Home To India

by Jacquelin Singh

  My remembering this now, after so many years have passed, is hard to explain. Why in such detail? Why this occasion? Why, even in those early days in Michigan did I keep going over it in my mind, at all odd hours, in strange places, amidst my own crises? She was, it is true, a good friend, and like a sister, even taken for granted. But what did her fate have to do with mine, or mine with hers, to make me obsessed with it? What happened to her? Why did she suddenly go silent after that last puzzling letter?

  In particular, I need to know why this brief scene in the International House coffee shop that late morning has so taken hold. Sometimes I think the details I claim to remember are only my elaborations, variations on a theme recalled in old age. I wonder, for example, if I actually did ask her about her family on that occasion or if it was later, when it appeared she was determined to go away after all.

  I can hear her voice now, the way it went faint as though she had wilfully turned down the volume: “What about my folks?” she said.

  I had her at last! It was, then, not the first time she had considered her mother, her father, her three sisters, and all those Italian relatives. The fact was not lost on me that she had parried yet another question of mine with a question of hers.

  “How do they feel about your going away?” I persisted.

  When she understood I was not going to stop until I had an answer, she said, “They don’t know anything about it.”

  I tried not to look surprised. “I see,” I said, as I let this sink in. “Well, I guess you can look upon it as a kind of elopement then? But the distance is so great between here and …” I hesitated again.

  “Now it’s an elopement. Not an adventure any more, but an elopement,” she said. “Why do you insist on dramatizing it?” She smiled. I knew her well enough to realize that beneath her offhand dismissal lay a fierce reluctance to say anything further about Tej, about going away with him, about leaving everything here—family, country, years of study, all kinds of human investments that had nothing to do with money or time.

  “If it’s not an elopement,” I said, “then what will it be?”

  I don’t think she heard my question. And it is always here that I stop (as she did, to look out the plate glass window) and try to go on with what happened next. I shall try to conjure it up once more. She’s looking out the window. I follow her gaze out toward the fog-wrapped city across the Bay, with the streets of Berkeley spilling away down the hills onto the waterfront, the day sunny this side, the Campanile striking the hour, unreal blue sky, theatrical clouds.

  It’s almost fall, and I know without seeing it that Faculty Glade it still all green grass, minus the pink-and-white daisies now, and that Strawberry Creek still cuts its way, as it has to, through the verdure. The air is chilly outside, but not cold, and I know without feeling it that a smart breeze is whipping the foliage of the eucalyptus trees down by the Forestry Building. Somewhere outside Sather Gate undergraduates are waiting to meet friends between classes or stopping to read the posters, sharing space on the steps of Wheeler Hall with the Great Danes from the fraternity houses, or just sitting in the sun.

  None of these everyday sights could be the cause of Helen’s sudden and complete attention. Whom or what had she seen outside? Under the force of her concentration, all else hung suspended. When I turned around again, she was already standing up, gathering her things, slinging the strap of her camera bag over her shoulder, ready to go. For an instant, I had the irrational notion that she had been appropriated, taken over, possessed, so that, although the young woman in front of me looked like Helen, she was really somebody else. The illusion passed as quickly as it came.

  “What will it be?” I asked again.

  “Nothing. I don’t know,” she said. “In any case, you’re dead wrong, like everybody else.” She got up. “I’ve got to go now,” she said, and hurried away.

  It might have been her final goodbye, but it wasn’t. It doesn’t seem to me that she has ever really taken her leave, even after years of my not hearing from her. I have one of her letters in front of me. It’s one I picked up from the pile just now, and it happens to be one I got from her early on. It’s dated June 26, 1950.

  “Dear Carol,” it says, in the timeless voice that memory confers on the writers of old letters rediscovered, “Here I am …”

  Summer

  2

  “… halfway around the world from Berkeley, in a Punjab village called Majra, sitting in our garden with a glass of cooled buttermilk in one hand and the New Yorker in the other. Can you picture it? It arrived only three weeks late (the magazine, not the buttermilk). The bearer is our village postmaster, a youth with a B.A. and a black umbrella who doubles as a postman and comes on a bicycle from Ladopur, the town two miles away, to deliver it. For news we depend on a battery radio. Yesterday, North Korea invaded the South. American troops are to be sent! It all seems to be happening so far away, although it’s going on in our backyard.

  “I write this amongst gaudy green parrots scolding each other in the mango trees and a bereaved gander, recently widowed, forcing—for the fifth time this morning—his amorous attention on a puzzled, but not unwilling hen.”

  I interrupted my letter to Carol Thorpe long enough to take a swipe at a persistent fly. He had his small, compound lenses aimed at my buttermilk. I missed, he buzzed off, and I picked up my pen again from the unpainted wooden stand nearby, where I had set it down. I tried to imagine Carol over there, reading this letter. Good, dear Carol. The placid playmate from down the street whom I had grown up with. My frequent friend in high school. My college confidante in undergraduate days. And now the classics major. Carol had turned into a nag those last few months in Berkeley. But she was only doing what she did best—acting like my conscience, my Self in the sensible mode, me with an eye on what was in my own best interests. The older sister I never had.

  What else would she like to hear, I wondered. I reread what I had written, all about the “cooled” buttermilk. How could I explain to Carol that what I was calling buttermilk was not the same stuff you got in cartons at the Safeway? And “cooled” was a turn of expression for “at-least-not-warm.” Which was all you could ask for without a refrigerator. And we didn’t have one. Nor even electricity to run one. As a matter of fact, we had no plumbing, either. No running water, no faucets, no showers, no toilets. In place of the latter were adult-sized potty chairs with lids that the British, with their genius for uncompromisingly adapting to all sorts of places and situations, had devised and called commodes.

  The trouble was, once you tried to explain one thing, a whole bag of supplementaries would need emptying, and there would be no end of trying to deal with them. Better to let the “cooled” go undefined. And a lot of other things as well.

  For instance, I couldn’t have told Carol I was writing this letter at the exotic hour of six o’clock in the morning because, after a couple of hours, it was going to be too hot to do anything but shuffle around, exerting as little as possible, before having lunch and then lying down for a nap until tea time, and then going for a walk through the powdered dust of paths through the fields before sunset (after sunset there might be snakes), then having dinner and finally going to sleep to the whine of indignant mosquitoes mad to get inside the net festooned on bamboo poles crossed at either end of the cot.

  I thought it might be possible to say something about the garden, but now that it was June, dry, yellow grass struggled through the hard, packed clay, and the supports which must have been put up for long-departed sweet peas sagged in the wind that was already starting up.

  Sweat from the previous night’s lovemaking had dried and caked on my skin. My hair was sticky. It would be too much for Carol to hear about. Better to get back to details that would reassure her that all was well. Now she was in Michigan, and the early summer would be making its gentle appearance. It was easy to picture Carol taking a job translating Dante, or helping somebody else translate him. I could see her, earnest and nearsighted
, slogging through the library stacks armed with three-by-fives, chasing down references and compiling a bibliography, while her boss had all the fun and got all the credit. In the midst of this, Carol would probably like to hear about the postman, the New Yorker, the gander, even. She liked comfortable, everyday, recognizable things.

  I’m certain Carol would have found far too unusual the item of furniture I was sitting on as I wrote, had made love on a good deal of the previous night, and had sent Tej off from before dawn, in order to spare the rest of the family—Mataji and Pitaji, the girls, and Hari, Dilraj Kaur, and little Nikku, the cousins from Amritsar, neighbors on adjacent rooftops—the sight of us in bed together. Sleeping out of doors in summer was a way to keep tolerably cool, but it lacked privacy. The charpoy itself, a cot fashioned out of a bamboo frame mounted on wooden legs and strung with rope, sagged in the middle, so that whatever else was on it toppled into my space as I wrote.

  Best not to burden Carol with the charpoy, but I could have written a treatise about its uses. As the setting for even the most extravagant of amorous encounters, for example, the charpoy provides the logical place for babies to be conceived, and later birthed, on. The sick and the elderly die on it and are carried, bound to it, to their funeral pyres. Tipped upright and leaned against a wall, it creates acceptable shade on a summer’s day. Set it on its side, and you can drape wet clothes over it to dry. And of course you can simply sleep on it, with a thick woven dhurrie thrown over the ropes, and sheets on top of that. The foot end, where the ropes can be tightened from time to time, has gaps where your heels get entangled if you thrash around too much. Otherwise, it is serviceable and good, and lightweight for easy moving indoors out of dust storms or rain on summer nights. In winter, I was told, it makes a sofa to settle down on while one sits wrapped in a quilt. But how was I to get into all this with Carol? Carol would have fretted over the rough ropes, imagined my spine getting permanently curved from the sag, sent yet another letter urging me to say if I was all right and asking when I was coming back. All letters from the States were variations on this same theme.

  “I don’t know!” I heard myself say aloud. “I don’t know!” I looked around to see if anyone had heard me. Veera Bai, the Harijan woman who swept our yard every day, looked up from her work briefly and then went back to her sweeping. Mataji had already bathed and washed her hair. The curly grey strands amongst the black were highlighted by the sun. Her bedding was folded for the day, and she was sitting on one end of her charpoy on the roof reading her prayer book and reciting her morning prayers from the Japji Sahib while the maidservant Ram Piari stood over her, rubbing and pounding and slapping the thick, dark, orange-colored mustard oil into Mataji’s scalp. The cot drooped with her weight. She didn’t look up. Nor did the girls—Tej’s sisters Goodi and Rano, sitting on low stools beside her. The two were crouched over some embroidery they had started together the evening before and were bent upon finishing before another sun went down. It was a bright length of muslin, a dupatta that when worn over their heads or draped over their shoulders would catch dozens of sunbeams in the tiny round mirrors they were stitching into it. Hari was bathing. I could hear him singing and splashing water from the pump at the back of the house.

  Pitaji, Major Sant Singh Sandhu (Retd.), would be off on his rounds of the farm. It’s what he did every morning, if he didn’t go hunting with the cousins from Amritsar, three young men of indeterminate age who all looked alike. Middays he escaped to town on farm business. These trips often turned into social forays as he searched out friends to talk to. Life in the army had made him gregarious to the extent that Majra company fell short of his taste for talk. In the evening Pitaji made another round of the fields before dinner. Sometimes he would send for me to listen to him talk about world affairs, Indian politics, or the price of sugarcane. Today Tej had gone at dawn with the Amritsar cousins to oversee the loading of the last, drying stalks of sugarcane for market. Now that the juice that plumped up the weight (and the price) had largely dried up, it was hardly worth the effort and cost of hauling it off. Still, Pitaji had decided it must be done, and Tej was probably already waiting for the tractor driver to bring the trailer around and mad with impatience to finish the job so he could return to me. To his sitar. To his music, for the rest of the day.

  I contemplated for a moment the surroundings. The compound of our house was closed off from the rest of the village by a mud wall two feet thick and seven feet high. In the six weeks I had been here, I had scarcely gone outside it. The photographs I had envisaged taking still lay curled up in the Rollei as unexposed film. Women of a landlord’s household do not have the freedom of the village, and especially not for taking photographs. It would create excitement of the wrong kind; it would invite criticism from all sorts of people. I had, then, to rely on my imagination for the pictures I might have taken. From the roof where Mataji sat, there could be seen—and photographed through the widest of wide angle lenses—the whole expanse of fields, and in their midst, the mud houses clustered together. The horizon would be as flat as a table top and the sun a pale orange mask of a face behind a veil of dusty beige. The blindfolded camel was walking around in circles, powering the Persian wheel well outside our gate. I could hear the creak of the wheel and the slosh of the water from where I sat. And the circles would expand to include the whole village, those dwellings that rose up like natural extensions of the earth from which they were fashioned, the fields, and even the towns I had never seen, but felt must be there, endless copies of Ladopur as far as the imagination could take me. I had been told that in the monsoon season one could actually see the foothills of the Himalayas to the north. Now they had to be wondered about.

  Inside our compound a series of rooms with thick mud walls leaned along the north side, shaded by a tamarind tree under which the vicious Moti had sat furious and chained since dawn. He had nothing to do but await his release at sundown, while Jim and Lal roamed the yard free, sniffing the morning air, marking their territories, and frightening the butterflies. Ram Piari had finished Mataji’s massage now and was rolling up the beddings from the charpoys and stowing them inside the house for the day. Gian, a youth conscripted from the village for odd jobs around the house, was stacking the rope cots against the outside of the storeroom wall. Something he whispered to Ram Piari as they went through their routine caused her to flash him a fierce look. As soon as he had turned his back, she pulled her dupatta more tightly over her head to hide a smile.

  And she was already in the kitchen, up before everyone else, overseeing the work of Udmi Ram and Chotu and Ram Piari, keys jangling from her kameez pocket and her bare feet slapping the packed earth of the kitchen floor as she strode back and forth. She would have bathed, washed her hair, said her prayers, and seen to the servants’ getting up and starting the wood-burning chulas. The kitchen would be all smoke and boiling water, steaming buffalo milk and tea things taken out. Six-year-old Nikku would be sitting on a low stool, drinking sweetened cow’s milk from a big brass tumbler. I could hear the striking of brass utensils, one against the other. Soon it would be the groan and squeak of the wooden beater in the earthenware butter churn. She was seeing that everything got done. But how did she manage to shout without raising her voice?

  Mataji was joining her now for the first of the day’s series of ongoing conversations. The kitchen was the favored locale. It might have been that it offered the two women an excuse to sit together without seeming to waste time. No one could accuse them of idleness if they cut and peeled, stirred and ladled while they talked. I often caught bits about the flamboyant life of Mataji’s younger brother, Uncle Gurnam Singh. It was obvious Mataji didn’t approve of what he was doing with his life and to his family. There was something about another woman.

  The kitchen, indeed the whole household, was a scene that would have done just as well without me in it; nor had it taken me long to arrive at this. Now, after all these weeks, I had almost got used to it. But not quite. Sometimes I wante
d to stand up on the flattopped roof and shout to the village at large: “Hey! Look at me! I’m Helen! I can recite the Lord’s Prayer in Gothic, tell you the difference between an Italian and Shakespearean sonnet. I can give a recitation of Goethe’s lyrics from the Weimar period. I can take pictures and develop and print them myself. I saw the world premières of Gone With the Wind and Citizen Kane; the sneak preview of Casablanca before it was released. Humphrey Bogart was in the audience! I can tell you who starred in the original version of A Star is Born and who Bette Davis’ costar was in All This and Heaven Too. I can conjugate verbs in five Old High German dialects and recite the first twenty-five lines of Virgil’s Aeneid!”

  But I had no audience, and besides, knowing all this was about as practical in the present circumstances as being able to write all the four Gospels on a grain of rice.

  There were clearly other skills to be cultivated here. So far I hadn’t shone at any of them. Trying to light the wood stove had ended in blackened fingers and tears in my eyes from the smoke and frustration. Rolling out chapattis had provided a hilarious time for all as the wet, sticky dough slipped and slid beneath my rolling pin, producing a polygon of varied thickness, instead of the neat, perfect circle aimed at. Attempts at crochet had resulted in tight little masses of sweat-stained cotton thread with no shape, and holes everywhere.

  She had always been there to smilingly take the offending rolling pin or crochet hook or metal tube blower for igniting the fire out of my awkward hands to finish the job perfectly herself.

  “Marvelous,” I thought, “how I have managed to keep Dilraj Kaur out of my letters back to the States all these weeks and out of my conversations before leaving. But I have. She is my secret from all those at home. An obsession here and now. A raging preoccupation.”