Darshan

by Amrit Chima

  Forty-five minutes later they rounded the corner onto Livleen and Taran’s street. Ahead, a car pulled out of his sister’s driveway and came towards them. As it passed, Darshan saw Navpreet through the lightly tinted windows, her sunglasses on, rummaging for something in the middle console. She lifted her head, gripping the steering wheel with both hands, but did not look their way. The sun glinted off her lipstick. Irritated, he watched her through his rearview mirror as she disappeared around the corner. She had seen them, he knew.

  Taran opened the door. His smile was wide, exaggerated. He shook Darshan’s hand, awkwardly patting Elizabeth on the shoulder, inviting them in. Darshan turned his head toward the scent of garlic and chili coming from the kitchen. The children ran off to the nursery where Dhillon was playing in a pen.

  Livleen poked her head through the kitchen entrance, forced a smile, then untied the knot of her apron and greeted them in the living room. She allowed both Darshan and Elizabeth to embrace her, but her back was stiff, unresponsive. “Would you like something to drink?” she asked, tossing the apron on the loveseat. “A pot of tea is ready.”

  “Thank you,” Darshan nodded.

  “I’ll help,” Elizabeth said, following Livleen toward the kitchen.

  “No, I’ll only be a minute.”

  She returned with a tray of mugs, a bowl of sugar cubes at the center. She put the tray on the coffee table but did not pass the mugs around.

  “We saw Navpreet leaving,” Darshan said, dunking two cubes into a cup and handing it to Elizabeth.

  “Yes,” Livleen murmured.

  “I’m sorry she wasn’t able to stay for lunch.”

  “She had to work.”

  Taran reached for a mug. “Speaking of, I hear Kaiser has promoted you,” he said to Darshan. “Navpreet says you head the lab now.”

  Darshan nodded. “I suppose it was inevitable.”

  “I am surprised you have time to run the lab,” Livleen said.

  He smiled ruefully. “I had to make time.” He winked at Elizabeth, playful. “The kids and the wife are expensive, difficult to keep satisfied.”

  Livleen reclined into the sofa cushions, her lips twisted in a slightly mocking smile. “How can that be? There has never been a long-term vacancy at Howard, and Navpreet tells me the restaurant has been full. Perhaps you should consider lightening your burdens.”

  Darshan looked at her in astonishment, taken aback by the implication. Her eyes flicked toward Taran who wordlessly stirred his tea.

  “Now wait a minute,” Elizabeth said.

  Darshan gently touched his wife’s forearm to quiet her.

  The room was momentarily silent. They could hear the kids laughing through the baby monitor.

  “Is that what you think?” Darshan asked. “That I take Howard money, that the restaurant is suddenly profitable after Bapu signed it over?”

  She did not answer him.

  “Howard does not belong to me,” he told her, straining to speak softly, conscious of the children. “And you saw what Bapu did to the restaurant. It will never be what it could have been. We’re just trying to pull it out of the mess he buried it under.”

  “It could have been something,” she said in a flat, monotone voice. “I could have made it something.”

  Taken aback, he did not understand her meaning.

  “My food is better than Bebe’s,” she said.

  His heart ached with sudden remorse. Helplessly, he looked at her. In this house, under this suburban roof only a mile from Manmohan and Jai, shared with a husband who could not see her and a son she did not wish for, held up by walls that would never display diplomas or doctorate degrees in her name, her pulse had slowed and no one noticed.

  A timer bell dinged in the kitchen, and she stood. They waited for her, not speaking, listening to the chink of a metal pot lid as it was placed on the ceramic-tiled counter. The smell of bean curry grew stronger—a savory aroma of onion, cloves, coriander, a hint of ginger—the air now spiced and buttery.

  A chef. Better than Jai.

  ~ ~ ~

  Golden streamers crisscrossed overhead, from lamppost to lamppost. They swayed and glittered brilliantly over the masses of Sikhs parading the street toward the Sacramento temple. Flanking the crowd were two unbroken lines of stalls in which families labored to prepare and sell food. Women sweated within them while rolling out dough for roti, flour caked up to their elbows. Their daughters tossed vegetables about in pans, stirring up clouds of humidity containing oil and masala mix. Their husbands stood out front, soliciting customers, holding aloft paper plates of Indian delicacies. Farther down the line, farmers shoved long green sticks of raw sugarcane through a large, industrial press, squeezing out sweet, green water for sale. Children clambered, reaching for cups, begging their fathers for money.

  In the center of the street, the crowd parted in awe for a group of men issuing sonorous battle cries. The men whirled stealthily, spinning their swords, circling each other warily. Each appeared so much like the Hindu god Shiva dancing to the tune of destruction and creation within his ring of steel weaponry. People cheered, mouths full of samosas and pakoras. After a time the men slowed their pace, finally halting. They turned to face their admirers, bowed. Merely an act, a memory of India, a memory of war and self-preservation, of grace. A spring festival to mark the heritage of Sikh fighting prowess. The martial art, gatka, was not needed, not anymore, not here.

  Closer to the temple, the priest could be heard over the speakers, kirtans now modernized, the holy scripture of the gurus extending beyond the prayer hall to the thousands on the street. Inside, the temple was slowly beginning to fill. Junker Singh listened to the priest, dreamily, Sonya on one hip, Anand on the other. “You do not need to understand the words,” he told them when they asked what the priest was saying. “Just listen to the music of it. Goodness can often be encouraged by a beautiful rhythm.” They stroked his beard.

  “You’ll hurt yourself,” Elizabeth told the mechanic.

  “They’ve sprung up like trees,” he replied as he released the children, smiling. He pulled some bills from his pocket, sending them off into the crowd. “Stay together. Bring back sweets for your mother.”

  “You be back in five minutes,” Darshan shouted after them.

  Elizabeth lowered her eyes as several women walked past toward the prayer hall. They contemptuously stared at her, observing her salwaar kameez.

  “A meaningless, self-important game of theirs,” Junker Singh said, looking at Elizabeth. “It cannot be easy.”

  “Will it ever change?” she asked.

  “I think not,” the mechanic replied with regret. “Indians on the whole prefer not to evolve, prefer that in your own country you not be here to offend the purity of the customs we imported.”

  “We’ll go soon,” Darshan told her. “Eat something, then go.”

  Junker Singh peered into the prayer hall. “I am off now, to find my wife.” He shook his head regretfully as he stepped away. “She feeds me so well I can no longer sit on the floor. I have to sit in a chair and avoid meeting eyes with older men in much better shape than I whose wives unjustly deprive them of good food.”

  Darshan grinned as the old man stepped away, his smile weakening when he saw Livleen and Taran at the hall’s entrance. Elizabeth looked sadly at Dhillon clinging to Livleen’s leg. “So big,” she said softly.

  “We should say hi,” Darshan told her.

  “We don’t have to.”

  “She’s my sister.” He moved through the crowd toward the hall.

  Taran’s face brightened in a superficially warm welcome. “Darshan,” he said cheerfully.

  Livleen glanced away, shifting her weight from one leg to the other.

  “Thank you for bringing Bapu and Bebe,” Darshan told her.

  “I don’t need to be thanked,” she replied.

  “I suppose not,” he murmured. “Are they inside?”

  She nodded.

  Sonya and Anand
returned with their sweets. Anand was upset.

  “Hey,” Sonya protested as the boy shoved her.

  “Kids,” Elizabeth said sharply.

  Livleen turned her stolid gaze directly to Darshan. “You did not tell us you were selling the restaurant.”

  “It was time.”

  “Does Bapu know?”

  “Of course.”

  Sonya was crying. “Mommy. Tell Anand to stop hitting me.”

  Elizabeth bent to face the children. “Both of you,” she said. “Behave.”

  “And the money?” Taran asked.

  Darshan shook his head. “Money?”

  “From the sale.”

  “We were in debt. I paid it all off. There is no money.”

  “Taran,” Livleen said, lifting Dhillon up onto her hip. “I am hungry.” She indicated the langar hall where lunch was being served.

  “Mommy,” Sonya said, still crying. “I was being hayve.”

  Elizabeth sighed and kneeled to wipe the girl’s face.

  Livleen pushed through the crowd, her body rigid with fury, Taran close behind. And then Darshan spotted Navpreet standing at the mouth of the langar hall, waiting, craning her neck as she searched the crowd. She relaxed when she saw Livleen nearing. Her eyes then met Darshan’s. She smiled at him, gave a slight patronizing wave before disappearing with Livleen into the hall.

  He did not see either of them again that day. In the evening, after the three-hour-long drive home from Sacramento, he received a call from a clerk at the Greyhound bus depot.

  ~ ~ ~

  Manmohan again looked away from Darshan. The man who had kicked the vending machine now sat, grudgingly eating a bag of nuts. Manmohan slowly surveyed the waiting area, stopping at the ticket clerk who openly stared at them, curious, his mouth frozen mid chew, a nugget of gum pinched between his front teeth. “It is late,” the old man said. “We should go. It is a long way home.”

  Darshan nodded, reaching for his mother’s hand. Jai allowed herself to be helped out of her chair, momentarily leaning into his chest, murmuring repeatedly, “She left us, she left us.”

  Manmohan stiffened, offended by her sniveling, his earlier sympathy spent. “Stop it,” he said tersely. “Stop it.”

  She froze, then straightened, resolutely wiping her face with the back of her hand.

  He rose on his own, refusing assistance. A small piece of weatherworn paper fluttered to the floor from his lap. Darshan bent to retrieve it. Manmohan took it from him, catching his son’s surprise at seeing what was on it, the faded scratch of handwriting, the scribble of Darshan’s phone number.

  Face blank, eyes hooded, Manmohan tucked it away into the front of his flannel coat before leading the way outside to the car.

  Manmohan’s Garden

  1993–1994

  Family Tree

  Vehicles were like children, Junker Singh had once told Darshan, fondly regarding one of his motorcycles, just restored. He ignited the engine and pulled on the throttle. It revved, eager to move. They required constant, devoted care, the mechanic said, a stroke of the gears for encouragement, a whisper of reassurance for better performance and faster speed, to excel beyond their capacity. They were fed oil and petrol, nutrient rich, like vegetables for the body. They gleamed with metallic skin that soon became scraped and bruised with play. They were a salvation. They freed the heart.

  He had propped Darshan on the saddle of that bike, clapping the boy on the back with a rough hand before lovingly sending him down the unpaved Fijian road. But bikes did not engender the same sentimentality for Darshan, who in his fear steered, despite his best efforts, directly into a trench, bending one of the handles as he crashed through the underbrush of the jungle, snapping off the mirror and tearing a gash in the seat.

  Laughing his way down the trench slope, Junker Singh had cried out as if to the trees themselves, “I wish I could still ride! I wish I could take you myself, boy!” Yanking Darshan up, he slapped the dust off the young man’s trousers, checking for broken bones, examining a wound along a cheek downy soft with the first signs of a beard. Looking at the damaged bike with tremendous satisfaction, he had nodded. “Now it has new life in it.”

  So long ago. Darshan regarded his hands, discerning a trace of wrinkles forming on the back, so many lifetimes removed from his childhood, from that day of his first and only ride. He raised his head and gazed before him at the sickroom in which Junker Singh now lay, patiently waiting for death.

  Beside him Manmohan stood, afflicted by an animal fear. The mechanic’s wife had lit incense from a local Turkish shop. The smell infused the hallway. Downstairs, a loop of a kirtan played on the tape deck, the volume low, the priest’s chanting voice somber.

  “He was not always fat,” Manmohan muttered tightly, hunched over, eyes cowled. “He was thin and flat, rode his bike like a dancer.” He retreated from the door, giving ground to his dread.

  Jai slipped her hand into her husband’s, murmuring softly to him. Manmohan listened to her, but his face sagged with remorse and still he did not move.

  “He asked for you, Bapu,” Darshan said gently, taking his father’s arm, feeling the seventy-seven-year-old bones beneath the flannel coat.

  “He thinks he knows what is coming,” Manmohan replied irritably, looking helplessly at the bedroom door. “He always thinks he knows everything.”

  Darshan turned the knob, and Manmohan exhaled, readying himself.

  There were no shades or curtains on the windows, only several holes in the sheetrock where a set of blinds had once been screwed in. The room was bright with direct sunlight, casting Junker Singh’s body, slightly thinner now, in a pastel hue of yellow-white. The mechanic gazed contentedly outside at the thick cotton clouds, at the lime green of the tree leaves. The room had been recently aired and smelled fresh. Several pill bottles were lined tidily next to a glass of water on the nightstand. The old man smiled when the Toors entered, squinting against the sun.

  Manmohan’s demeanor changed. Gathering courage, he bent to kiss his friend’s forehead.

  Junker Singh lightly traced the tips of his fingers over his brow where Manmohan’s lips had brushed the skin. “You are becoming too indulgent,” the mechanic said, his voice no longer booming, but still powerful in its undercurrent.

  “Nothing is ever serious,” Manmohan said. A crack of a smile broke through his stonily pursed lips.

  “That is precisely it,” Junker Singh replied, also smiling. He then looked beyond his friend at Jai.

  “We will come again next week,” she told him.

  “Yes, I would like that.”

  She nodded, refusing to cry, taking Manmohan’s arm and leading him out of the room.

  Junker Singh lifted his age-spotted hand to point at some coins on his bedside table. “Give those to Sonya and Anand,” he told Darshan.

  “They will say they are too old for coins,” Darshan replied in amusement.

  Unruffled, the mechanic lowered his hand onto the duvet. “We both know they are not.”

  Darshan laughed softly, then covered his mouth in apology.

  Junker Singh grinned, a bit drowsily. “Do not worry so much, boy. You should always laugh. If it were you down here, I would be laughing.”

  Smiling, Darshan gathered the coins. “Do you remember that bike?” he asked. “The one I rode?”

  The mechanic chuckled, eyelids drooping. “I remember everything.”

  It was all he said. Tired, he fell asleep, the rise and fall of his chest calm and steady, like an idling engine waiting for the kick of the throttle that would hurl it down the jungle road. Later that evening Junker Singh died in his sleep, his face toward the sliver of moonlight that cut through the glass of his un-curtained window.

  ~ ~ ~

  The garden moved. Worms shifted through the soil, burrowing small holes. Creaks and rustles came from the trees. An apple fell, thudding to the earth. Birds broke from the branches, a flurry of wings, a crash of leaves. The Saturday morn
ing air in Berkeley was bitter, but fresh and calm as the sun peered over the hill beyond the house, promising a day of warmth. Sitting in the shade on a wooden bench along the stucco wall of his parents’ house, Darshan shivered as the line of sun inched across the cement patio.

  The sliding screen door scraped along its tracks as Manmohan shoved it aside with his cane. He glanced sidelong at his son as he came outside, securing the screen shut against flies. “You are here early today,” he said, unraveling the watering hose.

  “Fence needs mending,” Darshan replied.

  “And the others?”

  “Elizabeth took Sonya and Anand to see Victoria.”

  Manmohan twisted the knob on the faucet and swung the hose around, using his thumb to partially stopper the water, generating a spray that he waved over the strawberries. “Sonya tells me she wants to write a book.” He seemed to find the notion deeply gratifying.

  Unsettled, Darshan flipped a metal bucket upside down and propped his feet on it. “She is sixteen,” he replied, as if her age justified his displeasure with the idea.

  Manmohan dropped the hose, which continued to run in the mud. He did not respond. Using his cane, he shook a branch of his almond tree. A number of pods fell, splattering in the saturated soil.

  “The world requires something different of her,” Darshan continued, trying to explain. “Something more sensible.”

  Manmohan gestured toward the almonds. “Not a good crop this year.”

  Removing his feet from the bucket, Darshan brought the pail to the edge of the patio to gather the nuts. He settled them carefully at the bottom.

  “In Fiji I grew cucumbers,” Manmohan said, turning away from the tree. He shuffled slowly toward the bench, sitting with tired relief, his eyes closing momentarily as his muscles settled into position. “At the old house.”

  Darshan wiped his muddy fingers on his trousers, waiting for his father to continue.

  The old man scratched a mosquito bite on his wrist. He was quiet for a time, then reached out a hand. Darshan placed several almonds on his palm.