China Room

by Sunjeev Sahota

  ‘It is all our cause,’ he says, a little too earnestly for Suraj, who suppresses a laugh.

  * * *

  *

  Like everyone else, they’d been expecting him. The whole village had been a-chatter with the news that the great Tegh Singh was in and around the city, assembling funds to launch an attack on the British. Funds or men, the rumour went. So you’d better make sure you had the funds.

  ‘So where is this new India he mentioned? Is it as far as the river?’ Mehar asks.

  ‘It’s just another idea,’ Suraj says. ‘That it’s better to be oppressed by your own than by the British. It won’t change anything for us.’

  They are on their sides and Mehar comes up behind him to rest her cheek between his shoulder blades.

  ‘In Lahore, where will we live?’

  ‘I’ll find somewhere. I promise.’

  There is silence. She imagines the village crashing into the hut and catching them like this, her arms around him, his hands on hers. She’d almost welcome it.

  ‘Can you imagine if they caught us like this?’ he says, and Mehar, dumbstruck, blinks several times.

  ‘Old Aunt Besant came looking for you yesterday,’ she says, eventually. ‘Told me she had a very special effect on you. She also said she’s going to make you have injections in your bum next time.’

  He doesn’t laugh, barely makes a noise of assent, and in the quiet a phrase Tegh Singh uttered swims towards her.

  ‘Complete self-rule,’ she whispers, not loud enough for anyone else to hear, as though the idea were a wonderful heresy.

  There’s a sudden noise, a movement in the crops that freezes them both. Stealthily, Suraj shifts on to his knees, his feet, and edges to the door, certain he is prepared to kill whomever it may be. But it is only a dog, a thin black stray bouncing high in the gold of the wheat. The relief of it makes Suraj laugh, and loudly.

  ‘Come and look at this,’ he says, and they stand in the doorway watching the happy animal yap and jump, yap and jump.

  ‘What’s that?’ Mehar asks, of the thing trailing around the dog’s neck.

  It is a string of red bunting, in all likelihood from some festival, and Suraj retrieves it from the bouncing animal and coils it around Mehar’s head, a crown of sorts. She spends a moment rearranging it all, so the bunting trails through her hair like a corsage. She can’t stop touching it.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asks, though she is not facing him. She is still at the doorway, looking out, he behind her.

  ‘My queen.’

  ‘When I am free this will be my hair every day. You agree, my lord?’ she asks, glancing over her shoulder, and Suraj, hand across his heart, bows low.

  31

  It is washing day, Lord knows where the other two have got to, and Mehar’s shoulder is tiring under the sodden roll of the indigo sheet. She stretches and squares it out along her arm, then launches it across the line. As she bends to take up another, she finds herself wondering how long it’s been since she last bled. She tries to think – can she even remember? – when from inside the china room comes the sound of shattering, smashing. Mehar throws the wet sheet back into the basket and hurries there. She sees Mai sitting on one of the beds. At the long cement slab, bewilderingly, is Jeet, his back to Mehar. His shoulders are shaking, and on the ground are the broken shards of Mai’s wedding plates. Mehar pulls down her veil.

  ‘They fell,’ Mai tells her.

  ‘I’ll clean it up,’ Mehar says, as Jeet exits the room, and through the bottom of her veil she watches Mai leaving too, her feet stepping through the shards, stepping on them.

  32

  Suraj is at the top of his ladder when the calls for prayer come and the cobbles of the tight lane below disappear beneath ten, fifty, one hundred, two hundred men coming out of their stores, reaching for their cotton caps, heading towards the masjid. The white caps are like silken buoys on a surging river. Twice his ladder is jostled and Suraj grips the roof, calling down for them to take care. He waits for the lane to empty and then he picks his paintbrush back up. His feet ache, the insteps curling, and he adjusts his position, his eyes snagging on the tallest of the three minarets with its lopsided smile of a crescent moon. It makes him pause, the brush poised in his hand. He feels something lift inside him, some moment of his soul: a new road is calling. He only has one more job after this one, maybe two more weeks of work, and then he will be on it, that new road. Strange thing is, he doesn’t at first see her on the road beside him. Then he remembers. The powder has dried. He swirls the brush inside the colours again and with his mouth a hard line gets back to work.

  * * *

  *

  Once home, he is washing at the stone bath when he feels Mai’s approach.

  ‘A word,’ she says.

  He takes his time, sliding a towel off the line, running it twice over his face, his neck, deliberately putting it back, and only then ducking into her room. She is sitting on a straight chair, waiting.

  ‘I’d hoped this was all over.’

  He nods up: carry on.

  ‘Your brother’s wife.’

  He absorbs the words cleanly, without letting show even a single flicker of fear. And, really, it is not her knowledge of the affair that shocks, but more this public airing of it.

  ‘You’ve had your fun,’ she goes on. ‘But now it stops.’

  ‘If it doesn’t?’

  ‘If it doesn’t, I’ll strip the bitch and parade her around myself.’

  He sighs, already tired of her drama. ‘We both know, if you were going to do that, you’d have done it by now. Won’t he let you? Does he say he loves her too much?’

  ‘I wanted to give you a chance. No sense in spreading my shit around the village unduly.’

  ‘A kindness. But we’re leaving. You won’t try to stop us.’

  ‘What a wonderful way to protect your mother’s honour. The mother who has given you everything.’

  ‘Well,’ he says, laughing hollowly, ‘these things happen.’

  The words enrage. She stands. ‘I’m filing a statement with the village court tomorrow. Might you attend her stripping? The shaving of her head? I’m sure she’d love to see you there.’

  He watches her, weighing the threat, and asks, ‘Does he know? You didn’t answer.’

  ‘Your father never protected me, either,’ she says, almost to herself, as if a memory has ambushed her, but then her face sharpens, all the strings pulled taut. ‘When are you leaving? The two of you?’

  ‘Does he know?’

  She thinks quickly, calculates. ‘It would kill him. Let’s spare him that.’

  ‘Yes. Because you never could bear to see him hurt, could you?’

  They gaze at one another for a long while, each measuring their own pain against the other’s, until Mai looks away and Suraj leaves.

  33

  ‘How are you feeling now?’ Jeet asks Mehar, in the darkness.

  ‘The same. I’m sorry. I don’t know what the matter is.’

  ‘Perhaps I should take you to the doctor.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  ‘It’s just so expensive.’

  She nods in the dark. ‘I’m grateful for your patience with me.’

  ‘You’re my wife.’

  He closes his hand around her ankle and moves it up her calf in one long motion full of desire. She retracts her leg beyond his reach and hears a low growl, like an animal denied.

  ‘I want to do something for you,’ he says. He gives her time to respond, but she doesn’t. ‘I’m having the house painted and I’d like it to be your favourite colour. What is it?’

  ‘I don’t have one.’

  ‘Red? Green?’ He waits. ‘Pink?’

  ‘Please choose whichever you like.’

  He sighs, defeated. ‘As you wish.’

&nb
sp; * * *

  *

  Mai catches him leaving the room and he follows her into the barn, away from any ears.

  ‘She was welcoming?’ Mai asks.

  ‘She’s still not well.’

  ‘Pish. She’ll give your brother a child first.’

  ‘Stop. Please.’ He paces around the barn, hands on his hips, and Mai lets him stew in his pain a little.

  Then, ‘I still think the court should know,’ she says, testing things out. ‘Why not let them sort it?’

  ‘No.’ He comes right up to her, finger in her face. ‘Don’t do that. Don’t ever do that.’

  ‘Your brother’s not going to give her up.’

  ‘You’ve spoken to him? What did he tell you?’

  ‘That he’s leaving with her, of course.’ Mai waits a beat. ‘He says he enjoys her too much.’

  And it is that word, enjoys, that makes him seethe. ‘He doesn’t care a thing for her.’

  ‘Hmm. Who’s to know?’ Mai watches her son, wondering if she needs to goad him more. ‘You know, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’s a man for every occasion. Perhaps you could come to like the thought of your younger brother inside your wife.’

  ‘She’s mine,’ he snarls. ‘She’s mine. She’s my wife.’ His voice breaks and he whispers, as if uttering some blasphemy: ‘He’s the one who should go.’

  She had been waiting for this, but she knows he won’t think of it, that he’s never been able to see that little bit further. ‘Do you mean the revolutionaries? Are they still looking for men?’

  He looks across, not sure if this suggestion has come from him or from her.

  ‘It’ll take a few days to find them. You could set off in the morning. I’ll say you’re looking for cattle.’

  ‘He’s my brother.’

  ‘Think straight, fool. He probably won’t die, but he’ll be out of the way. Time enough for you to get your seed in. She’ll be yours again.’

  34

  While Jeet’s away and the painters fill the yard, consuming everyone’s attention, or so they think, there is opportunity for the lovers to meet spontaneously. Suraj comes up with a sign: a pile of enamel bricks that he stacks in one corner of the barn, under a tent of cut wheat.

  When he asks her to take control in their lovemaking, to be on top of him, she blanches, and then the shyness escalates to fear when he asks her again.

  ‘Please,’ he adds. ‘I’d like it very much.’

  She can’t look at him; her head is off to the side so her hair hangs like a screen between them. Her hands on his small chest. He is staring at her. Her thighs, either side of his own, burn against his skin. His hands run up to her hips, sleek with sweat, then further up, to her waist with its small pocket of a stomach. He can hear her faint pants behind the curtain of her hair and feels himself contract bodily, exquisitely; she so devastates him it is almost like grief, the knowledge that floods him that he must be with her for ever.

  ‘I want to go,’ she says, once dressed, and she feels him nod, his chin tapping several times against the top of her head. ‘Why can’t we go now? When can we leave?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I get paid in a week or so. That shoe store. I think I can get even more out of him.’

  ‘Aren’t you clever.’

  ‘No match for you.’

  ‘I mean it, Suraj. I want to go soon.’

  He pauses, perhaps because she used his name. What’s got into her? ‘I said soon.’

  ‘In the meantime, your brother keeps visiting.’ She’s forcing his hand, she knows.

  ‘There’s nothing I can do about that.’

  ‘You can get me away.’

  ‘Money first.’

  ‘You can earn in Lahore.’

  ‘It’s a matter of a few days!’

  She swallows her riposte, then steps clear of his arms. ‘Was my plait tied up?’ He juts out his bottom lip – he doesn’t remember – and she starts braiding her hair, fingers working anxiously. Straightening back up, she flicks the plait behind her. ‘I’m with child,’ she says.

  Nothing moves on his face and there is a long silence, so long it comes to seem absurd and they both give in to laughter, to giggling really, giggling without being able to stop.

  * * *

  *

  A surprise awaits her at the farm: the decorators have finished preparing the walls, and all four men are stationed evenly along the porch, holding exceedingly long brooms topped with balls of cloth. They are whistling, happily enough, whistling as they daub the house with her very favourite shade of pink.

  * * *

  I’d been living at the farm for over a month when I felt ready to leave its gates for the first time and make for the main bazaar. I walked the first kilometre before jumping on a passing tuk-tuk, disembarking in the busy village centre. It was so much louder than I remembered: the chickens, the bartering, the motorbikes and wind chimes, the hymns blaring statically through the temple’s rooftop speakers. Above all this commerce, the sky was extravagantly blue, and two distant planes seemed destined to collide, until they didn’t, and sailed silently on.

  I found the dhaba down a long side lane full of shoe-sellers, and a large woman in a tight apron glanced up from frying dumplings in a giant wok of oil.

  ‘Food all okay?’ she asked, before I’d said a word.

  ‘Great. Thank you. But you can stop sending it now.’

  ‘You leaving?’

  ‘I’ll cook my own.’

  She smiled, slyly, her eyes still on the oil, bubbling hard. ‘He’s cooking his own food,’ she said to the dumplings, and I wondered if they weren’t dumplings at all but the severed heads of customers who’d pissed her off. A man sitting at a nearby table belched and grinned.

  ‘Will you be keeping your lady-friend fed?’ he asked, and I stepped back quickly, as if stung, nodded a goodbye at the woman and set off towards the main road.

  While I was there I got my hair cut, shorter than I’d ever had it before. Then I decided to pop in on my uncle at the bank, if only to show him how much healthier I now was, but he wasn’t in, sent out by the manager to buy him a fridge, the guard said and laughed. As I left, I saw Kuku, my aunt, coming up the lane, a burgundy handbag wedged tight under her armpit and Sona struggling to keep up. They walked straight past me, Kuku’s face firm and uninterested, but she paused at her house, as though a tiny dart had pierced her back, and turned slowly round.

  ‘Feeling better?’ I asked Sona, who nodded, wide-eyed and silent.

  ‘No thanks to you,’ Kuku said. I raised my face to meet hers. ‘You look well,’ she went on, and I swear she seemed affronted by that.

  ‘Much better.’

  ‘I hear you’ve become fast friends with one of our doctors.’

  ‘It’s the talk of the town.’

  ‘Is it just the two of you living there?’

  ‘She doesn’t live there. She’s done nothing wrong.’

  ‘She visits you? Food and women straight to your door. Haven’t you done well this summer?’

  ‘Ask Tanbir Singh if you don’t believe us. Instead of giving us a bad name.’ Us: part of me was revelling in all this, in being thought of as Radhika’s lover, perhaps even hoping that it was in some deep sense true.

  ‘The teacher?’ she said, after a pause. She seemed curious. ‘What would he know?’

  ‘A lot more than you.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’ Her expression faltered, and something like pain crossed her face. ‘Is he with her, the teacher?’

  Shaking my head in despair, I walked away. A scandal, that was all these people wanted, some easy story that they could loop around a person’s neck, and lynch them with.

  * * *

  *

  Later, at the
farm, Radhika, Tanbir and I were all smoking, she fanning herself lazily with the end of her silk scarf, a tangerine thing with red fish scales. Our plates were stacked by the water pump. I’d made a cauliflower and potato curry, the way Tanbir had showed me. Evening light dappled through the plane trees, throwing coins and lines against the wall behind us. Many minutes passed, and then Tanbir flopped back against the wall.

  ‘So, for how much longer are you with us?’

  ‘Couple of weeks,’ I replied.

  ‘Same,’ Radhika said, and I smiled. ‘Back to the clinics of Hyderabad.’ She lit another cigarette. ‘Do you think you’ll come back?’ she asked. ‘After your studies?’

  ‘Of course I will. I love it here.’ Just by saying that word, love, I felt closer to her, and the fact of our leaving within days of each other, as if together, made our time seem fated.

  ‘You love it here?’ she repeated.

  ‘I feel at home.’

  Slowly she nodded, took a drag on her Marlboro. ‘You like being around people who look like you. A sentimental thing.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel sentimental. It feels true.’

  ‘But it is sentimental,’ Tanbir interjected, in a firm way that irritated me. ‘Spend long enough here and you’ll fall out of love with it too.’

  ‘Which is also sentimental,’ Radhika said.

  ‘We can’t all be as itinerant as you,’ he replied harshly, which surprised me.

  Radhika was smiling around her cigarette. ‘Is that why you’ve stayed here? To allow yourself to fall out of love with the place?’

  ‘You know what the best thing is about falling out of love? It sets you free. Because when you’re in love it is everything, it is imprisoning, it is all there is, and you’d do anything, anything, to keep that love. But when it withers you can suddenly see the rest of the world again, everything else floods back into the places that love had monopolised.’