Inheritance

by Balli Kaur

  ‘The weather’s too nice,’ Narain said.

  ‘We have to go. There aren’t enough people out there who are willing to fight for the truth anymore. It’s important to show our support,’ she said.

  ‘Of course,’ he told her. Evening was too far away for him to even consider. This was the happiest he’d been since arriving in Iowa. He said this to Jenny but she thought he was only talking about the weather.

  ‘It’s like this in California,’ Jenny said. ‘All the time. I went there one year for Christmas when my dad was living with this woman in San Diego. The weather was amazing.’

  ‘Let’s move there,’ Narain joked. He laughed with surprise when she responded enthusiastically. Kisses suddenly rained on his cheeks and neck.

  She asked him if he wanted to take a road trip to Los Angeles at the end of summer. ‘We’ll save up and go see where all the movie stars live.’ She let out a delighted squeal and listed the celebrities they would see. ‘Okay?’ she asked.

  Narain closed his eyes for moment. ‘Of course we will,’ he replied. The farther away from home he was, the more things seemed possible.

  Two days later, Amrit left the house in the middle of the night and didn’t return. Narain was the last to know because he had become so difficult to reach. It took a phone call from his father to the Dean, who sent a resident advisor to tell him in person.

  ‘Come home right away,’ Father said gravely when Narain returned the call. His heart pounded. He could not think about refusing. Too many questions spun through his mind. Where was she? Was she safe? What was he expected to do?

  As he packed his room for the return home, he pulled out the suitcase from under his bed. Thoughts of Amrit, her mangled body abandoned somewhere, flooded his mind and made it hard for him to focus. His hands shook as he struggled to open the suitcase. It contained items that he could throw out to make room for what he had acquired in America. Shot glasses. Photographs. Magazines that were banned back home. A clock radio.

  Tears stung his eyes as he emptied the suitcase. He hadn’t expected the smells of his home to remain so well preserved in this bag. Sandalwood and cardamom drifted into the air and tinted the skies a rich orange.

  Narain spotted his thick-soled shoes. Amrit had done most of the last-minute packing. Probably out of mischief, she’d removed the shoes from his other suitcase and placed them in this one. He sat cross-legged on the floor and pressed his head into his hands. Fellow students peered anxiously from the doorway asking if he needed anything but his cries only grew louder when he picked up the shoes and found them sitting flatly on a dictionary, a Holy Book and a popular novel.

  Father

  After making the phone calls, Harbeer returned to his room, sat at his desk and waited for his wife. She would surely arrive soon, sensing the first signs of trouble with Amrit. Her secret visits had become so frequent lately that Harbeer became nervous the children would find out. He always kept his voice low and their conversations brief. Whenever she lingered and tried to offer advice, he reminded her bitterly that it was she who left. If you know so much, why don’t you come back to raise your children? Why don’t you let them know you are here? To this, she never had a reply.

  On the corner of Harbeer’s desk was a fresh stack of loose-leaf paper for his writing practice. Twenty-five years ago, during his first months in Singapore, he had practised writing in English, imitating the extensions and swoops of his British officers’ penmanship. Graduating from single words, he focused on sentences and then paragraphs. Soon he was able to write lengthy letters without having to consult a dictionary. He still wrote letters often. These were different from the letters written to Narain in America or to his father in India. These letters remained unsent – they were not addressed to anybody in particular but somehow the format allowed him to articulate thoughts that he could not otherwise. Perhaps there was a worthy recipient out there to whom he would eventually send his thoughts, a person who would read them with sympathy as well as appreciation for his experiences and ideas. It was a far-fetched idea, of course. Harbeer could not imagine entrusting anybody with the contents of his mind, particularly his deepest disappointments. The letters sat in the bottom drawer.

  When Harbeer first designated a place to store such letters, he was certain that just one drawer would be sufficient. There had been a promising future ahead. He and Dalveer had arrived in Singapore a few months before his sister, Rashpal, her husband and their toddler, Karam were due to follow. He had a dignified and respected post with the British Military Police so he had not arrived in Singapore as so many migrants did, as labourers and construction workers from China and India. His job was to protect the citizens, and there were opportunities for promotions to higher ranks in the coming years. He and Dalveer lived in a modest but comfortable bungalow on the British Naval Base in Sembawang.

  The day Harbeer heard the dreadful news of Rashpal and her husband’s deaths, he sat down to write a letter, intending to inform his officers that he had to take a leave of absence to tend to some family matters – the last rites in India, the question of what to do with young Karam. Instead, Harbeer began to write a list of questions. He asked his unknown recipient how Rashpal’s ship could have capsized. He asked where her body was now and how to carry out a funeral with only a memory. He wanted to know how Papa, having only lost his wife two years before, would cope with his grief. He asked, pleadingly and with hope, if the fact that Karam had been saved by surviving passengers was a sign that goodness existed.

  This letter was tucked away in the bottom of the drawer. Harbeer hoped to read it again one day and feel a sense of peace but over the years, more letters were piled on, burying those early regrets with more disappointments. His first son, Gurdev, born three years after Karam, was not athletic or confident; he pouted constantly and had outbursts of unnecessary emotion. His second son, Narain, was meek and always in tears. In his letters about these two, he speculated on the ways in which he might model another son to be more like him. When Dalveer was pregnant with a third child, Harbeer thought God himself might have been peering over his shoulders and reading his words as he wrote them. Then the child turned out to be a girl and no sooner had she arrived than Dalveer exited, leaving Harbeer with the baffling task of raising a girl. Letters overflowing with Harbeer’s despair filled the drawer. Over the years he had to fold them into tiny squares to make room for more, determined that only one drawer was sufficient for all of his disappointments. He stopped writing for a brief period while he decided where to keep all of his old letters to make space for new ones. This period extended as Harbeer became busy with the task of raising the children on his own, and soon he had abandoned the letter writing altogether, considering it an indulgent pastime. There was plenty to be grateful for in this new country and he had allowed himself to succumb to the same melancholy that he had criticised his wife for.

  Only two more events gave Harbeer reason to open that drawer again and both occurred in the same year. It was 1967 – the year Harbeer began studying for the written test to be promoted to Police Inspector, and the year Narain was conscripted into the army. Nothing turned out as expected. The British announced they would be withdrawing from the country, leaving Harbeer’s aspirations suspended. He wrote furiously, scribbling out the practiced answers to the test, unloading them onto the paper until his mind was blank. Months afterwards, there came the phone call from a head officer at Narain’s base camp. Harbeer was called in for an interview – a standard procedure, they assured him, for identifying Narain’s type of problem. They had sounded so confident, as if they had been handling these cases for years, but Narain was in the first cohort of National Servicemen in Singapore. He was supposed to make history in this country but instead he was probably the first case of… what did they call it? Sexual deviance. Evidence of effeminate behaviour. Homosexual tendencies. They had asked if any signs had existed when Narain was a child and Harbeer had said no. The officers must have thought the puzzlement a
nd grave disappointment on his face were genuine signs that he had suspected nothing over the years. Actually, Harbeer wasn’t entirely surprised but he was confused as to why Narain would admit to that filthy behaviour. Why hadn’t Narain denied it? Why was he trying to destroy his family’s reputation? There were Punjabis in all ranks of the army who would look at Harbeer now and know it was confirmed. His son was a homosexual.

  After that meeting, Harbeer spent entire nights writing letters, recounting everything he had witnessed in Narain over the years: the left-handedness he had tried to correct by making the boy sit on his left hand while writing with the right; the nervousness; the posture; that girlish walk. The pages overflowed with regrets and so did the drawer. Only when Harbeer bid farewell to him at the airport did he feel his despair subsiding. America would change the boy, and four years away would buy some time for Harbeer to rebuild his reputation. ‘My son is studying to be an engineer,’ he would pointedly tell those Punjabis who had heard the rumours from their army friends. Surely this detail would be enough to appease them – no young boy went overseas unless he was serious about becoming a man.

  Now Amrit was gone. Now more letters would have to be written. Harbeer cringed at the thought and reminded himself not to get carried away. She was probably playing an elaborate prank on the family, nothing worse. It was good that Narain was returning for his summer break – he would watch over Amrit and pass on some of the discipline he had learned in America.

  The hinges of the back door creaked slightly – or was it a sound from outside? Harbeer strained to listen. Sometimes it was impossible to tell whether Dalveer was entering. Rain dripping on the roof could be mistaken for the patter of her feet. A gate opening, her languid sigh. A rustle in the trees, her fingers raking coconut oil through her hair until it was soaked. The only way to be sure was to see her. He waited until he caught her shadow, then her slight figure making its way through the corridors. Her questioning eyes darted at the doorways. Harbeer called out that nobody was home, just him. She entered the room and brought with her the hard scent of freshly-churned soil. Harbeer looked outside. Clouds were huddled in the sky. Somewhere on the island it had already begun to rain.

  He informed her that Amrit had gone missing. ‘I checked her bed in the morning and she was gone,’ he said.

  Dalveer let out a cry and tore through the house. Harbeer went after her, pleading for silence. The neighbours would hear her. Did she want that? Did she want the neighbours to come rushing over? She went through all of Amrit’s things – her schoolbag, her clothes, her books. Harbeer sat and watched her. He had gone through these same actions this morning when he noticed the empty room. Amrit was nowhere to be found in those things.

  Dalveer sat in a heap on the floor and wept softly into her hands. Harbeer crouched next to her. He waited for her breathing to slow, for the sobs to subside, and then he promised to find Amrit. He paused, and then softly told her that Karam and Gurdev were arriving soon. She understood what this meant and she picked herself up. She did not tell him when she would come back but he knew to expect her soon. He had stopped trying to follow her years ago, and so when she left, he went back to his desk and began to write. The sharp rap of Karam’s knuckles was familiar – he always made an announcement of his presence rather than a request to enter. Harbeer beamed when he saw the boy. He couldn’t help it. People in the neighbourhood used to mistake Karam for his biological son, and if Harbeer had to correct them, he did so with great reluctance. Their surprise was not unusual – Karam’s broad shoulders and confident stride mirrored Harbeer’s, and his sharp features gave him a strong resemblance that Harbeer’s own sons did not have. Somewhere in his letters of disappointments, Harbeer had written that Gurdev and Narain had taken after their mother.

  ‘Any news?’ Karam asked. ‘Have you heard anything?’

  ‘I’ve only called you, Gurdev and Narain,’ Harbeer said. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to let anybody else know at this stage. It might just be mischief.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Karam said, reassuringly. ‘I wouldn’t worry.’

  ‘I’ve asked Narain to come back, though,’ Harbeer said. Karam looked a bit surprised at this. ‘I need him to be here to look after Amrit. The girl has no sense of right and wrong anymore because her older brother hasn’t been around. This is their home and there are rules to be followed. They can’t just run off like that. Both of them must learn this.’

  ‘Where do you think she might be?’ Karam asked. ‘Does she have any friends that she might have gone off with?’

  Harbeer could only recall the last time he lectured Amrit, after he spotted her in a coffee shop during his evening rounds. He had been with two fellow police officers, one of them a Punjabi man, and so he could not make a scene. By the time Amrit came home, his fury had subsided and he chose instead to appeal to the girl’s sense of pride. ‘Amrit, you are the smartest girl in your class,’ he said. ‘If you want to keep that title, you should be studying after school instead of running around with those half-past-two characters.’ He had borrowed this term from a Chinese colleague who used it to describe boys with tobacco-stained teeth and dyed hair like burnt grass, who gathered in coffee shops. They were aimless with their days, unaware of the passing time, only interested in the crackling radio music to which they bobbed their heads and clapped. Amrit had cried, said she was sorry. Within days Harbeer saw her at the coffee shop again.

  ‘No, no friends,’ Harbeer said quickly. Surely those coffee shop boys were not friends of Amrit’s.

  ‘Do you think she’s gone to school for something? Should we check there?’

  ‘The gates are always locked. She wouldn’t be able to get in,’ Harbeer replied. ‘If she wanted something from school she would have told me. She was gone very early this morning, when it was dark. There’s no reason for a girl to be out at those hours.’

  Karam gave Harbeer’s shoulder a pat. ‘We’ll find her,’ he said. They both fell into their usual comfortable small talk, the type of banter that Harbeer had never enjoyed with his other children. When he heard the creak of the gate opening outside, Harbeer felt a twinge of irritation that their conversation would be interrupted.

  Gurdev arrived in his usual manner, huffing and puffing, wiping the sweat from his neck, his eyebrows furrowed in complaint. ‘I could have picked you up,’ Karam told him. ‘I drove over here.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ Gurdev said. His tone contained more than the usual dose of coldness towards his cousin. He sneaked a glance at Harbeer. ‘It would have been too much trouble,’ Gurdev added more generously. Harbeer nodded approvingly. He had little tolerance for jealousy. It had no place between brothers. This was how he had always told Gurdev to regard Karam – like a brother. Learn from him, Harbeer had always said, but Gurdev always insisted on continuing a petty rivalry that stemmed from their childhood.

  Karam filled in Gurdev on the details concerning Amrit’s disappearance. ‘We’re not calling anyone,’ Karam said. ‘Once people start to hear that Amrit’s gone missing, they’ll just start gossiping.’

  Gurdev’s eyebrows bunched together. ‘Not calling anyone?’ He directed the question at Harbeer. ‘Not even the police?’

  ‘This is not a matter for the police,’ Harbeer snapped, glaring at Gurdev. Imagine if he had left all of his problems in the hands of this boy – where would his reputation be? Harbeer was a policeman himself; if his colleagues found out that he had no control over his own daughter, he would be a laughing-stock. And with all the cutbacks happening in the force lately, with only a few years before he would be forced into retirement, did Gurdev want his last few years to be spent in disgrace?

  ‘I doubt she’s in any danger, Gurdev,’ Karam said. ‘We’ll just hold on for now.’

  Gurdev looked back and forth between Harbeer and Karam as if he did not know who was who. ‘Hold on? This could be serious!’

  Harbeer felt his anger mounting. ‘Gurdev,’ he said, warningly. ‘You’re becoming
too emotional.’

  Gurdev scrunched up his face and shook his head. He was overwhelmed now, Harbeer could see. ‘You’re telling me that Amrit’s gone missing and we’re just going to sit and wait for her to return? What if she’s been kidnapped, or worse?’

  Harbeer’s arms shot out. Only when Karam stepped between them did Harbeer realise that he meant to grab Gurdev by the shoulders and give him a firm shake. It used to steady Gurdev as a child when he became taken up by these sorts of theatrics. Kidnapping? Worse? Only Gurdev would voice such extreme possibilities. Not once had they crossed Harbeer’s mind; he had exercised great restraint to keep such thoughts at bay. All he knew was that Amrit was not at home, where she was supposed to be. His imagination had stopped there because he was respectful to the superstitions about speculations becoming reality.

  ‘You should know better than to say such things,’ Harbeer barked over Karam’s shoulder. ‘Your wife.’ Karam gently steered him towards a chair into which he gladly sank, feeling the energy drain right out of him.

  Gurdev’s chest heaved unsteadily. He looked stricken. As Harbeer calmed down, he wanted to offer more soothing words, something to dull the sting of calling Gurdev’s pregnant wife to mind. If Dalveer were in the room, she would chide him for not being gentler. She would go to Gurdev and calmly remind him that such thoughts invited misfortune during what was already a sensitive time for his wife. Anything an expectant parent speculated about somebody else’s luck could impact their own child. This was what Harbeer meant but his words were always shards, his reminders turning quickly into insults. It was Dalveer’s role to temper him but she was gone.