Home To India

by Jacquelin Singh

  Imagine us, then, sitting around, drinking tea and arguing about what to wash our hair with. It was one of those evenings when Uncle, Tej, and Pitaji had gone off on a visit to a neighboring landlord, leaving those who stayed back the job of entertaining themselves.

  “No soaps at all should be used to wash hair,” Santji began. He waved his hand in a gesture that discouraged all opposition when the others seemed about to take issue. “Even water is bad enough.”

  The cousins from Amritsar shook their heads doubtfully and gazed into their mugs of tea. For Sikhs, with uncut ropes of thick hair, the subject was one to raise debate, since everyone had his own theory about the best way to manage a shampoo. Ramu looked from Santji to the others. Uncle’s little son, Surinder, and Nikku ran through the company bent on some chase game of their own. Mataji poured another round of tea and I passed the pakoras. The hot vegetable fritters turned out to be only a momentary distraction.

  “Look at my hair,” Santji went on. He lifted his turban off like a hat, and showed everybody the twisted and coiled mass of healthy mane, then put the turban back on again, giving it a smart tug as he did so. “I have never poured water on my hair in all my sixty-three years,” he said. “Oil and lots of massage. That’s all that’s needed.”

  One of the cousins—Jeet?—asked how that helped. He said the best thing was to rub chick-pea flour into dry hair before washing it in water, and to follow this up with a lemon or curd rinse.

  “Curd stinks,” Brother John said. And that was that.

  Shiv Kanwar Singh, ever ready to talk about his war experiences, regaled us with stories of washing his hair in diesel oil from the tank he drove in the North African desert. “There wasn’t even water to drink,” he said. “So where was the question of getting water to wash our hair? We would just take some diesel from the tank, and it worked fine.”

  And so the days passed. The real reason for Uncle Gurnam Singh’s apparently impromptu visit did not come to light until his week-long stay was almost over. We were sitting on our charpoys after dinner one evening. A light breeze that had come as gently as the kiss of a mosquito scattered the dust-haze and revealed the rare sight of bright stars, soft glowing planets, the moon!

  “Bhaji,” Uncle said to Pitaji and the whole company at large, “I’m trying for a ticket from the party headquarters to run for the State Assembly when the general elections come up.” He paused for the announcement to sink in.

  Mataji was appropriately thrilled; her younger brother would be a Member of the Legislative Assembly of Rajasthan, an M.L.A.!

  Pitaji looked uneasy. It was no secret that when funds were low, Uncle Gurnam Singh would take a loan from a relative (usually Pitaji) to tide himself over, and everyone knew that election campaigns cost money—the more so as this one would be the first in independent India. All that driving around from village to village through the Bikaner sand dunes in the diesel-hungry, trouble-prone jeep, all that entertaining and feasting to create a political base, as Uncle termed it! Party funds would cover only a fraction of what he would have to spend; the rest would have to come from his own (or some other individual’s) pocket.

  “I’m going to need your help, Bhaji,” Uncle Gurnam Singh went on. “I need smart workers, people around who can lend a hand with things. Do you think you could spare Hari for a few weeks?”

  Pitaji leaned back on his charpoy against the still rolled up bedding he used as a bolster and gave a soft groan of relief. “Why not?” he said. “We can manage by ourselves for a few days, can’t we, beta?” he asked Tej.

  Tej said yes. What else was there for him to say? But I knew he was rapidly calculating how much more of his precious time looking up some newly-found musician friends in Ladopur or practicing the sitar was going to be usurped by the work he hated, when Hari would not be there to do his share. Hari of course brightened at the prospect of a few days away from the farm and the excitement of going along with Uncle. For my part, I wondered if Hari would indeed be back in a “few weeks,” in time for Tej and me to get on with our much-delayed wedding. It was to be a civil ceremony, and for that we needed to go forty miles away to the District Headquarters in Ambala. The date was not ours to choose, but waited on the convenience of the District Commissioner who was to officiate. In all these weeks he had not answered our letter asking for an appointment.

  “I’ll go to Bikaner too,” Mataji declared. “Bhabhi Gursharan Kaur will have lots to do,” she added pointedly. It was the opportunity for Mataji to see for herself what was going on inside Uncle Gurnam Singh’s household, and she was not going to let it go. She would size up the situation, see what Gursharan Kaur was going through, would get her brother to see reason and realize what a shameful position he had got himself into with the concubine. I played out the scene in my imagination as Rano, her large eyes earnest and intent, whispered translations of snatches of the conversation there in the dark, illumined now by a single kerosene lantern on the unpainted wooden table by Pitaji’s charpoy. For one fleeting instant, something in her expression, something about her eyes—not on the surface, but deep inside the pupils from where the person who was Rano looked out on the world—reminded me of Tej. I felt drawn to her on his account; I felt an immediate kinship.

  Monsoon

  6

  The family pattern broke up the next day like shifting pieces of a kaleidoscope. Mataji and Hari went off to Bikaner with Uncle (who had yet another loan from Pitaji in his pocket, got at the last minute). Because Nikku made a great fuss, he too was squeezed into the overloaded jeep, on the lap of Brother John, which he shared with the shotgun. Dilraj Kaur had to attend a wedding in her brother Arjun Singh’s village in Faridkot, and one of the Amritsar cousins—Sukhdev?—was deputed to escort her there, gentlewomen never being left to travel alone. Tej and Pitaji, Rano and Goodi, and I stayed back to see to the Majra house and to await the monsoon.

  All but the minimum of farm work came to a standstill amidst the hushed waiting. The dust-haze and the humidity returned, clamped down even tighter over the part of the earth we occupied. In a wash of homesickness, I tried to remember what July in Berkeley had been like, and failed. I supposed there would have been wild oats covering the dry, yellow hills of California, and on their gentle slopes, the neat, patterned shade of the occasional clump of oak trees. As soon as the image surfaced, it floated away like the scene in a mirage.

  At the same time, uneasiness over my status within the family grew as the days without rain followed one upon the other, and the silence from the District Commissioner in Ambala remained unbroken. Tej and I bickered through the long afternoons in our little Persian-carpeted room, once the joys of the flesh had been savored and the sweat wiped away. Three days after Uncle Gurnam Singh drove off with half the family, the lid flew off.

  “I need to know where I stand,” I said. “I’ve been keeping quiet, trying to get the hang of things here. Just seeing what’s going on. Where I fit in. I can’t go on wondering what other people think of me. Mataji has put us in the same room together, as if we were man and wife.”

  “That’s because we are, or will be soon enough.”

  “Not soon enough for me,” I said.

  “Do you think I’m enjoying this wait?” he asked. “It’s bad enough without you making it worse with all your imaginings.”

  “They’re not imaginings. You don’t know what it’s like, dealing with the women in this house,” I said.

  “Don’t try to draw me into your squabbles,” Tej said. “I refuse to take their side and I refuse to take yours. It’d be a mess if I got into your kitchen quarrels.”

  “They’re not even quarrels,” I went on. “Nobody says anything outright. There are lots of innuendos and sneaky asides and meaningful pauses. I’m tired of it. I don’t know how to handle it.”

  “I say it’s all in your head.”

  “I say it isn’t! Rano told me what they said the day Uncle arrived, about his having a concubine and all …”

  �
�What’s that got to do with you?” Tej said.

  “That’s what I need to know,” I said. “The way she was going on and on about that kept woman, keeping the whole kitchen eagerly tuned in to her talk. It wasn’t lost on me that she was forcing a comparison.”

  “She. Who?” Tej wanted to know.

  “Who else but Dilraj Kaur?” I said. “Mataji just goes along with whatever she says, without pausing to think. I don’t believe Mataji would hurt my feelings on purpose. And the girls are friendly to me. But for how long? Under this kind of constant bombardment? Rano told me …”

  “Rano should keep her mouth shut,” Tej interrupted.

  “Just listen to me,” I said. “Rano told me the gist of what they were saying about Uncle Gurnam Singh the day he arrived. How the woman is too young for him. How shameless she is … things like that. I just want to know if that’s what they think of me.”

  “That you’re too young for me?” he asked facetiously.

  “Of course not,” I said, furious with him for not taking me seriously. “You know what I mean. Dilraj Kaur is continually suggesting I’m not quite pukka, not quite legitimately here. She’s forever bringing up this woman of Uncle’s in ways that bring out her similarities to me.”

  “Look here, what do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said and began to cry. “It just seems like things will never get resolved, never get spelled out, we’ll never get to Ambala, get married, get settled …” I chanted.

  “Why do you keep insisting on everything getting defined? Where’s the need? Sooner or later the District Commissioner will give us an appointment, we’ll be married, and everything will be okay. In the meantime …”

  “In the meantime, I have to put up with all of Dilraj Kaur’s nastiness, I suppose.”

  “Why don’t you lay off her?” he said, getting really impatient now. “She’s an unfortunate woman. Her husband is dead …”

  “Her first husband,” I corrected him.

  “Her only husband,” he said pointedly. “What I am trying to ask you is, who would want to trade places with her? With only that little son to love her? When Hardev Bhaji died, her whole life was over. She broke her bangles, tore her hair, threw away all her fine clothes.” Whenever Tej, or anyone else in the family got on this subject, their language took on the flavor of myth in the retelling. “She even wanted to die on his funeral pyre,” he went on. “We men had to hold her back from making the supreme sacrifice …”

  “That doesn’t give her a license to make my life miserable,” I broke in. I had heard the story too many times now. It had become family folklore, this grief of Dilraj Kaur’s and her desperate acting out of it.

  “Let’s drop it,” Tej said. It was more of a warning than a suggestion.

  I knew he hated to come to grips with things. He hated defining relationships, pinning things down, drawing lines, receiving ultimatums, looking at circumstances from an either-or perspective. He hated me for insisting on it now. His way out was to turn to the sitar, or to go see the musicians in the gurdwara. I wasn’t going to let this conversation go the way of all the others if I could help it. “Well, she appears to have your sympathy, anyway,” I said. “You’re always leaping to her defense like some …”

  He was on his feet, standing over me. “What is that supposed to mean?” he demanded.

  “No more than what I said.”

  “That’s already too much,” he shouted.

  “After all, she did have you to herself when you got back, those seven months before I arrived,” I couldn’t help saying.

  “What?” he exclaimed, seizing me by the shoulders and looking at me hard. “Say that again, and I’ll …”

  I will never know what threat he was about to make because just then a deep rumbling from far away came bursting in upon us, and his words were lost in it. We both stopped and listened. It was followed by yet another deep rumble and a rushing sound unlike anything I had ever heard before. In an instant, the sky closed down and turned the sun off. The rushing sound soon became a roar, the wooden shutters began to rattle, and the door to shake on its iron hinges. We ran to the window to look out, and as we unbolted the shutter, it was ripped out of our hands before we could stop it and went banging rhythmically on its hinges against the outside wall. The sky was a roiling mass of low, black clouds amidst a garish yellow glare now, and lightning stabbed the ground in repeated thrusts. The smell of sulphur and the continuous blasts of thunder fueled our excitement and exhilaration as we fought our way to the roof, our clothes whipping about us and dust forcing its way under our eyelids and between our teeth. Palm trees in the distance were bent double, snapped back, and hurled forward again. Branches were torn off the sheesham trees in our yard. Pitaji was in Abdullapur for the day, and the girls, who had gone to visit a friend in the village, returned laughing and running against the wind in a wild, spontaneous celebration. On the distant horizon to the east we could see it advancing—a moving sheet of water. The earth sent up its pungent female fragrance as it received the first hesitant drops of rain. And then the sky opened up to pour out the monsoon.

  Bucketsful! The whole village heaved to life as if it had been a corpse miraculously revived. From the courtyard below, Rano shouted something to us about tea and some sweet, fried pancakes made of semolina and syrup that she and Goodi were preparing.

  “We’ll be down in a minute,” Tej shouted back.

  Hilarious bursts of laughter and splashings around could be heard from our rooftop vantage point as we watched neighbors fling open the doors of their houses and pour out into the rain. We ourselves pirouetted in a crazy, impromptu dance, laughing at our sodden, clinging clothes and at our hair plastered to our heads and necks. When our laughter died down, we looked at one another and knew the dance had taken us as far as it could on the rooftop. Back in our room, wet clothes flung off, wet hair thrown back, we went into the final pas de deux.

  That night we were serenaded by thousands of frogs in the village pond celebrating their liberation from summer hiding places. It was a surprise the next morning to find the sun out, a bright and glittering ball, and every bit of dust blown away. Steam rose from the fields as heat hit the drenched earth and drew forth grass and weeds that grew inches in a day. Inside our compound the hard-packed clay of yesterday had become a no-man’s-land of mud over which busy brown centipedes hurried, frantic to get to the outside walls of the house and climb up them toward some goal known only to themselves. They shared space with spiders of vermillion velvet, no bigger than holly berries, that polka-dotted the landscape. Butterflies flew out of hedges; whole new generations of houseflies swarmed. By night mosquitoes, all but wiped out by the heat of summer, made their comeback, while fireflies—twinkling green lights—made love in the mango trees.

  The monsoon turned out to be a humid, hot celebration of all life, except human. Ants competed for the sugar in the sugar bowl, flies for the cookie crumbs, mosquitoes for breathing space. Rats gnawed holes in the doors. Lizards had the impudence to die in inaccessible corners where their corpses rotted. Winged termites flung themselves against the light of the lanterns until they died.

  By day, our enthusiasm burned away in the sun’s rays that came directly now with the disappearance of the dust layer in yesterday’s sky. All energy drained away in the sweat that followed the least exertion. Freshly washed clothes that were hung out to dry in the morning and were exposed the whole windless day to the dazzling sun were still damp at nightfall. Mangoes began ripening faster than we could eat them. We filled whole buckets of water with them, lifting the fruits out one by one, sucking them, and comparing flavors until we were up to our elbows in juice.

  Before long the much-awaited typed notice from the District Commissioner in Ambala arrived. Our marriage ceremony was to take place shortly.

  “It’s fixed for next Monday morning in his office,” Tej said, “in the District Headquarters.” He handed me the letter.

  “It lo
oks official, anyway,” I said. I resented the fact that someone we didn’t even know or care about, and who didn’t care about us either, should be deciding on such an important date.

  Tej drew out a second mimeographed sheet from the envelope. “I, AB, take thee, CD, to be my lawful husband, or wife, as the case may be,” he intoned.

  “What?”

  “It’s the marriage vows, I guess,” he said laughing as he handed me the sheet. “What we’re supposed to say under oath.”

  I read it over a couple of times. It had a certain poetic quality, short as it was. It was above all a stark statement that took care of every eventuality of gender. Was it enclosed with the District Commissioner’s letter so that we could rehearse it? Or were we to study it? Was it supposed to give us a clue about what we were getting into?

  We boarded a train from Abdullapur station early the next Monday morning after a wild ride on a tonga through a rainstorm. I wore rubber boots and a nylon sari to my wedding. My mind presented me with a brief flutter-cut to a recurring girlhood vision I had had of myself in yards of white tulle and a bridal veil decorated with orange blossoms, carrying a bouquet of pale pink roses and lilies of the valley, my father offering his arm before escorting me down the aisle of the church. Organ music. Flowers. Happy faces greeting us in our progress. Mama crying into a newly-bought embroidered, lace-edged hanky; Nicoletta, a flower girl in organdy; Gloria and Julia, bridesmaids in pastel pink. The light through the stained glass windows filters in. Everything is in soft focus and slow motion.

  And then, quite surprisingly, we were in the waiting room of the District Commissioner’s office and being called into his august presence. I looked around and saw there was nobody to give me away. Mama and Papa and my sisters didn’t even know at that moment that I was standing amongst shelves of untidy, dog-eared files, mended chairs, and scarred desks, getting married—with Tej beside me (he, AB and I, CD), and the only witnesses drawn from interested onlookers from the next room.