Pa-ji noticed groups of young men in black turbans walking through the crowd and collecting money in tins. He thought he saw Jasbeer too, but in the confusion of the crowd he could not be certain. The boy had not spoken to Pa-ji since the morning of his announcement and was hardly seen at home except at mealtimes, when Dr. Randhawa and his acolytes returned for their meals.
Dr. Randhawa began his speech, in Punjabi, without any preliminaries. It wasn’t very different from the one he had delivered years ago to a crowd of five, with its demands for an independent Sikh state, the slide show displaying flag, coin and map, and a few archival photos of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. He didn’t go on as long this time, to Pa-ji’s surprise, and his speech was met with rapturous applause. Now he was holding his hand up for silence. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in English, although there were few women in the crowd. Then he switched to Punjabi again. “There are some witnesses here, who come straight from the torture chamber of the Hindu Raj. They will give those of you who need to be convinced the proof of what I have just said to you—we need our own country where every individual is treated with respect, where we can practice our religion in peace, where we will not be penalized for it.”
A young man sitting in the row of chairs behind him stood up and came slowly to the podium. He was only about twenty years old and had the thin, hunched look of a beaten animal about him. Dr. Randhawa introduced him, and he began to speak.
“My older brother, Lakki, wasn’t at home that night,” he said without any introduction, as if he were already in the middle of a story started long ago. “He was rarely home, and we never mentioned him because he would be in danger if we did.
“But there were others who remembered Lakki’s existence. One night they came, the killers. My father opened the door, what else could he do? He was an old man, and the only weapon he had was a rusty scythe. Inside the house, my mother quickly unwound my long hair. She didn’t know what sort of men were at the door: these days it is difficult to tell. Sometimes it was the police, at other times it was the extremists.”
At that, Dr. Randhawa, who was contemplating his hands, looked up with a slight frown. The witness was here to support him; he did not appreciate the mention of extremists.
“There was a war, we were told. My brother was a soldier in that war. The enemy was everywhere, and people had forgotten what the war was about or whose side they were on. We could hear my father shouting something. My mother took a pair of scissors and hacked off my hair, crying bitterly at the sacrilege that her hands were obliged to commit.
“‘If the police catch you,’ she whispered, ‘they will think you are a Hindu. It is safer to be someone you are not.’ She was wearing pink glass bangles, and I can still hear the way they went chhin-chhin.
“‘Go, putthar, go quickly,’ she whispered to me. ‘Get help. Tell them … tell them … I don’t know, but bring back help. Run, run like the wind.’
“I didn’t know who I was supposed to call for help, but I did run like the wind. I raced around the village banging on doors. But everybody was too terrified of the knock on the door in the middle of the night to help. I ran to the police chowki, but there was nobody there either. When I came home, my mother and my father were dead.”
The young man paused, dry-eyed. He touched his head. No turban, no long hair. “I kept my hair like this to mourn, to remind myself of the last touch of my mother’s hand. But every moment I can feel the weight of hair on my scalp.”
An uneasy silence had descended over the crowd. Many people cried silently. Pa-ji, too, felt like weeping. Was this Dr. Randhawa right after all? Was the situation for Sikhs in India so wretched? Could yet another division of the country heal the wounds that had been caused by the first one? Pa-ji realized it was difficult, from this distance, to have a proper perspective. But he held on to the flickering idea that somewhere, between the boy’s raw story and Dr. Randhawa’s posturing, lay the truth.
TWENTY
THE NIGHTBIRD
New Delhi
October 1983
The air was clouded with the smell of burning wood, the smoky odour that was peculiarly a part of this time of year, which reminded Nimmo that once again Diwali was around the corner and they still hadn’t purchased any firecrackers, clay diyas or even cotton wicks and oil for the diyas. Satpal had been urging her to stop this annual ritual of filling a hundred earthen lamps with oil, rolling the cotton wicks into spires and lighting them all at dusk, and to switch instead to the simplicity of a string of electric lights. But Nimmo wasn’t ready for simplicity. She liked those small earthen lamps-filling them with oil, arranging them outside and finally lighting them, so that at night it looked like a hundred twinkling stars had fallen about her house. And she had to admit that the celebrations were more for her and Kamal than for Pappu, who was now a towering young man and no longer as excited as he had once been about festivals. Only Kamal shared her enthusiasm, helped her light up the diyas and place them all over the house. Sweet, good-natured Kamal, how happy Nimmo was that she had this last child, a daughter, to complete her happiness.
She waved to her two children from the head of the alley as they went their separate ways to school and work, and returned to her home. In the kitchen Satpal was lifting lids off the pots to see what there was to eat.
“Anda-bhujiya and parathey,” Nimmo said. She went to the refrigerator and removed three eggs and a few green chillies. Her husband loved scrambled eggs with spices and onions and hot parathey. “Can you buy some vegetables on your way back home? Don’t bring cauliflower again. We’ve have had it every single night for the past week. Everybody is sick of it.”
“Have you forgotten? I am going to Modinagar today. Have to pick up some parts. I’ll be back very late tonight.” Satpal glanced quickly at the newspaper as he ate his breakfast.
“Do you have to go? Why not Mohan Lal?”
“He has a prospective groom coming to see his daughter this evening,” Satpal said.
“How about Pappu, then? It will be good experience for him.”
“No, I have to decide what to buy after I see how much it is going to cost. And that young man has to finish work on Sharma-ji’s car.” Satpal frowned at the thought of Pappu, who had dropped out of high school and joined the mechanic’s shop, but was rarely to be found at work. He preferred to hang around on street corners eyeing the girls. Sometimes Satpal wondered whether Jasbeer, their oldest son, might have become a scholar if they had kept him here in India. He too had not done well at school, it seemed from the letters they received from Bibi-ji, but what was that she had said in the last missive? The boy was showing a deep interest in religion, in fact he was planning to go for a year to the Damdami Taksal in Bhinder to study the scriptures? She had not commented either way on this decision, but it worried Satpal. Like most of his friends, he was God-fearing but not fanatical. Not that a good religious education would turn Jasbeer into a fanatic; but still, had they not sent him abroad so that he could become a doctor or an engineer, and was it not better for the boy to remain abroad instead of entering the violent mess that Punjab was deteriorating into?
“What time will you be back then?” Nimmo asked, stirring the eggs in the pan.
“Why? Aren’t you going to be at home?”
Nimmo shrugged. “I was thinking of taking Kamal to the market this evening to buy new clothes. I saw a pretty green salwar kameez set in Jain’s store. The last one we bought was for the Baisakhi festival in April. She is growing so fast, everything she owns looks too tight.” Nimmo thought pleasurably of spending an evening shopping with her daughter. “What is in the news today? Any strikes or anything? I don’t want to go out if there is likely to be trouble.”
“No news, except for more deaths in Punjab. More violence, encounters with police, encounters with militants, more widows and orphans on all sides,” Satpal said bitterly. “I don’t know why the government is sitting on its hands and doing nothing.”
“You sound li
ke your nephew Sunny, always talking about killing and war and trouble in Punjab. We live in Delhi. It is not our problem.” She handed him his plate of food and set the kettle on the stove for tea.
“How can you say that, Nimmo? We are Sikhs, our relatives live in Punjab, it matters to me what happens there. You lost your family and your property because of what happened in Punjab. Now my family is also getting affected. Manpreet says that because of Sunny’s involvement with all these political groups the police are harassing them all the time, and you say it’s not our problem?”
Nimmo strained the leaves and stirred milk into her tea, sipping it resolutely. Yes, she cared what happened, and no, she did not want to be involved. All she wanted was to be safe. To live without fear.
Satpal rose to his feet. “I can’t understand you. What is happening to you these days?”
“Nothing is happening to me.” Nimmo snapped, annoyed with him for infecting her morning with dark fears.
Satpal headed for the door and paused. “Sunny is coming to stay with us for a few days. Okay?”
“Kamal will be having her exams, she has to study. Having people in the house will be disturbing.”
Satpal gave her an irritated look. “Every time Manpreet wants to send her son here, one of your children has an exam. I am beginning to think that you don’t want him to come at all!”
Nimmo did not respond. She was afraid of the politics that Sunny would drag with him into the house, but you could not refuse to host your own relatives, especially not your older sister’s son.
“And when I come back from Modinagar,” Satpal said, the irritation still in his voice, “I will get that extra room built on the roof. That way anyone can come and stay, exams or not.”
Nimmo handed him one of the lunch boxes and said in a pacifying voice, “Okay, okay. Don’t leave the house angry. How many years have you been saying you will build that room, anyway? I will write to your sister and tell her to send Sunny to us. But it will have to be next week, after Kamal’s exams. At least allow one child to finish her studies well!”
The rest of the day was tarnished as Nimmo brooded over the prospect of Sunny’s visit, which filled her with nameless worries. She wished that Satpal’s nephew would stay away. Not that she wasn’t fond of him; she had good memories of him. But he had changed in the years since that dreadful Emergency, which, Nimmo had been forced to admit, had been a terrible mistake on the part of Mrs. Gandhi. She had seen Sunny turn from a cheerful, open youth into a secretive, hard-eyed man whom she barely recognized. She worried that he might drag the impressionable young Pappu into the politics of Punjab, fill his head with ideas of fighting to create an independent country called Khalistan.
The last time Sunny had visited them, a few years ago, Nimmo was in the kitchen, cooking dinner. Kamal and Pappu were in the front room with their older cousin. She heard them laughing over something that Sunny had said, and then Kamal’s voice, begging Sunny to tell them stories.
At first she hadn’t paid attention, assuming they were the same ones he had told before—amusing folklore about animals, or the famous Akbar and Birbal tales that Kamal had loved. Then her daughter’s voice pierced through her fog of thoughts.
“I don’t like your stories anymore, Bhai-ji,” Kamal said. “They are so scary.”
Nimmo had started to listen more carefully—he must be telling them those silly ghost stories he was so fond of. Like the one about the four-winged nightbird that made those who heard its song go mad. Only those people who were about to die could hear this deadly bird. She remembered hearing this story as a child and being terrified by it. But now what were these other things Sunny was telling her children?
“The police always burn the bodies,” she heard him say. “It is the best way to get rid of them. Sometimes, though, a body part does not burn fully. Perhaps it hasn’t been doused properly with kerosene; perhaps the police have run out of firewood, for so many corpses need a lot of wood to roast well. Once my friend found a skull in his field, partially covered in skin and soot. Another time, his dog Blackie brought home somebody’s hand.”
Kamal had run to Nimmo, covering her ears with her hands, and Nimmo had scolded Sunny for scaring the girl. “Stop filling their heads with rubbish,” she had said.
“But it is not rubbish, maami-ji,” Sunny protested. “It is all true, every word of it. Everybody should hear about the things that are going on in Punjab. Kamal and Pappu as well.”
“No, I don’t want them to know.” She weighed her next words before uttering them. “Maybe you should go home,” she said evenly. “As soon as possible.”
Sunny had left the next day, giving a puzzled Satpal an excuse about having to meet someone in Jullundur.
Nimmo hadn’t told Satpal about this incident. She was certain he would be annoyed by her rudeness. Sunny hadn’t showed up at their door for the next four years. Now, Nimmo was certain, he was coming here to get away from the police, or worse. He was bringing Trouble to her home, and she couldn’t think how to stop him.
PART FIVE
ENDINGS
TWENTY-ONE
A SENSE OF BELONGING
Vancouver
March 1984
It was a quiet day at The Bay’s shoe department, and Leela spent most of it listening to Erin’s woes. In the sixteen years since she had started working at the store, Leela had seen her sales manager through three boyfriends and two marriages. She had often wondered why Erin had decided that she, Leela, married for twenty-six years to a man whom she had met only once before her wedding, should be an authority on affairs of the heart.
“I told him he’d better watch out,” she said to Leela, fluffing her already high hair with her red fingernails. She leaned against the countertop. “I am not, I repeat not, going to take crap from anybody. You know me, Laila. You know I don’t take crap, right?”
Erin persisted in calling her Laila. Once, exasperated, Leela had even written it down in big black letters and waved it in front of Erin’s nose—LEE-LA—but to no effect. It wasn’t that Erin didn’t care for her. She had shown Leela many kindnesses, often going out of her way to drive her home, bringing her small gifts every Christmas and remembering her birthday as well as Preethi’s and Arjun’s. Leela suspected that she had merely decided that Leela could not possibly be a name because she had never heard of it, while “Laila” was the host of an American television talk show Erin watched faithfully. She was now resigned to being the more dashing Laila at work and mundane wife and mother-of-two Leela at home.
“Yes,” Leela said doubtfully. Recently there had been signs that her sales manager’s latest relationship was in trouble—Erin came late to work, sighed more than she sold, didn’t wear the bright make-up of which she was so fond.
“Would you take crap from your guy, Laila? Tell me honestly, would you, as a self-respecting woman, take any old shit?”
Leela thought about it for a few moments. She wasn’t sure what rated as crap in Erin’s book. She had met Erin’s boyfriend, and he had not seemed the sort to give anyone crap. He was a mild-mannered man with a shy smile and seemed to adore her.
She caught Erin looking anxiously at her through mascara-ringed eyes. “Well, would you? Take crap from your husband? Or would you leave him?”
The thought of leaving Balu had never entered her head, so Leela could only nod and say judiciously, “Well, it depends on the crap. I mean what kind of crap is Don giving you?” Hearing herself speak, she marvelled at the variety of tongues she had acquired—one that made her sound just like Erin, another a soothing, in charge-of-things tone for the customers who came to her like helpless children holding out pairs of shoes in confusion, a third for her home, the children, Balu, Bibi-ji and the wide circle of friends and acquaintances she now had. How enormous her world had become that she needed so many languages to negotiate it.
“Laila, are you listening?” Erin tapped her nails on the counter.
Leela widened her eyes at her co
lleague and nodded. “Yes, I am, Erin.”
Erin was looking closely at her. “I just noticed, Laila. Your eyes are the same colour as mine.”
“You just noticed?” Leela exclaimed. “And how long have we known each other?” She began to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Erin asked, looking puzzled.
“Never mind. It’s a long and complicated story,” Leela said. She shook her head and chuckled again. “I’ll tell you some other time.”
It was seven in the evening by the time she finished her shift and took the bus home. She settled into her seat with a sigh, noticing two teenaged girls sitting in the back of the bus. With their copycat hairstyles, dark lipstick, fishnet stockings and short leather skirts, they looked, to Leela, like a new singer called Madonna who appeared on television a lot these days. They were having a conversation that involved the repetition of a favourite word in a variety of tones and volumes.
“Fuck!” said one of them, shaking her head and rolling her eyes.
“Yeah, like fuck, man!” said the other, more verbose one.
“So I told him to, like, fuck off!”
They got off the bus at the next stop. Watching them as they sashayed down the sidewalk, Leela thought back to the first time she had heard their favourite word. A driver had spat it at them the day they arrived in Vancouver. Fucking Chinese was what he had called them. He had pointed his middle finger at the sky and she had wondered what all those words and gestures added up to, afraid of the dislike implicit in them. Now it all seemed so long ago and of little consequence.
Fishing around in her purse, she pulled out a letter that had arrived the previous day from Vimala, Balu’s cousin in Delhi. It was full of news and gossip about their relatives. Leela liked rereading her letters until she had memorized them. She would reply in her spare time, writing a few words, a sentence or two, sometimes the entire paragraph between chores and during her lunch breaks at work. Somehow she could think of much more news to put into her missives when she wrote them piecemeal than when she sat down and tried to write about everything at once.
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