official’s face. “When we received this lease, we were told—”

  “Whatever you were told was inaccurate,” the official said, turning over a sheet of paper. He flicked his eyes up from where he was seated at his small desk. His expression was bland, like the whitewashed wood and mortar around him had dulled the color of his face after years of working in that office.

  “You cannot simply take away a family’s livelihood.”

  The official clasped his hands together over the papers on his desk and focused his attention impatiently on Manmohan. “Your father is the person of record on this lease. It is non-transferrable.”

  “But he will be gone in just a few weeks. We were told—”

  “Perhaps a local Fijian working at the leasing office told you something that you did not then verify with the administration. The Empire has the final say here.”

  An assistant, a native Fijian man, middle aged with dark skin, his kinky hair pulled back into a band, was standing at attention to the left of the desk. A flash of annoyance crossed the dull whites of his eyes. Affronted, he adjusted his shoulders, pulling them back straighter.

  “We have heard all this before,” a man shouted from the back of the small room. By the rugged creases in his face, darkened by hard labor, he looked to be an oil worker, and a Muslim from the cap on his head. “Do not waste your time,” the man told Manmohan. “We have been trying to get the British to understand that we cannot live on the pay they give us. It has been years, and they do not seem to care that we are starving. They only want to bleed us dry.”

  Trying his best to ignore the oil worker, Manmohan began again, keeping his tone even. “I was an army signal for the British, and for many years my brothers and I were colonial police officers, as was my father who served in China. My brother needs this farm.”

  The British official looked away as if bored. “If you wish to appeal it,” he said, “we are open to listening. The appeals office is down that way.”

  Manmohan glanced toward the assistant as if to ask for help. Despite what had been a long segregation of Indian and Fijian races on the island, Manmohan could see that this native sympathized with him. The assistant pursed his lips and shook his head slightly, suggesting that an appeal would be a waste of time.

  When he exited Suva’s parliament offices, Manmohan balled the lease that had grown damp from his sweaty palm and tossed it into the street. He walked away past the courthouse guard, the lease soaking in a puddle from the recent storm.

  “Why did you go there?” Jai asked when he got home. “It is Satnam’s problem.” She was in the living room, sitting on a footstool, hand-grinding spices into a small wooden bowl.

  Manmohan lea
ned back into the couch. “I don’t know.”

  She stopped and looked at him with irritation. “After all this time, you feel sorry for him?”

  He stood from the couch to sit on the floor next to her stool. Touching her wrist, he was about to speak, then closed his mouth, instead bringing her hand to his bearded cheek. He kept it there for a time, inhaling the freshly ground mustard seed at her feet and under her nails, until finally she sighed and let it drop.

  Manmohan spent the next several days in the backlands supervising the loggers, trying to clear his head. He had felt the need to remove himself temporarily from his family’s reach, to go to a place where the only sounds were the loud crash of trees falling into the jungle underbrush and the rough gnash of the saw’s teeth on wood. Baba Singh and Vikram would be leaving soon, and this confused and unsettled him.

  When he returned to the mill, he was exhausted from the steady and hard work of collecting the felled logs and roping them to his flatbed trucks. He strode slowly and heavily up the stairs to the main house. Pulling the workman’s gloves from the back pocket of his trousers, he set them on the table by the front door as he entered the living room.

  Satnam was on the couch.

  “I did not expect to see you here,” Manmohan said.

  “I have been checking in. I heard what you did with the lease.”

  Manmohan cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Is Priya here?”

  Satnam shook his head. “She is upset with me.”

  Manmohan sat on a chair opposite the couch.

  “A lot has happened in the last few days,” his brother said, gripping his knees, arms stretched out, elbows locked. “I have decided to go with Bapu.”

  “I see,” Manmohan said, not surprised.

  “Priya does not want to go. But it is all right. I never wanted the farm. I could stay, but…” his voice trailed off uneasily. He sighed. “I should go with him.”

  “You do not have to do that anymore.”

  “I think I do.”

  “You were different before Bapu came back from Barapind.”

  “That was a long time ago. I remember it, the images I guess, but I don’t remember how it felt. You were different, too.”

  Manmohan leaned forward. “Would you like some chai?” he asked. He wanted Satnam to stay for a while.

  “No, no,” his brother put up a hand. “I just came to tell you. And Vikram will come by. He has his own plans. He will stay a while in Barapind, then go to England for school. He wants to be a professor at Oxford.”

  Manmohan smiled, but his smile quickly faded, realizing he would be left in Fiji, that he was never going back. “Yes, I suppose that is what he would be good at.”

  “What about you?” Satnam asked.

  “Will I go?”

  Satnam nodded.

  “No,” Manmohan said, his voice firm. “I do not think so. Not this time.”

  ~ ~ ~

  The dairy farm was still. Manmohan was struck by the dead sound of the place without its usual generator hum. Nature sounds were more audible, the rustling palm leaves and the skulking footsteps of small animals. He had come for a look around, to retrieve anything he might need for the mill before the government reclaimed the land. He pushed open the door to Baba Singh and Vikram’s shack and went inside. It was small, with only two rooms, each with a cot. Vikram’s room had been emptied of personal possessions. But Baba Singh’s room still looked as if he would come back. His bed was neatly made, and his few belongings were still arranged as they had always been since moving here.

  They had traveled by jet, departing from Nadi airport, Baba Singh boarding a plane at age fifty-three, not at all intimidated by that unknown. Manmohan had been a little envious of them, watching through the chain link fence as they accelerated down the runway. He tried to imagine what they would see from up there, how big the ocean and the earth and how small the island.

  Clinging to the fence as the plane lifted into the sky, Darshan asked, “Will we see them again?”

  “I don’t know,” Manmohan replied, glancing over at Mohan, who was squatting on the ground, squinting at the plane. Things were clearer now after talking with Satnam. He hoped maybe he could make it right with Mohan. He wanted to ask if his son believed that another chance was possible. But he was not able to form the words. Maybe it was enough that he had thought them. It was a start of sorts.

  “I want to go to India, too,” Livleen said, smiling dreamily with a five-year-old’s imagination.

  Navpreet jammed one of her loafered toes into a chain link hole. She was wearing a sundress, and her black hair had been washed that morning, slicked back into a rubber band and braided. Rolling her eyes at Darshan, she had said, “Maybe you will never see them again, but I am going to India some day.”

  Standing in Baba Singh’s room, Manmohan was not sure what would happen. The reality of the Toors dispersed across the globe just as some things were beginning to be clear gave him a hollow feeling, like being hungry but not wanting to eat.

  Against the wall, next to Baba Singh’s bed, Manmohan was surprised to see his father’s chest. He knelt and opened it, releasing the musty scent of things long closed in. He discovered a few items of women’s clothing and an ivory bangle, a broken-toothed wooden comb, a hand-painted wooden elephant that he recognized as Satnam’s. There was also a faded, moth-eaten red turban, an old debt ledger with pages and pages of markings in neat columns and rows, a vial made of green glass with liquid inside, chisels, a smoking pipe of some kind, and a dented tin containing all of Khushwant’s letters.

  With the exception of the letters and the elephant, Manmohan knew they belonged to people who had died, important people. He tried to imagine what of his mother’s he would add, but he did not have any of her possessions, nor did he remember the things she had called hers. He knelt beside the chest, leaning heavily over it, clutching the sides. Smiling, he decided that he would place the memory of her black irises within, and also the quiet fortitude that had sustained his happy and carefree life as a child.

  Something about the maroon turban was very familiar. He held it close to his nose, breathing in deeply the dulled scent of gunpowder and metal. Closing his eyes he saw a one-eyed man speaking softly to him, walking with him through the winding lanes of Barapind. Manmohan realized then that he also knew the elephant. Long before Desa had given it to Satnam, this one-eyed man had given it to him for safekeeping.

  I do not think we will see them again, he thought, in answer to Darshan’s question.

  Replacing the turban, Manmohan closed the lid and carried the chest to his truck. At the main house he heaved it up the ladder and into the rafters where he then slid it into place next to the old plywood box.

  Malady & Mutiny

  1959

  Family Tree

  Fevers heat the body, cells boiling into riotous, chilling shudders. They heat the mind, creating a torrent of babbling thought, brain synapses loosened and wild. Manmohan traced his finger slowly over the lines of text in his medical journal, reading, contemplating. He snapped the book shut. But they cool the spirit, he thought. To ignite the body and the mind, they drain the spirit of its warmth, leaving it cool and dark.

  A quiet, wintry fear had returned as he sat vigil outside Livleen’s room, his daughter plagued by the same illness that had long ago taken his son. Odd, unintelligible murmurs escaped her, flushed out by the heat. He listened hard, his own spirit depleted, cooling with hers.

  He had not been to bed in two days and slept in a chair in the hallway. He again opened the book, trying hard to focus on the medical terminology that grounded him, words he could hold and dissect, but his neck hung, his mouth went slack, and the journal slipped from his thick fingers, falling with a rustling of pages to the floor.

  He woke with a start. Junker Singh was covering him with a blanket.

  “I am not cold, ji,” Manmohan told him with bleary eyes, struggling to lift his head.

  The mechanic insisted.
“You were shivering.”

  “Is she awake?”

  “No, ji, not yet. Jai is with her. You should go in. Do not stay out here.”

  Manmohan closed his eyes again. He could not go inside. He did not have the courage. “Who is this girl?” he heard himself say, but the house was empty and it was only him, sobbing in his chair. “Who is she? Is she mine?”

  “She is yours,” someone said. “But I know you do not want her. I know you do not want any of them.”

  “I want them. I am here in this chair. I want them.”

  “Sitting here like this only makes you believe that you want them. Nonetheless, she will be fine. The same events cannot happen twice.”

  It was his own voice in his own mind, he realized, half asleep, aware of his stiff body in the chair, aware of his aching neck. He woke again, wearily rubbing his eyes. Listening through the door, there was no sound coming from Livleen’s room, no more mumbles of distress.

  His medical journal was gone, and there was a bowl of rice and spiced taro for him on the hallway floor. Someone had laid out a sleeping mat. Pushing aside the food, he thankfully crawled onto it.

  Sometime later, his mind once again pulled through the tunnel of deep sleep into consciousness, he sensed movement about him, people stepping into and out of the sickroom, but he did not open his eyes. He listened, for panic, for grief, but heard only muffled speech through the door, the sloshing of water in a bucket, the snap of a sheet as someone shook it out. Then he felt a shadow hovering near, kneeling beside him, and he groggily peeled open his eyelids.

  “Bapu,” Mohan whispered. “Come see. Livleen is awake.”

  “Is it over?” Manmohan asked.

  His son nodded, his expression a mixture of relief and a question, asking why he had never been loved this much.

  “I want to see her,” Manmohan said, pushing up off the floor, shakily standing.

  Mohan grabbed hold to steady him. “She will not be the same. She will have pain for a while. The doctor said she might never fully recover, that her heart has been damaged.”