by Sara Alexi
“I wanted to take everything that was mine so I would never have to go back. I was looking for something, I forget what, it might have been a shoe and I had searched everywhere. I went to look in the bottom of Mum’s wardrobe because that’s where she kept her shoes, so yes, I suppose it was a shoe. Well, you can guess what I found there! They dated back to the day he left.”
She strokes the cat, his fur slicking with the slight sweat of her palms. He has a quiet purr. Juliet takes a deep breath.
“The first one had no address or stamp on it so I presume he left it at the house on the day he left. It explained his position and how he regretted what was happening and how he loved me and that I could not have done anything to help. He said he’d come for me as soon as he found somewhere for us but meanwhile I could ring him at the pub he used to go to. He couldn’t call me because of Mum. The next one had a stamp, two days later. He asked how I was and why I hadn’t called, was I cross, if I was then he understood but he needed to talk to me and a time and a place to meet after school.
“The next letter said he had been to the house but I had been out and Mum had been angry and would I please call him. We moved sometime around then to a tiny flat and I had to move schools. I felt like I was going mad, losing my dad and all my friends at the same time. The flat wasn’t far so I still saw Michelle in the evenings and at weekends, but the letters dated after that were to a post-office box. That’s a box for letters you can have at the post office so no one really knows where you live.”
Aaman nods his understanding and accepts more coffee.
“He said he had called round. He said he had gone to my old school. He said he had even gone into Mum’s work. He said she had said I didn’t want to see him and that I would contact him when I did. Was it true, he asked? You get the picture.
“There were fewer and fewer letters dated over the next three years to that P.O. box. There were three birthday cards and three Christmas cards. All hoped I would like the gifts. I have always wondered what the gifts might have been.”
Juliet stops stroking the cat and picks up her mug, tipping it slightly to look, but not to drink. She sets it back down.
“In one envelope was a Decree Nisei. That’s a divorce paper saying it is final. In the last dated letter, just before my sixteenth birthday was a newspaper clipping. A one-inch report of a pedestrian killed in a car accident and my dad’s name. That’s how I found out my dad was dead.” Juliet feels the weight of her words. She is still, and in that stillness is a crack, followed by a splintering and then the crashing of protective walls, the explosion of repressed emotions.
Aaman's eyes are upon her. She feels vulnerable as she speaks of her father's death and wonders if she can now act tough. But as she utters the words “my dad was dead,” the cat stands up on her lap and rubs its nose against her chin. It is the touch of kindness that undoes the last binding. She makes no noise but rocks backwards and forwards, her shoulders raising and lowering in an impulse action to her silent sobs as she slowly curls into a ball on her chair squeezing the cat onto the floor.
Aaman puts a hand toward her. Saabira cried in his arms for so long, cried until she was asleep and awoke to cry some more. He felt responsible for her pain. He had promised to make her happy, but by creating within her a lifeless child, he had created her greatest pain. Aaman feels tears in his eyes and puts his arm across Juliet’s back, smoothing and stroking. He leans in until his hair touches hers and he makes a gentle sucking, tutting noise, as a mother to a child.
Juliet rocks and noiselessly cries, arms across her raised knees, oblivious of Aaman or his stroking hand, but falling into the rhythm of his calming sounds. The cat jumps onto the back of the seat where Aaman is sitting. He reaches his paws up Aaman’s back and stretches. Receiving no attention, he curls up behind him to sleep. All three of them take all the time they need.
Juliet feels herself calming. She has avoided talking for as many years as lay between her and her loss. She had mentioned it in heartless one-line statements to Michelle here and there, almost as if Michelle were the problem, but she had not visited the emotions. She is surprised that she is still alive in this moment, that she has survived meeting with these feelings, that she has not been engulfed and eaten alive by the enormity of the pain. She half straightens and feels a weight has been removed. She is surprised and straightens some more.
Aaman takes his hand away and sits back, disturbing the cat who feels he has had enough abuse and jumps off to go and sit on the sofa.
“Are you OK?” His voice a whisper that offers the option not to reply.
“Yes, I think so. That was scary.” She stands slowly and makes her way to the bathroom for tissues.
She splashes her face with water. When she returns, there is no colour in her cheeks, but her eyes are alert. Juliet feels she has gained some strength from the morning. She feels brave but fragile.
“Are you OK?” she asks Aaman, who has tears in his eyes.
“Yes, yes. It is sad. Loss. The things we do and don’t do. Life makes so many choices for us.”
Chapter 9
A tear balances on the rim of one of his eyes, his brown irises shimmering under a wash of saline. Juliet is not sure if it is for her or for himself. Or maybe it is for someone else. He gazes across the sitting room and out the front door. Juliet feels the need for some air.
“Shall we sit outside?” She picks up her coffee and the coffee pot and moves towards the light, the promise of warm rays on her face. Aaman follows. The village is still alive with sound. The clarinet music has stopped, the bouzouki has won, but there are many other sources of music scattered around the houses of the village, blending with calls and cheers and shouts. Someone is firing a gun to celebrate. No dogs are barking. No doubt they have all been fed scraps from the roast and lie full length under tables or in olive tree shade.
Juliet puts down the china and briefly re-enters to emerge with two awkwardly large folding chairs. When one hits the door frame, Aaman turns and hurries to help.
“They are a bit more comfortable, I think.” They each unfold a chair and sit. Aaman’s eyes are dry but there is a childlike limpness to his muscles. Juliet holds her head high. Her head feels clear. There is lightness to her movements.
“So we both lost someone at a young age.” Juliet offers him the opening.
Aaman tenses at the invitation. He looks over the wall at the hill beyond the village rooftops. He takes himself far away. Juliet sits for a moment, but feels uncomfortable in this silence. She opens her mouth to speak but changes her mind. She looks for the cat. He is not there. She pours more coffee into her mug and holds it between both hands, sipping it as if it were a cold day.
“Giaan.”
Juliet starts and a drop of coffee drips onto her jeans. She rubs it away before turning to give Aaman her attention.
“That was his name. Giaan.” He leans forward and traces the letters with his finger on the table top in English, slowly, with unpractised movements.
“It means having knowledge of God or heaven. I am not sure how to say in English. It was the first thing I learnt to write in English.” He picks at the edge of the table.
“Then I learnt to spell my name A-A-M-A-N. With two ‘A’s like Giaan.” He writes this with his finger on the table top. The movement becomes more familiar with each stroke.
“Not A-M-A-N, which is the proper way.” He licks his finger and writes again, turning his head this way and that to make the shapes, faint traces of his letters remain on the varnished wood. He returns to running his nail on the table edge.
“How much older than you was he?”
“He was fourteen years old when he died.”
Juliet puts her hand to her mouth. She had imagined him to be older.
“When we were little, he would take me to the pipe at the end of the village and he would bang on the pipe with a stick and the rats would come running out. Then he would try to hit the rats with the stick. The first rat
s out always got away, but the smaller rats, the weak rats, were last out and too slow.”
Juliet puts her coffee down to give her full attention.
“I watched my big brother chase rats and load wood and help with the land and even stand up to my father. I felt like one of the little rats, not beaten but always running behind, never quite fast enough.”
Juliet wanted to say something but the words wouldn’t come.
“My mother she praised Giaan. My father spoke to him like he was an adult. My grandparents would hug me when my parents gave Giaan this attention, like I was still a child. They did not understand what it meant to be small.
“So I tried to be like Giaan, but when he died that day, I could no longer pretend to be something I wasn’t. I had done nothing to save him. I ran too slowly. I felt like I was one of the little rats running out of the pipe, only, I suppose, in this case, you could say, the wrong rat died.”
Juliet shook her head, her throat tightened. She is overwhelmed with the need to help Aaman forgive himself.
Juliet recalls a conversation she once had with her tutor at college one rainy afternoon on campus in the student cafe. They were practising past tenses. Juliet, for some reason, used her father’s letters as the subject and, whilst struggling with the language, she said that she felt she let her dad down by not contacting him all the years he sent the letters. Her tutor replied in a very difficult sentence structure that Juliet asked him to repeat several times to understand. She cannot remember the sentence structure in Greek now, but she remembers it basically said that she could only do what she had the knowledge and power to do at the time. It was only a Greek conversation practice, but the sentence has haunted her and over time relieved, to some degree, her feelings of guilt. Maybe not.
“Aaman, I wouldn’t wish it, but if this event happened again today, would you do the same thing?”
“I am sorry.” Aaman pulls himself from a faraway place. He hadn’t been listening.
“Suppose, just pretend, it happened today, the fire happened today, I wouldn’t want it to but just supposing it did with the same room and the same factory and everything. What would you do this time?”
“You think I haven’t thought this over and over, the different route I could have run to get to the big men faster, stopped him going in a second time, gone in with him and then maybe it would have been me not him. I have played this game many times in my life to bring him to safety, but he is still dead.”
“I can imagine,” Juliet’s voice grows soft. “What I was trying to say was, well, when you were little, you would have thought in one way and as you get older things change. What I was meaning is has what you would do changed over time?”
Aaman leans forward.
“Obviously I realised as I got bigger, I could have done different things. When I learnt, once, about using something very long as a lever to lift a thing to make it light, this would be my dream to return and do this. This would work, even for a small boy. But if I could go back, I would do everything I could, everything.” Tears are on the edge of spilling, one escapes and runs down his face and drips from his chin.
“Exactly, Aaman, you would do everything you could do and you were the same person then, so you would have done everything you could have done then. But we do everything we do with the knowledge we have. I guess that is my point, and this is something my Greek teacher once said to me. We can only do everything we could do with the knowledge we have at the time.”
Aaman considers this.
“What more can anybody do than that?” Juliet continues.
Aaman looks at her.
“After he died, I got a job in a carpet factory. I felt I had to make the money that Giaan was no longer making. It was very long hours for little pay, so I would work seven days a week. It took a long time to walk there and back.”
“And you were how old?”
“I was nine years old when I got the job. I wanted to be a computer programmer. That was my dream. That is every Punjabi boy’s dream. But life makes the decisions. I stayed working there until I was eighteen and then I got a job in a shoe factory. It was official so I got much better pay.” Aaman’s mood seems to lighten a little at the thought.
“It was OK. I forgot my dream of being a programmer. I realised that you cannot escape what will happen. I was twenty one when my mother arranged marriage for me.”
“Did you have a girlfriend? Were you in love with someone else at the time?”
“Oh no, no, no! But to be a husband is a big responsibility. Very serious. She was a distant cousin of my mother’s, and everyone was agreed that it was a good match, not least because she was smaller than me.” Aaman adds a dry laugh.
“She was so scared on our wedding night. So instead of undressing, I sat on the bed and asked her to talk. I tried to be kind and considerate in what I said, and she tried to be brave. We talked until the morning. I have seen married women who are unhappy and afraid. I wanted Saabira to be happy like my mother.
“We talked for many months and held hands and kissed a little. Nothing was changing, and I felt like I was a small rat again and I needed to be a big rat. So one day I got cross and I shouted at her and she came to me to say sorry and she kissed me and there was much passion and the passion stayed. So for a long while I felt good. I had achieved a happy wife and then she became pregnant and all my family were overjoyed. For a while I was not the boy who left his brother in the fire. I was Aaman, with Saabira his wife.
“She was so happy to be with child. She would hold her sari under her belly and say, ‘Do I look more beautiful if you can see the bump more?’ And then she would giggle and fall on me and we would be close. Towards the end, she looked pale, but she was so happy, nothing could make her lie down. I would beg her for the sake of the child to take rest, but she said there would be no rest when the baby came so she would take no rest now.
“I was feeding the bullocks when she cried out. It was one of those noises that you know needs action, like the cry of my brother. I dropped the pail and ran so fast. She had collapsed on the floor and there was water everywhere. I put her on the bed as my grandmother came. She told me to tell my mother and that she would stay with Saabira.
“My mother came and the ladies who helped for birthing. They closed the door on me. Saabira was screaming. I felt that I had done this to her. Without me, she would not be screaming. She screamed on and off for hours. My father and grandfather went to the farthest fields to work but I could not leave the closed door.
“It was my mother who opened the door, looking away and leading me to Saabira. She was so pale and her hair all plastered to her face and she saw me and smiled.
“Who is it, Aaman? Who is our child?” I turned to the women and their faces were long. Ma handed me this bundle, but all I could do was stare at Ma. She looked so beautiful, but her face was wet with tears and eyes so sad. She shook her head from side to side and looked at Saabira, who now realised something was wrong.
“Shouldn’t he cry? Why does he not cry? Aaman, why does he not cry?” She tried to get up so I hastened to her side and stroked her face with one hand. In my other arm, wrapped in a cloth, I had our lifeless baby. She pushed my hand away and moved the cloth from the baby’s face and then went quiet. I saw a part of her die. It squeezed all the air from my lungs. She lay down to sleep and stayed not moving and not eating for several days.”
Little sobbing squeaks come from Aaman’s throat as he suppresses his anguish. His elbows rest on the table. He holds his own fist, tightly pressing it against his mouth to silence any sound, every muscle tight.
Juliet’s chair scrapes against the patio as she pulls it nearer Aaman. She encircles his shoulders with one arm, stroking his hair with the other. She was happy to hold him. After a while, he twitches his shoulders, and Juliet retreats, allowing him his dignity. Aaman pulls himself up, leans away in his chair and wraps his arms around his body.
A child shrieks in play in the next yard.
The cat jumps back over the wall and onto Aaman’s knee. He unlocks his barrier and strokes him.
“Not only had I lost a child, but I had seen a part of my wife die. I was the little rat again, but this time it was my son who died and my wife who must mourn.”
Aaman clears his throat and passes the cat to Juliet to draw his chair nearer the table and test the weight of the coffee pot. It is empty.
“So when she came up with the idea of a harvester machine for the village and we were short of the money to buy it, it was the least I could do to come to the West to make what was needed.”
Aaman clearly feels safer talking about the practical necessity of his life. His voice is stronger, clearer.
“Ahh, so that’s why you are here. How long do you think it will take you?” Aaman is obviously in much pain, so Juliet supports his change of tack.
“Saabira thought it would take two years but I am here now and I know that it will take much longer.” He shook his head.
Juliet has no idea what a harvester would cost, but they are big machines so she guesses in the thousands. She sees Aaman is on a futile mission.
“Something I have come to realise ...”
Juliet perks up at the sound of hope in Aaman’s voice.
“Since I began this journey, I have had much silence. Silence from the necessity to be quiet or discovered, silence from lack of anyone to talk to, silence for lack of anything good to say, and in my silence I have thought a lot. It is like all my thoughts are coming together today. I thought my uneasiness of being here and my behaviour to my wife was about the sad things that have happened. But I am beginning to think something different. I must thank you, Juliet, because my thoughts began to become something different when you told me your sad life and through seeing you, if I might be so bold, I saw me.”
Juliet is slightly shocked, a little weary and feels ever so slightly smug.