Home To India

by Jacquelin Singh

  When I lowered my camera again, Tej gestured for me to stay where I was, that he’d come on board. Was he trying, as I was, to see him and me in Berkeley again and at the same time to adjust to us here, as through a different lens, now in this alien scene? I could feel him hurrying up the gangplank and rushing up the stairs. There was so little time left for me to prepare myself.

  All at once his arms were around me in an embrace circumspectly achieved in the Indian setting, where everything is permissible in public, except affection displayed between a man and a woman. Just at that moment I caught the eye of Edith Ritchie as she disembarked for a day of sightseeing in Bombay before sailing on to Penang. She looked quickly away.

  The intimate moment I had long looked forward to dribbled away in a multitude of complexities. There was nothing beyond the stamp of the immigration officer on my passport that I could hold up as proof that I had truly arrived.

  Tej was hurrying me along to the customs shed, walking faster than I could keep up, looking back from time to time to see if I was still there, helping me over potholes in the pavement, guiding me along. Would the family accept me, I wondered. Would they like me? Would I like them? What would we have to say to one another when we met at last? Tej had told me that Mataji was the only one in his family who would not be able to talk to me in English. Where and when would that meeting take place, finally? There were other questions I dared not even ask, as we went through one formality of arrival after another: questions that began and ended with Dilraj Kaur. It was a name that was impossible to utter; an idea that was hard to ignore.

  There was a moment when coming out of the customs shed Tej stopped short and took a long look at me. “Helen,” he said, “you’ve become thinner.”

  “So have you.”

  “I haven’t felt like eating,” he said, his voice uttering the words, but his eyes expressing quite another message.

  “Neither have I,” I said.

  About the time we got on a tonga to go to the hotel, I’d started to take in the surroundings. My hand baggage and the red steamer trunk occupied the driver’s seat, so that he, light as a bird, had to perch on one of the traces that attached the trap to the harness on either side. He delivered a stream of comments to which Tej replied in monosyllables.

  “Have you brought your sitar?” I asked Tej during a pause in the tongawalla’s monologue.

  “It’s in the room,” he said. “But you weren’t supposed to know. I was going to surprise you with a serenade.”

  By then the tonga was lurching along the broad streets of Bombay drawn by a skinny horse that alternately swayed and bolted through the heavy traffic. So far I hadn’t dared to look at Tej too long or too searchingly. I couldn’t have endured finding a stranger beside me in that tonga, in that city.

  “About the house,” Tej was saying, “it’s got the roof on, and the floors are almost finished. We just need the polishers to come. We can move in soon. After the rains, if all goes well.”

  “Oh?” I said. I tried to create for myself an idea of the dwelling going up in a Punjab village that would, for all I knew, house me for the rest of my existence.

  “You’ll like it. There’ll be a fireplace in the sitting-room, and a kitchen, and a terrace on the roof,” he went on.

  Meanwhile, Bombay slid by haphazardly. I wanted to put it all together but couldn’t. Finally, not knowing one street from another, but assuming Tej did, I gave myself up to the ride. Getting to the hotel had become yet another stage in the journey which had not yet ended.

  Tej was still talking as we checked in. “You know, before Mataji’s mother died last month, she became delirious—was shouting that you had arrived and asked the girl attending her to make tea at once.” Then, as we walked up the two flights of stairs to our room, he said, “It’s a good hotel,” and unlocked the door and showed the bearers where to set the suitcases down. “There’s a big bathtub, and …” (after the bearers had got their tips and left, and the door locked again) “… a view of the street. From the end of the hall … there’s a window. You can see … the sea … from there, and …”

  Delight set in before he could finish. Remembered faces and gestures and voice sounds and touches—different from before—assembled themselves into a fresh reality behind the locked door. We seized the moment and squeezed from it the last measure of seven months’ worth of minutes, hours, and days ticking slowly away in waiting. Our first fight came later.

  For the present, this reality was all I could be sure of, this and Tej’s music. The sweet, explosive notes burst like bubbles from the sitar. And for as long as they lasted, we were in Berkeley again. Bombay itself was sliding into the sea in a great pre-monsoon blur. Rain was supposed to sweep in from the Arabian Sea any day. The busy streets looked like no busy streets I had ever seen. People were living on them, sleeping on them. They never emptied. Sidewalks, buildings, sky, pedestrians, all registered as dazzling, shifting images by day. By night, shadows masked the sleeping forms on pavements in front of offices and shops and apartments, with only the random light from a hawker’s stand or a fruit seller’s kiosk to reveal their identities as human. At one point, a car’s headlights caught like a camera flash the fleeting vision of a mother sitting, as in a living room, with her wide-eyed infant in her lap, under the arch of a bridge.

  At six o’clock in the morning it was already hot. I had no sense of things: how the city was laid out, where we were staying. I only knew the room was high-ceilinged and cavernous and furnished simply. Perhaps this is what all the hotel rooms in Bombay looked like. Light slammed in at dawn through the half-open wooden shutters, and with it a tired breeze from the sea. I looked down into the street below, where I would presently be joining the throng, escorted by Tej, and wearing my newly-bought sari. Old men in white dhotis, white shirts, and black pillbox hats walked purposefully past. Hawkers selling furious green parrots in cages and others, flowery neckties, found their spaces on the pavement for the day. A seller of garlands sat surrounded by heaps of marigolds outside a temple across the street. A panwalla stacked fresh betel leaves and small tins of condiments on his stand that was covered with a wet red cloth. Street urchins pushed and elbowed their way through the crowd as if toward some grim goal. There was excitement out there, but it lay beyond an invisible bubble that held me in. Is this what being foreign feels like, I wondered.

  I closed the shutters again; the hot, humid air had made its way in. The sitar lay where Tej had set it down the night before. He hadn’t given up his music, in spite of his declaration in the letter. If anything, he played better than ever before. Halfway through an improvisation, matters of more urgency claimed our time, and he left the alap, the slow opening movement to the raga, before he had finished. Now he still lay asleep under the ceiling fan. Sweat trickled down his forehead and into the strands of hair at his temples. He turned over, then, and sleepily pulled me to him. “I missed you so much, missi-bawa,” he whispered.

  From Bombay to Delhi by the Frontier Mail, it was a matter of hurrying slowly. The individual shots are frantic, but put together, they become a sequence in slow motion, composed of long waits at railway stations along the way, alternating with headlong hurtlings through the Rajasthan desert. There are takes of exhausted, sweating passengers staring through the open windows of third-class carriages with wooden seats. They are packed as tightly as the belongings they have stuffed into big, square tin cans with close-fitting lids and padlocks. They sit clutching the lunches they have tied up in squares of cloth and supporting themselves against the bedding they have rolled up and tied with rope.

  The sequence includes a sudden, disoriented awakening at night in our first-class compartment, shared with a Gujarati couple and their two teenage daughters, when lights from a station flooded my bunk. My watch said two o’clock. A glass of steaming hot tea was handed in to me through the open window by Tej who had, it appeared, leapt out onto the platform as soon as the train stopped. “Here, this will do you good. It’s
authentic ‘stationwalla’ chai,” he said, and went off to stretch his legs and have a look around.

  I sat and stared out the window, half asleep. There was something on the platform I kept looking at without seeing as I sipped the hot tea. It was composed of movement, precise and continuous, and carried out in a box of a space underneath the tea-stall counter. Gradually it gathered itself into focus with stunning force: a child about six years old, crouching in a little world too small for him even to sit upright in, was washing plates and tea-cups and spoons. I set the half-empty glass of tea on the stand beside my seat and lay down again.

  When day came, Tej and I played canasta and talked, aware that every word was being listened to by our inquisitive fellow passengers. During the odd moments when both Tej and the Gujarati man were absent, the woman questioned me in heavily accented Gujarati-English about what my husband did for a living, what his salary was, who my in-laws were, and where I came from. She mistook me for a Kashmiri, and I let it go at that.

  “We’ll get a first-class coupé, a carriage all to ourselves,” Tej announced the next morning as we left Delhi for Abdullapur, the railhead for Majra. It was seven o’clock, and the dry heat of Delhi was already rising from the rails, a heat in which there was no more moisture than in a furnace.

  Once the red steamer trunk was checked into the baggage car and we installed in our coupé, Tej set his sitar carefully on an overhead rack, stowed our hand luggage under the seat, and proceeded to pull down the seat back to form a bed. Even as the train pulled out of Delhi’s main station, we were hurriedly undoing the leather straps of the khaki-colored canvas holdall that contained our bedding, spreading the cotton dhurrie, arranging the sheet, taking out the pillows. We fastened the wooden shutters tight against the dust, the hot winds, and the blistering landscape that spun dizzily past outside; flung off our clothes and lay down on the improvised bed.

  The big supply of still-unanswered questions which I had carried around with me was, like hand baggage, getting heavier with every stop. It was about to burst the lock and spill out.

  “Where is she?” I asked Tej as we lay together in the darkened compartment.

  “Who?”

  “Dilraj Kaur,” I said, pronouncing her name aloud for the first time and nearly choking on it.

  “Oh,” he said, turning on his back, “what does it matter where she is?”

  “It matters to me and you know it!”

  “She’s in Majra.”

  “Will she still be there when we arrive?”

  “Why shouldn’t she be? It’s where she lives.”

  “I know, but …”

  “But what?”

  “It will be awkward,” I said. “For me and for her too.”

  “Don’t worry about her. She can take care of herself,” Tej said.

  “Then what about me?” I cried. “What am I supposed to do? Pretend she’s not there? Pretend she’s not your wife?”

  We both sat up, facing each other.

  “I don’t even know what the sleeping arrangements are,” I went on. I could hear my own voice as though it belonged to somebody else. “Will all three of us sleep in the same room? The same bed? Will you sleep in the middle? Will we take turns?”

  “Shut up!” he shouted. I thought he was going to hit me.

  The clickety-clack of the wheels on the rails poured in and filled the silence between us that followed his momentary outburst. We stared at each other, my heart racing with rage. I began to cry. Miles went by. I could not have imagined a train could make so much noise. At last, Tej reached out his hand to take mine, and I grasped it. It was almost impossible to carry on a fight with no clothes on.

  “I am no good at saying ‘I’m sorry’,” he said. “I’ll probably never say it again, no matter how at fault I feel, no matter how miserable. It’s my nature.”

  We spent the rest of the journey to Abdullapur that morning alternately making love and coming up for air, drenched with sweat and euphoria. I realized only later that my questions (even the reasonable ones) remained unanswered.

  We had to be quick at Abdullapur station. The train halted there for a bare five minutes. We grabbed our baggage which we’d already lined up beside the entrance and opened the door of our coupé. We stepped down into the white heat of noon. There at the bottom of the steps to the platform stood a twenty-year-old with smiling lips and eyes and black, curly beard: Hari come to meet us. It had to be Tej’s younger brother. Three other young men were also there to receive us. I discovered later that they were the cousins from Amritsar: Prem, Sukhdev, and Jeet, although who was who I would have been hard put to say.

  “Sat Sri Akal, Bhaji,” Hari greeted Tej as he reached out to help us with the suitcases, and then looking over Tej’s shoulder, he paused an instant. The look he gave me was shy and straightforward at the same time. He wanted to see what I was like, but he had no one to compare me to. “Bhabi, Sat Sri Akal,” he said, looking me straight in the eye and smiling. The other three, like bearded musketeers, stepped up to greet us then, their sharp, black eyes taking me in with one brief, curious glance.

  The time for meeting the rest of the family was not to be quite yet. I remember writing to Carol about how it was too hot at that time of day to walk the two miles into Majra from where the paved road of Ladopur left off and beyond which our tonga-driver refused to go. Instead, I told her, we drove into the town first, to leave the heavy luggage at Ghasitoo Ram, the Commission Agent’s shop, from where it would be picked up later and taken by bullock cart to the village. No one explained this plan, but I was getting adept at piecing bits of recognizable Punjabi together to arrive at some sort of meaning … not always accurate.

  I told Carol how we all went to the house of a family friend after that. We were given lunch and invited to take a nap. When I woke up, it was all confusion: Where was I? On the Corfu? In Bombay? On the train? Someone was sitting over me, waving a fan of woven reeds back and forth. It was the young wife of the family friend. She had sat all afternoon seeing to my comfort in a house that had no electricity.

  Orange light through the drawn curtains of the room suggested that the sun was going down. It was time to go. Punjabi thank-yous and goodbyes were being said and responded to. There were smiles and gestures for me. Soon there would be no more trains to board, no more ports to disembark from, no more crowded city streets to be guided through, no more open drains to jump across.

  At sunset the tonga-driver dropped off the six of us, and we started down the dirt road that Tej said led to Ambala, but had been unused by through traffic since Kipling’s time. We had to turn left off it for the last mile into Majra. In the presence of Hari and the cousins from Amritsar, Tej’s manner had taken on a new, hard-to-define tone. Brusque was not the word: offhand and managing were. Or it may have been that the unfamiliar sound of Punjabi on Tej’s lips became aggressive and abrupt-seeming.

  The sun had turned into an orange ball, bloated and obscene as it lowered itself onto the prostrate horizon. Parrots screeched and crows cawed as they headed for their nests in the sheesham trees by the side of the road. Deep yellow laburnum blossoms hung in languid, back-lit festoons, and the leaves of the occasional teak trees fluttered and crackled like flat fans in the dying wind. The fields stretched beyond in an unbroken plain of cracked clay where the stubble from the harvested wheat still thrust its sharp, dried shoots.

  “Watch out for these, Bhabi,” Hari said, turning to me. “They can go right through heavy shoes, even.”

  These were the first words that he had spoken directly to me since we stepped down from the train. His voice had the same timbre as Tej’s, livened by a Punjabi rhythm superimposed on English.

  When we reached the turn-off to Majra and rounded the bend, Tej and Hari, the cousins, and I found ourselves directly facing the setting sun. It threw into silhouette everything ahead of us—the tall sheesham tree windbreaks bordering the fields, the stray birds that hadn’t reached their nests yet, the mud houses of th
e village as we got nearer. Presently we reached Majra pond. It was just as Tej had described it once in a letter, and I knew without being told that the building standing at its edge and mirrored darkly in it, was an abandoned mosque, crumbling at the walls, weak in the minarets. There had been no one to see to its upkeep for three years now.

  There still remained a little way to go. Smoke from the fires of dried cow dung rose in the dusk, filtering the orange and diffusing whatever light was left into a soft, even glow. Its subtle fragrance, like old wood burning, or some exotic incense, filled the air.

  “It’s just beyond that tamarind tree,” Tej said and pointed to a spot a few yards off where great shadows had formed in the gathering darkness. In the afterglow, we proceeded past the tree, past a compound wall, and finally reached a wooden gate seven feet high.

  It opened at our coming, and inside the yard was a bouquet of disembodied faces. Expressions of unself-conscious curiosity, suspicion, and shyness were held for an instant in bold relief by the light of kerosene lanterns. Family and servants had gathered for this, as had onlookers from the rooftops of nearby houses. Then out of the dusk a short, brisk, motherly figure emerged and took me in her warm, plump arms before I had a chance to go through the ritual of touching the hem of her garment. Tej had coached me to do this with older people as a mark of respect and good upbringing. The others materialized out of the deep dusk—Pitaji, a tall, heavy, military presence against the lantern light; then Goodi and Rano. Beside them was a third person.

  We two must have looked at one another for a moment too long. I could feel the breaths of the others stop. They stood watching us. Tej created some business with the luggage. Hari turned to help him. Mataji, Pitaji, the girls, and the cousins from Amritsar formed a tableau in the half-dark. I took a step forward. An unanticipated question crossed my mind: was I supposed to touch the hem of her garment? She was, after all, older than I. Something powerful held me back. Where was Tej to advise me what to do? To get me through this moment? There was no one to give a hint. And she kept standing there, a tall, full figure in the light of the kerosene lantern that made a shadow of her features at the same time it shone through the dupatta—sheer as a dragonfly’s wing—that was drawn over her head and that partially covered her face.