“I didn’t figure it out either,” Rajni said. “And I spent years looking for every little sign of pregnancy in my own body when we were trying for another baby. I guess I just thought that if she was pregnant, she’d be shouting it from the rooftops like I would have wanted to.”
All of Shirina’s strange behavior made sense. All those moments during the trip: Shirina avoiding the little girl on the train, which was weird because she was usually so nice to children. That stricken look on her face as well, when Jezmeen mentioned the statistic about female feticide in the villages. Then there was that strange outburst after the awakening ceremony. “Do you think she wanted to talk about it to us at any point?” Jezmeen wondered aloud.
“She did ask me if Mum regretted having daughters,” Rajni said. “Honestly, I didn’t know what to say. All those years of wanting another child, sometimes I’d break down and confide about it to Mum and she’d flippantly say things like ‘Just be thankful—the next one could have been a daughter.’ Or, if I said we wanted to try again, she’d say, ‘Make sure you don’t have a girl.’ As if I could control the outcome! It frustrated me, but Shirina must have grown up hearing things like that and thought her whole existence was a burden.”
Jezmeen sighed. “I wish we’d paid more attention. We spent so much of this trip wondering if something was up with Shirina but not actually addressing it with her.”
“I thought everything was fine,” Rajni admitted. “She was just being Shirina—uninvolved with us and wholly devoted to her in-laws.”
A thicket of bushes was coming up, and in the far distance, a cluster of blocky new houses—an extended family building their empire, Jezmeen thought. “What was it that bothered Mum so much about us being daughters, though?” she asked. “She couldn’t inherit her father’s land, but that’s kind of irrelevant for us, isn’t it? It’s not like we were denied any land. Dad didn’t have any, and the rules about inheriting land were different when she was young anyway.”
The question made Rajni shift uncomfortably in her seat. She looked out the window, suddenly disinterested in the conversation. Jezmeen followed her gaze. In a clearing between the straggly trees on the edge of the road, there were scattered patches of sunburned farmland. Plows and livestock dotted the horizon. The hottest afternoon hours were approaching, and even though they were speeding through the Punjab countryside, Jezmeen had a sense of everything slowing down.
“Madam, the air-conditioning is all right?” Tom Hanks called. Before waiting for an answer, he turned it on full blast. Air burst from the vents and scattered Jezmeen’s cards onto the floor. Rajni was too distracted by her thoughts to notice.
What was she being so secretive about? Jezmeen picked up the pieces of the card and stacked them together. It seemed she understood very little about her sisters, even though the purpose of this journey was to bring them together. She couldn’t remember a recent time when she and Shirina banded together the way they used to when they were little. Even their trip to the market in Delhi together had the feeling of two old friends reluctantly reacquainting.
“You know, I never told anybody this,” Jezmeen said. The memory, even though it happened so long ago, still hurt to recall, but if Jezmeen wanted the truth from her sisters, she had to start with herself. “When I was about eight and Shirina was five, there was one Saturday that we really wanted to go to the park. You were out at some university thing. It was the first warm and lovely day of the year, and we had this idea that we’d have a picnic. I think I’d seen a family on television sitting on a checked blanket and eating baguettes and I thought it looked very sophisticated. We kept pestering Mum to take us, and she was tired. She had just started commuting to that hotel housekeeping job in Central London, and she was always exhausted when she got home. So I came up with the idea to go by ourselves. We took a couple of slices of bread from the pantry, and the two spotted bananas on the fruit bowl, and we sneaked out the back door. It didn’t last very long—the woman who worked at the newsagent’s noticed us wandering around on the main road and she marched us back home. Mum’s reaction was so extreme, though.”
“What did she do?” Rajni asked.
“She didn’t speak to us for the rest of the day. Like she literally didn’t acknowledge us—no food, nothing. We were gone for all of twenty minutes, but something about us leaving like that really upset her. She didn’t even seem angry. It was more like she just . . . gave up on us.”
“How did you manage to eat, then?” Jezmeen noticed that Rajni was listening closely. Her hands were clasped tightly together.
“We didn’t. We waited for ages, and searched the fridge but we didn’t know the first thing about cooking, so we couldn’t eat whatever was in there. Eventually Auntie Roopi came around to hand us some mail that had been delivered to her place by accident,” Jezmeen said. “We told her Mum was sick, and we needed something to eat. She didn’t ask any questions but she had a quick chat with Mum and offered to have us over for lunch. She said she had ordered fish ’n’ chips because her daughter was going to have friends over, but she’d decided to go to a movie or something, so there was extra. Mum just went straight back to bed.” Jezmeen sighed. “Mum had other breakdowns like that, where she suddenly just switched off and didn’t want to deal with us. Anytime Shirina and I got into trouble, it was because of some scheme that I had cooked up. Sometimes she told you what we had done, and then you’d lay into us as well. After a while, Shirina started distancing herself from me and just focusing on being a good daughter so Mum wouldn’t neglect her anymore.”
Jezmeen shut her eyes. The truth had been bubbling beneath the surface for a long time, and it was finally coming out. “It was because of me that Shirina wanted to get out of our home, and distance herself from all of that tension. She was advertising for a new family when she put her profile up on the matrimonial site. It’s my fault she ran off to Australia and . . .” She blinked back tears. “I should be saying all of this to Shirina.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Rajni said. “Listen—”
“I know, you’ll say she made her own choices,” Jezmeen said. “But I could have looked out for her more. I spent the past decade focusing so much on my acting career that I completely forgot about my sister. No wonder Mum probably thought having daughters was a burden.”
“For the record, having children is difficult,” Rajni said.
“I didn’t exactly make it easy. It was my fault that Shirina grew up hearing Mum saying things like that.”
“That wasn’t your fault.”
“It was.”
Rajni shook her head. “No, it wasn’t. Jezmeen, listen. The way Mum felt about having daughters? That was because of me.”
Chapter Eighteen
Twenty-eight years ago . . .
There was a drought in Punjab the summer before Dad died. The Punjabi community in West London was rife with speculation about weather patterns, the news having traveled all the way from India to England through networks of friends and relatives who had one foot in each country. Rajni’s parents agreed that the poor farming conditions back home were another reason to be grateful that they lived in England, although they waited anxiously for the overdue rains to revive the dying crops and heal the cracked soil. To Rajni, it didn’t always feel like they were in England. Sometimes it seemed that a huge tornado had uprooted her parents’ home from Punjab and plunked them down in London—the smoky scent of spices in the kitchen and the morning prayer broadcast from Amritsar serving as constant reminders of where home really was. The atmosphere in their house certainly felt more jubilant the day the rains returned to their ancestral land thousands of miles away.
Dad wanted to sell the land then. It had been stressful hearing about farmers driven to suicide because of their dwindling livelihoods. He brought it up with Mum at the dinner table, and it led to arguments. Although it wasn’t hers to give up, she was reluctant to let go of their place in Punjab. “If we don’t have that, we have nothing t
o go back to,” she said. It bothered Rajni that Mum saw India as a place to go back to. She remembered walking home from primary school once, and a group of girls had cornered her and pointed to a murky puddle of water they named Paki-land. That’s where you belong. Rajni hated the idea that they might be right. Where Rajni belonged was Britain. But sometimes she had trouble proving this to Mum, who had stern rules about her hemlines and her music, her preference for Western food, and her disdain toward Punjabi community gatherings where all the aunties and uncles compared their children and reminisced about India. It’s irrelevant now, Rajni always wanted to say when they became nostalgic about the past. They were in England and it was time to move on.
That October, Dad’s older brother, Thaya-ji, came to visit. From her parents’ conversations about the land in Punjab, Rajni was aware that Thaya-ji had made some poor business decisions and had to sell his portion of the land at a loss during the drought. He and his wife also had to move to Delhi to live with their elder son, who had just gotten married. It was shameful, having to depend on his son, and allowing Dad to pay for his ticket to England because he couldn’t afford it himself. The trip was long overdue, though, because Dad had not seen his brother in many years. Rajni noticed how excited Dad became as the day of Thaya-ji’s arrival approached. The long-distance phone calls over the years hadn’t allowed much room for telling Thaya-ji about his daily life, and he was keen for his older brother to see England. “We’ll take him to all the tourist sites,” Dad said. “But also, he will want to go to the temple, see how close-knit our community is here.”
Instead, from the moment he stepped off the plane, Thaya-ji made his disdain clear. “Our people come all the way here to clean toilets?” Thaya-ji asked, referring to a Sikh man he had seen mopping the toilet floor at Heathrow. Rajni could tell the comment stung Dad, who worked grueling shifts in a factory because his university qualifications from India hadn’t been transferable.
Thaya-ji spent most of the visit reiterating how unimpressive he found Dad’s life in Britain. “All of these things can also be found in Delhi,” he said when he accompanied them on a trip to the shops. “The weather is so damp and dreary—you enjoy shivering like this all the time?” he scoffed. Dad didn’t argue, out of respect for his older brother, even when Thaya-ji made comments about Mum’s cooking (“too bland”) and Rajni’s rusty Punjabi language skills (“she sounds like a gori”). Jezmeen and Shirina were just little girls then, and they weren’t held to the same standards.
One night, as Mum was clearing the table, Thaya-ji mentioned to Dad that Mum had spent a while chattering with a red-faced Englishman who came to their door. “You mean the man who checked our water meter?” Mum asked. “He had come back from a family holiday in Norfolk and I was just asking him how it was. It’s only polite small talk.”
“It’s just that you have daughters,” Thaya-ji said. He liked bringing this up as a mild warning. “You don’t want them learning to talk in such a familiar way to strange men, do you?”
Rajni noticed Mum seething afterward as they rinsed the dishes together, but if Dad noticed that Mum was upset, he didn’t say anything. It was probably better than agreeing with Thaya-ji, Rajni thought, although she wished he’d stood up for Mum. The next morning when the postman arrived just as Rajni was heading out the door for school, Mum said quietly in Punjabi, “No need to smile and say hello, all right?” Rajni pretended to be distracted by something in the distance as she walked past the postman. She reminded herself that Thaya-ji would only stay with them for another week, and then she hoped never to see him again.
But the next day, Thaya-ji found something else to criticize. Mum was finally learning how to drive, having put it off for years by taking buses and walking to the market. Her instructor was a man from the community who was recently divorced. Seeing Mum pull up to the driveway after her lesson with the man, Thaya-ji was not pleased. “It’s inappropriate,” he said. “It’s after dark. What will people say?”
“They will say that I’m learning to drive,” Mum said. Her voice was calm but Rajni could see a hint of uncertainty in her expression. Mum shot a look at Rajni, Jezmeen, and Shirina sitting at the dinner table. It’s just that you have daughters. Maybe if they were boys, Thaya-ji wouldn’t meddle so much.
Thaya-ji’s laugh was short and unpleasant. “You don’t have to turn everything into an argument. I was simply saying—”
“You’ve said enough,” Mum snapped. Thaya-ji was so stunned that he didn’t reply.
Rajni was filled with admiration for Mum for speaking up. It was about time. Although Dad looked a bit embarrassed, he simply shifted in his seat and didn’t say anything. That night, Rajni heard her parents arguing in hushed voices. Their words were indistinct, but at one point, Dad’s voice rose sharply and the conversation was over. In the morning, Mum was distracted and irritable. She threatened to take Jezmeen’s breakfast plate away if she didn’t finish eating on time. As Rajni swung her bag over her shoulder and left for school, Mum said, “You come straight home after school today—no hanging around in the shopping center with Nadia afterward.”
“But—” Rajni protested.
“Oh, you want to argue?” Mum challenged. “Come home right away.”
The rest of Thaya-ji’s visit was filled with tense smiles and stiff silences. Mum didn’t seem triumphant after talking back to her brother-in-law. Knowing that she had crossed a line, she was careful not to enter any more arguments with him or Dad, and she became stricter with her daughters. Rajni was told off most often—for rolling her eyes, for playing her music too loud, for doing anything that Thaya-ji might consider too English. The general sense of unease in the house was enough for little four-year-old Jezmeen to notice. “When’s he going back?” she whispered one night, when Rajni was putting on some glittery eye shadow for her. She had been begging to look just like Madonna on the cover of Rajni’s album.
At dinner the night before Thaya-ji was due to leave, Dad tried to defuse the tension with a joke. He had fallen in the shower that evening and hit his head—not really hard enough to be concerned, but his fingers kept returning to the spot, checking for swelling. “You really shouldn’t have pushed me,” he said to Mum with a grin. Mum, filling Shirina’s plate, looked up in surprise and then retorted, “Don’t think I haven’t thought about it.” Thaya-ji didn’t laugh. He gave Mum a hard look. Come on, lighten up, Rajni thought. It was the kind of joke that always passed between her parents, and she was relieved that things would get back to normal after Thaya-ji left.
Dad’s death was nobody’s fault. He couldn’t have known that the impact of the fall was more severe than it seemed, especially since he wasn’t dizzy or throwing up afterward. The slow bleeding in his brain only caught up to him four days later while he was clocking off from his factory shift. A supervisor found Dad slumped near his car but there was nothing anybody could do at that stage. The doctor made sure to explain what was called an acute subdural hematoma to Mum, who was already taking responsibility. “My fault,” she kept sobbing. “Now, Mrs. Shergill,” the doctor said firmly, “this was just an unfortunate thing that happened.” But misfortune, rather than the accident itself, was what Mum was blaming herself for. Rajni knew how Mum’s superstitious mind worked. It was checking all of her transgressions that invited the evil eye. She shouldn’t have celebrated so much when the rain returned in Punjab, tempting fate by saying aloud how lucky they were to live in Britain. She shouldn’t have argued with her brother-in-law. She certainly shouldn’t have made that disrespectful comment about pushing Dad.
After Dad’s ashes were flown to India and scattered by his brothers, Mum’s superstitious behavior went into overdrive. Rajni and her sisters were grieving too, but Mum’s concerns were wrapped up in rituals to protect them from suffering any more unexpected tragedies. The rules were the same as before but more strictly enforced, and attached to consequences by tenuous links the logic of which only Mum could see. Leaving the windows exposed in
vited evil spirits into their home, so Mum kept the curtains drawn at all times, and the house was shrouded in darkness. “I am just trying to protect you,” Mum insisted when she lined up the girls and circled their heads with fistfuls of dried chilis and birdseed to ward off bad luck. Prayers from the Golden Temple boomed from their speakers throughout the day now, drowning out the beats from Rajni’s radio.
Mum implemented more house rules too, as if taking on the roles of both parents meant she had to be doubly strict. She implemented curfews and constantly asked Rajni to consider what people would think about their family if they saw her chatting with boys on the bus, or trotting around in those skintight blue jeans. Mum explained that they had to be more careful about how they appeared now, because with Dad gone, a family of only females was more vulnerable to gossip. “God knows how I’ll get you all married off now.” Mum sighed. “People will say, ‘Those girls raised without a father? We don’t want our sons getting involved with such a family.’ ”
Rajni responded with rebellion. She hiked up her skirt as soon as she disappeared from Mum’s view, and she skipped classes and smoked cigarettes. On Saturday afternoons, she danced her frustrations away with her friend Nadia at the daylight discos for hours until her clothes were soaked in sweat. With pop music still ringing in her ears, she returned home before dark and made sure to mention just enough details about that afternoon’s study session at the library to keep Mum’s suspicions at bay.
The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters Page 26