Home To India

by Jacquelin Singh

  “The kitchen and store are quite separate from the main building,” I continued. “Outside the courtyard beyond a wall are sheds for machines and cattle. I guess it would have been simpler if I’d just drawn a picture. But you remember I’m no good with pencil and paper.

  “Anyway, we all have our dinner in the kitchen where it’s warm. Chotu helps the cook, Udmi Ram, roll out fresh rotis of cornmeal, and Ram Piari ladles out fresh ginger-flavored, pureed spinach, buttery and hot from the earthen cooking pot.

  “It’s crowded in the kitchen and smoky from the wood fires, and Ram Piari has to pick her way over our feet and reach across our laps to hand us our trays of food because we’re all sitting on low stools as close to the fire as possible. Nobody wants to leave after dinner to go to bed in a cold room, so we stay on, telling stories. The elders remember relatives long gone about whom innumerable legends abound: the grandmother on Pitaji’s side who in the seventh month of one of her eleven pregnancies, fell from a horse, got her foot caught in the stirrup, was dragged several feet before being rescued, and delivered the baby at full term, with no complications at all; then there were the family eccentrics, military heroes, a great-grandfather with seven wives, one of the girls a Paharan, a hill girl from the lower Himalayas, who must have been as exotic a creature as I am in this scene.”

  I stopped to wonder if I too would be the subject one day of a winter’s tale told beside a kitchen fire. Nikku as an old man, Goodi as a grandmother—would they remember the girl from California with the round face, the straw-colored hair, the green eyes like a cat’s? What, will they say, became of her?

  And then I wanted to pour it all out to Carol. Unload everything. What I had written up to now was true as far as it went, but there was so much more I needed to get rid of.

  “Well, I’ve made everything appear picturesque and full of cheer,” I continued. “But life is not all wildflower gathering and stories by the fireside. If you want to know the absolute truth, I’m as homesick as it is possible to be. I have not received even one letter from Mama since I got married last August. I guess she can’t forgive me for not taking her advice, throwing up everything and going back to California. Papa has written a couple of times, but mostly to say how badly off Mama is without me, and how much Nicoletta and Gloria and Julia miss me.

  “I’m homesick for the Christmas tree lights, the party times, the shopping, the going home for the holidays, all the relatives. I never thought I’d miss them so much: the sound of Italian being spoken, the taking of communion, the going to mass, the candles!

  “We’ve moved into the new house all right, but we’ve brought along all our problems from the old one. It was not, after all, a case of cramped quarters, mud walls and floors, and a makeshift, outdoor shower room for bathing that brought everything to the point of desperation, but ourselves.”

  I wanted to tell Carol about Dilraj Kaur. How street-smart, or village wise, she was. Like the day we were all getting ready to attend a wedding in Ladopur. A big occasion! Excitement!

  “I’ll help choti bahu get dressed,” Dilraj Kaur announces to the household at large. She always refers to me in the third person, and always communicates with me through other persons in Punjabi. I suspect she knows English well enough to do without an interpreter. But it suits her not to speak it.

  Well, here is a friendly gesture at last. Surprised and happy, I put myself into her hands. I’m already getting installed in red finery with gold embroidery. The ornate but elegant salwar has extra-wide, fashionable cuffs, and the kameez has a tight-fitting bodice that flares away to a full hem. It’s a wedding present given to me by Mataji, and the only outfit I have that would befit the grandeur of the Ladopur wedding we are going to.

  “Let me do that,” Dilraj Kaur says, easing the kameez over my thickening waist and midriff. She helps me on with it and is giving the shoulders a little pat to settle the seams straight when she offers to do my hair as well. I hear her whisper something to Goodi about how thick and dry and uncontrollable it is. She stands off and gives me a narrowed-eyed look.

  “A little hair oil is needed,” she says. “Get me some, Goodi, from the cupboard over there.”

  I watch in the mirror in disbelief. The usually meticulous, sure-handed Dilraj Kaur, who never lets slip a cup or saucer or plate, who never breaks a vase, who never spills even a drop of curry while cooking, fumbles now with the bottle of hair oil as Goodi hands it to her and allows half of it to spill over my lap.

  “Oh!” she exclaims, allowing the bottle to slip from her hands. “I’m so sorry! What can be done now?”

  Mataji and Rano come running in from the next room, and in the confusion, everyone is talking and exclaiming about what a pity it is. The upshot is that nothing is done, nor can anything help. There are offerings of clothes to borrow. But the close-fitting style is such that one person’s salwar-kameez cannot fit anyone else. There is nothing for it except for me to stay home from the wedding and watch from my window as the whole family sets out together. All except Rano, who pleads a headache and says she’d rather stay back. Rano’s a good teller of white lies and this one makes me grateful to her. Dilraj Kaur rides with the women in the bullock cart, managing to be in command, even in such a vehicle. The men go on foot.

  “She did it on purpose,” I told Tej that night after everyone had returned well fed, and satiated from an afternoon and evening of eating and drinking and socializing.

  “How can you say that?” he asked.

  “I know it,” I said.

  He muttered something about women’s intuition and tried to laugh it off.

  “That’s not funny,” I countered.

  “Why would she deliberately spill hair oil on your clothes?” he asked in a tone of voice adults reserve for unreasonable children. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  And I suppose it didn’t to him. But it did to me. And I said so. “It was an ingenious way for her to see that I was cut out of things.”

  “You’re being childish if you think Dilraj Kaur is interested in ‘cutting you out’.”

  “That’s no way to look at it,” I said. “You don’t solve anything by saying I’m childish, do you? You just don’t want to face up to the fact that your Bhabi is devious and mean.”

  “Not so mean as you are with your baseless accusations every third day.”

  “It’s natural for her to resent my being here,” I said, ignoring his last remark and trying to keep my voice at a sensible pitch.

  “She may think anything,” Tej said.

  “There you are again,” I said. “Not taking account of her. Bringing me onto this scene was wrong—at least in her eyes. You’ve hurt us both by it. I didn’t anticipate this. It’s you she should be taking it out on, not me.”

  “You seize upon an idea and just won’t let it go, will you,” Tej said. “You refuse to understand that Bhabiji Dilraj Kaur has nothing to complain about. Nothing, no one has been taken away from her by you. Besides, I wouldn’t expect her to behave as you make it appear. She’s an unfortunate person. I’m disappointed in you for not having more feeling, more compassion. You should be above such petty thoughts. They only spoil your looks.” He paused a moment. “And I like your looks, missi-bawa.” He took my face in his hands and kissed me on either cheek, then held me at arm’s length for a moment.

  I couldn’t return his gaze. Instead, I buried my head against his shoulder. My heartbeat rattled in my ears. Rage and frustration were making my head pound.

  “You are naturally disappointed because you couldn’t go to the wedding. It was a silly affair. All show and bad taste, and I wished I could have got out of it,” he said, stroking my hair, holding me close to him.

  A millon little suns exploded into being along my bloodstream, whirled their lifetimes out, and collapsed one by one upon themselves, as I reminded myself that when affection is truly offered—love, even—you don’t turn away. I hugged him back.

  Remembering that occasion was enough. I didn’
t need to write it down in my letter to Carol. Nor all that about how homesick I was. Instead, my thoughts went back to an earlier time when all these maneuvers and manipulations of someone like Dilraj Kaur would have seemed petty and inconsequential and not worth thinking about: back to Berkeley after that weekend in Yosemite.

  It was Monday morning, and the idea of running off to India with Tej bounced off reality and got knocked about in the process. Everything in my life said no! Family considerations. Friends. The degree I’d worked so hard for. The photography, the technical skills mastered to the point where they were beginning to respond to the ideas I had in mind. Above everything else, the widow-mother-sister-in-law-wife occupied my head where she banged on my conscience and demanded to be taken into account. How could I do that to another woman?

  I persuaded Tej that I needed to be by myself for a few days. Questions bloomed like carnivorous lilies, and I had no answers. He stayed away. Questions remained. It gradually occurred to me that what I was doing was preparing myself for saying a belated good-bye. It was just at a time when rumors of my impending flight to India with Tej started making the rounds of International House. The irony of it struck me. Everything was out of sync, like the shutter and flash of a camera working at odds. I had no energy or will to set right my friends, least of all Carol.

  When the week was up, there was Tej. He’d come during the coffee break after dinner to sweep me away through the swinging doors of the Great Hall, out into the night. An effervescence in the cells, a tingling in the nuclei set in.

  But I stuck to my resolve and told him we’d have to say good-bye for good when he left for India. I must have said a lot of things, all sensible and right, arrived at with effort. And he must have countered them all with his own reasonable-sounding assurances about how nobody would really be hurt by us: an idea I wasn’t ever able to accept. Not even as I recalled the scene.

  We stayed up talking all night under the eucalyptus trees by the Forestry Building, ignoring the cold and the campus police. By one o’clock in the morning I would have been locked out of International House anyway. Tej and I watched the dawn come up behind the football stadium and then went our separate ways, wrung out and vacant. I had stayed firm. For the first time in months, we parted without saying when we’d see each other again.

  I resumed my letter to Carol. “Remember that morning I missed breakfast? I ran into you in the International House coffee shop. We had a long talk. You didn’t know, but my life was falling apart, leaking away, oozing through the cracks. I didn’t like the feeling. I needed a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

  “I squeezed through the crowded coffee shop and found a table by the big plate glass window facing onto Bancroft, sat down opposite it, and waved you over. You were picking up an order from the counter and had turned around to find a place. There you were, a smiling reminder of the familiar amidst the phantasmagoria of the past week. But you soon started in on whether I was going to India with Tej. You didn’t call him Tej; you called him my “Sikh friend,” as if by avoiding naming him, you would somehow not have to acknowledge him as a person, someone real. It appeared you wanted to say a lot, or at any rate, ask a lot of questions, all of which were designed to exclude him from my much-discussed future. I could understand why you were behaving like this, Carol. Other friends, too, had given us no support, Tej and me. Not his friends; not mine. As a pair, we were threatening. Subversive. Dangerous. We upset everyone’s idea of how things were supposed to be; we were underminers of one another’s cultures; wreckers of tradition and custom.

  “You kept digging around the same idea. Trying to find out what in the world I was after. Adventure? Excitement? Satisfaction of curiosity? A good screw?

  “I was exhausted from sleeplessness and the previous night’s tug-of-war between everything I wanted and everything I thought other people wanted for me. I longed to be left alone before I dissolved away in a fit of hysteria. Smiling vacantly and looking out the window were my strategies for turning off your questions and avoiding a scene in which I imagined myself standing up and screaming, or alternatively, sinking into a flood of tears. Perhaps you would give up at last, but you didn’t. Instead, your words were getting lost in the din of my own thoughts when, without having time to prepare myself or an opportunity to pull myself together, I happened to look out the window, past you, past the steps up to the coffee shop.

  “And there was Tej, walking up Bancroft toward International House, wearing a fawn-colored Nehru jacket and light tan pants. He was still half a block away and would have been lost in the crowd to eyes other than mine. I watched him as he came up the hill. He was lovely about the neck, silky about the beard, a mover without excess motion.

  “A single conviction took hold for a period of time that was briefer than a second and brighter than the sun: I had to marry that man or no one else. I had denied some loyalty deeper than family and country and culture when I had believed otherwise. Going away with Tej would be going home. I stood up. He was nearing the steps, now, in just his particular way of walking, like nobody else, not another person in the world. All I knew was that wherever I went, whatever I did henceforth, I wanted him to be in on it. I rushed out to tell him so.”

  14

  I took up a fresh sheet of writing paper to continue. Then stopped. The letter was getting out of hand. I was telling Carol more than she would be able to understand and much more than I wanted her to know. I went back to the part where I described the sitting around in the kitchen at night. Then I tore up the rest.

  In its stead I’d have to put in something concerning our daily lives that she’d like to hear about. Things like the week-long visits from family friends, old army comrades of Pitaji’s and their wives and grown-up children. The men off shooting partridge and wild buck; the women and children on long walks through the fields at sunset or into some cooking project for tea time. Very romantic. A scene from a nineteenth century Russian novel!

  Not so romantic were the frequent callers from Ladopur, petty but powerful officials and their wives who were motivated more by what they needed from our farm (sugarcane, garden vegetables, flowers for garlands meant for special occasions, chickens by the dozen for wedding feasts, honey, milk, eggs—whatever was in season or available or both) than by friendship. Pitaji liked to oblige them because he was a genial, generous man, and it also made certain official transactions go more smoothly.

  Hari finally got back from Bikaner in November and out of the orbit of Uncle Gurnam Singh that would have threatened to keep him going around and around for months more, if Pitaji had not written several letters saying he needed Hari at Majra. Hari came back grown up, pounds heavier, sporting a thicker beard, and full of news.

  It surprised no one that Uncle was unsuccessful, for the time being at any rate, in getting a “ticket” from the party. But he had had a great deal of fun during the attempt. Hari was ready with stories of whirlwind tours of villages, Uncle’s speechmaking before wildly appreciative supporters, Brother John’s arguments with Santji and Shiv Kanwar Singh, and the repeated breakdowns of the jeep that driver Banwari Lai had to cope with in the middle of sand dunes and date palms, miles from the nearest village. Midnight suppers on the road became a nightly feature. Wayside meals at dhabas were always the same: stringy goat meat in watery, chili-peppered curry, with burnt tandoori rotis.

  “It was Mamiji Gursharan Kaur who did most of the work, though,” Hari said. “She did more than any of us. There was always a bunch of people back in the village to feed and bring tea for at all hours. And she always had a smile for everybody.”

  While he was saying this, an image of yet another smiling server of tea crossed my mind and for a moment I couldn’t place it.

  “What about that other woman?” Mataji was quick to ask.

  “Oh,” Hari said. “She’s moved into Uncle’s house. She and her little girl.”

  Mataji had her mouth open to say something further, and Dilraj Kaur shook her head in disbelief. Bu
t Hari hurried on to other stories of his stay with Uncle before he could be further grilled on that lively man’s indiscretions. Hari clearly enjoyed his role as newsbringer, but found no relish in the more prurient bits so eagerly awaited by Mataji and Dilraj Kaur and Goodi.

  Would I need to tell Carol all this?

  In any case, I’d tell her about how, all fall, Tej had been spending less time looking up musicians and trying to find a tabla accompanist, and more time trying hard for a job. But not succeeding. Then there was this bizarre process taking place in the family all the while as I watched helplessly on. A neat magnetization: Dilraj Kaur at one end; I at the other. The rest of the family were being drawn like bits of iron filings to our opposite poles. Pitaji and Rano and Hari remained open and unself-conscious with me; but I got the impression that “people” were saying I kept to my room too much. Wasn’t I feigning morning sickness, just to get out of work? Didn’t I find too many excuses to visit the Mission Hospital in Ladopur for prenatal check-ups? Weren’t the two Scottish nursing sisters there, Jean Campbell and Ina Mae Scott, trying to get me back into the Christian fold while pretending to deliver only professional care with their tea and scones?

  These messages came more through body language and facial expressions, tones of voice, and studied silences, than from anything concrete. They also came through Goodi, who had become Dilraj Kaur’s mouthpiece. Opinions, feelings, judgments were conveyed to me via Rano, who in passing them on tried to soften them for my benefit and in the interests of maintaining harmony in the household. Rano was a peacemaker. I would describe for Carol how she operated. I’d tell her about the morning Rano and I were taking Jim for a walk.

  “Goodi and I were talking last night,” Rano began.

  “And?”

  “Before we went to sleep. You know how she is, pretty childish, really. Anyway, she was telling me what Bhabiji has been saying. And, I don’t know if Goodi got it right or not, but she said Bhabiji in a kind of joking way remarked that you seem to have cast a spell over Pitaji, he spends so much time talking to you. More than anyone else in the family.”