by Amrit Chima
Manmohan picked up his watch from the nightstand. “It is okay Darshan. I was just scared. You scared me.”
“I know. I am sorry.”
“Sometimes…” Manmohan began, his voice weakening, thinking of the plywood box, wanting to say what was in it and why it existed. “There are reasons why I do things, reasons I say things.” He waited for Darshan to ask what he meant, but his son only looked at him uncertainly. The words and stories Manmohan had hoped to share suddenly caught in his mouth. “Just think first next time.”
“Yes, Bapu,” Darshan said, rising. “Can I get you something? Water?”
“No, I am fine. I will be out soon.”
Manmohan dressed himself unhurriedly, grimacing as he eased his legs into his trousers. He was still weak. In the living room, he found his wife sitting on the couch, cupping a mug of chai.
“You slept for three days,” she said.
“Three days,” he murmured, dragging a chair to the window, but not sitting in it.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“A little tired. Was it bad?”
She shook her head. “I have seen worse. There is water for a bath.”
“Not now.”
“You should eat something.”
Manmohan rubbed his stomach. He was not yet ready for food. “Later,” he replied. He eyed the mouth of the hallway. “How is Livleen?”
Jai sipped her tea, eyes focused on the mug. “She will be fine.”
“Resting?”
She nodded.
“I am going for a walk,” he told her. “I need some fresh air.”
“That’s good,” she said, resettling the mug in her lap. These happenings were beyond even her strengths. He could feel her watching him go, and even when he was outside he sensed her still looking, waiting for direction, wondering what to do next, but he had no answers.
When he reached the bottom of the stairs, a gleam of chrome caught his eye from the shade of the carport across the drive.
“Junker Uncle brought it,” Navpreet said, indicating the Ford Falcon Futura parked next to the World War II truck. She was playing jacks on a piece of plywood at the edge of the port. “Bebe wouldn’t let me see inside.”
He made his way slowly over. Running his finger along the brand-new chrome rim, he wished he could drive it, feel the one-hundred-and-one-horsepower engine, the rear-wheel drive, and 3M transmission yield to his every nudge of the steering wheel and change of gear shifts. “Did you see Darshan?” he asked. “He was just in my room.”
“No,” Navpreet said, catching the rubber ball and looking at him. “Can I see it now?”
“I want to show it to him.”
“It’s his, isn’t it? He never did anything to deserve it, and I just want to see. I am twelve. When he was twelve you let him drive.”
“Where is he, Navpreet?”
She inclined her head toward the jungle. “What did he ever do for it?”
“He takes care of me,” Manmohan told her.
Navpreet let the ball drop from her hand into the pile of jacks, scattering them over the edge of the wood and into the dirt.
Jai had come outside, watching them from the balcony. She waved, nodding at the car and smiling.
Caressing the smooth paint of the Falcon’s hood, Manmohan sighed impatiently. He wanted to shove his way through the jungle towards Darshan’s shack and bring him here. But he could not go to that place, the one room on four sturdy stilts that he had only ever seen in his imagination, with its desk where his son studied, with its Coleman lantern hanging on a hook for late nights, with its pile of pillows for long, daytime naps, and its shelf for books, water, and snacks. It was a star in the universe. They all needed a place like that, a place separated by light years and matter and darkness.
~ ~ ~
It was the middle of the night, and again Manmohan could not sleep. He had been lying there, clinging to his watch, his body tense with alertness. He swung his feet around and out of bed, the floorboards cold.
Jai stirred, pulling the sheet to her neck. “Do you need something?” she asked drowsily.
“No,” he whispered, but she had already fallen back to sleep.
He went out into the hallway toward the rafters. It was always hot up there. Even at night when the island cooled pleasantly, the heat in the rafters was the warmth of day accumulated and trapped, making him sweat. It was uncomfortable, with no place to lie down and curl up. Yet this was where Livleen had gone to undo herself, the space packed with pieces of a tarnished life. But it was his life, all its flaws, everything that was beautiful but melancholy, ugly but necessary. There were answers there, even if he did not know how to identify them. He went there now because he needed a place, and this was his.
Rounding the corner into the living room, he discerned the faint light of a lantern flickering from the kitchen. At the entrance he found Darshan halfway up the ladder, his hand poised on the door of the rafters.
Manmohan’s eyes widened, and he quickly backed around the corner before being seen. His legs still weak, he slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. Listening, he heard Darshan scramble around up in the crawl space, making scuffing noises, dragging heavy items across the ceiling. It soon grew quiet. It was quiet for a very long time, until finally there was movement again, more dragging, heavy, exerted breathing, and then Darshan climbed down. As his son folded the ladder and moved it slowly and softly across the floor, Manmohan stood, pressing his heels into the floorboards, his back skimming up the wall. When he was steady on his feet, he silently snuck away, escaping into the corridors of his dark house.
Psalm of Peace
1965
Family Tree
The musty odor of Motherland Books was sharp in the back, unlit corners where Manmohan often lingered, browsing for additions to his collection. Embraced by a wealth of words, the high, varnished shelves packed with manuscripts eased the charge of adrenaline in his system. He skirted around a shelf into the next aisle, his fingers gently dragging and bumping along the book spines. Murmurs of quiet speech came from the front of the bookstore where Darshan and Upinder Balil were conversing.
He stopped to examine a familiar volume, small and thin. Tilting it out from the shelf with his forefinger, he read the gold-embossed title on the front cover. “Psalm of Peace,” he silently mouthed, an English translation of Guru Arjun Dev Ji’s religious cantos.
“Bapu,” his son called from the front. “Are you ready?”
Manmohan paused, holding his breath and remaining silent. After a moment he heard Upinder and Darshan resume their conversation, and he relaxed.
Opening to the foreword, he scanned the lines: Unity is the light-winged dream of humanity, but when this dream is to be turned into intention, few followers remain.
“Bapu,” Darshan called again, entering the aisle. “We will be late.”
Manmohan ignored him, letting the pages flip under his thumb, stopping at a familiar passage, one his mother had often quoted when he was a child: This “Psalm of Peace” is the knowledge, the praise and the Name of God; / The man who gives it a place in his heart becomes an embodiment of all excellences. Knowledge of God, however, had been wiped from Manmohan’s heart, to reside in his mind only; he possessed an intellectual awareness of divinity, gathered from various world religion texts, but no longer a spiritual one. Without God in his heart, he embodied nothing. Indeed, he felt disembodied, floating aimlessly, emptied of excellences.
His mother had always read from this Psalm during the morning hours, when the dew was thick over the field of crops and the animals were still sleeping. God, channeled through the guru’s words and into Sada Kaur’s clear voice, could not be denied during Manmohan’s childhood. And then one day, after alighting so disruptively into their quiet, fatherless lives, Baba Singh had begun to join them in these prayers. It was then that the recitations had lost their ability to penetrate and Manmohan’s connection to God was severed.
; With his father sitting next to him on the floor of the mud hut, the act of devotional reading became imbued with a secondary, shameful meaning that was in direct conflict with the Psalm’s intended message. It was a need for his father’s good opinion, which had come to mean more than God’s. Manmohan turned to canto three, stanza three and read the lines that thereafter haunted him during those hushed morning readings: A man may surrender his life at a holy place of his own choice, / But pride and vanity will not cease to invade his mind.
“Bapu,” Darshan said again, stepping farther into the aisle. “The hospital…”
“I know.”
“Bapu.”
“Yes?”
“Mohan is gone.”
Manmohan looked up from the book. “Okay,” he said.
They had seen Mohan on the street, not more than a half an hour earlier. They ran into him after stopping to pick up cumin and turmeric from the spice shop on their way to the hospital. As they exited, a sack of spices under each of their arms, a Hindi movie poster taped to the display window caught Manmohan’s attention. The woman in it was smiling coyly, lipstick thick, a sparkly bindi placed between her eyebrows, her midriff exposed, wind blowing her hair back, her chuni fluttering off to the side. Her outstretched hand was pressed against the bare chest of a man standing beside her, suggesting his advances were unwanted, yet her come-hither expression seemed to say something else entirely. Open me up, she was saying. Ravish me.
“So much has changed,” Manmohan had muttered to Darshan. “There is no shame anymore.”
“The movies were always like that,” Mohan said from behind them. “Even the ones you took me to see when I was young.”
Disgust welled up in Manmohan’s chest like oven-rising dough at the sound of that voice, once spoken from a dark hallway in the shape of a silhouette that still haunted him during sleepless nights. Turning around, he braced himself against the sudden nearness of the enemy, the years of unspoken, agreed-upon distance that had now been breached.
The mass of body fat that had collected around Mohan’s midsection was more repulsive up close. It sagged heavily, pulling him downward. There was a sordid quality about his eyes, in the way they narrowed at the corners, assessing and prodding. Lehna was standing near, her skin gray like ash. Manmohan detected a scar along her left temple that she tried to cover with her chuni, and he could see that two of her lower front teeth were missing by the way she nervously suctioned her lip into the empty space. A boy of about two was resting snuggly on her hip, and Amandev, now four, clung to her pantaloons.
“Lehna,” Manmohan said stiffly, addressing his daughter-in-law.
She nodded in acknowledgement.
“You look well,” he told her, wanting to be kind but regretting it instantly when she flinched. His expression remained stony so as not to betray his embarrassment.
“How is the mill?” Mohan asked, smiling with self-satisfaction.
“How is yours?” Manmohan replied. “I have heard it is a great success. Is your father-in-law impressed by his investment in you? Does he know you run your business solely to put me out of mine?”
Mohan flushed, his smile gone. He roughly nudged Amandev forward. “Say hello to your dada before we go.”
Squatting next to his granddaughter, Manmohan extended an open palm, and she rested hers tentatively upon it. He smiled gently at her to allay her fears, suddenly overcome by affection, but she seemed about to cry. Staring helplessly at her quivering lower lip, memories fluttered up in his mind like bird wings, a commotion of events jumbled together. He felt the sudden and powerful urge to stretch time on a table, smooth out its wrinkles so he could better see how one thing had led to the other, how all of it had led to this.
“Say hello, Amandev,” Mohan repeated, a threat at the edge of his words.
“Hello, Dada.”
Hers had been such a sweet voice, like the music of the old days, like Ellington and Hindi love songs. Manmohan had fled from it, jetting across the street into Motherland Books.
He slid the Psalm of Peace into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet for some Fijian dollars. He handed the money to Darshan. “Give this to Upinderji.”
“Shall we go?” his son asked.
Manmohan looked down the aisle, through the big glass window at the spice shop across the street. She was still there, that woman in the aged and faded poster, her hand still pushing the man away. He reached toward her, his chest leaning forward into her open palm, reading the words he perceived in her expression. Open me up, he believed her to be saying. Ravish me.
And he did. Manmohan was sure of it.
~ ~ ~
Nausea came in waves in the aftermath of Manmohan’s electroshock therapy session as he watched Jai from the living room window. She was in the clearing distributing lunch to the workers, efficient with her movements, no energy or time wasted. After, she would make her way to the mill to oversee the jobs on the kiln and electric saws, another task she had accepted into the fold of her many other responsibilities whenever her weak, diseased husband could not manage them. Agitated, he pulled his eyes from her, finding Darshan amongst the crowd of workers stacking more logs on an already overloaded flatbed that his son was scheduled to take to Ba that afternoon.
His mood worsened when he saw Darshan jump off the truck and scrutinize the strain on the tires with noticeable misgivings. Rapping the corner of the hardbound Psalm of Peace on the glass pane, Manmohan then sat in a chair by the window and opened the book. But still looking outside as the men struggled to rope down the load, he did not read. Instead he felt the pages, lightly touching them, trying to discern the minute raise of the inked letters under his fingertips, but the words were level with the paper and indeterminate. Flattening his palm over the cantos, he then tried absorbing fresh insights and new meaning from the text through his porous and ready skin, yet all he perceived was the grain of paper growing damp from his sweat.
Outside, Darshan gestured at the men to stop. Once more assessing the load, the young man then dropped his coil of rope and began to cross the clearing toward the house. Manmohan set his book aside, rising from the chair to his full height, ignoring his cane resting against the wall.
“It will be fine,” he said the moment his son entered the living room.
“The truck will not make the hills,” Darshan replied.
“It will.”
His son stood there a moment longer, then finally turned to go, doubt etched deep into the lines on his brow. Manmohan heard him jog down the wooden steps, saw him again come into view through the window as he returned to the flatbed. Chandan and Vasant, both of whom would also go on the delivery, each spoke, and Darshan shook his head in reply, bending to pick up two large blocks of wood. He set them in the truck’s cabin and wiped his hands on his trousers. Chandan glanced once toward the house, and although the urge to move away from the window was strong, Manmohan remained resolutely where he was.
~ ~ ~
Manmohan dozed on the couch, halfway between sleep and consciousness. His sensed his tongue, a dry, meaty wedge in his mouth like a thick sheaf of sandpaper. An insistent finger jabbed at his shoulder, but he was not sure if it was real or from a dream.
He recognized an urgent voice. “Manmohanji,” it said.
Swallowing, trying to generate some lubrication in his mouth, Manmohan opened his eyes to see Chandan standing over him. “You should be with Darshan,” he said, slowly sitting up, confused. He searched around for his book.
“Ji, the truck broke down.”
Finding the Psalm of Peace on the floor, Manmohan bent to retrieve it. “Say again,” he said.
Chandan paused to catch his breath. “She stalled around the bend of a hill about five kilometers west, just shy of a ravine.”
Manmohan slowly turned his gaze to the millworker, eyes sharpening. “Impossible,” he said flatly.
“Ji—”
“What did he do to her?”
“Nothing, ji.”
<
br /> “He pushed her too hard,” Manmohan said, standing, reaching for his cane, irritated that he was not more surprised by the circumstances. “He did not ride her slowly enough.”
“No, ji. He—”
“She can manage in second gear if you take her up slowly. He rushed her up the hill. I have told him never to do that.”
Chandan tightly shut his mouth, anger dancing in his flushed cheeks.
“Get Sabar and the other flatbed,” Manmohan told him, waving him off. “Now is not a good time to miss deliveries.”
They approached the site, turning around the bend of the steep rise to see the rear tires of the overloaded truck resting precariously against the two wooden blocks Darshan had packed. The front tires were suspended an inch above the pavement, the weight of the load threatening to flip the vehicle in a back somersault down the ravine.
“Bapu!” Darshan called out from where he was perched on the hood of the vehicle, attempting to balance the weight.
Manmohan climbed out of his truck and looked down the ravine, at the craggy rough surface of it, then assessed the pressure on the back tires of the flatbed. He quickly turned at the sound of another truck pulling up the hill, which grew louder from around the bend until finally he recognized Vasant signaling from the passenger seat and saw the large, heavy outline of Mohan behind the wheel.
Gently pulling to a stop, his eldest son lumbered out of his seat to greet them.
Manmohan spun sharply to Darshan. “You should not have sent for him.”
“Oi,” Mohan said loudly, coming toward the broken flatbed.
Manmohan stepped in front of him. “They are my customers.”
“I did not come to take your customers,” Mohan replied, his expression indecipherable.
It took Manmohan a second to understand, and then he violently shook his head. He shoved Mohan, hands sinking into that soft flesh, satisfied when his son stumbled backwards. “It was not me. I did not send for you. I will never give you even the smallest chance to fix it.”