“What?” Jim was tugging at his leash, and my exclamation as I kept him in control came out in a burst of breath that gave it more force than intended.
Rano looked at me. Is this the wrong topic to have started, she perhaps wondered. Whatever, she plunged ahead. “That’s what she said,” Rano replied. “Goodi said that Mataji looked up from her knitting—she was working on that grey pullover for Hari—and gave a little laugh. Not amused, but uneasy. Maybe she didn’t know what to say. Anyway, Bhabiji said, ‘Haven’t you ever noticed? Every evening before dinner they sit there together listening to All-India Radio Jullundur and talking for I don’t know how long’.”
“‘So,’ Mataji said, ‘then what?’
“‘Nothing,’ Bhabiji said.
“‘You must have something more to say,’ Mataji went on.
“‘Isn’t that enough?’ Bhabiji asked. Then everything was quiet. Goodi said Mataji seemed to be thinking about what Bhabiji had said. Udmi Ram had been hovering around like he does, with the tea things and all, and Ram Piari and even Gian had been listening to every word. They’re all terrible gossips. They must have repeated that conversation to every servant in the village by this time. Anyway, Goodi says Mataji seemed really upset then, all of them there and all. Her face got red and she put away her knitting and didn’t say another word until dinner time.”
I stopped a moment to take this in and to sort out some impressions. What I came up with was as much ado about nothing as anyone could possibly imagine. Tripe and trivia and nonsense. Yet I had to give Dilraj Kaur credit for seizing upon such meager material and wrestling something sensational from it, or at least disturbing to Mataji. Plus food for the gossip-hungry. Laughable. Pathetic. Dangerous.
“So what do you say?” I asked Rano. “Is it another case of black magic?”
She laughed. “I should not have told you all this probably. It’s so silly and stupid. Still you need to know. Bhabiji can make trouble for you.”
“Why would she want to do that?” I asked, not that I didn’t know a reason or two, but I wanted Rano’s ideas on the subject.
“She must be jealous, Bhabi,” Rano said.
“Of me?”
“Of course. Her position in the family was different before you came,” Rano said.
“How?”
“She got more importance then. The only daughter-in-law and all. She probably envies you also.” Rano said.
“For what?”
“You’re younger. You have a husband …”
“She’s your brother’s—my husband’s—wife, too.” I stopped to let Jim have a sniff around and mark out his territory on a tree stump.
“Only in name,” Rano said.
“What about before I came?” I had to ask.
Rano looked embarrassed. Pretended she hadn’t heard me. We started walking again, neither of us saying anything, but I with a mind full of questions I couldn’t ask.
Meanwhile, I rang mental changes on the envy idea. Did Dilraj Kaur feel jealous of my education? I asked myself. Not likely! She would think it was useless and something that made me masculine.
“I suppose I disgust her a little bit, too, don’t I?” I said to Rano after a few moments.
She looked confused. Alarmed. “What do you mean?”
“My ritual cleanliness is about nonexistent,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “You mean not touching certain utensils at certain times and all. Well. Yes … Maybe. Sometimes you handle food with your left hand; sometimes you taste something while you’re cooking it.”
“Is that bad?” I asked.
“It’s just not the custom,” Rano said. “But Bhabi, please don’t take it ill that I’ve told you.”
“Why didn’t anybody tell me before?” I wanted to know.
Rano rummaged around for a reason. “I suppose we just took it for granted you knew and didn’t care about doing things our way.”
I wondered what other innocent practices of mine offended. Using toilet paper or some available substitute instead of water, perhaps? Offering to shake hands with a man? How many times had I unwittingly been the source of embarrassment to the family, I wondered.
At the same time, my value in my own culture had not been a piece of baggage I could bring with me and unpack at this destination for everyone’s delight. Like ice, it was substantial and weighty enough when I started out. But when I carried it off, it melted and dribbled away, just leaked out, and I had nothing to show for it at the other end. And nothing to save me from committing blunders.
It was not news to me that Dilraj Kaur believed in black magic, or that she could do me harm. But the matter of Pitaji and me was. Who could have imagined evil intent in our listening to the six o’clock news from Jullundur every evening, bending our ears to the sputtering, static-filled portable radio speaker as we strained to hear the English-speaking newsreader? It’s true, life in Majra was conservative. All that covering of heads and turning away the minute a man walked into the room. But from the start I had enjoyed a kind of immunity from observing purdah and had supposed everyone took it for granted. Tej himself had declared it unfeasible: “You’d be forgetting to cover your head all the time. It’s better if you just don’t start doing it at all. It’s an old-fashioned custom, anyway.”
These things hadn’t seemed to matter up to now. Pitaji liked to keep up with what was happening in Korea, and to have someone hear his views on it. I’m a good listener, and no one else in the family had the time or the inclination to hear Pitaji’s pronouncements on the state of the world.
“What do you think, beti?” Pitaji would say, addressing me by the same term he used for his own daughters, “Will Mac-Arthur dare to cross the 39th Parallel?” His voice had a timbre all its own. It was resonant, slightly nasal, and not particularly deep. But it carried. And while I’d think about how to answer, he would go on, keeping time to the rhythm of his words with jabs at the air, his right hand, palm held toward me like a policeman’s, discouraging all dissent. “I can tell you he won’t. He won’t dare cross the 39th Parallel. But he should. The Americans always play fair and most of the time play safe. It doesn’t get them anywhere, but they do.” He would pause for this to take effect. “Look at this country: Nehru reaches for the Chinese with one hand and has the other out for American aid. And the Americans oblige him, don’t they? Extraordinary! India is a nation of calamities,” he would go on. “No matter how much help we get, it would never be enough. Some new problem would come up. Look what happens to farming, to agriculture, if the monsoon fails just one year: famine, misery. More calamities.”
These views would be delivered in impeccably grammatical English with only rare lapses, and an overlay on the native Punjabi of a Scottish accent, a speech mannerism that Pitaji had picked up as a boy in a Presbyterian mission school.
I took up my pen again and tried to picture Carol still in Michigan, receiving this letter from me after so many months. What would these random details mean to her? These anecdotes? If they were a puzzlement to me, what sense could she make of them? We belonged to different worlds now. The one I was in was as untranslatable as a Martian’s would be. I tore up everything I had written and picked up one of the Christmas cards I had made. Old magazine cut-outs pasted on heavy white paper procured with difficulty from Ladopur. Lettered with poster paints. Under the cartoon of a snowman, I wrote: “Dear Carol, Will write a proper answer to your long letter SOON! Belated holiday greetings and all good wishes for the New Year! Meanwhile, keep in touch. Love, Helen. P.S. I’m pregnant. Baby is expected end of May! I’m doing fine.”
There was just time to put it in an envelope and hand it over to the boy with the B.A. and the black umbrella who would be coming by on his bicycle any moment to pick up the Majra mail.
15
I would not have known it was Christmas Day if I hadn’t ticked off the dates on the wall calendar in our room every morning, and if Pitaji had not wished me a Bada Din-ka mubarak, which is as close as
you can get to saying Merry Christmas in Punjabi.
I had sent off cards to family and friends, with long letters to Mama and Papa and Aunt Teresa. Now there was the tree to trim. Actually a palm branch I had spirited into our room the day before without anyone taking notice. I had to feel my way along in this. I didn’t want to seem to impose some esoteric religious ritual on an unsuspecting family. The truth is, I anticipated a reaction like my family’s would have been, had some Hindu or Buddhist in their midst come up with a celebration. Alarm bells would have gone off, and excitement would have erupted in Italian exclamations of dismay and disapproval. I didn’t want my tree-trimming rite to cause a disturbance like that in this household where I had, after all, been received as a family member with kindness and a good measure of love as well.
So I went ahead with as little fuss as possible, searched everywhere for a suitable evergreen, and finally settled on a palm branch. It was installed in our room on my red steamer trunk that occupied one corner and doubled as a table. The trouble was that by Christmas morning the branches were already drooping and threatening to turn brown and crisp in the dusty cold. The branch was firmly set in a sturdy vase weighed down with moist earth, but that hadn’t helped to preserve its original freshness. I propped the container tightly against the wall so that the “tree” wouldn’t topple over.
Tej was interested and amused for a while, and contributed some of his own ideas for decorating it before heading out to the sugarcane fields where laborers were already cutting and stripping the stalks before loading them onto the tractor trailer. I had to rely principally on using foil from candy wrappers and cutouts from magazines pasted on thin cardboard for the ornaments. Tinsel was easy to come by; I had stashed some away in anticipation.
I had to admit it was not the traditional Christmas tree, but it was a gesture to the past, to what I had grown up with and so recently parted from. The lights were a problem, though, with no electricity; still, I reminded myself, there were Christmas tree lights before Edison. However, with the unsteadiness of the palm branch, I had to give up the notion of balancing candles on it and had to settle for placing some around its base. I stood back and looked at the display, trying not to be aware of the makeshift origins of the ornaments and ignoring the drooping leaves.
Life was good, after all. The warm spirit of Christmas, of the winter equinox, of whatever it was that kept inhabitants of the northern hemisphere alive and hopeful, century after century, through the dark days—lighting lights against winter’s sunless sky, keeping in mind that spring was never far behind—entered my bones, cheered my heart.
A persistent memory kept surfacing, searching for a place to settle down in the scene: a Santa with the beatific smile and the carelessly wrapped turban of the Ranikaran Babaji. I stopped a moment to consider him, the real Babaji. He would be in his cave-room now. Snow all around. Warm inside. It was somehow reassuring to contemplate this certainty. It brought to mind past Christmases and made me wonder about future ones. Playing Scrooge. The holiday time invites comparisons.
Christmas Past. I couldn’t fail to remember it, the previous Christmas. I had to recall it now, for remembrance’ sake, and for my own sake, to come to terms with it. I turned my mind to it, as I had to, and dragged up images of traveling on the train from Berkeley that last time, of being met at the Los Angeles Union Station by Mama and Papa and the girls, sharing hugs and kisses (the feel of little girl flesh and muscles and bones; the smell of freshly washed hair and clean clothes). Middle-age rotundities, muscularities: Mama was plump and short; Papa lean and tall and bouncy. There was occasion for the usual argument about which sister would sit beside me in the front seat. Six-year-old Nicoletta won by reason of her being the youngest. Gloria and Julia flanked Mama in the back seat. I kept turning around, looking over my shoulder, hearing all the news at once, all the anecdotes they had saved up just for me, while headlights of cars from the opposite direction illumined their features in intermittent flashes: smiling, eager, excited.
Homecomings were always like this, thanks to Mama’s genius for event-staging, custom-establishing, family-reinforcing. Faced with the impossibility of transplanting Old Country traditions in the unreliable soil of California, the household she grew up in did the next best thing: they invented their own. Meeting me like this had become one of her rites and rituals subscribed to by everybody.
Driving at night through the great grid of Los Angeles, along its streets threaded with lights all the way down to the ocean, I never failed to be gripped by its magnitude: Where did it end? The ride was all questions without time for answers, tuggings at my sleeve, old family jokes brought out once again, the latest concerns that had everybody wound up. And Aunt Teresa? She would be waiting at our house for us, and there would be homemade ravioli stuffed with lamb and spinach, and polenta on the stove, and some Barbera to wash it down.
Once home, it was all of us bursting through the door, Aunt Teresa hurrying out of the kitchen to welcome me in her embrace, and the air redolent of garlic and butter and salsa ala Piemontese. Out came the glasses and the bottles of wine. My sisters displayed the house I grew up in for my inspection, now that I no longer lived there. Nicoletta demonstrated how bouncy the new sofa was: Julia, blonde and blue-eyed and self-consciously fourteen, and Gloria, more confidently sixteen, posed on the new bar stools beside a counter that had replaced the partition between the kitchen and the living room.
Would I ever be welcomed anywhere like this again, I wondered, as the keen sense of this as the last Christmas with the family for a long, long time froze my bones. When I boarded the train again, I would be bound for a point far beyond Berkeley.
I sat there at the counter in the midst of the family, receiving more hugs and kisses (cousins arriving now from Rosemead and Glendale), pregnant with this heavy load of subterfuge which lay cradled in my insides like some secret child, loveable only to a mother. Now that I had finished all the work for my M.A. I was going to join Tej in India in the spring. We were going to get married. There was something of a fantasy in the notion considered in the present context. The plan belonged to another set of characters, in another place, at another time, far removed from the present. Even to rehearse the plan in my own mind seemed novel, exotic, unlikely. Yet I knew that I was going away to spend a lifetime with him. My mind reeled with astonishment and fear at the certainty of it. I had just a few more weeks to spend here, and no one amongst this bright, happy, noisy company had even heard of Tejbir Singh’s existence. I’d sent out some feelers that I hoped would prepare them for my going off in March. To Europe. Perhaps to India. I hadn’t been specific. But there was not a hint so far that I wasn’t coming back.
“Why India?” Mama asked when I tried the idea out on her for the first time. “Everybody else you know is going to Germany, or somewhere in Europe, anyway. It’s what you told me yourself, Helena.” She was ironing clothes and set the iron down on its stand while she turned toward me, a hand on her hip. “I don’t know why you wanna go anywhere outside these United States. We have everything here, Helena. Everything.”
It wasn’t the first time she had said this. I had never had a reply. We did indeed have everything. Yet everything wasn’t enough for me, nor for any of my friends. We were all on our way. To Munich, to Berlin, to Paris, Vienna, places we’d waited out a war to see. In my case, I was going farther, staying longer, perhaps never coming back.
I moved through the holiday in a state of well-concealed panic that saw me through shopping for presents, hiding them away in cupboards to be wrapped later, decorating the house, the tree, going to mass, helping Mama prepare the Christmas breads from old recipes brought over from Piedmont, playing at being big sister, obedient daughter, the family’s hope and pride onto whom were hung bright dreams, like tinsel along the branches of a fir tree. It anaesthetized me against the unendurable and kept my concentration fixed on getting across the tightrope and onto the other side.
I struggled to keep my wandering a
ttention on what the others were saying, keeping a smile ready in case it was needed, or an answer to a half-heard question. There were times I would discover my mother staring at me when she thought I wasn’t looking, as one does at a loved one of whom some dreadful fate is suspected: a terminal illness, a financial disaster, an irreparable loss. Her eyes pried and penetrated as she tried to figure me out. She knew something was up. And so did Papa. But I’d have to keep my plans secret for a while more. Christmas was not the time to drop the bomb. It would have to be later. After New Year’s.
This memory needed closing down now, required a dissolve to another scene. Why not the present? Majra. The room Tej and I share in the new house, looking out on the garden in front, and beyond it, on acres of sugarcane. The crop is sweetest this time of year. There’s a flat horizon’s worth of cloudy sky and the leafless branches of the sheesham trees are being whipped by the wind that races through every noon, raising dust-devil dances across the yard. Against the fluorescent green of the Egyptian clover fodder crop, the trunks of the sheesham trees are stark black. Mauve ageratum, looking like pale but vibrant purple dandelions, hug the irrigation channels. Alongside them wild orange-and-yellow lantana flowers glow amidst the shrub’s dark green foliage. It’s cold and damp after a recent rain and gloomy inside the house with no electricity into which to plug a heater. At the same time, it’s too cold to sit outside. The clouds are high and thick and dark on the horizon, light only where the sun shines through in a shapeless luminescence. Each spot of color arouses a physical response—a glow along the ganglia—made more intense for sharing space with darkness: like happiness whose face is glimpsed in the mirror of its opposite.
I return to the business of trimming the palm-branch Christmas tree and wonder what to do for a star. I’m working on this, cranking up whatever creative forces lie inside, discarding idea after idea as unfeasible, ridiculous, or both. I’m concentrating so hard that I don’t hear—am unaware—that someone else is in the room, has come in through the open door, parted the curtains that hang across the opening and stands watching me. I have the feeling that Nikku has been waiting there for some time before I turn around and discover him.
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