Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

by Anita Rau Badami

  Not these people, Leela thought wryly, taking in the line-up of mostly brown-skinned passengers, the sari-clad women, the children in bright clothes, the enormous piles of luggage accompanying each one of them. These people were all headed for India, she had no doubt about it.

  She spotted Arjun approaching with his fiancée, Fern. “Hello, Amma. Ready to leave?” he said, giving her a hug.

  “Here, Leela. These are for you.” Fern added a plastic bag full of magazines to the bags on the cart.

  The girl was wearing a sari, Leela noted. The light blue one that Leela had given her as an engagement present last month.

  “You look great, Fern,” Preethi said. “Doesn’t she, Amma?” She shot Leela a meaningful glance, which Leela ignored. What has the world come to, she thought indignantly, that my daughter has to tell me what to say or not to say?

  Arjun gave her bags a dubious look. “Are you allowed so much luggage?”

  “Three check-in and one carry-on,” Leela said defensively. “I am slightly over the limit. Look at all those other people. I have nothing by comparison!”

  Arjun rolled his eyes. “Slightly over the limit?! You are allowed only two check-in bags, not three. And those bags are the size of rooms. Bet you you’re going to have to pay extra for them.”

  “Why should I pay extra? As if my ticket was cheap! We will see who makes me pay!”

  Then Fern and Arjun wandered away to find coffee, and Preethi turned on her mother. “Amma, why are you always so mean?”

  Leela widened her eyes artlessly. “What did I do? I didn’t say a thing!”

  “Precisely. You could have told Fern she looked nice in that sari, couldn’t you? She bends over backwards to fit into our family and you bend over backwards to keep her out!”

  “Why does she need to wear a sari to fit in? I didn’t ask her to. You wear trousers and miniskirts, and you fit in okay.” But her tone was mild. She was determined not to be drawn into a quarrel with her daughter just before departure. It would be inauspicious. A quarrel invited the wicked spirits in, opened doors for them.

  There was a small commotion farther up the line. Two passengers ahead of Leela, a man wearing a grey turban was arguing vigorously with the check-in clerk about his baggage.

  “What’s going on there?” Leela asked Balu. He strolled ahead to find out.

  “He wants his bags checked right through to Delhi,” he said when he returned, shaking his head impatiently. “Some of these people, really!”

  “Why what’s wrong with that? It is allowed, no?”

  “Not if you do not have a confirmation on the connecting flight,” Balu replied. “Suppose he does not get a seat from Toronto on that Air India flight? His baggage will still be on it, and he won’t. Creates unnecessary confusion, that’s all.”

  “Not to mention security problems,” commented the passenger in front of them. “I doubt they’ll allow it.”

  Leela smiled at him. He was dressed in a nice suit and looked well off, Leela thought, like One of Us.

  “What is going on there?” the woman behind her asked, craning to look over her shoulder. “We will miss our connection. What nonsense!” She smelled of sweat and heavy perfume. Definitely not One of Us.

  Leela watched closely as the turbaned man leaned forward and continued to argue with the check-in clerk. If he was getting all sorts of concessions regarding baggage, she would insist on getting the same treatment.

  “Look, I assure you I have a confirmed ticket for the onward journey.” The man’s voice was suddenly raised. “On business class, as you can see. My brother has it with him—he is flying on another plane to Toronto and then we will travel together from there. If you wish I can go find him and bring the ticket. It won’t take long.”

  The clerk considered his suggestion for a moment and then said, “No, no. There are all these other people waiting. Sorry sir, I can’t allow this.”

  The man wouldn’t budge. Now he accused her of being bureaucratic. She looked worriedly over his shoulder at the long, restive queue and gave up. The baggage was checked through. The obstreperous passenger went his way and a sigh rippled through the crowd.

  Finally it was Leela’s turn. The clerk, now in a thoroughly bad mood, charged her for the extra baggage, refusing to give in to any argument. Leela paid angrily and moved out of the line.

  “What cheek!” she exclaimed to Arjun. “That man wanted his bags booked all the way to India without having a seat, and the woman allowed it. The other woman had twice the number of bags I did, and no problem. But me! I had to pay excess baggage for those tiny suitcases. They aren’t excess, I know. I weighed them at home and they were within limits. These people will make money any way they can!”

  “Leelu, you did have three huge suitcases to check in,” Balu pointed out.

  “Yes, I know all that. But they should have some consideration for people who are going back after so many years, no? I can’t go empty-handed. What will all our relatives think?”

  With a twinge of guilt she remembered the wild shopping sprees she had indulged in this last month—recklessly buying presents for Balu’s aunts, uncles, cousins near and far, their children and grandchildren, friends, aged servants, their children and then some extras, just in case. She wanted to spoil them now that she could afford it. And it was also necessary to show that she was settled into life, prosperous, able to afford such extravagances. In addition there were the things her friends had asked her to take back for their families; these were requests she could not refuse. After all, for so many years, they too had carried things to and fro for her. Now, finally, she could repay all those kindnesses. Mrs. Shah had given her two Teflon-coated frying pans for a newly married niece. Mrs. Menon had sent a parcel of old clothes for her family-servant’s grandchildren. Cashews and black pepper for Mrs. Patel’s sisters—both of these items had arrived in Canada from India, but, said Mrs. Patel, they export the best to the West and our own people are left with the poor-quality stuff. Besides, it was cheaper here than in India.

  “Amma, we wanted to tell you. Fern and I, we’re planning a fall wedding,” said Arjun suddenly.

  “What? Just like that? I thought you said you had not decided. And what a time to tell me, just before I am leaving! We have to talk about this. Is this fall date auspicious?”

  “Auspicious? Who cares? All that stuff doesn’t matter here, Amma. When you come back we can pick the actual date. We were thinking sometime in September—it is still nice then.”

  Leela looked at Balu, who seemed pleased. “Did you know about this? So suddenly these children—”

  “No, I didn’t,” Balu said. “But look, I think you should be heading for the security check now.” He propelled her gently forward.

  “Arjun, Fern,” Leela said over her shoulder. “Phone me when I reach Delhi and we will talk about this. Okay?”

  “Yes Amma, we’ll call.”

  Balu patted his wife on her back. “I’ll see you in Delhi day after tomorrow.”

  “Here, don’t forget your food bag,” Preethi said. She hugged her mother hard. “And be good.”

  Leela took the large tapestry handbag, which was Arjun’s present for her journey. Inside were several Ziploc bags of idlis, parathas, tomato sandwiches. Everyone knew how terrible airplane food was. No spice, no flavour, only that awful freezer smell. She adjusted the pleats of her dark green silk sari so that they hung down at the right height above the stylish green and gold slippers Balu had purchased for a ridiculous price on Main Street.

  “Okay, I will go and come, hanh?” Go and come. The traditional goodbye, a farewell and a promise of return. For a traveller’s journey is never complete until she returns, until a circle has been described, until the people she has left behind are before her once more. I will go and come.

  Ahead of her, striding confidently through the terminal, was the man who had managed to get his bags checked right through to India. Some people, Leela thought indignantly, some people had all
the luck. She quickened her steps to catch up with him and throw him a dirty look, but he walked faster and was soon lost in the crowd of people heading towards the security gates.

  The wait in Toronto was longer than expected. There was a problem with one of the engines. Leela struck up a friendship with two teenaged girls going home to their grandparents for the summer holidays and spent a pleasant couple of hours chatting with them, barely noticing the delay until it was time to board the Air India flight to Delhi.

  She settled herself in the humming plane, packed with people, leaned back in her seat and thought, I am going home. A doubt crept into her mind unbidden. Where was home exactly? Back in Vancouver or ahead of her in India? She had forgotten, lost her bearings. This is the house that Rama Shastri built. This is the well in the house that Rama Shastri built. This is the tamarind tree by the well in the house … The ditty she used to sing so long ago, as a child who wanted so badly to belong to a family that did not love her. Heard Akka, her grandmother, saying, “Nothing worse than to be a dangling person, a foot here and a foot there and a great gap in between. Imagine how painful it is to stay stretched like that forever.” Like King Trishanku, a floating, rootless, accursed creature, up-in-the-air.

  The words shifted, changed. This is the house that we bought. This is the house with pine trees and hydrangeas, roses and clematis. When her back was turned, while she slumbered at night, her life had been usurped by another country; her thoughts, her memories changed or replaced. She had tried so hard to appropriate the world around her by renaming everything so that it would feel the same as Back Home. She had tried very hard to dislike Vancouver, to keep it at arm’s length. And now, at this moment, inside the airplane, up in the sky, thirty-five thousand feet above sea level, she discovered that the city had stealthily insinuated itself in her mind and her heart. It had become home just as surely as Bangalore became home the day she entered it as a bride all those years ago.

  Leela glanced at her watch. They were one and a half hours away from Heathrow airport. Right now, she was literally between two worlds. She yawned, pulled her blanket over her legs, and fell into a deep sleep.

  Across the ocean, across a continent, the telephone rang in the Bhat household. Balu struggled out of his sleep, wondering who would call this early in the morning. It was Majumdar, who had never learned to sleep, staying up all night, listening to radio broadcasts from all over the planet.

  “Balu, listen. Did Leela board that flight to India?”

  “Yes,” Balu mumbled. “She got lucky.”

  “Oh no,” Majumdar moaned. “Oh God, no.”

  EPILOGUE

  JUNE 1986

  BIBI-JI

  The house is hollow with silence—the house guests have gone, hardly anyone comes here anymore. Now there are many other homes that have open doors and the money to afford kindness. Bibi-ji stands before her dressing table crowded with bottles and jars of creams and powders, the trays of lipsticks she has not touched since Pa-ji’s death, the silver-backed comb and brush set that was his last gift to her. She looks at herself in the mirror suspended over the dressing table and sees her mother staring accusingly back at her.

  “Greedy girl, Sharanjeet Kaur,” Gurpreet says, shaking a thin finger at Bibi-ji. “One day you will pay for all that you have stolen from others. You will pay.”

  “I have, Amma,” Bibi-ji whispers. “I have.” Not once, but twice. She has learned that for everything you gain, you lose an equal amount. She had grabbed her sister’s fate, and Fate had turned around and taken that sister away. Then she had taken Nimmo’s son, and he had so warped her sense of right and wrong that she had sacrificed her friend Leela to the gods.

  Now Bibi-ji is an old woman living in a dead house on 56th Avenue in Vancouver, on the western edge of the world, with neither husband nor child nor friend, only ghosts and guilt for company. She gazes at her mother’s face, reflected beside hers in the mirror.

  “Amma, you were right,” she whispers. “I have paid dearly.”

  She pulls open a drawer and removes a letter that arrived from Jasbeer a week ago.

  “Dear Bibi-ji, just to let you know. I am out of prison and will be home soon.”

  Home? She thinks. Her heart flutters with hope for a moment. But which one?

  PREETHI

  Jericho Beach. A beautiful morning just like the one on which Leela had died, falling, falling thirty-five thousand feet into the Atlantic Ocean far from home. Either home, neither home.

  Preethi stares out at the flat grey water. At this time last year, they had all come here for a picnic. They talked and joked and laughed. Preethi and Arjun had teased their mother about the things she was taking back with her as presents: umbrellas—six of them—for each of Balu’s aunts, bottles of Oil of Olay for favourite nieces, watches for nephews, two transparent negligees without matching robes that she had found in a sale bin and planned to give to a relative who was getting married soon, egg beaters to whip buttermilk into a froth, sheets of stickers for the children in the family. Leela had shaken her head at her critics and defended her purchases stoutly. Balu had presented her with a pair of gaudy green and gold slippers that he had bought from Bela’s Boutique as a surprise pre-departure gift. “You can’t arrive in India wearing a sari and those running shoes, Leela,” he had laughed. “What will our relatives think?”

  Preethi worries about her father. He has quit his job and spends his time travelling between their home in Vancouver and the family home in Bangalore that Leela had loved so much. He blames himself for her death. “She never wanted to come here,” he had said when Preethi asked him how he could have foreseen or prevented the disaster. “I was the one who insisted. If we hadn’t left Bangalore …”

  She thinks of that terrible morning when Alok Majumdar had phoned them with the news. They had gone to Ireland to identify Leela’s body, but nothing had been found of her. Only the tapestry handbag that Arjun had given her as a farewell gift, with the freezer bags of food inside still intact.

  She thinks about Brian Mulroney’s gaffe, calling India’s prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, to offer his condolences when it was a planeload of mostly Canadian citizens who had died. How would Leela have felt? Preethi wonders. Even in death, neither country claimed her poor mother as its own. A Trishanku for all eternity, Leela used to say.

  She glances at her watch. Her father will be here soon with Arjun and Fern, and together they will remember Leela.

  The sun beats down on her back. Fishing around in her bag for a bottle of water, her fingers find an envelope. She draws it out and looks at it for a long moment. It is from Jasbeer, and had surprised her when it arrived in August last year. Even now, she is not entirely sure why he wrote to her after such a long silence—or why she has kept the letter. He had written it while he was in prison in India and, as he put it, “had plenty of time to think about my sins.” She opens it and reads a random passage. Do you remember how we used to go from house to house on Halloween saying Trick or Treat and expecting nothing more terrifying than a handful of candy? We were dressed as monsters but we were only children. Now I am no longer a child but in the last few years I had become a monster. I didn’t bother to hide myself behind a disguise. I went around the villages of Punjab, banging on doors, holding out a cloth bag. The door would open and a frightened face would peer out. I didn’t need to say anything. They knew I was there to collect money. Trick or Treat, I wanted to say, Trick or Treat. Not that the person who opened the door had a choice. I expected a gift of money or gold. Both would be used to buy us food and more guns and grenades. This was how we found the means to fight for a free country. After a while I didn’t know what that meant anymore, really. Free country. Every single time I saw a frightened face putting the last of their savings—perhaps a gold chain bought for a daughter’s dowry, perhaps money kept aside to thatch a roof or feed the family for a month—into my bag, I felt more wretched and unsure. These people were giving me their last pennies because they w
ere terrified of me. All they wanted was to be left alone to live their lives. And all I wanted was to go home. I was sick of the violence and the killing.” And then, on a single sheet of paper: “Preethi, I read about the Air India flight in the papers. I saw your mother’s name. I am so sorry.”

  She can read it no more. She begins to tear up the page, into tiny pieces. Then, page by page, she tears up the remainder of the letter and finally the envelope. She gets to her feet, walks over to the edge of the sea and tosses in a handful of torn paper.

  The tide has retreated. She watches two children crouched on the sand flats intently poking at something in the wet mush with their fingers. She smiles as another memory, more pleasant than the last, of a different day on the beach, surfaces. Four children on the wet sand, their heads close together as they pushed a twig down into a geoduck.

  There is a scuffle of feet approaching, and Arjun drops down beside her. “What are you thinking about, Pree?”

  “Something that happened long ago,” she says. “Nothing important.”

  NIMMO

  As soon as she comes home, Nimmo collects Satpal’s turban cloths, which she had starched that morning and hung out to dry—long strips of colour fluttering in the sun, reminding her of him, standing before the small mirror in the front room, winding his turban about his head, catching her eye as she watched, smiling at her. She carries the armload inside, folds them and puts them away. Then she begins to clean the already-spotless house for the second time that day. This is now her daily routine. Get out of bed in the morning after a sleepless night, clean the house of all the evil that she can still smell in it, go to the temple to help with the children in the nursery, visit the market to buy fresh vegetables for her family, clean the house again in case the wickedness has crept back in during her absence, cook for Satpal and Jasbeer, Pappu and her little Kamal, and wait for them to tell her how much they miss her. Then they will drift away, leaving her to another night of sleepless tossing.