Balu broke into her thoughts. “I wanted to take the scenic route home, but now I think I might be lost. Can you get the map out of the glove compartment and check, Leela?”
Leela removed the map and, unfolding it, turning it this way and that, realized with some embarrassment that she had never before consulted a map to find her way around. She had never needed to. In Bangalore, Balu, who had every street and gully of the city etched into his mind, had been her guide. And before that, in Balepur—her father’s town—if you wanted directions you asked the nearest person, and if it wasn’t Dodda the madman you would be told, That way, two furlongs past the neem tree that belongs to Sheshadri Rao, or, Left, past the police station, and then right after the dog sleeping in the shade of the dispensary. The black dog, not the white and brown one, mind.
But this new world they had moved to was different. Here you needed maps to find your way. Her eyes wandered over the lines criss-crossing the map, absorbing the details of the colours and the shadings and the words, until the hidden patterns of the city’s roads became apparent. She found the road she was looking for and proudly pinned it with a finger before slowly tracing their way back home.
“Take the next left,” she told Balu. And then the next right, and a left again. Leela felt absurdly pleased with herself. Soon she might not need any maps at all. Soon Vancouver might become a place as familiar as Bangalore or Balepur.
NINE
COINCIDENCES
Vancouver
1967
A week later, Leela walked down the street to the Taj Mahal to return Bibi-ji’s food containers. She had filled them with samples of her own cooking: it was rude to return empty boxes, and an admission of poverty. Even though Balu’s salary was barely enough, she had discovered, to cover their weekly basic requirements, not to mention the rent on the first of the month, and their savings converted from rupees to dollars amounted to a frighteningly small sum, which was dwindling at an alarming pace, there was no way Leela would either display a lack of manners or admit to a lack of money.
She walked through the open gates of the Taj Mahal, noting the faux-marble lions adorning the gateposts on either side. She thought them a bit over the top. Continuing down the driveway, lined with its twin rows of young pine trees, she cut through a sunny garden full of rose bushes. Between them were tulips and a variety of other flowers that Leela could not identify. Beyond all this was the Taj Mahal.
A Sikh youth opened the carved front door when she rang the bell, and led Leela through a long corridor crowded with a variety of odd objects: an elephant-shaped umbrella stand, two enormous Chinese vases with pink-and-green-and-gold decorations creeping all over them, a photograph of Queen Victoria and several more of people Leela assumed were the Singhs’ relatives. She followed the young man through a spacious room where more men sat on opulent couches and armchairs around a television set. She realized that they were giving a soap opera their rapt attention. In one chair lounged Lalloo, the man who had accompanied Bibi-ji to Leela’s home a couple of weeks ago. He was wearing a dazzling yellow shirt with black stripes, and a pair of black trousers. He looked, to Leela’s eyes, like an exotic insect. He was leaning forward and, she later discovered, providing a running commentary on the soap. When she got to know Bibi-ji better, Leela discovered that it had been Lalloo’s idea to plant the young men in front of the television—he believed there was no better way to learn English than by watching the soaps. It was how he had acquired the language himself, spending long hours in Bibi-ji’s living room, his eyes fixed on the screen. And nothing, according to him, provided more information about western society than the daytime soaps.
Lalloo waved cordially at her and called, “Halloo, Mrs. Bhat, how you are?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” she shouted back, over the din of the television.
They passed through the dining room, which had more of the large, heavily carved furniture the Singhs seemed to favour, and entered the kitchen. The room was crowded with women of all ages, some squatting on the floor rolling out rotis or chopping vegetables, others standing at the stove and stirring vats of food. A cacophony of voices, speaking what Leela assumed was Punjabi, filled the air.
“Leela, come, come, sit down,” Bibi-ji said, beaming at her. She sat at a small table surrounded by bills and receipts that she was entering into a ledger.
She pulled out a chair and patted it. “Tea? Coffee? I know you South Indians like coffee. Whenever your Balu comes to The Delhi Junction, he wants coffee and then he complains about it. Says that it is nothing compared to your Mysore coffee, henh?”
“No, it is okay,” Leela said. “I just came to return your boxes. And to give you a sample of my cooking.”
“Nobody who comes to this house is allowed to leave without at least a cup of tea,” declared Bibi-ji. She opened the boxes that Leela had filled with food and smelled them. “Oh! This smells wonderful! I have never tasted South Indian food!”
As if it is from some other country, Leela thought. She had tasted Punjabi food often enough; even the restaurants in her childhood town of Balepur served the mandatory chholey-bhaturey, naan and saag-paneer. But she smiled and said politely, “Hope you like it. But you have so many visitors. I don’t want to interrupt …”
“No, no, these are not visitors,” Bibi-ji exclaimed, catching Leela’s arm and pulling her down on the chair beside her. “These are …” She paused and crinkled her forehead. “They are not relatives or visitors. Just people who have newly arrived, staying until they find work and a place to live and all that.” She leaned forward and whispered sotto voce, “I don’t even know some of their names.”
Leela looked around in amazement. The Singhs were hosting all these people, at their own expense? They must be rich.
“They made those parathas I brought for you the other day,” Bibi-ji said. “Nobody stays here for free. Life is all about give and take, eh, Leela?”
Leela gave Bibi-ji an appraising look and nodded. She was beginning to appreciate this woman with the loud voice and louder clothes.
One of the women brought them cups of tea, thick with milk and sugar. Bibi-ji pushed a tin full of orange jalebis towards Leela. “Take, take, it is very good,” she said. “Homemade, fresh and crisp.”
Leela picked up one of the sugary concoctions and bit into it, letting loose a thread of sugar that dribbled down her chin. She laughed. Who would have thought she would end up in Canada and find herself in a home called the Taj Mahal, full of Sikhs chattering in Punjabi, sipping milky chai and eating hot jalebis?
“Something is funny?” Bibi-ji asked. In the time it had taken Leela to eat one of the sticky sweets, the older woman had consumed three.
“No, I was just thinking, I might be in a house in Punjab,” Leela said, waving her hand around.
“But this is Punjab,” Bibi-ji pointed out. “Inside my home it will always be Punjab.”
Naturally, Bibi-ji had to return to Leela’s with another instalment of boxes to show off her culinary range, for how could she allow a small, sparrow-shaped Southie to outdo her in the kitchen? Which meant that Leela had to make another trip to the Taj Mahal. And so they went, back and forth, until the urge to show off their cooking became a simple desire to meet over a cup of chai and chat about this and that and the children and the weather and the strange ways of the pink-skinned goras, whom Bibi-ji had come to understand and often appreciate after twenty-one years of puzzling over them, but who needed to be explained to Leela the new immigrant. They discussed recipes endlessly, each woman reclaiming the place left behind—Home—in the food that she cooked. And so, if one day Bibi-ji chopped onion-ginger-garlic to create a sauce for her famous chholey, leaning over the pot, stirring-stirring-stirring, adding a pinch of this or that and inhaling the aromas until she knew it was just exactly right, the next day saw Leela standing on tiptoe, using a long-handled ladle to draw forward the sealed packet of asafetida from the back of the kitchen cupboard, carried all the way from
There to add to the pot of Venki’s famous eggplant sambhar. As for the authentic ingredients to create the authentic taste? Well, Bibi-ji knew where everything could be found.
“For dal and rice and cumin and coriander go to JB Foods,” she said. “Even your Southie things you will get there. The Korean store for fruit and the Chinese store is where you go for the vegetables.”
Chinese? Leela shook her head. No, never.
Bibi-ji was puzzled by her friend’s vehement refusal to go to Mrs. Wu’s shop, where the whole world—even the goras, who usually shopped in the big chain stores that carried perfectly shaped but soulless vegetables—came for their greens.
“Why?” she wanted to know. Large-hearted Bibi-ji knew little about the irrational angers, carried for years, that created hard callouses in the heart. She did not have Leela’s grudge-bearing nature, the kind that did not forgive unloving grandmothers, cousins who humiliated her or the Chinese who had invaded India.
“So now do you see why I cannot go to this Mrs. Wu’s shop?” Leela demanded, having also catalogued China’s responsibility for Nehru’s death. “Now do you see, Bibi-ji?”
“Now I see nothing!” snorted Bibi-ji. “Other than that you are a silly-billy, Leela! Was this Nehru your own daddy-ji or what?” Bibi-ji jangled her bracelets, purple and pink to match her dress, at Leela. “Now that you are here, all that old stuff does not matter. What matters is that you want the best beans and cauliflowers at the lowest prices. For that you must go to Mrs. Wu!”
Forgetfulness was good, said Bibi-ji. A bad memory was necessary for a person wishing to settle in, to become one of the crowd, to become an invisible minority. This was the first lesson she imparted to her new friend, although invisibility was not a lesson that she herself had been able to practise. “The Chinese, the Japanese, the Italians, that barber Majid, you and me,” Bibi-ji said. “In this country we are all in the same boat.”
“What boat?” Leela asked.
“The Minority Boat,” Bibi-ji said darkly. “A leaky thing—could go down any minute if you don’t watch out.” She patted Leela’s arm. “Make sure it does not drown you.”
Leela looked at Bibi-ji with some surprise. Somehow she had never seen this woman as having a history of her own. She seemed so rooted, so much a part of this world. How silly I am to have imagined such a thing of anyone, Leela thought. She wondered about the distances Bibi-ji had travelled before arriving here at this steadiness. As for her own layers, how long would it take for this new life to become a skin over the open wound of departure, or the older wound of being half-and-half? All week she brooded over Bibi-ji’s remark about minorities. She had grown to perceive herself as one of the Well-Known Bhats from Bangalore. It was a nose-cut, a comedown, a humbling thing to realize, that now she was a Minority lumped together with an assortment of other Minorities. All in-between people.
Then on the last Saturday of the month, when Leela went to Bibi-ji’s house with the rent cheque, she discovered something else new about her friend, who was seated, as usual, at the kitchen table, surrounded by the clatter of voices and utensils. Leela’s eyes fell on the stack of envelopes filled with bills and other letters. A number of them were addressed to Khushwant Singh and several others to Sharanjeet Kaur.
“Is this you?” she asked Bibi-ji, picking up an envelope. “Sharanjeet Kaur?”
“Who else?” Bibi-ji said.
“I didn’t know,” Leela said. “You never told me.”
Bibi-ji shrugged. “Everybody calls me Bibi-ji now. To my family I was Sharanjeet. Or Sharan. That’s what my older sister, Kanwar, called me.”
Leela frowned at the envelope in her hand. “Your name sounds so familiar …”
“It is a common name. Half the women in Punjab must have it!”
But Leela wasn’t listening. She was scrabbling around in the bottom of her handbag, turning it upside down, emptying its contents on the table before her. “It is here, I know it is,” she muttered. “I haven’t emptied this purse since …” She located a scrap of paper and held it up. “Here it is. I knew I had it.”
Bibi-ji leaned forward. “What is it?”
“An address. It might mean something to you, it might not, I don’t know. I had forgotten all about it. And I am known for my memory, believe it or not! A taxi driver in Delhi gave it to me when I was leaving. Here.” Leela unfolded the paper and passed it to Bibi-ji. “This is his wife’s name—Nirmaljeet Kaur. She was a child when India and Pakistan were formed. You said you had lost a sister and her family, Bibi-ji. This woman’s mother was Kanwar, same as your sister. And her aunt was Sharan. I didn’t think of it before. Your name … I didn’t realize …”
Bibi-ji stared at the grubby scrap of paper. “Is such a coincidence possible?” she whispered.
“Yes it is,” Leela said firmly. She was an ardent believer in Fate. Look at how an extended foot had brought Balu into her life and how a fallen arch had propelled them across the world to Vancouver. “It surely cannot hurt to write. And who knows, she might be your niece after all.” She tapped her fingernail on the paper. “I have a good feeling in my bones about this, Bibi-ji. Believe me.”
PART THREE
NIMMO
TEN
A BIN OF GRAIN
New Delhi
June 1967
Four o’clock in the morning, and already the busy alley was wide awake and humming with life. From the kitchen of her two-room home in the centre of the alley, Nimmo could hear the milkman arguing with Asha, the tailor’s wife next door. Nothing unusual about that, she thought, smiling to herself as she moved around softly, boiling some milk in a pan. Asha needed to disagree with the whole world about this, that or the other. She carried on a running battle with each of her neighbours. Last month it was a dispute with Nimmo over the branches of a neem tree that had roots in her compound while most of its branches leaned into Nimmo’s.
“What can I do if the tree insists on growing this way, Asha?” Nimmo had asked, half amused by the woman’s indignation. “And anyway, I don’t take the leaves, so why make such a fuss?”
“You don’t, but those boys of yours are always pulling down branches, climbing up the tree, making a mess. I am telling you for the last time, sister, this is my tree!”
So what if two small boys pulled a few leaves and branches down? It wasn’t as if they were killing that wretched tree, Nimmo thought. “In that case, sister,” she said, “since it bothers you so much, I’m going to cut down every branch of the tree that is on my side of the wall. Then there will be nothing to fight about.”
“That will kill it!” Asha protested. “You can’t kill my tree.”
“But it is interfering with the air on my side of the wall,” replied Nimmo. She had no intention of acting out her threat, but Asha could do with a scare.
After that exchange, Asha had simmered down and started a war with her neighbour on the other side. All of them lived too close to each other, Nimmo thought.
A new sound joined Asha’s high-pitched diatribe as Nimmo’s other neighbour, Kaushalya, emerged to feed her hens and collect their eggs. The clucking and squabbling of the hens reminded Nimmo that she was out of eggs and would have to buy some later in the day.
A child howled somewhere; vehicles screamed, rattled, honked their way down the narrow gully. Above all this noise a bird sang deliriously, as if determined to drown it out. Perhaps it was the fabled nightbird, so sweet and unearthly was its singing. Nimmo had a vague memory of her mother telling her stories about this bird, whose song was a portent of ill luck. Or was it death? She shook her head to remove the darkness and started to prepare the day’s meals.
Her ears caught the sound of her husband’s car drawing up on the road outside, the soft thump of the door and the slap of slippers coming towards the house. She opened the door before Satpal could knock. Nimmo didn’t want to wake their boys, asleep in the inner room, for another hour at least. She wanted a small wedge of time alone with Satpal before he dropp
ed into bed. When he woke at eight, he would leave again for his day job at the mechanic’s shop that he owned with his partner, Mohan Lal. By the time Satpal came home in the evening, Nimmo would be busy with dinner and the children, and then it would be time for his taxi shift again. If not for the single hour they had alone together at this time every day, they might be strangers living in the same house.
“Did you have a good evening?” she asked after he had washed his face and joined her in the kitchen.
“The usual.” His voice was tired. As he settled down on the floor, she put a glass of hot milk in front of him. “I don’t know whether it is worth going on with this taxi business. There is too much competition, and petrol costs are going higher and higher. Maybe I should sell the car and put all the money in our shop. But then we might have to take out another loan on this house to get by. What do you think?”
Nimmo was silent. She did not like rushing into things. Neither was she particularly happy about mortgaging their house for a second time in three years. What if they were unable to meet their debts? “I don’t know,” she said finally. “Why can’t Mohan Lal find some money to put in this time? He is your partner in the shop, after all.”
“He doesn’t own his house, Nimmo. You know that,” Satpal replied. “So a mortgage is out of the question for him. He has taken two loans from his father-in-law, and they are not exactly rich people themselves. Selling my taxi to repay the loan I took to buy it and remortgaging our house are the only options.”
“Maybe you should talk to a few people? Elders at the temple, perhaps?” Nimmo suggested.
Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Page 11