Home To India

by Jacquelin Singh

  “You are good enough; better than good,” I said. “But sometimes other things crowd in. It’s too hard to manage.”

  “Especially with no other musicians worth the name around,” he said. “No tabla player to practice with; no one to back me up with the tanpura.”

  “Things you want sometimes get set aside,” I said, and remembered the unexposed film in my old Rollei. I was going to say something more but Tej went on, as if he hadn’t heard me.

  “I got spoiled in America,” he said. “Every note I struck was great by their standards. People didn’t know what to listen for. I got worse instead of better, with no critics to keep me from getting sloppy. Then I lost heart when I got back here. I saw Panditji only once before he died, and he spent the entire meeting telling me how awful my playing had become. How I’d have to start all over again. When he died I knew I could never find another guru like him.”

  He went on to tell me about the first time he heard Pandit Shankar Dayal perform. He was just a schoolboy. His uncle Manjeet Singh from Amritsar had got some tickets to the Harvallabh Music Festival in Jullundur, a week of all-night affairs for true music lovers. Out of doors. In October.

  “He insisted I go with him,” Tej continued. “Said it would be part of my education. Four maestros were performing that night. One on the sarod, the others all on the sitar, with top names as their tabla accompanists, Uncle said. The most famous of the soloists, Panditji from Bombay, wasn’t to play till the end, so we settled down on the lawn to wait. Uncle had brought along a dhurrie to sit on and some bolsters to lean against, but the ground felt damp and cold and hard all the same.

  Tej paused a moment to raise himself on an elbow and rest his chin in his hand. “Can you picture it?” he asked. Then he completely lifted out of our way the mosquito nets hanging between us on our charpoys. I turned toward him to listen. “There was hot, spiced tea, courtesy the organizers, served in earthen cups. Some hot, salty snacks, too. People came and went; listened to the music or carried on conversations, as they felt like. A bunch of fanatical music lovers sat at the feet of the performers, keeping time, coming out with sounds of approval. Encouraging the performers. You’ve seen how they do, haven’t you? Some listeners got bored, got up and walked around; came back again. I did too. I spent lots of time that night looking into the faces of the crowd.”

  “What did you see in their faces?” I asked.

  “A kind of craziness, like some religious experiences bring on,” Tej said. “I wondered what it must feel like to be able to have that effect on people.”

  “Then?”

  “By midnight the crowd had thinned out. The real devotees stayed on. Those at the back moved forward, settled themselves into more comfortable positions. Some had waited all night long just to listen to the ustad and his famous tabla accompanist from Bombay. The percussionist was such a skilled artist, that he once forced a famous Kathak dancer off the stage in tears because she couldn’t keep up with his intricate rhythms on the drums.”

  Tej went on remembering aloud the events of that night while I tried to create from his words a feel of what it must have been like for that weeping dancer, for that boy with his uncle from Amritsar: a tired and sleepy schoolboy, wandering amongst the crowd of grown-up music lovers near midnight. Staring into their rapt faces.

  “Rumors started going the rounds,” Tej went on. “The ustad’s train from Bombay had been delayed; he was in a bad mood; he had drunk too much, was refusing to perform; he had quarreled with his mistress and was in no humor to play.”

  He said they kept waiting, but no one got up for tea or chatted with friends. He whispered to Uncle; asked him why everyone was so quiet. And his Uncle looked at him with this fierce expression and told him to be still.

  Tej then described a frail little man with dyed hair and a forlorn expression who appeared out of the night, carrying a sitar and wearing a gold-colored silk kurta-pajama suit.

  “But what was he like,” I asked.

  “I’d never seen anyone like him before,” Tej said. “He came in, and when he acknowledged the applause from the audience, a gold chain around his neck shone, and diamond rings on his fingers sparkled. Admirers and students hovered around him. One handed him a big, white handkerchief. Another took a red sacred string bracelet from him that he’d carefully undone from his wrist. Another handed him a freshly made betal nut “paan” which he tucked into his mouth. As he sat down, he threw a Kashmiri shawl over his shoulders; it fell in ripples around his feet. The whole thing was like some kind of spectacle,” Tej said. “It really woke me up. Uncle settled back on his bolster; he was prepared to be carried away.”

  The ustad interrupted the tuning of his instrument to talk to the Punjabi audience in Hindi sprinkled with Urdu, and to acknowledge the presence of old friends in the front row. When the maestro saw Tej’s uncle, he smiled and salaamed. His voice was barely audible; he shrank into his shawl so that he was all but invisible in its folds.

  “And then he started to play,” Tej said. “He began with the alap in raga Bihaga.”

  “One for the midnight hour,” I said, remembering a time Tej himself had played it for me.

  “Well, the crowd settled down. There was a sigh of approval you could hear from all over the audience. You know, when the music is good it joins both the performer and the listener. It’s a bond closer than that between lovers.”

  “You’ve told me that before. Tell me more about Panditji,” I said.

  Tej paused a moment before going on. “When this little man began to play, he became a giant; a god,” he said. “He filled up all the space around us. It was his presence. His music. And like a lover, he led us along. He wanted us to understand what he understood and to feel what he felt.”

  Tej described how sometimes the ustad would mime the meaning of the music with movements of his right hand as it hovered over the sitar, or with nods of his head, or with facial expressions. Sometimes there would be a broad, ecstatic smile on his face, as if he had seen God. At other times he would be in pain. He cradled the neck of the instrument to him as if holding a reluctant lover. The notes became plaintive, shy, expressive of longing, hope; some were mildly complaining; some joyful. All this during a conversation between the louder notes and those played as softly as possible. There followed a dialogue, one to be conducted on either side of an arabesque screen. Speaking of secret love? Of mourning that dare not be expressed? The ustad looked into the eyes of the audience, inviting them to eavesdrop on this tête-à-tête, this small drama. He wanted them to understand the agony of a hidden love.

  “I listened to every note,” Tej said. “Every phrase. I was a restless boy with the concentration of a grasshopper, but I had a pretty good idea of what the music meant and the grown-up feelings it dealt with. I don’t think I moved a muscle all that time.”

  Finally he described how the ustad and the tabla player began the final passage. The gat was a celebration! It was joyful. It was raucous. There was laughter in the music. Notes were shooting into the night like fireworks. And then came the final contest between the tabla and the sitar.

  “It drove headlong to the finish in a kind of frantic dance,” Tej said, “a rhythmic extravaganza.” He stopped for a moment. “I was ten years old and I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up,” he said. “Well, that was a long time ago, wasn’t it? Before I became an electrical engineer.”

  We both fell silent while the sounds of the night hummed around us.

  “Whatever it’s to be, I’m with you,” I said at last, but by then he had turned over, covered himself with a sheet against the dampness of the night, and fallen asleep.

  Tej followed up his declared intent of getting a job with a batch of applications for engineering jobs advertised in the newspaper. At least one would have seen us in Bhakra. All kinds of government “schemes,” as they were called, were being “formulated,” but these did not materialize in the form of job offers.

  “It could take months,”
he said one day, and resumed farm work.

  Dilraj Kaur arrived, as she said she would, in the first week of September. She was escorted by her brother Arjun Singh, a big landlord from a rich family, with maroon socks that matched his stiffly starched turban. He was not singular in his cleverness, but this escaped almost everyone’s notice, as Tej pointed out once, because whoever has a full granary, even his mad family members are thought to be clever. I recognized this as one of Mataji’s favorite proverbs.

  Arjun Singh and Dilraj Kaur had arrived by the morning train from Faridkot, and Pitaji had sent the cousins from Amritsar and Gian on the bullock cart to bring their baggage. Would the roles Dilraj Kaur and I acted out be different now, I wondered, as I watched their arrival from inside our room in the old house. They walked through the gate surrounded by flurries of butterflies, against a sky as blue as an Iranian tile. She was all white chiffon dupatta and cream satin salwar-kameez; new earrings hung in cascades of gold filigree on either side of her face. She was tall, withdrawn, important, waiting for others to come to her. No one would have believed she had just walked two miles through mud to get here.

  Goodi was the first to run to meet them. She had put on a freshly starched salwar-kameez, and her fine new muslin dupatta was a streak of red flying behind her. She gave Dilraj Kaur a deferential hug and a smile. Nikku was next; he threw his arms around his mother and clung to her knees. Everyone was there, crowding around; servants on the fringes. Except Tej, who only now was coming back from overseeing the transplanting of rice shoots. As he came up, the crowd around Dilraj Kaur and her brother parted, leaving a space between them and Tej. It held me riveted.

  Fall

  11

  Four seasons had passed since Tej planted that woman in my head with his disclosure that night in Yosemite. She had grown there like some monsoon vine ever since. I had come to wonder if there would be any place left for other thoughts.

  How the revelation that Tej was already married triggered what happened next that night, it is hard to say. The logic of it is missing, as is the ethical component. Instead of doing the sensible, the right thing and saying good night and goodbye, there we were, within minutes, both of us in my room in the hotel on top of the mountain, making a universe of our own out of ourselves, embarking on explorations too long postponed, making up for time lost holding hands, walking in parks, trekking the hills of San Francisco, kissing under eucalyptus trees.

  Now the moment had come that I had always agonized over. And I was unprepared. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. There was no occasion for doubts, for games and maneuvers. All misgivings fell away as we ourselves, a constellation of arms, legs, and bellies, joined the slowly turning, shifting stars, the great spinning galaxies, and the slow moving planets in that starry Yosemite night. The sky against which they all whirled, and each at their own pace, was black with excitement. Great shiftings and changes of place were going on. In the midst of it, a rope of silky black hair came rippling down, once the turban was discarded. It lay coiled between us as we made our re-entry the next morning.

  It was the room again. Helen and Tej, and … a third person. “How much of a wife is she?” I asked.

  I was on my side, leaning on one elbow, facing Tej as he lay on his back. The long rope of hair was coiled again into a tight knot on top of his head. He looked at me for one sharp moment, then abruptly got up, throwing the sheet around himself. He sat looking out through the gauzy curtain in front of the window by the bed without giving any evidence that he saw what was outside.

  “Tell me,” I said. “I need to know.”

  “What do you need to know?” he said, still staring out the window. “I’m married. That’s all. What else is there to say?”

  “There’s a lot you can say,” I persisted, placing myself between him and the window so that he had to look at me. “For a start, you can tell me who she is. What’s her name? Where is she? Do you love her? Do you have children? How long have you been married? Do you reduce her to jelly like you do me …?” I started sounding hysterical, even to myself. I had to stop.

  “She has nothing to do with us, now,” was all he said.

  “She has everything to do with us. She’s so real I feel her in the room this very minute. She’s all over the place, she’s …”

  “Be still,” he said, without raising his voice. “I tell you, she has nothing to do with us. And never will have.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “We have found each other, haven’t we? Can you say no to that? Can you go back on that? I hadn’t intended we should come together like this. But we have in spite of everything. Ten thousand miles couldn’t keep us apart. Nor can she.”

  “Are you saying we have some kind of special bond or something? Is that it? While you go back, as you have to, to your wife? That this was all too beautiful a mistake not to have been made, and so on?”

  “I’m not saying anything like that.”

  “But isn’t it? A colossal mistake? Too beautiful not to have been made? Charles Boyer fed that line to Olivia de Havilland in Hold Back the Dawn. It fits in here okay. It’s about time for the orchestra to come in with the love theme before the fade-out, The End, and the lights come on.”

  “You’re not making sense,” he said, “I’m trying to tell you I can’t spend the rest of my life without you.”

  “Are you saying you’re in love with me? At least this morning? Right now?”

  “I don’t know anything about love,” he said. “You talk about love, whatever that means, and quote dialogue from some half-assed movie I’ve never seen. People fall in and out of love so easily here. Come down to earth now. Look at life as it is. Look at me as I am,” he insisted. “That’s all I’m asking for. I’m without too many prospects. I told you I was already married, and that’s true. But at the same time it’s not what you must be imagining.”

  “Then …?” My voice was once more doing what I wanted it to do, which was to sound casual without being flippant and interested without being desperate. He hadn’t thought about the next bit, I guessed, because he was clearly thinking aloud, improvising skillfully enough, but it was unrehearsed all the same.

  “I’m asking you to come with me, just as I am, to a dusty Punjab village, where life is meager, boring, and hard.” He looked at me and then away. He had gone too far too fast.

  “You told me last night you didn’t think you’d ever get married. So what kind of proposal are you making?” I tried not to sound sarcastic, because I really didn’t feel anything but a certain puzzlement about where I fit in. Was I to be his soulmate? Baby-sitter for his children, if he had any? Friend? Buddy? Lover? The possibilities went on presenting themselves. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to see myself in your dusty Punjab village. I don’t see that we have anything to say to one another, but good-bye.”

  “What I said last night about not getting married has nothing to do with anything this morning,” Tej said. “Everything’s changed now. Last night I was trying to keep my life uncomplicated and spare you too. But now everything’s changed.”

  “You keep insisting on that!” I was ready to burst. My head ached. “What has changed in the meantime?”

  “Do I have to spell it out? Don’t you feel differently now? Do I have to tell you everything? Can we ever go back to being the same two people?” The rhetorical questions kept pouring out.

  I drew aside the window curtain that made a fog of everything outside, hoping to break the impasse by a moment’s business with our surroundings. El Capitan was revealed, basking in the early morning sunlight now, golden-faced and craggy and somehow reassuring.

  “What I’m saying is, I don’t know how I’m supposed to go with you,” I said finally. “Am I supposed to consider myself engaged? And if so,” I went on hurriedly, “how can I be to a man who’s already married? It’s insane.”

  “Listen to me,” Tej said. “I want to put you in a bottle, push in the stopper, twist the cap, keep you in m
y pocket. I want to have you with me always. I don’t know at this moment how we can work it out, but … I want to marry you. Divorce in India is impossible, but a man can marry a second time, under the law. It’s legal. You must know … a man can have more than one wife.”

  I was still trying to absorb the part about being kept in his pocket. I wasn’t sure whether that was what I wanted out of life. However, if I was to be in anybody’s pocket—and that’s the way life up to now had looked to me; one was in someone or the other’s pocket all the time: parents’, friends’, whatever—I could think of no one’s I’d rather be in than Tej’s. Besides, he went on opening up a new kind of logic, like some sleight-of-hand. It made sense until I thought about it carefully, soberly, in the way everyone else in the world would. Absurdities fell into place like fake flowers in a magician’s posy, as if they cohered into some rational whole; improbabilities became possibilities, at least for as long as he talked.

  Tej told me she had been his elder brother Hardev’s bride, his own Bhabi. He had been just a teenager when his brother married her, and he could scarcely remember a time when she was not part of the family. When Hardev died in a shooting accident, she became a widow with a son, Nikku, who was three years old at the time. Tej went on to describe how intolerable life is for widows in India.

  “But Punjabi farmers—landlords—have a remedy for it,” he said. “Sometimes the older brother’s widow is married to the younger brother. They are not married in the traditional way, but are placed under the chadhar, ‘under the sheet’.” He described a ceremony where a sheet, like a canopy, is held over the couple while they sit in front of the holy book, the Granth Sahib and the priest pronounces some words over them, making legitimate their sharing of more-than-symbolic bedclothes afterward.

  “This ceremony allows them to live like husband and wife. The real idea behind this is that whatever property there is due to the widow and her children, will remain in the family: she’s supported by the family. Her children have a share in the lands and can claim it when the time comes,” Tej said.