by Amrit Chima
“I did not kill him,” Darshan said quietly.
Stunned, her eyes grew wide, tightening. “I am a doctor,” she choked, appealing to the others, who watched frozen in their seats.
“You did not know his favorite book. He could not let you decide his fate.”
“He read everything,” she said, her voice cracking. “He loved all books.”
“Maps,” Darshan told her, “of stars, of the earth, of where we were, of where we might be going. Not the ones with words, not the ones he could read, only those he could study.”
She shook her head, refusing to believe him. Softly clasping his hand on her shoulder, she recoiled, but only slightly, still trying to hold her ground. He stared at her for a moment, his feelings of affection and suffering unguarded, hurled at her like weapons of defense. And then he tenderly shoved her aside.
~ ~ ~
“Who is it there?” Jai asked, squinting, shielding her eyes against the daylight that drowned the front porch. “Do we know each other?”
She seemed shrunken and surly, the unfocused medley of her thoughts interrupted as she was forced to invoke some measure of lucidity now that company had arrived.
“It is only me, Bebe,” Darshan said. He carried with him a mini tape recorder from the garage archive, as well as the tin of Khushwant’s letters and the debt ledger he had found in his father’s chest, planning to spend the afternoon deciphering them. He stacked everything on his knees as he sat in a plastic chair next to his mother.
She considered his face for a moment. “Yes,” she said less churlishly, turning away, gazing at the flowered front yard.
The sun arched over the house to the front, dappling the driveway with light that filtered through the small, scattered lemon trees. He placed the tape recorder on the railing in front of them.
She guardedly scrutinized it.
“It was Bapu’s,” Darshan told her.
“Is it important?”
“No, not very. I am not sure it even works.”
“He would have tested it,” she told him, “when he was ready for it.”
“Yes,” Darshan nodded, “he would have.” He inserted a blank tape from the packet he had also found in the garage, pressed the record button.
A car hurtled past, too fast, momentarily slicing through the afternoon peace. Darshan relaxed into his chair, his hands over the ledger and tin. Tapping her sandaled foot on the cement, Jai began to hum. He recognized the tune as one she had hummed often in Fiji while cooking or milking the cows. Absently, he began to hum along with her. She laughed, delighted.
“Good boy,” she said contentedly. “There is always music to hear, to catch in the waves around us.” She then lowered her voice. “My other children cannot hear this music.” Her lip quivered. “But I love them, all of them. I know your bapu will never forgive me for saying it.” She turned to look confusedly through the window into the house, trying to recall something important. Her face twisted slightly with sorrow as she remembered.
“There is nothing to forgive,” he told her, thinking of his own children, of Sonya’s last phone call, when they had spoken but said little, of Anand’s bitter refusal to make eye contact when something was asked of him, angry sentiments seething just under the surface.
Jai resumed her humming.
Darshan thought that his mother had no business in this new century, in this year 2000. She was a woman of another era, who fed chickens; who balanced a clay pot of water on her head, carrying it from the village well to her mud hut; who baked fresh bread and rolled dough for rotis; who knew the secrets of clarified butter; who bathed herself and her children in the river. She knew this earth, had lived in it and with it, the seasons guiding the course of her life as she hummed the folk songs of her village.
He listened, and as she began to form words he used the melody of her voice to tether him to his childhood. “‘Dhan bhag mera,’ peepal ache,‘kurian ne pingan paaian.’—‘How blessed am I,’ says the peepal tree, ‘that the girls have hung rope swings on me.’ ‘Sawan vich kurian ne Pinghan asman Charhian.’—‘In the month of Sawan, girls have swung their swings sky high.’”
She again laughed, pointing at a mole on her chin. “A tattoo. Before I married your father. It was my secret. He never knew.” And again, as suddenly as before, her face fell, horror spreading across her wrinkled brow, and then she started to weep.
“No, Bebe,” Darshan said, taking her weathered hand, pity tightening his chest. “There is no need to cry.”
“I am empty,” she told him. “Everything is gone.”
He dabbed her face with his handkerchief. “It is not true.”
“Navpreet gave me a pen. I signed a paper.”
“What paper?”
“From the bank.”
He tried his best not to let the heat of anger creep into his face, remaining calm as he caressed his mother’s cheeks. He forced a smile.
Reassured, she stopped crying, so he folded his handkerchief and tucked it back into his pocket. Another car tore down the street in a dangerous hurry, like they all were on this stretch of road. He switched off the recorder.
“Such a sweet girl and so sad,” his mother said. “She brushed my hair.” She sniffed, adjusted her chuni over her white hair. Smoothing her salwaar, she again began to hum, soothingly, like the breeze touching his face.
The melody drifted on the wind. He looked down at the tin of letters and debt ledger in his lap. Settling the tin on the ground next to his chair, he then opened the leather cover of the book. He ran his index finger along the columns, flipping the pages, one after the other, happening upon a notation for a Toor, a man named Lal Singh. There was a scribble next to the name he could not read, a line through the numbers canceling out the remainder of dues, perhaps a reevaluation, a setting of matters straight and right.
He raised his head, gazing out beyond the flowers and lemon trees to the street.
It had to be. They could not all be subject to the travesty of greed, swindled and made to look like fools.
The Apartments on Howard Street
2004–2005
Family Tree
South of Market, the building on Howard Street knew Darshan’s touch. For over three decades it had survived under the care of only one man, and as a result had sometimes faltered on its one-hundred-and-ten-year-old limbs, stained by fuel emissions, pissed on by vagrants, tagged by young thugs. But Darshan had always managed to give it fresh life, revive it with coats of paint, with new and gleaming plumbing fixtures, wiring, heating, polished flooring, and caulking sealant to fight the chills that shuddered through its arthritic joints. He had carried the grit of this building’s maintenance on his back, wood slivers under his nails. Only he possessed the instinct needed to care for its corridors, its walls and supporting beams, to maintain its vitality after being afflicted by the wear and tear of tenants, of wailing babies, of hysterical children, of drunkards and drug addicts, of rock musicians and old hoarders.
But there was something new in his body now, a grain of fatigue of a different sort, the kind that spoke of age and limitation. It promised to intensify as he got older, to deplete him. He wanted his children to be sensitive to this, for Sonya and Anand to develop their own bond with the roots he had bled so much to establish. He wanted them to love this building, to come and preserve it with him until they could carry it forward on their own.
And Sonya did come, returned from New York to live again with her parents. Twenty-seven years old, she had finally parted from those unconventional dreams that had stirred such rebellion within her, that caused her to go so far from him, to waste so much time, drastically reducing her chances of survival in a world that did not understand or respect her artistic impulses. He could not help but measure her lack of success against Anand’s great and pragmatic achievements. That future tycoon, that business mogul, so silent and calculating in his maneuvers upward, money flooding his accounts, the best form of safety and independence.
<
br /> Still, where was Anand now? Where had he ever been?
Darshan’s brow contracted inward, eyes tight. He entered the front room of a recently vacated Howard Street unit, stepping around Sonya as she worked on the task he had delegated to her. Rankled, he crossed his arms, scrutinizing her efforts, her method, the sloppy disregard for detail as she plastered over the many nail depressions in a piece of sheetrock he had just hung.
She paused in his presence, her spatula lingering over an exposed nail. “You don’t need to supervise.”
“A little less,” he told her. “It should be subtle.”
She stepped back, unenthusiastically examining the sheetrock.
“You see?” he asked, pointing. “Too much. Too thick.”
She nodded, scrapping her spatula over a few nail dimples to clear away the excess paste.
He frowned, running a light finger over the areas where the plaster had already dried like tiny, horizontal stalactites. “You can find sandpaper down in the garage.”
He retreated to the hallway where he had left his electrical kit. Loosening the buzzer from the wall, he began to strip the wires, muscles stiff, mind steeled against a vague sense of insult.
“It is a very subjective thing,” Elizabeth had told him not long after Sonya returned home.
“She didn’t publish her book,” he said, affronted. It was all that had mattered, that mattered still.
“You can’t be angry about it. I’ve read her book. You should read it.”
“It has an awful tone, so emotional and self-indulgent.”
“It isn’t frivolous,” his wife had said. “She worked very hard on it.”
“Only for herself.”
“That’s unfair,” Elizabeth replied crossly. But he had not been sorry.
He worked in the unit for hours. The delicate fingers that had once sutured bodies, that had once caressed the skin of his newborn children, gripped and twisted the handles of his tools with a surgeon’s grace. But there was no more satisfaction in it. A leavened unease mounted within him as the day progressed, intensified by a sudden and consuming hunger that finally made him throw down his tools and flex his tired fingers.
Sonya was still in the front room, her task unfinished. She stood close to the wall, squinting at her work to consider the result, a piece of sandpaper in her fist. He again ran his hand over the wall, over its now rather impressively smooth surface. She waited, but as he looked at her, at the eagerness to please, to do right, he could only wonder why it had taken her so long to learn.
His stomach grumbled insistently. “Lunch?” he asked, already turning from the room.
Dropping the sandpaper, the worn sheet of it fluttering heavily to the floor, she followed.
They placed their orders at the counter of a Mexican restaurant on the street corner. Grabbing her cup of sweetened rice water, Sonya selected a booth seat by the window. She stared outside at the light flow of traffic down Howard Street, gnawed at her straw, picked at some dried plaster on her forearm.
“How is it?” Darshan asked, sitting across from her.
She looked down at her drink. “This? Good.”
He popped open his can of Coke, poured some into the paper cup of ice the cashier had given him. “How’s Anand?” he asked.
“Good.”
“Big day approaching.”
“Yeah.”
“He and Roshna pick a wedding cake yet?”
“Not yet, I don’t think.”
“I told him last week, nothing too pricey. It’s all the same in the end, and we’ve got a lot of people to feed.”
“He knows.”
“I’m waiting for his final guest list.”
Sonya pushed aside her drink as the food arrived. “He told me he was waiting for yours.”
Darshan sucked on his straw, Coke rinsing through his mouth. He watched his daughter slice open her burrito with a plastic knife. When did this happen? he wondered, glancing over at the swinging lip of the trash can, at the stack of trays above it. All this rubbish, all these low-maintenance accoutrements that dried out any sense of culture. He looked at his food, not sure it was really Mexican.
“Dev and Indirjit’s families are coming,” he told her.
“Does Anand know Dev and Indirjit?” she asked.
“I know them.”
“He and Rosh wanted something intimate.”
“He never told me that.”
“I think he did.”
He did not answer, but leveled his gaze with hers, reminding her who she was speaking to.
Unperturbed, she said, “This must be why you eloped.”
“Different time,” he replied. “A very different set of circumstances, something I earned.”
“They almost did it,” she told him. “Anand and Roshna. Almost went to Cabo.”
Darshan squeezed a lime over his meat, the spray of acidic juice coating his plate. He set the lime aside and said, “But they didn’t. They didn’t earn it.”
~ ~ ~
A cord of brake lights stretched boundlessly across the Bay Bridge, beyond to Berkeley, down Highway 80, likely all the way to Tahoe, slicing straight through the entirety of America. Darshan scanned the traffic, the stop-and-go flash of red torturing his insides, making him restless and peevish.
He sensed the strained calm of Sonya beside him, and his eyebrows sunk low with indignation. Her presence on this freeway, trapped by traffic, was a statement of reposed and self-assured martyrdom. He was certain of that by the way she focused her gaze just somewhat to the right, chin raised a little with the same defiance that had taken her to Los Angeles and then to New York. He knew that chin, that bunch of jaw muscle flexed against the downward pressure of her teeth.
“You don’t have to go,” he had told her in the morning on his way out to see Jai.
“No,” she replied, tugging her eyes from her computer screen, a flicker of annoyance flashing across her face. “I want to go.”
“You seem unsure. She’s your grandmother. You shouldn’t be unsure.”
Snapping her laptop shut, she had said, “I’m not unsure.”
The oncoming traffic on the opposite side of the freeway divider flowed like river water. Darshan ignored it, forcing his eyes to look directly forward. “Another story?” he asked her now.
“Hmm?”
“Your computer. Earlier.”
“Nothing special,” she replied, still not shifting her gaze.
“Job hunting?”
Her jaw muscle rippled. “A little.” Pressing her lips together for a moment, she then asked, as if she had been pondering it for a very long time, “Why don’t Anand and I speak Punjabi?”
A tsunami of memories smacked across Darshan’s mind, all the lost time, the supplication to make his family happy, to satisfy their whims, to settle them all here with more than just the slew of useless things they had brought with them from Fiji, the compromises, the tightwire he had walked between them and his wife and children, the ache in the soles of his feet from so much balancing.
“Is that what you wanted?” he asked as she finally turned to look at him.
“It just would have been nice, not feeling on the outside. Dadiji is my grandmother, but she doesn’t know me. We don’t know each other.”
The traffic gave a little as they approached Oakland, brake lights easing, their speed increasing. “If you had spoken Punjabi, would you have stayed?”
She did not respond, but he could sense her mulling it over. “Anand tried to teach himself once,” she said after a minute.
For some reason he found this flattering. “Did he? Why did he stop?”
She shrugged. “It made him angry to teach himself.”
As swiftly as he had been impressed, her words punctured and deflated him. They said no more during the drive.
The familiar smell of spice and clean linens embraced them as they entered Jai’s house a short time later. Darshan removed his shoes and went to his mother, that old and c
rinkled woman, grayed and toothless from age, memory ravaged by disease, but still the only one who had held him at birth, humming tunes in his ear. Seated on the edge of the sofa with the nurse, she smiled dreamily.
“I am here, Bebe,” he told her.
“Darshan?” his mother asked, pointing at Sonya, face darkening with sudden suspicion. “Who is that?”
“Sonya, Bebe. This is Sonya.”
She laughed then. “Sonya and Anand. Elizabeth and Darshan.” She clapped her hands to the music playing in her head, then raised her voice in sudden song.
“Sada chirian da chamba ve, babal assan ud jana. Sadi lammi udari ve, babal kehre des jana. Tere mehlan de vich vich ve, babal dola nahin langda. Ik it puta devan, dhiye ghar ja apne. Tera baghan de vich vich ve, babal charkha kaun katte? Merian kattan potrian, dhiye ghar ja apne. Mera chhuta kasida ve, babal das kaun kade? Merian kadhan potrian, dhiye ghar ja apne. Mera chhuta kasida ve, badal das kaun kade? Merian kadhan potrian, dhiye ghar ja apne.”
“What is it?” Sonya asked, clearly ill at ease. “What does it mean?”
Darshan listened.
Ours is a flock of sparrows, dear father.
We’ll fly away
on a long, long flight,
we know not to which land we shall go.
Through your mansion’s door, dear father,
the doli won’t pass.
I’ll have a tali tree uprooted.
Go, for that is your home, O daughter.
In your mansion, dear father,
Who will do the spinning?
My granddaughters will spin.
You go to your home, O daughter.
There is my leftover embroidery;
Who will finish it, father?
My granddaughters will do it, O daughter,
You must depart, for that is your home.