by Balli Kaur
‘How are you, Father?’ she asked, when his eyes opened.
‘Fine.’
‘What happened to your feet?’
‘I was walking and they started to hurt,’ he said. ‘I think I walked too much.’
Amrit approached him. ‘Your toenails are too long. They need to be cut. They’re probably digging into your skin and making it more uncomfortable.’
‘They’re fine,’ Harbeer said. He knew his toenails were too long but his fingers weren’t dexterous enough to wield the clippers. Each time he leaned forward, he felt the stiffness in his back. ‘They don’t need any cutting.’ Amrit ducked into her room before he had a chance to protest any further. She came back with nail clippers. ‘I told you they don’t need to be cut,’ he said sternly. He turned away from her and picked up a prayer book.
‘Father,’ Amrit gasped. ‘Your hands just touched your feet.’
Harbeer dropped the prayer book back onto its stack immediately. He leaned towards the book and kissed it as an apology. He noticed Amrit looking away as he did this. Had any of his children ever witnessed him making such a mistake? He noticed his hands were shaking slightly. He started to pull himself to his feet and waved Amrit away when she tried to help. She followed him into his room.
‘I brought red bean buns for tea,’ Amrit said.
‘It’s almost dinner time.’
‘We can save them for breakfast tomorrow then.’
He lowered himself onto the edge of his bed. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I’ll have dinner tonight anyway.’
‘Father, I got a promotion at work today,’ Amrit said, suddenly. ‘Ms Rosario says she wants me to help her market her products. I’m going to start taking more shifts.’
‘Good,’ Harbeer said. He had to force a smile but could not help the next words from escaping his lips. ‘You’ll move out of this flat soon then. This is what your mother did when she had the chance. She left.’
‘She died,’ Amrit said calmly. ‘She died when I was born. She did not choose that.’ She looked away for a moment. ‘Unless she told you something different.’
Harbeer caught Amrit glancing at the desk. She continued. ‘I know you think… I know she comes to see you. I know you think it’s her spirit but actually…’ Her voice trailed off as Harbeer stood up and took a step towards her. She shrank away, but he was not trying to harm her – he wanted to inspect the order of his papers on the desk. When Amrit realised this, she went on, her words gaining momentum. She talked quickly about hallucinations and delusions, those so-called medical terms similar to the ones that echoed through the flat after her diagnosis.
‘You looked through my letters,’ Harbeer said. ‘You broke into this room and looked through my letters.’
‘The door was unlocked,’ Amrit said. ‘Father, there are people who can help you.’
‘Help me?’ he cried. ‘Help? Everybody wants to blame me! You think I gave this problem to you? You think that’s what I did? Your Mother is the mad one. She left us because she wanted her old life. She thought she could run back into the past and stay there. She left me with you.’ He swung his arm into the air and brought a clenched fist down on the table. Some of his letters tumbled onto the floor, grazing his feet. He searched the room, wishing Dalveer would burst in and show herself to Amrit, but she was never willing to appear for anybody but him.
At first, Harbeer had believed it was just death – simple, and part of an incomprehensible system of balance: the arrival of his only daughter for the departure of his wife. The doctors had had to explain it to him several times, and despite his strong English, he was a novice at the vocabulary of Dalveer’s exit. High blood pressure. Complications. Renal failure. Seizure. A nurse handed him the bundle that contained Amrit, and he received a slip that contained details of the birth date and time, to apply for her birth certificate. A pause, a mere pause, and the nurse sorrowfully handed him another slip for Dalveer’s death certificate. The dates and times were nearly identical.
After the cremation, members of the Punjabi community arrived at their home offering their assistance, along with their condolences. Men came unannounced with their wives holding pots of dahl and containers of fresh rotis. Women came to attend to the newborn Amrit. At first, Harbeer graciously thanked them, expecting the stream of visitors to wane as the effects of the tragedy faded. After all, their help was appreciated while he was trying to settle his sons into a routine of cooking and cleaning. But weeks after Dalveer’s death, the visitors were still constant, appearing at his doorstep punctually, as if it was their duty. Conflicted between feelings of puzzlement and gratitude, Harbeer began to evade them. ‘Please, this is plenty. Do not trouble yourselves any further,’ he would say.
A comment from one wife settled his confusion. ‘Brother, what trouble is this? You have a daughter who will never know her mother. Something will always be missing in her life.’ Those words haunted Harbeer. He was new at fathering a daughter; he only had the vaguest sense of what the girl would need over the years. Concerned about Amrit’s welfare, he put aside his grieving and searched for a solution. Several members of the community offered to arrange a new marriage for him but few parents in India were willing to surrender their daughters to immediate motherhood in a foreign country. He briefly considered moving back to India, where his sister and female cousins could step in and take turns helping to raise Amrit, but he thought against it; some departures were not meant to be reversible. The first few years of Amrit’s life were a blur, as he and the boys took on shifts to attend to her. Narain was especially gentle towards his sister. He smiled at her and cradled her as Dalveer would have. During those difficult colicky months when Harbeer grew exasperated with Amrit’s constant mewling, Narain patiently picked her up and rocked her until she calmed down.
When did Dalveer return? Harbeer remembered thinking he was seeing her silhouette on the edges of the room when actually they were just shadows cast by low branches. Then one day, he thought he saw her peering through the window, but when he rushed to her, she scurried away. That night he heard her whispering through the window, a sound so distinct that it could not just be the wind. She had returned to him.
It defied all logical explanation. Didn’t he have a death certificate? He retrieved it that night from the depths of his desk. He read it carefully, his heart filling with sadness at the scant information brought over from Dalveer’s village life. Her date of birth was unknown. Her name in the official English hardly gave justice to its Punjabi phonetics. He had looked up to find Dalveer standing at the edge of the room. Speechless, Harbeer could only crumple the death certificate in his hands. When he recovered from the shock, he asked Dalveer why she had left in the first place. She did not have an answer. She did not speak very much – she made gestures and murmured incoherent sentences. One condition of her visits was very clear, however. He was not to tell anybody about her.
There were only two instances when he mentioned Dalveer’s presence in front of the children. There was an afternoon when he was at a loss to explain to the toddler Amrit why she should not publicly scratch between her legs. Feeling a blush creeping into his cheeks, he pleaded but Amrit’s hand kept on travelling to that region. ‘Stop it,’ he snapped finally, advancing towards her. Amrit ran into her room. Dalveer’s shadow slipped along the window outside, catching his attention.
‘Your mother does not like you doing that.’ The words just slipped from his mouth but they were successful in making Amrit freeze. Gulping back a sob, she looked at him strangely, pondering this sudden introduction. ‘Your mother says it is very bad.’ Dalveer approved with the quietest murmur.
On the eve of Amrit’s first day of primary school, Harbeer was sitting at his desk looking through the bills when Dalveer arrived, the bells on her anklets ringing so faintly that he initially mistook them for the jingling collar of the neighbour’s cat. With nothing but worry etched into her face, she reminded him that Amrit’s uniform needed to be ironed.
He waved her off – her visits had become frequent to the point of being inconvenient and annoying. She inched closer to him. The fabric of her cotton kameez brushed his fingertips as she leaned towards the desk. ‘Fine,’ he said, as he shot up from the chair and went to the closet to retrieve the package from the uniform tailor. Keeping his voice low, he read the date from the receipt to remind Dalveer that he had bought the uniform far in advance, so prepared was he to educate the daughter that she had carelessly left behind. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked distractedly at her hands while he pulled apart the plastic wrapping. He laid the uniform flat on the bed next to her, feeling a rush of warmth as his eyes took in the small sleeves, and the short belt that would encircle Amrit’s little waist.
Dalveer inspected the uniform, and gestured for Harbeer to look. Deep creases from the folding intersected the blouse and pinafore in the wrong places, cutting an arm and giving the appearance of two waists. Harbeer laid out the uniform on the ironing board, wishing it was not too late in the evening to call the local errand girl. He aimed the iron, pressing down hard on the creases, but they stubbornly remained, marking his daughter’s body in unnatural bends. He increased the temperature on the iron. When he lifted it, the creases were hardly noticeable but Dalveer was not satisfied. On his third try, the fabric hissed in protest. He lifted the iron to find that he had burned a streak through the fabric, making permanent what he wanted to erase.
‘Stupid woman!’ he shouted. Dalveer scuttled away, frightened as a mouse. ‘You made me do this. The uniform was fine before – now look what I’ve done! Stupid village woman!’ He had heard footsteps, and then Gurdev and Narain arrived to see him holding the iron and ranting at what seemed to be an empty room. He explained weakly that he had had a bad dream, and dismissed them before they could ask any questions.
Why Dalveer had begun to sabotage him, Harbeer did not know. Whenever his domestic inadequacies were exposed, he blamed Dalveer. When a splinter from a stray piece of rattan lodged itself into Amrit’s heel, Harbeer cursed Dalveer for leading him to buy the lowest quality broom from the local shop’s wide selection. When the errand girl took a day off and he brewed tea with two heaped spoons of salt instead of sugar, he rampaged through the house, certain Dalveer was hiding somewhere.
The sabotaging lessened as the children became older. Dalveer became a more willing partner, coaching him in the housework and demonstrating the order of things. Harbeer began to see himself cleanly divided as two parents. Every clutching sense of panic he felt was Dalveer’s. Every intellectual argument was his.
This was the period that inspired Harbeer’s first letters. Something had changed in his mind – a fog had lifted and unearthed his brilliant and original ideas. While Dalveer was busy wringing her hands and worrying about household issues, he wrote detailed letters to newspaper editors and leaders of the nation, making known his ideas. At times, his thoughts became so rapid that his pen could not catch up and he scribbled so hard that his hand cramped. For this, too, Dalveer was to blame. She hovered near him, watching him form a script she would never learn to read. Her presence often distracted him mid-sentence. So many letters were incomplete because of Dalveer. They all sat wrapped in rubber bands in shoe boxes stacked behind starched shirts in his closet. The sight of these boxes created knots of regret that tightened every time he heard closet hinges creak anywhere in his home. He would curse Dalveer, heaping the worst of insults on her for weeks, driving her back into the shadows. Then he would allow himself to grieve, because when the rage wore off, it seemed to be the only function for which his body was designed. The stomach that normally rumbled for food contracted instead and produced sobs that rose through his gullet and exploded from his mouth. The broad shoulders for displaying confidence curved inwards to shelter his heart. Dalveer did not appear in those days; she was gracious enough to let him grieve for her on his own.
Now, Amrit was still talking, but Harbeer would hear none of it. Still staring at the mess of his desk, and at the papers lying close to his feet, Harbeer felt his rage grow. He spread out his fingers and raised his hand into the air again. ‘Stop it,’ he warned. When he turned to face Amrit, he froze. She looked different. All of the questions that used to cloud her wide eyes were gone, and there wasn’t a trace of fear on her face.
‘There is nothing wrong with me,’ he said. ‘I gave you opportunity, food, education. And you have the nerve to tell me that I gave you madness.’
‘I’m not here to blame you, Father. I’m just concerned about you. She’s not real. I can’t see her. Nobody can see her but you. Doesn’t this bother you?’
Harbeer did not reply. He looked past Amrit’s shoulder, where a shadow had begun to form. What would anybody understand? Dalveer was here, gradually taking shape.
‘I think I will have to move out,’ Amrit said. ‘I’ll let you know when I’ve found a place. I’ll come back on weekends if you need me to help with cooking or anything.’
‘Narain will be here,’ Harbeer said.
‘Narain is also leaving soon.’ Harbeer had a hazy memory of Narain telling him this, and of seeing a lease with the name of his son and another man on it.
‘I will have no problems living without you two,’ Harbeer told Amrit. ‘Go whenever you want.’
Crouching on the floor now, Dalveer picked up the papers and did her best to arrange them. You will always be here, he thought. Dalveer did not acknowledge this as she continued her work, levelling the papers with her hands.
Mother
Dalveer paused beneath the awning of the textile shop, watching the street as daylight dimmed over Little India. Shrill violin notes from old Tamil songs floated in the distance. A fortune teller spread a set of cards on a table and instructed his parrot to pick one for the customer. The air was ripe with the mix of sweat, sandalwood and jasmine incense.
She followed Harbeer into the shop. The walls were lined with crooked shelves crammed with trays of glittery costume jewellery. While Harbeer searched for Rani’s birthday present, Dalveer’s eyes roamed. It was a decrepit shop, with chipping paint and the distinct smell of cumin that seeped through all the walls. In the shop owner’s tiny bedroom and kitchenette upstairs, there was bound to be beings like herself. Spirits thrived in these dusty old shops, their footsteps delightfully noiseless on the creaking floorboards.
Harbeer frowned as he picked through the trays. All of the bracelets and earrings probably looked the same to him, but Rani was becoming an age where colours and patterns were significant. He picked up a set of thin bangles with tiny bells attached and Dalveer saw his thoughts: he was uncertain about them. He turned to her imploringly and she felt herself emerge in full colour. Their bronze shade was too sober for a young girl. Gently, she guided his hand towards a tray on the centre of the shelf. It was a set of bangles in alternating baby blue and pink, and a matching pair of earrings. Rani would sparkle in those colours.
Under his breath, Harbeer grumbled about the prices. ‘Of course she makes me pick the most expensive one,’ he said, to nobody in particular. Dalveer pressed closer to let him feel her warmth.
He took the set to the counter and gruffly asked the shopkeeper in Malay for his best price. The shopkeeper wearily shook his head and said something in English. Harbeer barked back in Malay. The shopkeeper replied, shaking his head. Dalveer knew she had to interfere. She brushed her fingertips against Harbeer’s elbows and directed his gaze towards details of the shopkeeper’s haggard appearance. His fingernails were dirty and chipped, and the half-moons under his eyes were swollen and shadowy from a lack of sleep. Harbeer continued his rant until he was satisfied that the shopkeeper had learned his lesson. Then with a great show of pain at the injustice of the inflated costs, he pulled out his wallet and paid the full price for the bangles.
‘No more. We’ve spent enough time and money,’ Harbeer announced, as they walked out of the shop. A couple standing nearby watched him curiously but he didn’t seem to care. Deep in these lanes of
Little India, where chaos still reigned, a man talking to himself was acceptable.
‘He wanted three times as much as we needed to pay. These shopkeepers jack up all the prices and don’t recognise the difference between the tourists and those of us from India,’ Harbeer continued.
They were walking in the shadows now, and the lane was bumpy with smashed fruit. In the distance, the street lamps had been lit. Harbeer charged purposefully towards the main road but Dalveer lingered, stepping in the potholes, letting her sandals slip loose from her feet. She made excuses so that Harbeer would slow down and stay in the side lanes, so they could remain on this tiny portion of the island that already seemed like a memory.
Dalveer remembered dying. It had felt different from the way she had imagined it would: not a sensation of sinking into the unknown depths, but a gradual, exhilarating sense of floating on her own. As the doctor’s fervid commands to the nurses faded away, Dalveer had felt, tangibly, the world drifting away. The bed slid from her back, the doors moved off, the walls drew together and then exited. The hospital, the street and the island all pulled out from underneath her, leaving her untended and utterly free. An understanding overcame her: she would remain like this forever. But only moments later, there she was with her daughter, aged five, cowering in Harbeer’s presence after having tested his temper.
Dalveer appeared to her husband willingly, knowing that he would not be able to cope on his own. She had tried to appear to her children as well, but they didn’t see her. Yet, they knew her presence. She could hear them calling upon her in their deepest thoughts when they struggled, and she felt them leaping into her arms when they experienced triumph. For these encounters, however sporadic, Dalveer had continued to roam through their rooms and sit between them during dinner. At times, it pained her that she couldn’t be there in the flesh to reprimand or reassure them, but Harbeer was diligent about expressing her thoughts.
