Home To India

by Jacquelin Singh

  Tej looked at me. “Let’s have a look around this place, memsahib,” he whispered. “I’m not sleepy yet, are you?”

  We tiptoed out through the maze of packing-box rooms like cat burglars, not wanting anybody to hear us. We went down the winding stairs to the covered veranda that ran the length of the building and separated it from the sacred tank of spring water. Steam billowed out as the chill breeze off the river hit the boiling water that gushed out of the rocks below the gurdwara, housed in the ashram at ground level. A soft, steady rain was falling now, and instead of mingling with the water of the cold river, it darted here and there on the surface, just as the clouds of steam that rose from the hot springs failed to merge with the flood, but instead rebounded from it in great bursts of vapor. The pool was divided in two by a bridge that could be crossed in five strides. A low railing divided the body of water from the veranda. The bench along the wall of the building, and that which earlier in the evening was the center around which the life of the ashram spun, was empty now.

  Tej and I walked along the veranda, looking at the pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses which papered the outer wall of the building. They had been clipped from religious magazines and old calendars. Some had been hand painted by devotees. Gory scenes depicting battles and tortured heroes from Sikh history shared the space with pictures of Krishna sporting amorously with the milkmaids and Parvati worshiping the Shiva lingam. An ornate wall clock hung over the door of the cave-room which the Babaji was supposed to occupy. Its shiny brass pendulum and carved wooden case gave it authority and rendered Time important. Tej lifted the cover of a transistor radio that sat on a shelf beside the clock. It had been hand stitched by some devotee out of silk brocade and bristled with stiff frills and flounces. At the far end of the veranda was a separate enclosed tank for women to bathe in, and some more stairways, this time leading up to a multitiered terrace.

  “That’s it,” Tej said, taking my arm and putting it around his waist. We stood like that, absorbed in the scene, our eyes accustomed to the night now. All of these details clamored for attention. None of them blended. Everything was cut up, partitioned, refusing to mingle. Every item declared its independence from everything else, and at the same time demanded to be taken into account. It was more than I could take in. I closed my eyes. The damp air had penetrated my lungs, made my hair fuzzy and Tej’s beard curl. Our clothes were damp, our skin felt like wet rubber. It kept feeling hot, then cold.

  “Come,” Tej said, reaching down and putting one hand in the pool. “Let’s try it out. It feels warm.”

  The pool itself was in contrast to all the separateness and divisiveness of the surroundings. A constant stream of boiling spring water flowed into it and warmed the water from the icy river to a temperature just right for bathing. Tej drew me down beside him on one of the rock ledges in the shallow, warm, sulphurous water. It had a texture of its own. I had the conviction it was flowing through me, that I was dissolving into it, losing myself and at the same time gathering it all to me. The cells of the body renew themselves—almost a completely fresh set—every year. In that pool, it happened all in a few minutes to me. A great shedding of old cells. Fresh ones taking their place. New nuclei!

  The drizzle of rain continued, but it became one with the pool. All the complexities of the scene outside were dissipated. At the same time, the lines that divided Tej and me were impossible to maintain, even if we’d wanted to; they were erased, washed away by the flowing water. His loose shirt and cotton pajamas billowed out around him; my dupatta lost its veil-like quality and became a floating wreath around my shoulders. Without even touching him, I was certain that his flesh beneath the wet clothes was warm and solid, and familiar, as familiar as my own, and that I’d make my home on one of Jupiter’s moons, if need be, to live out a lifetime with him.

  Minutes later we emerged from the pool and headed towards our room, simply cold and wet now and eager to dry off. A figure came toward us out of the shadows at an unhurried pace from across the little bridge. It was the server of tea, the maker of dinner, the truck driver with the marvelous smile.

  “Good night, children,” he said in Punjabi-accented English. “Sleep well.”

  8

  Back in our room, Tej carefully replaced the sitar in its case, and I stretched out on my bedding against the wall opposite him. I speculated about what it must be like to be him—a man. What does it feel like to have a man’s body, I wondered. Those muscular shoulders, long legs? What does it feel like to rise almost six feet above the ground, to be able to see over the heads of crowds? To look down on everybody? How would it feel to have large hands like that? To manipulate the things of this world with fingers almost twice the length of mine? What to do with that long back? The tight, muscular hams? How would it feel to touch your face and encounter a soft, silky beard? To touch a chest that is flat and downy? To clasp forearms that bristle with hair? How to move the big bones and muscles, to establish a rhythm of walking stride by stride instead of step by step? What must it be to hold possession of such a body? And how could it not affect the mind inhabiting it? Did Tej even half realize the power it gave him over me? One drop of his semen could throw my whole system into top gear, could start a baby.

  What was it like, I wondered, to be Tej: the human being that he was. The behavior learned from family and kin lay fused like a firmly bonded veneer on his outward self, I thought. But in what conflict to his inner self, the one that fell in love with me, someone of his own choice, and experienced feelings contrary to the values he received while growing up. “He’s walking a tightrope too!” I exclaimed to myself in surprise. “Between two ways of life. And he can’t get off.”

  By now, all the other pilgrims had gone to sleep. I could hear Mr. Aggarwal lightly snoring, or was it his wife? From a room above us, a girl cried out in her sleep. Somewhere amongst the web of human life in that architectural nightmare of an ashram was the Babaji. Was he awake or asleep? Praying or meditating?

  A light breeze kept blowing the curtain back and forth as though with the comings and goings of busy phantoms, which, now that the lantern was out, possessed the room. It had become damper, the room more permeated with the smell of sulphur. Gigantic sighs and superhuman whispers raced through the window.

  “What’s that sound?” I said.

  “Which one?”

  “I can’t hear it just this minute, but it comes at regular intervals,” I said. It sounded like the hoarse whisper of a giant.

  Tej raised himself on one elbow. His silhouette was solid against the luminous night sky as it streamed through the hole in the packing box wall. “Where do you think it’s coming from?” he asked.

  “For all I know, from inside my head,” I said. “I just begin to fall asleep and then I hear it again.”

  “It might be Shiva and Parvati,” he whispered in a straight voice. “You heard what the lady said.”

  “You don’t really …”

  “Believe that?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “You don’t really think they’re here.” I strained to see him in the dark, but his features were in shadow.

  “He’s the god of destruction and she’s his consort and between them they’re supposed to be able to dance up a storm. This is, after all, their legendary home.”

  “Are you serious?” I asked.

  “The next valley is named after her. Not for nothing.”

  “Come on. What does that prove?” I said. “It’s just folklore.”

  “No,” Tej insisted. “It’s what the sound tells me. I hear it now. What you heard.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said. “You’re making it all up.”

  He laughed and lay down again.

  “If you want it to be Shiva and Parvati, why not?” I said, wanting to have the last word. “We haven’t even seen the Babaji yet, but you insist he exists. Do you think we’ll see him?”

  “I suppose so,” he mumbled, turning over.

  “Maybe we’ll
see him in the morning?” I suggested.

  “We’re leaving in the morning,” he said, barely audible now.

  “There’ll be time to meet him before we leave, won’t there? After all, he’s the reason we’ve come up here.”

  It was getting harder to make sense of all this, with my eyelids refusing to stay open and my breathing slowing down. “Tej,” I said, “isn’t it odd? I can see myself lying down here; I can see the two of us, your sitar and our gear and everything. And at the same time I can see us trudging through the rain up that slippery path, and earlier, all of us bumping up and down over that dirt road, squeezed into the bus all morning. Did we really do all that? Or am I dreaming?”

  “We did,” Tej reassured me.

  “You know,” I said, staring into the darkness of the room, “sometimes I wonder if life is going to be just a series of disconnected comings and goings. At the end, will I look back and see a meaningless hodgepodge of pictures that are unrelated? That have no development?”

  “Do you suppose,” I went on, not caring now whether he was listening or not, “that we experience life in the same way as we look at a motion picture? With that defect in the human eye they call persistence of vision? I once read that because of some peculiarity, our eyes hold onto the image of a subject for a bare instant after the thing we’re looking at has moved. Moving pictures are just a series of still pictures, but our eyes don’t perceive the gaps in between; we are fooled into thinking that everything is moving. Isn’t that odd?” He didn’t answer.

  “In our lives, are we really moving along? Or does it just seem that way? Do we suffer a kind of psychological persistence of vision too, that makes us think we’re going somewhere when we’re not? It could be that our lives, like the motion picture, are just some stills that we connect together so that they will make sense.”

  There was a moment like a blacked-out motion picture screen before the M.G.M. lion roars or the 20th Century Fox klieg lights scan the sky. Then the stills flashed by in my mind like rushes from a hastily filmed sequence. They needed editing, but there they were: scenes of Tej and me in Berkeley.

  Actually, Carol and me at International House, to begin with. By the time we were graduate students we moved in, I the better to find out about India and, more to the point, to meet Indians living there.

  One Saturday night Carol and I took the F Train to San Francisco, along with a couple of Hungarians from the International House. They had recently arrived from Shanghai where they had got bogged down while awaiting their U.S. visas. For eight years. I had a photographic assignment to cover for the college newspaper, and the others came along because there was nothing else to do in particular. Carol and I were made to feel somehow inadequate, since we did not share the Hungarians’ passion for bridge, which they played two-handed on a little board as we sped along in the train. Besides, years of travel with uncertain documents across hostile borders had made both understandably gloomy and prone to lapse into Magyar in the midst of conversations. Mama would have declared them too old for Carol and me. But I wasn’t dreaming of marrying either one, nor was Carol. They had simply turned up looking adrift in the International House dining hall a couple of days earlier, and Carol and I had introduced ourselves. When we suggested the jaunt to San Francisco to hear a Berkeley student, a musician recently arrived from India, play an instrument called the sitar, they seemed to think it was a good, if puzzling, idea.

  Our destination was a small hall that had once been a neighborhood theatre in North Beach. Once inside, we discovered a Sikh in a pastel blue turban and pinstripe Nehru coat about to occupy a raised dais in the middle of the stage where a snug group of expectant listeners was waiting to be enthralled. There were plenty of empty seats in the rest of the auditorium.

  The Sikh musician had just made his entrance and was acknowledging the applause. He sat down and settled his right ankle over his left knee, and with the face of the sitar toward the audience, he began to tune it, plucking the strings, and making adjustments. No unnecessary gestures; everything deliberate and sure. He sat with the instrument resting against the outer part of his right thigh. The long shaft of the instrument’s neck, held at an angle, crossed his left shoulder and extended above it. He played a few notes. The fingers of his left hand moved along the strings while he strummed with the right. Details I devoured!

  The Hungarians soon became bored and shifted around in their seats. Carol was working hard at enjoying herself for my sake. Of our group only I sat captive in the web of music that came spinning out of the exotic instrument. It was full of beginnings with no endings I could discern. There were exciting shiftings of tempo and rhythm, especially when the accompanist on the drums joined in. But I felt somehow suspended somewhere between pleasure and puzzlement. I was so lured away by those sounds insinuating themselves into my ears, that I nearly forgot what I had come for.

  As soon as the concert was over, I left the others to wait for me in the lobby while I got to work. I went up and introduced myself to the musician, busy all the while figuring out what shots I’d attempt. He was on his feet, getting ready to pack his instrument away. All movement of his hands were controlled, with an economy of motion, an absence of fussiness. There was a precision about everything he did that proclaimed he knew exactly what results he intended. Close up, it was the eyes I settled on, not the hands, nor even the sitar, for that matter. They were direct and half-smiling and enigmatic all at the same time. How did one fly into the life of one such as he, I wondered, getting ahead of myself somewhat. How did one find out what made such a one tick? What fueled the powerhouse, charged the batteries? Was he wondering the same about me? Something in his look made me check myself out to see if everything was all right. I had my arms and legs on straight, but what was I doing with my hands? Having them full of camera helped. Gave me something to hang onto. And something to talk about, as it turned out.

  “So you’re a photographer, a lady photographer,” he said, with a nod at the Rollei and a reference to my gender which I didn’t know whether I liked or not.

  “Yes. For The Daily Californian,” I said. “Mind if I take some pictures?”

  “Go ahead,” he said, sitting down again. The accompanist sat wrapping his drums in cloth, ready to pack them away, and a faithful handful of admirers still hung about the stage. “Do you want a picture of the instrument? The sitar’s made of a gourd; a neck of wood; some strings. Simple.” He got aside so that I could focus on the instrument and turned it so that the intricate design in ivory inlay was shown to advantage.

  “No. I want you in it too,” I said, waving him back into the viewfinder frame.

  And so this is Tej. Tejbir Singh. I’ve got him so that his face, black-bearded and moustached, fills up the frame with a wonderful smile, the sitar nowhere in sight. He’s amused at something I’ve said about how difficult such an instrument must be to learn. I don’t know whether he’s amused at my naïveté or at the way I worded my remark. But it’s a good laugh, a surprised laugh, about something unexpected that he’s enjoying. When I lowered the camera again, I found him, the smile gone, staring at me with the exactness of a photographer lining up a shot.

  “Well, thanks,” I said.

  “My pleasure,” he answered in what sounded like a clipped British accent. Except there was nothing brisk about it.

  I wanted to go on hearing that voice, but there wasn’t anything else to say that didn’t seem inane, so I said good-bye and hurried out to find the Hungarians and Carol.

  After that first meeting I used every means I could devise to scrape up an acquaintance with Tejbir Singh, to know him, gain the intimacy of his thoughts. But I had to wrest him away from his friends first. He would be in the midst of them, laughing, gesticulating, speaking Punjabi, if it were a Punjabi group, telling jokes that sent the others into seizures of laughter while I smiled uncomprehendingly on. Or he would be playing the sitar in the midst of students he had acquired by the dozen. His presence was enough to occa
sion a gathering. Girls in shoulder-length bobs, white buck saddle oxfords, and pleated skirts, their faces made bright with red lipstick, sought him out, wanted his company, dragged him away, smiling and protesting.

  Here’s a sequence from last spring. I’ve managed to maneuvre Tej away from all these people. We’re on the Berkeley campus, sitting in the sunshine amidst a Milky Way of pink-and-white daisies on the dark green grass of Faculty Glade. Beside us Strawberry Creek gurgles past.

  All this is to put us against a backdrop: we were acting out our lives in a particular time and place, and this was it. There were innumerable cups of coffee in the International House coffee shop and lots of time spent sitting around in the Great Hall. For two people with no home to go to, no car, and no money, a lot of time is spent in restaurants, parks, theater lounges.

  When June arrived, casual dates turned into weekend trips. By the time we went to Yosemite, we were moving into each others’ lives with the speed of light, and our time was running out. Tej had to go back to India before month’s end. The engineering scholarship that supported him was almost over.

  We watched El Capitan levitating in the moonlight, its rock face stark white and shadow-racked. It was freezing up where we were, sitting on a bench in front of the hotel, on top of everything. We bent to the breeze, cheeks stinging with the cold, breaths barely inches away as we talked. Feeling like conspirators and using fictitious names, we had taken separate rooms at the hotel. Between kisses we stared down at the shadowed valley hundreds of feet below and talked about the future.

  During the silences, I tried out some possibilities, ran them through, saw how they worked. But they didn’t. I couldn’t see myself continuing with my studies at the university. I couldn’t see myself at home again. Lots of friends from International House were heading for Europe, and visions of the cold German towns, battered by the North Sea and six years of bombing, sent shivers through my blood.