The act belonged to the oddness of the time, of the night itself. And I stood there, looking through the window, asking myself all the sensible reasons why Tej should go to Dilraj Kaur’s room at half-past midnight. Everything about that night belonged to the irrational. It had achieved a kind of sense of its own during the past hour when time stopped meaning anything, and place was a matter of opinion.
Instead of wringing my mind dry with further conjecture, I flung the shawl over my head again, let myself out of our room, and headed for the stairs leading to the upper floor. Before I could reach the top, the light in Dilraj Kaur’s room went out. The window opening onto the upstairs veranda was ajar; the door to her room closed. I stopped for a moment and grasped the banister. Their voices, disembodied and unreal, floated on the night air like smoke arising from incense through the open window. I strained to listen to those voices that were all too familiar, but now strangely new. Locked in speech. Heard in low tones, in words and phrases; the masculine and feminine sounds, Punjabi sounds, the timbres of the two complementing each other, like well-matched instruments, the utterances still unintelligible.
Meanwhile, something had happened to me. Physically. I wanted to climb the stairs the rest of the way. Yet I couldn’t trust my legs to take me up to the door, my hand to fling it open, my voice to say, “What the hell are you doing here, Tej?”
Instead, I became a fanatical eavesdropper, a lurker in shadows, an onlooker with nothing to witness but the surrealistic visions inside my own head.
“You never used to call me that,” Dilraj Kaur responded to something Tej had said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“You never used to call me Bhabiji after we were married. You called me Dilraj. Remember?”
“But you are my Bhabiji now. Again.” His voice grew faint on the last word. It was an explanation of sorts, but she chose not to be tutored.
“What’s the difference now?” she asked.
“You know as well as I,” he said.
She said something I could not understand and followed it up with a low laugh. I couldn’t recall ever having heard Dilraj Kaur laugh before.
“Well, it’s true,” he went on from where he’d left off.
“It doesn’t need to be,” she said. “I’m not the wife of your older brother anymore; I’m your wife.” If words could caress, hers were doing just that.
Tej mumbled something inaudible.
“How can you say that I’m not?” she asked.
Again, I could not hear what Tej replied. But she said, “Why should that make any difference?”
“It does,” he said.
Then I could hear them both move; getting up from somewhere? Coming toward the door? Walking away from it?
“Come,” I heard her say. “I have something for you. The least you can do is accept it. It will ensure your long life. Do this for me?” She lingered on the last words.
They were clearly walking away from the direction of the door now. Their voices were harder to hear, and their footsteps fainter. There was a short, unamused laugh. I recognized it as Tej’s. I knew what the expression on his face would be: raised eyebrows, an ironic look in his eyes. He laughed like that when he was embarrassed by something unexpected, when he sensed something was required of him, but he didn’t know what.
My frozen arms and legs and hands suddenly grew hot. Blood shot into my cheeks and raced along, filling the arteries and veins to the point of bursting. In two steps I was at the door and throwing it open.
21
Some moments in time stretch and snap like rubber bands. The door took a century to swing back on its hinges, and Tej a decade to react to my entering the room. The moonlight slashed in through the open door like a spotlight. Dilraj Kaur looked up without surprise. She took an age to take her hands away from Tej’s shoulders and to release the smile that her face continued to hold captive for too long. It took her even longer to try and cover her femaleness that threatened to overflow the boundaries of the room and spill out into the night. She was all breasts and belly and thighs; loosened hair and naked eyes.
Tej floated up and away from the charpoy on which he had been sitting, his back to the door. Was he levitating or merely unsteady when he got to his feet? At the same time, Dilraj Kaur sank down on the charpoy with a leisurely, languid gesture of resignation and made a slow, token attempt to cover herself with her dupatta.
Then everything snapped. “What’s going on?” I said, the sound of my own voice reverberating in my head. Tej stood looking at me; he was confused and mad and surprised all at once, and he made a move to hurry me out the door again. Dilraj Kaur sat silent and self-possessed as on a slow-moving carousel, amidst clothes, cast off and left where they fell; sheets and pillows creating a muddle on the unmade bed. She looked first at Tej and then at me, a spectator instead of a participant.
“We’ll talk when you come to your senses again,” Tej said. “Right now, you’re not ready to hear anything I have to say.”
“I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. Besides, it’s not up to you to decide when I’ll be ‘ready’. It’s just a way you have of getting out of answering my questions.”
Dilraj Kaur muttered something.
“This is her room,” Tej said. “Let’s go where we can talk, if you want to.”
“I want to talk, all right. But it will be right here. In her presence. We need to have it out one way or the other.”
“Come with me,” he said.
“No. All three of us have got to talk this out. Now,” I said.
“You can do your talking, then,” Tej said. “Without me.” And he went out the door, slamming it behind him.
Dilraj Kaur stood up, about to say something to stop him. It was too late. There were just the two of us left, and half a language between us to communicate with. We stood staring each other down. Her grey eyes had lost all color. It gave her the look of some wild thing at night caught in the beam of a car’s headlights. She pushed her hair away from her face.
“So now you talk,” she said in heavily accented English, groping for words. The sound of my own language on her lips came as a shock. “First, you tell me. What you were doing tonight? Tell me. At the hut of Veera Bai. I saw you there, covered up like a thief, sitting in the doorway.”
“Why don’t you leave Tej and me alone?” I said, ignoring her question because I had no reply ready. “You’ve spent all the time I have been here trying to wreck things.”
“Who’s wrecking?” she said. Then, lapsing into Punjabi, she went on. “You are the one who has ruined everything. Made everything rotten. Brought down the whole house, the whole family.”
After that, she started talking too fast for me to understand anything more than the fact that she hated me. I allowed her to run down like Pitaji’s old manual phonograph when it needed re-cranking. When she finally exhausted her store of abuses I began again, in what I thought was a reasonable tone of voice. “I haven’t done anything intentionally to hurt you. I mean, I have not wanted to hurt you. I haven’t …”
“What you are saying?” she interrupted, in English again. “Everything is okay? You come here. Take my husband. Act like a memsahib. Sit around all day, getting waited on. Don’t work. Not talking, even.”
“I.…”
She interrupted me again. “Why you don’t leave? Why? You and that child in your belly. You are not wanted here. My husband and me, we were okay till you come. Like a concubine. Into the house itself. You take him away from the family. You take him away from me. My husband. My son’s uncle.” She punctuated her words with signs and gestures that made any misunderstanding impossible.
“Look, what you’re saying isn’t true. I haven’t taken anyone or anything away from you,” I said firmly, drawing on an argument Tej had often relied on. “Your position in the family is secure. Nikku’s is secure. Nobody’s threatening you. So why blame me? If Tej has not treated you properly, blame him.”
“There!” she
said triumphantly. I had inadvertently proven one of her points. “That is what I mean,” she said in Punjabi again. “You don’t care for him. You have no respect for him, calling him by his first name itself. Saying I should blame him, and all. When it’s no fault of his. You have cast a spell on him. That’s the kind of woman you are.”
“That’s just nonsense,” I said. “I only want to be left in peace without all your tricks. Don’t think because I’ve been silent I haven’t noticed all the things you’ve done. You’ve tried to turn Mataji and Goodi against me. And you’ve worked on Rano too. All the filthy insinuations about me and Pitaji. And now this. You don’t stop at anything, do you?” I delivered this half in Punjabi and half in English, and I had no idea how much of it she understood. She got perfectly well my gesture that indicated her current state of undress, however, and pulled her dupatta over herself in a belated show of modesty.
“He is my husband,” she said. “How you dare come into my room like that?”
“Your husband, under the chadhar,” I said. “You know very well that widows never really remarry,” I couldn’t help adding. She understood my insinuation; it made her furious.
“You are a witch,” she cried in Punjabi. “You have tried to turn him away from all of us. He’s a different person now. Not the man who left for California two years ago. You have changed him. Still I understand him better than you do.” Then switching to English again, “All the time he is worried about what the memsahib will think. About your comfort. About this and that. He sits playing the sitar for you instead of attending to the farm properly. You have turned our lives upside down.” She paused for breath. Getting up from the charpoy, then, Dilraj Kaur stood confronting me, so that our faces were bare inches apart. “Where have you come from? Why don’t you go back there?”
It was more than a question. It was a plea. She had used up her store of strength and energy. Even the fund of anger and hatred that fueled her words seemed exhausted. Now there were tears in her eyes, and I didn’t wait to find out whether they were because of anger or distress, fury or despair. Whatever it was, I had no answer to her question. I left the room as quickly as I had entered. The shaft of moonlight lighted my way out.
“Well, that was a short talk,” Tej said when I got back to our room.
“It’s your turn now,” I said. “I’m waiting to hear all the reasons why you’re doing this to me. To us.”
“Doing what, for heaven’s sake?”
“Betraying me; betraying our relationship,” I said, trying to blink back tears and not succeeding.
“You come barging into a room. Rush to judgments and decide I’m betraying you,” he countered. “You were really acting crazy with your craving for drama. I don’t know what you thought you were doing.”
“Don’t try to put me on the spot. I don’t have to defend anything I’ve done. You’re the one who has got us both to answer to. Dilraj Kaur and me. I never knew her until tonight. But I think I do now. She’s fighting for her life and for her son’s. She mistakenly thinks I’m out to ruin her, and she’s trying to get me first she’s tried everything. To isolate me from others in the family; to keep me away from family events—like your birthday today; to make me out to be some kind of concubine, with no status. She’d like to relegate me to the position of a whore and our kids, when we have them, to bastards. That way they’ll have no claim. And now …”
“What rot are you talking?” he shouted. He seized me by the shoulders. Shook me. Stared into my eyes as one would stare into the eyes of a madwoman. Trying to fathom depths that the pupils refused access to.
“And now,” I went on, “she’s got me where it hurts the most.…”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you think I didn’t see her, half-naked, leaning over you and you sitting on her bed? What was I supposed to make of that?”
“Anything you like. But I will tell you. I saw her there on the veranda when I got back from the fields and thought I’d see if she was okay. She seemed to want to talk to me. I thought I ought to see what about, especially since she was unwell after feeding those villagers on my birthday and all.”
“Go on,” I said.
“She was just putting this around my neck when you came in. It’s for my long life, she says. She brought it from a place of pilgrimage she visited with her brother. I humored her and …”
“It’s nothing of the sort,” I exclaimed, lifting the amulet on its thread. “She got this from the sorceress, Veera Bai, tonight. I saw her with my own eyes. It’s a love charm like Veera Bai hands out at these séances of hers,” I said, yanking it off the thread and throwing it across the room as hard as I could.
“What the …!” he exclaimed, grabbing my wrist. “What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you listen to me? Have I ever lied to you? Have I?” he cried, still holding me, willing me physically to say no.
But I couldn’t say it. “How can I tell?” I said weakly. “After tonight.”
He let go of me then. “To hell with it,” he shouted. “To hell with you. I just want to get out of this madhouse. I thought you were someone special. Above stupid pettiness. Beyond kitchen feuds. Someone different from the general run. I thought we were special. Our relationship like no one else’s.” He turned away from me and started toward the door. I put my hand on his arm to stop him.
“Why don’t you level with me,” I said.
“Just leave me alone, will you? I was wrong about you. About us. There’s nothing great about us. Never was. We were just ordinary people pretending not to be. You’ve never understood how I felt about you. Now it’s gone. The feeling. Dead. I just want to get out of here.”
“It doesn’t have to be like this, if you’d be honest with me,” I said again.
“We’re going to be parents in another month or so. And you haven’t even grown up yet!” he shouted.
“How about you? Resuming a relationship with that witch. While I’m pregnant and clumsy and unattractive. Or did you never break off with her?”
“What did you say!”
“Did you never break …”
“Break off? I’ll show you what breaking off is,” he said in such a quiet voice now that I lost my breath waiting for what he was going to do next. “Nothing can get into your thick head,” he said, striding in silent fury over to the corner of our room where the sitar sat wrapped in its cloth cover beneath a photograph of Panditji. I can still see myself putting out my hands to stop him, saying “No! Don’t do it! Don’t …”
It all happened so fast, there was nothing to be done. Before I understood what was happening, he had pulled the instrument out of its cloth cover and had hurled it against the wall. It fell into bits on the floor.
What happened after that remains a muddle in my mind. To reconstruct the shattered moment of his leaving is impossible. Perhaps he pushed past me on his way to the door. It may have been that he grabbed some papers lying on the red steamer trunk and stuffed them into his briefcase before he went out. There was a brisk madness about his striding to the door, flinging it open, and rushing out. I didn’t watch him go. I only heard the door slam shut. I sat down to think about how I was going to spend the next fifty years.
Not like this, anyway. I was sure of that. I could see myself heading out. Pregnant and all. Tonight. This morning. Before dawn. Before Tej got back from Ambala; before the others woke up. Heading out for where, I wondered. I observed myself busy about the room, keeping pace in physical acts with the speed of my racing mind, as it picked up and discarded alternative after alternative. I collected bits of the sitar off the floor by the wall where Tej had smashed it. Looking down at my hands, I was surprised to find pieces of gourd clutched in them. There was no putting the instrument back together again. But I collected all the pieces I could find and set them aside for I don’t know what. The amulet, too, lay on the floor where I’d thrown it. I picked it up and tossed it into the old shortening tin I had turned into a wastebasket.
I got out the travel brochure I had picked up that day in Delhi. It was still in the little leather purse where I’d put it. The Golden Gate Bridge still hung suspended over the entrance to the Bay against a brilliant blue sky where it sat waiting to be crossed again by me. My mind was riding a whirligig of an idea: All it would take would be a telegram to Papa to send me the fare home. I wondered for a moment if that was the word to describe my parents’ house anymore. If it was the place for a child of mine and Tej’s to grow up in. A house without a father.
When I thought about it, the only place for our child to grow up in would be our house. Tej’s and mine. But that didn’t even exist as something I could picture. It certainly wasn’t Majra. The powerful craziness of Dilraj Kaur had swept up everyone along with it; no one remained untouched. Everyone collaborated in this madness, driven by the fuel of her mania, misinterpreting it as religious fervor, superhuman loyalty to Tej, or simply indispensable usefulness. She had made it her house. Now she wanted to reclaim Tej as hers too. There was no space for me to breathe. I decided this was no place for our child.
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