by Amrit Chima
“A song about birds, and their flight to God,” Darshan told Sonya.
He sat on the floor, clapping with Jai, not aware if his daughter joined him, or if she retreated to the other room with the nurse. He clapped until his mother stopped singing, his palms throbbing with gratitude.
Jai passed away soon after that day, at the age of eighty-seven. Reflecting on her life, it bothered Darshan tremendously that he had been the one to visit her regularly and consistently, to cup her face in his palms when she grew afraid, to wipe her mouth after she ate, to hear the stories and burdens of her life. And still, he had not been there when she died, had been too late, the drive too long. She had spent her final moments in the hospital with Navpreet, Livleen, and Mohan positioned around her hospital bed.
During nights Darshan now shuddered in his bed as he foresaw a future in which there would be no one to caress his head, no one to cut his food and feed him, to wrap his neck with a shawl when the evenings were chilly, at the end left to die alone or with those who only meant to undo him.
His only consolation was that Jai had lost her memory, that she did not know he had not been there, that for her there was music and her voice raised in song.
~ ~ ~
For Sale, the sign read, its post dug into Jai’s flowerbed, a wreckage of torn petals and snapped stems withering in the sun against the splinted wood. Her house had been emptied. Hastily, it appeared, by the scuffmarks along the walls, the debris of packing tape and the minutiae of life scattered about the carpet—stray buttons, safety pins, scraps of paper with long-forgotten reminders. The stench of Darshan’s siblings still lingered in all the things that were not there: his mother’s fine fabrics from India, the family photos, the paintings of gurus, her gold sets of jewelry, her furniture and linens, her spice jars and flour-coated rolling pins.
Sonya’s mouth hung slack with shock, her hands held open. She had come to help him retrieve Manmohan’s plywood box and chest, but those, too, were gone, as were all the tools and paraphernalia from Fiji, the whole of the garage archive swept away into trash bins. There had been letters, too, Khushwant’s letters, most still unread, their Gurumukhi script difficult and slow to decipher, records of their history now lost.
Darshan circled the barren landscape of the garage, his thin, cotton-socked feet unprotected from the cement cold, certain that nothing stored in this room had been preserved, that it had all been discarded, that somewhere in a field of garbage, the Toor heritage had been flung atop a heap, was now loosened and fluttering in the Bay breezes.
Curling his lip with disgust, he stood in the center of that frigid space, overcome by the profundities of this loss, stiff and hollowed out.
“Dad.” Sonya’s voice gently tugged at him.
He waved his hand, shooing her back.
“Dad, it’s okay. We don’t have to stay here.”
He shook his head. “No.”
Shivering, she reached to press the button to the sectional door, to let in some sun.
“Don’t touch that,” he said grimly.
She froze. “Dad—”
“Don’t touch anything. Get out of your dream world. Pay attention.”
“I was only cold.”
“This is not about you.”
She stood there, hand lowering slowly to her side. The look of baffled hurt on her face cinched between her eyebrows fueled his own stinging misery. “I gave you all so much,” he said, his voice like pebbles pelted at her. He gestured about the house. “Them. You and Anand. You all gave me so little in return.”
Her brow softened, as if more certain with her position, not shocked, like she had known something like this would come, like she was sorry for him. “We give, Dad. Me and Anand. A lot. You just never notice because you always want more, because you expect something different. We’re us. We aren’t you.”
~ ~ ~
Navpreet’s heels clacked on the pavement sidewalk in a foreboding rhythmic beat, the sound growing louder. Darshan surrendered to it, to the swing of her skirt, the haughty flair of her lashes thick with mascara, her dyed and wind-blown hair, to the grim hatred surging through her blood, which told him she hated herself much more.
“Hey,” she said, brisk, ready for business.
“So?” he asked her as Mohan and Livleen approached, not far behind.
“It’s on the market. We are waiting for a buyer.”
Darshan averted his eyes from the building. “Okay,” he replied.
Mohan tucked in the hem of his shirt, which insufficiently covered the expanse of his gut. He looked at the apartment complex with distaste. “You are the only one who wants to keep it.”
Navpreet flicked her finger against a tag of graffiti on the wall. “You can buy it, minus your share of the probate.” She removed a wet wipe from her purse and cleaned her finger. “We’ll give you a good price.”
Reaching into his pocket, Darshan took out a spare set of keys to the building and handed them to his sister for the real estate agent. “We’ve been through this already. I don’t know yet.”
“We won’t wait forever,” Navpreet told him.
Livleen stood off to the side against a parking meter, hands stuffed deeply into her coat pockets, her graying hair tossed up untidily. She would not look at Darshan.
They all turned to go. Darshan reached for Navpreet, touching her forearm. “Wait.”
She halted, the contact startling but not angering her. Passing her keys to Livleen and Mohan, she gestured down the block at the car. “I’ll meet you in a second,” she told them.
When they were gone, Darshan shoved his hands in his trouser pockets, his left folding around an old tape recorder he had long ago found in his father’s archive. “You threw away a box and a chest, from the garage,” he told her. “They were Bapu’s.”
“It was all junk.”
“It wasn’t junk.”
She tossed her wet wipe on the sidewalk and ground it into the cement with the ball of her foot. “Anything else?”
His hand squeezed more tightly around the recorder, his fingers caressing the buttons. “Why did you steal Bebe’s money?”
She smiled rigidly, scoffing. “I didn’t.”
“She told me once. She told me that she loved you.”
Navpreet’s face flushed. She turned to go, but instead spun around on one of her heels. “Bapu and Bebe would never have chosen me over you. I had to depend on myself. You would have gotten everything.” She stiffly clutched her purse, terror beyond the façade of her rage.
As he looked at her, he was struck by a swift and heated exhaustion. He released his grip on the recorder. “Maybe,” he finally said. “I don’t know.”
~ ~ ~
Moonlight inched across the living room carpet in Pacifica, penetrating through wisps of fog, creating eerie shadows in the dark. Downstairs, Elizabeth slept. “Don’t go,” she had sleepily beckoned when he first tried to slip away. Fitting his head in the crook of her arm, he had rested for a time, eyes pressed into the soft flesh of her bicep until her breathing again became regular. But he had not been able to stay, his mind aching with too much thought.
He tucked his bare feet up onto the sofa now, wrapped a throw blanket around his legs and gazed at the moonlit floor, his father’s tape recorder on the armrest. He listened to his mother’s voice, to the beat and measure of her words, her hum, her song. I am empty, she had said before forgetting again, before returning to her music.
With a click, he stopped the tape.
Turning on the end table lamp, the room was ignited with color, shadows dispelled. Untangling himself from the blanket, he rose, went to the kitchen, searching for snacks, for something to fill him. He rummaged through the pantry, dismissing the row of cereals, Elizabeth’s stash of chocolates, the dried fruit and nut mixes, the box of Indian sweets he had recently purchased in Berkeley.
He crossed the kitchen to the fridge, reached out and grabbed the hilt of the door. His eye snagged a corner of famili
ar handwriting behind a mess of menus, photos, and souvenirs held up by magnets. Gingerly, he shimmied the paper out from beneath the others and held it up under the halogen track lighting. He had forgotten about this, last year’s father’s day gift. Sonya’s gift, after she had returned from New York. A yearly calendar condensed onto one page, Dad written in blue felt on every weekend from June to December.
He had not given it more than a perfunctory glance when she gave it to him, this gift of time, of devotion, of nothing lacking.
Dad, Dad, Dad.
~ ~ ~
He slept. Flinching, he reached out to feel rough bark at his fingertips. Relaxing now, he then looked up at the deep blue Pacific sky from the base of his coconut tree. Tactically he assessed the bark for the best positioning of his feet. After blowing into his palms, he heaved himself up. Quickly and agilely he scampered to the top, grabbing hold of a palm branch, wriggling his way into the tuft. The tropical air filled his lungs as he settled into a comfortable position. Jungle plant life carpeted the island, spanning from the ocean to the inland volcanic ranges. The sparkling corrugated iron homes lay squat within the verdant foliage. In the distance the tops of Suva’s five-story buildings poked through the trees. Beyond the city the blue waters of the Pacific nestled against the coast.
Shading his face from the bright sun, squinting, he searched for landmarks: his school, Colonial War Memorial hospital, Penitentiary Hill, the roads he had traveled in his Falcon, the river where he had so often played, the tractor on which Navpreet had once tried to teach herself how to drive, his one-room shack in the jungle, the main house where he had once been left to die.
Smoke now rose from the cracks and seams of that house, the building’s walls aflame.
His entire family, miniature creatures, scurried outside shouting warnings. The smoke buffeted upward, a plumage of black rising toward his tree tuft, filling his nostrils with stinging ash. Navpreet was panicking, alone in her room, waiting for someone to save her. But no one came. She grabbed her dolls and fled. Jai carried Livleen, who was a rigid rod of arms and legs, unbending and unyielding to her mother’s protective touch. Jai shouted at her, but her cries could not penetrate the glassy stiffness of her daughter’s eyes. In the chaos Mohan absconded on a motorcycle, nearly colliding with Manmohan, who from a safe distance stared in horror at his house as it melted down into the soil. Mohan rode farther away down the road, the engine spitting angry fumes. He drove past Navpreet, who had climbed up onto the tractor, spinning it around in an endless circle, frozen in fear. Finally skidding to a stop, Mohan glanced behind him at the house with helpless and powerless love.
A man stood on the road nearby, face stern. Leaning forward, struggling to focus his eyes in the thickening smoke, Darshan recognized him.
Baba Singh held out his hand in a gesture of greeting.
Darshan began to cough, waving the acrid smoke from his face. The fire swelled, expanding. It ate up Manmohan’s books, consuming with greedy swiftness. It burned all the secrets in the rafters, moving beyond the house to the stacked lumber in the clearing. Jai ran furiously back inside to save her husband’s books, to rescue his secrets, and then Darshan could no longer see her. The fire liquefied the corrugated iron rooftop. It spread up the hill, incinerating Manmohan’s garden of breadfruit trees and chilies, yucca and taro. The flames ravaged the entire jungle, gathering at the base of the coconut tree, slowly working their way up, licking the soles of Darshan’s dangling bare feet.
Shouting incoherently into the roar of the inferno, trying to make his voice heard above the deafening noise, face lit by flaring reds and oranges and moistened by heat, Darshan plucked a coconut from the palm tuft. Staring into the flames that now engulfed the whole island, with all the might of his skinny boyhood frame, he heaved the coconut into the fire where he knew it was needed.
~ ~ ~
Darshan’s palm burned as he held his mug of coffee. The morning was brisk, the heat only just kicked on. He stood at the window, gazing at the large hill swelling behind the house, at the triangle of ocean view to his left. Sonya would be awake soon and this made him nervous. In the kitchen, Elizabeth added a sizzle of onions to a pan of heated butter, preparing eggs. The aroma thawed his hurt.
“Dad,” his children had long ago asked at Howard Street, pulling at Darshan’s trousers with little hands. “Did you build this place?”
“No, kids. It was here when I bought it.”
Disappointed, both of them mulled over the truth of those words, then frowned, conflicted. Anand had spoken first. “But you replaced pieces of it.”
Darshan considered this. “Yes, I suppose so.”
“Then those parts are yours. You built them,” Sonya told him. “And one day you will build the whole thing.”
They had always been such clever children.
A ringing interrupted his thoughts. Setting his coffee down on the windowsill, he went in search of his phone. Passing the stairwell, he heard Sonya moving about downstairs, the bathroom door closed, the shower spout opened, water through the pipes. She would be upstairs and ready soon. He wondered if he should say something to her.
He found his phone in the living room between the sofa cushions, held it up, squinting without his glasses. After such prolonged and hushed strain, centuries of withheld sentiments, Darshan regarded Anand’s name lighting up the screen. His whole life and future before him, tangled with his children’s, he raised the phone to his ear, murmuring the same words, over and over.
Do not speak.
Listen.
Epilogue
Family Tree
Darshan rubbed the soft skin of his head in the bald center where even wisps no longer grew. The light seemed like morning light, pale yet warm. He glanced around his bedroom, searching for something. Betrayed by his memory, however, he could not recall what. The curtains for the sliding glass door had been pulled aside. He smiled contentedly at the sunlight streaming through the double panes. The light settled onto the deck beyond the glass in a morning shimmer. The mattress beneath him embraced the contours of his body as he spread his arms wide, reaching for this light.
His hand fell against the other side of the bed. A surge of confusion made him sit upright. Elizabeth was not beside him. Her pillow had been fluffed, her side of the comforter smoothed. Her nightstand was in its usual disarray, objects on it filmy with dusty residue. He listened carefully for the sound of her in the house, the creak of a floorboard, the smell of coffee. Nothing.
Sighing, he swung his thin legs out from under the covers to go and find her. He slid his pallid and icy feet into his house slippers, reached for his cane, and shakily rose. “Honey,” he called out.
In the hallway, at the foot of the staircase, he paused, waiting for her response. “Elizabeth,” he called again.
He had forgotten to put on his robe. A chill sparked a flash of goose pimples across his skin.
“Anand! Sonya!”
He cocked his head. From upstairs he heard a flock of birds walking across the rooftop’s wooden shingles.
The heels of his feet were exposed at the back of his slippers, his pajama bottoms hiked too high, a draft skulking up the cuffs. He returned to his warm blankets.
In bed, he again contemplated the light on the deck, how it rested in and around the grooves of the wooden slats, the caramel brown color it produced, so different from the color in shade: a desolate, drab gray.
Allowing his eyes to soften, the unfocused sunlight expanded in his vision, becoming more and more brilliant. His eyelids weakened, and he let them fall shut.
Sweat soaked the sheets under his body. He shivered, taking great pains to breathe.
“I am happy to see you awake again,” Baba Singh said, holding a coconut in his open palm. He regarded it for a time without saying more, consuming the details of it, the hairy shell, the warped ovular shape. Finally, he spoke: “A very good friend of mine once told me that this is life. It is everything any one man needs to survive.”<
br />
Nodding gravely, Darshan said, “Yes.”
“It seemed to me that you should know this.” Baba Singh noted the sack of toy tools hugged close to Darshan’s side as he placed the coconut under his grandson’s free arm.
“Were you ever able to open it?” Darshan asked.
Baba Singh sighed, turning away. After a time, he asked, “Where is Manmohan?”
“With Mohan. I suppose they need to discuss matters.”
“I loved them. My sons, my grandsons,” the old man said with remorse. “But it was too hard. I needed to be forgiven for something. A very bad thing.”
Darshan squeezed Baba Singh’s hand and shivered again, tightening his jaw against the combination of cold and hot fevering his body.
“I built a two-story house in my village,” his grandfather continued. “I thought it would make things easier.”
“I built something, too,” Darshan told him. “It was like yours, a place for me to go for a while, to be by myself.”
“Yes,” the old man replied in sudden awe. “I remember. I saw it. I was there.”
“You helped me to build it.”
Baba Singh shook his head. “I never helped anyone in my life.”
Darshan curled his arm around the coconut. “There were others who also helped. I had to let them.”
Baba Singh released his grandson’s hand and leaned back in his chair.
“Dadaji?” Darshan asked, now holding his cotton sack over the side of the mattress, letting it hang on the edge of his fingertips, allowing it to slowly slip until it fell from his hand.
“Hmm?”
“Why the same name? Did the name matter so much?”
“It was yours.” The old man shrugged. “It was always your name.”
Acknowledgements
My mother Margaret Mary (Peggy) Barr Chima for knowing who I was before I did, yet nonetheless allowed me to sort it out on my own.