Satpal did not say anything, focusing instead on dipping a slice of bread into the tumbler of warm, sweet milk. He slowly ate the soft slice of bread. “We need the money urgently.” He looked up at her, and Nimmo saw the lines of worry creasing his forehead.
“How urgently?” she asked, fear knocking at her ribs.
Satpal shrugged, then saw her worry and smiled at her. “We can think about that later. I am too tired now. You tell me, how was your day? Were the boys good? That little one is turning out to be a real devil, isn’t he?” There was a tinge of pride in Satpal’s voice. “Now that he is in school you will have some time for yourself. Maybe you can do some tailoring work and bring in extra money, hanh?”
“It might not be possible for another three to four years,” Nimmo said. She paused. Her news was good, but she knew it would cause anxiety too. “You are going to be a father again.”
Satpal stopped fishing bits of soggy bread out of the milk and looked at her. “Again? Another one? In how many months?”
“Seven, I think. I will go to the doctor today.”
“Another one,” repeated Satpal.
“How will we manage?” Nimmo asked.
Satpal touched her face gently. “Don’t worry, I will think of a way,” he said.
But it seemed to Nimmo that the worry lines on his forehead had deepened. Was this the moment to tell him her other news?
“Something else, ji,” she said. “There was a letter …”
“From whom?” Satpal was surprised. They rarely received letters, not even from his older sisters in Chandigarh and Amritsar. “From my sisters? Not bad news, I hope. Are they well?”
“No, it isn’t from them. It’s from a woman in Canada who says she might be my aunt.”
She rose to her feet and, reaching up to a shelf high on the wall, removed a thick envelope from behind a picture of Guru Nanak. She kept her important papers behind this brightly coloured lithograph of the founder of Sikhism in the belief that no one who looked into his eyes would steal the papers.
Satpal weighed the envelope speculatively in his hands. “When did this arrive?”
“A week ago,” Nimmo admitted. “I wanted to think about it before I showed it to you.”
“How …” Satpal began, and then broke into a delighted grin. “Was it me? Was it one of those people I took to the airport?”
Nimmo, pleased to see the boyish delight on his careworn face, smiled and nodded.
“Who? The sardar who was going to Toronto? I knew it. I felt it when I gave it to him!” Satpal slapped his thigh and laughed again.
“No, it was not a sardar,” Nimmo said. “It was a woman going to Vancouver. She gave this Bibi-ji our address,” Nimmo said. “But I am not sure whether I should reply. Suppose she is not my aunt?”
“And suppose she is? Does she mention your parents?”
“Yes, she does. She writes pages describing my mother. But I don’t remember anything about her—or about my family, for that matter,” Nimmo pointed out.
“What about that postcard you showed me? That is proof, is it not? It has the name of your parents, doesn’t it?” Satpal’s voice rose with excitement.
Nimmo was silent. She had never told him that the postcard might not be hers, that she might have picked it up on her journey to India during Partition, twenty years ago. When she had showed it to him a few weeks after their marriage, after he had asked if she remembered anything of her family, she had produced the postcard, hoping that he would not ask any more questions. She hated any attempt to dig up the past. Unfortunately he had taken it upon himself to try to find her family, believing—or hoping—it would lift the sorrow that hung over her like a veil.
“Well? Those are your parents’ names on that postcard, yes?” Satpal asked, lifting her face by the chin and peering into her secretive eyes.
“Yes,” sighed Nimmo. “Yes they are.”
“Then why don’t you write to this Bibi-ji? What is the harm? Even if nothing comes of it, so what? You have me now, you don’t need aunts!” With a rough palm he stroked her cheek, lingering on her warm throat. “Now, come to bed,” he urged softly.
She caught his hand and held it hard against her body for a moment, tempted to follow him to where she had spread their mats. Then a whimper emerged from the inner room and she moved away reluctantly. “Not now. The boys will be waking up soon,” she said.
As if on cue, the younger child, Pappu, drifted out sleepily, rubbing his eyes. He headed for his father’s lap, and Satpal sighed. “Okay, not now. Wake me up at seven.”
A wave of morning sickness caught Nimmo by surprise and she rushed into the small bathroom, pulling the door shut behind her.
She stood at the sink catching her breath and trying to ignore the scuffle of feet and whispers outside the door. The older boy, Jasbeer, was awake as well. She heard the rumble of Satpal’s voice. “Your mother will be out in a moment, putthar. Leave her be.”
A moment later Nimmo heard Jasbeer’s heavy nasal breathing at the door of the bathroom. She smiled. “Mummy, I need to go!” the seven-year-old moaned.
And now Pappu’s voice, slightly distorted by the wood. “I need to go too, Mummy.”
Nimmo imagined the two small warm bodies on the other side of the door. The older boy standing straight, his legs apart, head flung back in a childish imitation of his father; the younger one, still a baby at five years of age, pressing his mouth against the door. She was responsible for these two young lives, she thought, savouring a last small moment of quiet inside the bathroom before emerging to receive her world. And now she was going to add another creature to her list of responsibilities. Would she be able to bear the weight of their needs? Would she be able to ensure that nothing bad ever happened to them?
A banging of small fists. “Mummy, hurry, hurry, hurry! I need to go!”
“No, me first, I woke up first, Mummeee!” came Pappu’s childish treble.
Nimmo rinsed the sourness out of her mouth and came out. “Okay, okay, one at a time now. Let Pappu go first, putthar.” She gently restrained her older boy from shoving his way in. “And you hurry up, okay?” she admonished the little one.
Jasbeer moved away sulkily. “He did that on purpose, just because I wanted to go. I hate him.”
Nimmo caught him and pulled him to her. “Don’t say things like that about your brother.” She stroked his hair away from his forehead, gathering the long strands into her hand, marvelling at their softness. The caressing motion removed the sting from her rebuke. “He is a baby.” She kissed his cheek and worried about the darkness she sensed in his thin body. Had she passed it on to him with the milk she had fed him when he was an infant?
But Jasbeer slipped out of her arms, his eyes full of resentment. “You are always on his side.”
By nine o’clock Nimmo was alone. The children had left for school with Pappu clasping Jasbeer’s hand tightly, and Satpal had gone to his shop. Nimmo hoped that Jasbeer would remember her stern instructions not to let go of his brother, to stay on the pavement and avoid talking to strangers. She thought about Bibi-ji’s letter, resisting the temptation to reread it before she had finished the housework. She moved about quietly, washing the dishes, putting them away, soaking the dirty clothes, sweeping and swabbing the floors. She was rigorous about cleanliness and scrubbed the small house every day, her strong body revelling in the work. The noise in the neighbourhood had also subsided, except for the dull roar of traffic from the nearby highway. Nimmo worked steadily, loving the silence that would be hers until the children returned from school. By eleven o’clock she was done. The house was so neat it looked as if she were the only person living in it. The clothes flapped on the clothesline in the tiny front yard, and the afternoon meal was ready for her sons.
Nimmo wondered whether she should go down to the fruit vendor’s stall a block away and pick up some bananas. She decided not to; instead, she unfolded the letter that had arrived from Canada, and began to read it for wh
at seemed like the hundredth time.
You will no doubt be surprised to hear from a stranger living across the seas. My name is Sharanjeet Kaur but these days they call me Bibi-ji … I got your address from a woman who was taken to the airport by your husband, Satpal Singh, and I am writing in the hope that you are related to my sister, Kanwar Kaur, who was married to Pardeep Singh of Dauri Kalan village …
Nimmo pressed the letter against her breast and leaned forward to gaze in the mirror at her long, smooth-skinned face, secretive eyes and lips that she kept pressed together as if afraid of what she might let loose. She took a deep, calming breath, trying to quell those dark memories for which she could never prepare herself, urged as they were into life by the most unexpected things. Once it was a sudden breeze bearing the fragrance of champa flowers in bloom—that had happened near the flower sellers’ stalls in the market one day. Another time it was a woman calling for her son. They were like wicked spirits, these memories, changing, uncertain, leaving her reaching out hungrily. Which one was true? A child runs through the rustling shadow of tall sugar cane, its syrupy smell mingling with the pungent odour of smoke from burning roof thatch.
Was that it? Perhaps not. Here was another one. A five-year-old sulks near the well, angry because her father would not take her with him and her brothers to the fields that morning. She leans over the edge of the well and throws a stone in, waiting to hear the distant splash. From the echoing darkness a voice comes wafting upwards: run, run, run.
Not that one either. Set it aside. Here’s one that rings true. This is it, then: A small girl plays in the dirt outside a low-roofed house made of bricks and clay, freshly whitewashed. Nimmo was sure of that detail. There on the wall, beside the front door, had been the imprints of three pairs of small hands and, on the other side, two larger sets. She, Nirmaljeet Kaur, had made the smallest pair of handprints. The other two pairs belonged to her older brothers. Sometimes their names teased at the edges of her mind and she would reach out stealthily, across the shadowy landscape of memory, hoping to trap the names of her brothers between her hands. But they were always swifter. Sometimes she wondered whether she had had any brothers at all. She had no trouble recalling her mother’s name, Kanwar Kaur, and her father’s, Pardeep Singh. Village, Dauri Kalan. At least that’s what it said on that postcard from long, long ago, the one from Canada, with the picture of a looming black bear, fuzzy green trees rising behind it. But what proof that Kanwar was indeed her mother and Pardeep her father? There was not a single word in the postcard that proved Nimmo belonged to these two people, Kanwar Kaur, c/o Pardeep Singh. And what about the person who had sent the postcard: Your younger sister, Sbaran. Was this woman really her aunt? Everything about her past confused Nimmo.
She read a little more of Bibi-ji’s letter, a sheet covered with neat Punjabi writing from a woman thousands of miles away, and wondered if she had changed in any way since its arrival. She drew out the photograph of Bibi-ji that had come with the letter—the woman was large and smart in a bright yellow salwar kameez, her face made up like the posh women who drove cars and shopped in Khan Market.
Had her own mother looked anything like Bibi-ji? Nimmo couldn’t be certain. But she did remember standing with a woman she presumed was her mother at the door of their home, while a man, tall and stooped and with a green turban coiled neatly about his thick knot of hair, and two young boys walked away from them and towards the fields. The boys had turned to wave. Nimmo had felt her mother’s tall, solid bulk beside her, comforting in its strength and permanence. She had hugged the long legs, modestly covered in a coarse cotton salwar, and her mother had stroked her head absentmindedly.
The morning had drifted by in silence, a peculiar silence, when Nimmo recalled it from this distance in time—a waiting, shadowy quiet, as if even the birds had a premonition of the horror creeping towards them. Around mid-afternoon, there was a commotion at the far end of the mud lane that crawled past their house and into the heart of the village. Her mother went out of the house to see what was going on, came rushing back inside the house and locked the door. She picked up Nimmo and lowered her gently into the large wooden bharoli of grain that sat in a dark corner of the house.
“Don’t make any noise,” she said. “Don’t even breathe loudly. I will come and take you out in a little while.”
“Are we playing chuppa-chuppi?” Nimmo had asked, delighted that her mother had finally found the time to play with her.
“No, but you must be as quiet as if we are playing it. Understand?” Her mother lowered the heavy wooden lid of the container, wedging a rolling pin under it to allow for fresh air.
A few minutes later, from her grainy hiding place, Nimmo heard fists pounding on their door.
“Who is it?” her mother asked. Her voice, normally deep and sure and comforting, now had an unfamiliar quiver.
Nimmo wasn’t sure what the people outside said in reply, but she did hear her mother unlock the door. The sound of footsteps entering the house and insistent male voices. Her mother’s voice grew higher and more angry. It altered and became pleading, and then abruptly she uttered a single scream, which turned into a sound like the one a stray dog had uttered when they found it dying in the gully behind their house. Then it ceased, that quivering animal whimper. A man laughed, and Nimmo heard receding footsteps.
She had stayed in the bin for a long time, waiting for her mother to pull her out. Time lost its shape and meaning as she sat hidden in the grain. She sucked on her fingers, consumed by a terrible thirst. But mindful of her mother’s warning not to make a sound, to stay until she was taken out of the bharoli, she crouched there until painful cramps overtook her legs and she changed her position slightly, hoping no one would hear the agitated rustling of the wheat beneath her shifting body. She tried chewing a few grains, but they tasted like chalk and made her even more thirsty. To her shame she felt her bladder open and the warm liquid spread around her bottom. She had fouled her mother’s stock of wheat—how could she tell her of this awful thing she had done? Nimmo began to cry softly, less from discomfort than from a fear of what her mother would say.
When her mother eventually opened the lid and lifted her out of the bin, Nimmo hardly recognized the dirty, bleeding woman who held her and rocked her and wept with a soundless, juddering agony.
“Amma, I peed in the bharoli,” Nimmo whispered. “I couldn’t stop. I didn’t know what to do.”
Her mother didn’t seem to hear her confession. She shushed her, told her to keep quiet while she washed herself with the water stored in pots in the kitchen. She didn’t light the lantern though it was pitch dark inside the house. Even the soft splashing of water sounded unnaturally loud. A sweet fragrance came to Nimmo. Her mother, she realized, was using the pale violet-coloured soap that her aunt had sent from somewhere far away and that she used only on special occasions.
Still in the dark, her mother changed Nimmo’s soiled clothes and, pushing her into an inner room, drew the door shut. What was her mother doing on the other side? Nimmo had wondered, beginning to panic. She had pressed her ear to the door but heard nothing.
This silence returned to haunt Nimmo again and again. Had she buried another memory under this one? Had her mother really come back to take her out of the bharoli? Or had she crawled out of it herself? If it had indeed been her mother, where did she disappear to after she had washed herself and Nimmo? And where was she when Nimmo cautiously emerged from the dark room into which she had been pushed? She had joined a kafeela heading for the Indian border and had walked for days in that enormous, ragged line of people, begging strangers for food and water, until a couple with two children a little older than Nimmo had taken her under their wing. They had wound their way across fields that hissed in the wind. Every time they heard approaching horsemen or car engines on the dusty road, they had hidden behind shrubbery or lain flat in sugar cane fields that had been burned down to stubble and still smouldered in patches. They heard trains chugging slowly
a few miles beyond the fields, saw their dark trail of smoke. A rumour spread that the long metal caterpillars were full of dead bodies—of Hindus and Sikhs if the trains were heading towards India, and Mussulmans if they were going to Pakistan. They passed burning villages and villages that were unnaturally quiet, and sometimes more people joined their kafeela, all heading south, hoping to cross the new boundary line which had appeared like a wickedness in their innocent lives, into India. She saw men weeping for their losses. Bloated corpses floated in the canals that ran along the edges of the fields, and lost-eyed children like herself begged pitifully for food and water.
Her long journey ended in New Delhi, in a vast village of tents and shacks—a refugee camp set up by the government of the newborn India. Weeks, perhaps months later, some well-dressed women in pretty saris, with notebooks and pens in their capable hands, had arrived. They had asked Nimmo questions about her family. She had shaken her head shyly at their questions and sucked her finger. She had called her mother Amma. Her mother had called her father Sardar or ji. She could not remember anything else. She did not show the women her discovery: a postcard picture of a bear she had found tucked into the waist of her salwar. Suppose they took it away from her?
Another month went by, and Nimmo found herself adopted by the Sikh couple who had rescued her in the kafeela. And soon, growing up in a busy city, playing with her adoptive siblings and going to school, Nimmo almost forgot her vanished family. She was eighteen when she married Satpal, and within a year she was pregnant with Jasbeer. Two years later Pappu arrived, and Nimmo found herself settled into an uneventful existence broken by nothing more disturbing than Asha’s daily battles.
Yet the chalky taste of fear that had clogged her throat since her mother had thrust her into the wheat bin remained with her even now, when she was a grown woman with a family of her own. Sometimes when she heard water running at night she was reminded of her mother’s furious washing, and her nostrils would fill with the smell of the pale violet soap. She hated waking up and not finding her husband’s body beside her. How would she live without Satpal’s gentleness and strength? How would she sleep without his arms wrapped around her to keep her nightmares at bay?
Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Page 12