“Chachiji, what are you making?” he asks, addressing me as “aunt,” the wife of his father’s younger brother. His voice is a husky Punjabi voice, and he speaks English in words, not phrases, grabbing them out of a bag and hoping they will say what he wants them to mean.
I go over and draw him inside the room. I’m thrilled! This is the first time he has ever come to me, the first time he has ever spoken without being spoken to first. His eyes never leave me for a second. He’s still, after all these months, trying to figure me out, with no idea where I’ve come from.
I try to make it easy for him. Put a hand on his shoulder, a little, bony-boy shoulder, lean and sinewy and tough for a six-year-old. He doesn’t wince. I show him what I’m doing, and try to explain why I’m doing it. “People where I come from put up Christmas trees this time of year,” I say. “It’s fun.”
“Oh,” he says. I can see he’s puzzled. Wondering how sticking a palm branch into a vase and hanging candy papers from it can be fun. His eyes search the tree for details. He’s wondering what’s important and what isn’t in the setting up of such a display.
“I have seen some photos,” he says, “but …”
I guess he wants to say this looks like no Christmas tree he has ever seen. “I know,” I say, “this doesn’t look like those in pictures.” It’s just symbolic, I want to add, but I know that would be no explanation. “It’s as near as I can get to what it should be,” I say, wondering why I feel I need to apologize for it. “There aren’t any real fir trees around.”
He sits down on a low stool in front of the red steamer trunk, leans his elbows on his knees, and rests his chin in his hands, contemplating the results of my work. “You need a star on top, don’t you, Chachiji?” he says.
“Yes. I was just trying to figure out how to make one,” I say. “What can I use?”
He looks at me. Confused. Have I said something wrong? He’s not used to having his opinion sought. Nobody ever asks him what he thinks about anything. Probably scared to say. Feels put on the spot. Can’t imagine what I want from him. Shrugs his shoulders.
“Well, I’ll figure something out,” I say in answer to my own question. He looks relieved. His round-faced, round-eyed look makes him appear plumper than he is. His hair has been pulled into a knot on top of his head, and the turban has been tied tight as a tourniquet on top. It gives him a quizzical, mature expression. Sometimes he looks like a little wise man. He’s lost a tooth, and the gap adds to the impression he gives of a clever gnome. His smile is broad and friendly when he allows it to brighten his cautious features, but he has learned early not to give too much away.
“Chachiji,” he says, getting up all of a sudden, “could I put some of these on?” He picks up one of the ornaments still lying beside the tree.
“Sure,” I say, “Go ahead.”
“Where shall I put this?” he asks, still holding the ornament.
“Anywhere you like,” I say. “Put it where you think there’s a good space for it.”
“And can I make some more?” he asks, already looping the thread of the ornament over a palm leaf. Before I can say anything, he steps back and says, “Is this all right here?”
We’re busy now, the two of us, filling in gaps, trying to reach a balance, so that no part of the tree appears more sparsely decorated than another. I get out some more candy wrappers, another string of tinsel, some silver foil that just might make a star. We’re sitting there, on the Persian carpet, on the floor with scissors and twine and glue, and candy wrappers in a heap in the center. The tree is loaded, but Nikku is just getting into the whole process. He’s forgotten me as he twists the wrappers into shapes more imaginative than I’ve been able to devise.
“This one is a bell,” he says. “They go on Christmas trees, don’t they?” He holds up his latest invention. Hardly a bell, but that doesn’t matter. For a moment I am ready to believe him, accept the crumpled bit of shiny paper as a bell. “And this is a peacock,” he says of another creation. “A blue peacock. This is his tail. Okay?”
When he’s exhausted his fund of ideas, after a tiger and two camels and a monkey have been added to the tree, he sits back and says, “But we have to have a star.”
His words are coming together faster now. Sometimes there’s a Punjabi word or phrase thrown in when the English term hops out of reach.
“What about this?” I ask, handing him a larger-than-usual piece of foil that has escaped getting twisted and cut up and strung.
“Yes!” he cries. “I know: we can put some glue on the back and put it on this.” He proceeds to attach the flimsy piece of foil to a bit of cardboard. “Do you have a kanchee, Chachiji?”
“Kanchee? You mean scissors?” I hand him a pair.
When the glue has dried, he hastily cuts out a more or less five-pointed shape, not exactly a star. He holds it up with a look of accomplishment and pride. “Changa hai? Okay?” he asks. The star spins around on the freshly attached string, catches the light from the window and sends it off to the four corners of the dark room and back again.
“It’s great,” I say. “Bhout changa hai.” And it is.
“I want to put it on the top of the tree, Chachiji,” he says. “Okay?”
He looks at me a moment. Coming back to where we are. Realizing who he is; who I am. We’ve never really had anything to do with each other before! I see a wave of alarm wash over him. He’s all of a sudden awkward, all hands, feet getting in his own way, fingers not doing what he wants them to do. Eye-hand coordination all fouled up.
“Go on,” I say. “It’s okay. Put it right there on top. Tie it with the string. I think it will stay up all right.”
He picks up his handiwork. Love in his fingers, in his eyes for this thing he has made, the five-pointed-not-quite-a-star of foil. A little glue has got smeared on the right side, but he doesn’t see it. The star of Bethlehem about to rise yet one more time, shakily, unsteadily, lopsided, flashing light.
Nikku leans across the red trunk to reach the top of the tree with one hand, and he’s gripping the star in the other, holding it so tightly it’s as if he expects it to escape him. He tries several angles, makes his own six-year-old calculations. He wants to get it right. His hand is shaking with the effort at precision, and he looks back over his shoulder for my help. But he’s not looking at me. He’s looking beyond me, and I understand in less time that it takes to draw in a breath that what he sees has brought him back to where we started from half an hour ago. Even before I turn around to look behind me, he has dropped the star onto the red trunk and has started to wipe his hands on his pants. Even before I turn around, I know what it is that has seized him. His mother strides into the room, and without looking at me, without taking notice of the tree, or uttering a word, gathers the boy up into her arms as if to protect him from some evil force and hurries out without looking back. Nikku doesn’t dare speak, but gives me one blank glance, full of alarm, in which there is one confused element of apology—for what? To whom?
16
The New Year began with a hailstorm and a rainbow. It was tea time, and the family sat around the fire in the kitchen, eating a homemade sweet. It was a crumbly mixture of sugar, almonds, raisins, and quantities of clarified butter all held together by parched wheat flour. Mataji had spent the entire morning preparing it. Nobody had stayed up the night before to celebrate the coming of the New Year; nevertheless, the weather was remarkable enough to make us all take note of the day. Pitaji recalled that when he was a boy a similar combination of atmospheric events had preceded a bumper crop of wheat in May. “It was the year my cousin brother Sumeet got married,” he said, “to Hukum Singh’s eldest daughter.”
“He married Harbans Singh’s daughter,” Mataji corrected him. “My older brother went to that same wedding.”
“Hukum Singh’s daughter,” Pitaji repeated as if he hadn’t heard her. “We all went to the wedding in Cheecha, near Lahore. He was a big landlord, and the celebrations lasted for five
days. There were two hundred people in the marriage party from the groom’s side.”
“Five hundred,” Mataji said.
Everyone looked suitably impressed, even though the story must not have been new.
“Anyway, the entire barat was fed, the whole groom’s side. Housed, too, in the village all that time,” Pitaji went on.
“That girl brought twenty-five sets of bedding in her dowry,” Mataji said. “But she turned out to be a troublemaker. Right from the start she got everybody fighting with everybody else.”
“That was a long time ago. She’s a grandmother now,” Pitaji said, settling the issue.
I sat staring into the wood fire as one conversation flowed into another. Talk involved people and places too far away; too long ago. I, on the other hand, had my own recollections to sort out, and the fire’s unpredictable flames helped give a moveable, changeable focus to the events in my mind: transitory and ever changing close-ups, mid-range shots, long-shots in quick succession.
It was New Year’s day. Just exactly a year ago.
“Mama says you’re talking about going to India instead of looking for a job,” Papa began. “If I thought for one minute you were going over there to get married, I’d do everything in my power to stop you. It would just kill Mama.”
I was too surprised even to try to deny what he was saying. His words came without warning. Where had I betrayed even a hint of my plans, I wondered. How had he been able to guess? To hit the spot so accurately, all in one shot? I turned from what I was doing and looked at him, a wet dish in one hand, the dish towel in the other. I was finishing up after breakfast. The others had gone to Aunt Teresa’s across the street where the Rosemead cousins and their families were to have lunch. Papa must have stayed back to have it out with me, to get a clear answer, without Mama’s hysterics and my sisters’ alarm and confusion. It was just he and I. I didn’t know what to do with the dish cloth. I guess I kept twisting it in my hands. This was it. The occasion I had rehearsed for. But the initiative had been taken away from me, and I didn’t know whether to feel relief or panic. The things I had planned to say, the arguments I had aimed to present, were useless. The whole story of Tej and me and our decision to marry, once I joined him, got told out of sequence, in bits of stammered phrases. It sounded unreal even to me.
“That’s a fine idea,” Papa said. “You are going to meet this guy in Bombay … after being apart seven months, did you say? He’s already back in the Punjab.” (He pronounced it Poonjob) “And you’re here? Helena, you’re crazy. Your Mama and I can’t understand you. What makes you think he’ll be at the docks to meet you? What makes you think he’ll be there, huh?” He threw up his hands in disbelief.
All the time he was talking, he paced up and down in the kitchen, stopping to bang his fist on the bar counter whenever he wanted to emphasize a point. I tried to say something, give him a word of reassurance, talk about my sense of destiny, remind him the world was getting smaller, that I wasn’t really going so far away, and that my thoughts would always be with the family, but he kept interrupting me. In English and Italian, by turn. I even tried an appeal to universal brotherhood, but it only made things worse.
“Let everybody live like they like,” Papa said. “We don’t have no trouble. They don’t have no trouble. You don’t owe him—what’s his name? You don’t owe him nothing. You owe us. Your family. Forget about what’s going on in India. The Hindus can take care of themselves.” There was a pause. “They eat rice, don’t they? A no-good diet. Can’t keep a man going. You’d get sick on it.” He stopped for a moment and then said in a quieter voice, “Why don’t you stay and get your Ph.D., like you wanted to? You’d be the first in the family, honey. We’d be so proud …”
“I don’t want to get a Ph.D.,” I said, my patience and eagerness to be understood all at once abandoning me. “To hell with a Ph.D. What would I do with it? Teach other people to get Ph.D.’s in the same subject? Grow old and crazy in the process?”
“Shut up,” he said. “Stop shouting. Listen to some sense. I’m trying to make you see what you’re doing. You’re the stubbornest person I ever saw. Headstrong. Your head is of stone.” He tapped his own forehead to make the point. “It’s no good. But if you insist on going ahead with this crazy plan—like I said—I’ll do everything in my power to stop you, Helena!”
And he did. He used words, arguments, threats. He used love, memories …
A long time ago. Smiling faces; happy shouts. Fleeting. Disconnected. Across an expanse of sand, competing with the sound of waves sloshing against the wet beach, the tide coming in … It’s Santa Monica, the day Mama and Aunt Teresa got the bad sunburns and quarreled about which of them always got fussed over more, who got more sympathy, aroused more interest, got more attention. The sun is in my eyes, but I’m smiling as if it is expected of me, since I’m standing in the parking lot at the beach in front of the new Studebaker. The spare tire fastened at the back is a rubber halo behind my head.
The conversations of the grown-ups, half in Italian, half in broken English, wash over me in a comforting tide at first. Aunt Teresa’s laughter, my father’s asides, Uncle Oreste’s jokes, Grandmother Graziani’s sibilant scoldings through false teeth as she sits shielding herself from the sun under the multicolored umbrella. The jokes end in jibes. Mama is feeling aggrieved about something someone has said.
“Whatsa matter, Fran, honey?” my Papa asks. “She didn’t mean a thing.”
I feel I should understand all of it. I’m left out; bypassed. Nobody actually brings me into the conversation. At the same time, I’m the center of attention on an outing like this. I think it is because I am somebody special. It must be true: I am the only seven-year-old amongst all these adults.
“Hey, tyke, whose pal are you?” my Papa says in English, lifting me up in his arms, putting me on his shoulder, making me feel important. Blue eyes; coarse, curly brown hair; white, freckled skin; muscular body wet from the surf.
“Papa’s!” I giggle, self-conscious with love and wonder.
Three sisters arrive in turn to claim everyone’s attention. Papa, Mama, aunts, uncles, cousins, all get caught up in these fresh births. Death takes Grandmother Graziani, Uncle Oreste. Aunt Teresa moves across the street. High school has to be gotten through; a war has to start; boys I have known since kindergarten are in boot camp instead of in classrooms.
About that time, Carol Thorpe moved in two doors away. Her father kept bees and worked on the swing shift at Lockheed; her mother made Scottish tarts with coconut and jam and what she called shortcrust. Her brother played the tuba in the high school band. Within a week, Carol fell in love with Andy down the street and talked me into walking with her past his house every evening after school, as though we were going somewhere. He would be practicing boogie-woogie piano—just the bass part. We could see his silhouette through the screen door. Andy, battling acne and a bad case of adolescent voice change, was enough to satisfy Carol’s appetite for romance. To me it seemed she was settling for a starvation diet.
Summer nights followed tedious summer vacation days when there was nowhere to go, nothing to do. By contrast, the throbbing Southern California evenings, once the sun went down, offered numberless, undefinable escapades, leaps into fantasy and glamor. Barely eight miles away klieg lights scanned the Hollywood skies, heralding the coming of the stars. Plantinumed, sequined, minked, escorted goddesses rose like Venuses from waves of shiny black limousines while cameras clicked and flashbulbs popped. The lights searched the skies in restless, bold diagonals, crisscrossed each other, and searched again. Carol and Andy would have gone to the beach. Even now they would be watching the grunion swim in by the tens of thousands, turning the waves into liquid silver with their flashing bodies in the moonlight. There was nothing for me to do but lie awake wondering when I would start living. While I waited, I found some temporary time-fillers: school work, movies, and India, each in its way a road out.
“Why are you so interested i
n India?” Mama often asked. “It’s too far away. They worship cows there.”
I didn’t tell her my reason because I didn’t know myself. Part of it may have been the very remoteness Mama looked upon with such suspicion. Part of it was surely something else. When others in my high school geography class went after the pyramids, the Coliseum, or the Empire State building during a project on famous buildings of the world, I settled on the Taj Mahal at Agra. Did I choose it? Did it choose me? I decided to do a poster of this tomb built by Emperor Shahjehan for his favorite wife: a tribute to love! In undying marble! The drawing arranged itself in my mind first, from details I had been able to make out from a small black-and-white illustration in an encyclopedia: the fine bits of floral inlay in the marble, the paths that lead to the mausoleum, and the evergreen trees that line them. When I started to draw, I walked those paths, climbed those stairs, disappeared through that grand entrance.
The poster needed something more: gilded highlights would do it, I thought, and gold paint was the answer. I had to show what would happen with sunlight on those trees, on that central dome, on those minarets. Even then I knew that what I had perceived as other-worldly grandeur, I had rendered merely garish with my gold paint. I never stopped looking for yet one more detail to add to the picture to make it right, and at the same time for a way that would one day lead me up those actual paths whose reality I had to see for myself. An obsession! Nothing and no one was going to stop me.…
“Do you understand? Nobody, nothing is going to stop me!” I heard myself shout.
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