Home To India

by Jacquelin Singh

  It was only after emerging from this cocoon that I woke up to the metamorphosis. I was alone. The sounds I awoke to were all different from the everyday sounds of Majra: strangers’ voices speaking strange languages. Only occasionally did I pick up the brisk, nasal lilt of Punjabi. No voice of the sitar sang me to sleep at night or woke me in the morning like the echo of a dream. The river thrashed against boulders in its way; steam hissed from the hot springs.

  The sights were unfamiliar too. New pilgrim faces appeared each afternoon after the arrival of the bus two miles below Ranikaran ashram and disappeared again, the following noon. None of them looked like anyone I knew.

  The Ranikaran villagers who helped the Babaji serve the meals were rendered faceless by the similarity of their dress and speech and behavior. Only the Babaji and the old Sikh in the pink turban who distributed bedding and collected it again were reassuringly familiar. However, they carried on with their routine without reference to me. I joined the villagers when help was needed in serving food or washing utensils and spent long hours in contemplation by the side of the pool. I took warm baths in the womblike covered area which, illuminated by a single candle, was especially reserved for women. In there I duplicated in another dimension and on an amplified scale the slow, floating life of the child inside.

  At night no warm body slept next to me in the bed, no arm was flung in sleep across my stomach, no legs were entwined in mine, no soft breath reached my ear, no muscular back was there to curl around. I spent the dark hours swallowing back panic with wide-open eyes, replaying that last night in Majra and reigning in, with doubtful assurances, my galloping thoughts of an uncertain future. The frightening certainty that I had, indeed, made a successful getaway left me suspended over a void with nothing holding me up but the tenuous thread of my own self-awareness. If I let go of it, I would be lost.

  A week passed and each night became easier to get through. The days were more manageable. Meanwhile I had not taken any sort of action. I hadn’t sent the cable to Papa and I knew I wouldn’t now. There were other possibilities to be considered, and Ranikaran provided me the time and the place to think. Each day I found more ways to make myself useful to the ashram to compensate in labor for the expense of my meals and my room. I watched what others did, and in time came to discriminate between one village child and another, one face from another, and finally the names that distinguished one individual from another.

  I stopped waiting for the “rescue” I had imagined during the first few days. The scene where the hero, like Charles Boyer in Love Affair, after a reel or two of anguished searching, finds his way at last to his lost love, to the accompaniment of a chorus and full orchestra on the soundtrack. Tej would come in breathless after the climb from the bus stop, discover me in the ashram kitchen rolling out chapatti dough, lift me up and crush me—still shaking flour from my hands—in his strong arms. “I’ll do whatever you want, meri jaan. Whatever you say, forever and ever,” he would promise. “I’ve been blind to your troubles in the past, but never again. This has taught me a lesson I’ll never forget. Only come back. Never go away again.” In real life, things didn’t happen that way, and I had come to know it.

  The Babaji appeared loath to be drawn into conversations that did not concern the hot springs, their constancy, the inevitability of rice and dal being cooked in half an hour. He did not ask me why I had not gone back with the same group of pilgrims I came up with nor how long I intended to stay. He accepted my presence as a matter of not-very-interesting fact and in return gave me peace.

  “Would you like some tea, beti?” he would ask in the mornings on my coming down from the cubicle I occupied to where he sat on the veranda by the pool. “Or would you like to have your bath first?”

  Later, he would recite to the pilgrims who gathered around him the same speech he had delivered to Tej and me. The occasion for unburdening my heart never came, while the need to do so gradually disappeared as one day flowed into the next.

  The version of my immediate future that finally came out of all the thought I applied to it was, I hoped, workable. A great deal depended on me. I sat figuring out the details, picturing the scene against which my life and the baby’s would unfold in the next few months. The baby would be born in Ranikaran. The village could be depended upon to have a midwife who would make up in skill what she lacked in hygiene. That could be taught in six easy lessons beforehand. I would go to Delhi when I was strong enough and find a job, a little flat, an ayah to take care of the baby.

  I’d have to do all this in two months because that’s when my money would in all probability run out. Once I got a job, everything would be all right. At least money would be coming in every month. Then, when I’d earned enough …

  It was always at this point where the film broke. And that too was all right. One couldn’t work out each and every detail of one’s life for the next fifty years.

  “The baby will be born here, if it’s all right with you,” I said to the Babaji one early afternoon. A group of pilgrims had left just before another was to arrive. He was sitting in his usual place, outside the entrance to his cave-room. I sat down on the stone bench in front of him to have a talk before he retired for his afternoon nap.

  “As you wish, beti,” he said. “And if God wills it. Yes. But have you thought about your own comfort and the baby’s? You’re a foreigner, and …”

  “I’m comfortable here, Babaji,” I broke in. “But I need to know the name of the midwife in this village so that I can talk to her beforehand and call her when the time comes. I’d like to …”

  I paused. Something had caught the Babaji’s attention, because he wasn’t listening or even looking at me; he was looking behind me, over my left shoulder. The same instant, I felt a kind of electrical charge zing up my spine. I turned around.

  “Hari!” I cried, getting up and hurrying toward him as he crossed the bridge over the pool. “How did you know I was here?”

  24

  Our reunion, Tej’s and mine, was not what might have been imagined. Not even by the standards I had recently come to acknowledge as true to life. The picture show was over. Hari arrived first. An advance party of one. I don’t think I had really looked at him so closely since that day almost a year ago when he was there to meet Tej and me when we got down from the train at Abdullapur station. He was a man now. More confident. Less puzzled about me. Through all the family rifts and misunderstandings at Majra he’d remained a well-wisher. That was plain to see as he greeted me with obvious relief and affection that afternoon in the unlikely locale of the Ranikaran ashram.

  “Sat Sri Akal, Bhabi,” he said. And then asked “Are you all right? Is everything okay with you?”

  “I’m fine, Hari,” I said. “Really very well. The Babaji has looked after me like a father. He …” I turned around to introduce the two, but the old man had already left for his nap, and Hari and I found ourselves sitting alone on the ashram veranda. It soon became evident that he was there to plead on behalf of the whole family that I come back home.

  “Majra is not the same without you, Bhabi,” he began. “Mataji is sick with worry, and Pitaji beside himself. The girls can’t understand, none of us can understand, why you ran away; what made you do a desperate thing like that?” He paused for breath in what was taking on the sound of a prepared speech. “Tej Bhaji hasn’t eaten or slept for days. He hasn’t been himself, but like some mad person, with only one idea in his head—to find you. He’s been to the police, for them to try to trace you. But they were too slow. They said there was too little to go on. An old woman from Ladopur said she saw you get on a bus. It was the same morning we discovered you were gone. But she couldn’t remember which bus. She wasn’t even sure it was you. Tej Bhaji and I have even been to Delhi. To find out if you had been there, to the American Embassy or to the hotel you stayed at, that time in February.”

  He described to me how my going away had plunged the household into gloom. The details came out, not as I hav
e put them down here, but in half-sentences, false starts, repetitions, and falterings because he wanted to get it all said, because of the oddness of our surroundings, and because of what he felt to be the urgency of the moment and the seriousness of his mission. All the while I half listened to Hari and half watched for the sight of Tej.

  “How did you think of looking for me here?” I asked. “And where’s your brother? Why hasn’t he come?”

  “He has come,” Hari said. “He sent me ahead. He’ll be here before long. He got the idea day before yesterday. It was when we got back after looking for you in Delhi. He thought you might have come up here.”

  Hari went on to say they had been sure they’d find me when the tea-stall owner back at the bus stop told them he had seen a foreign woman arrive with a group of pilgrims from the plains two weeks earlier.

  Hari made no mention of Dilraj Kaur. How had she reacted to my flight, I wondered. Had she held a private ceremony to celebrate her victory? Waved a candle thrice over some cowrie shells? Sacrificed a toad? Stuck a doll that had my name on it with pins? It was impossible for me to put myself in her place, to experience the kind of insecurity and helplessness she must have felt all along. Nothing could assuage it. It festered on its own fears and swelled to include anxiety for her son’s future, for his place, even more than for her own place, in the family and the claim to his share of its fortunes.

  Tej arrived half an hour later. He came toward us in just his particular way of walking, like nobody else’s in the world. I stood up, and while each of us waited for the other to speak first, Hari went off for a round of the ashram. We hesitated for a moment longer amidst the gaudy presences of Lord Krishna, Shiva, and Parvati, and the stoic Sikh martyrs watching us from their calendar pictures on the wall.

  “How are you two?” he asked finally, taking a step toward me.

  “We’re fine,” I said, unable to restrain myself from touching his arm. “But you’ve lost weight.”

  “I haven’t felt like eating,” he said. “Even your cheeks have become hollow.” He put his hand to my face. The palm was warm. Familiar.

  “Ashram food,” I said steadily, looking into his eyes. “Wholesome and plentiful, but no variation and not very tasty.”

  Even before I got the last words out we were in each others’ arms, reaching across the expanse of my middle to achieve an embrace.

  “Why did you do this to us?” he whispered against my hair. “I tried to explain what happened that night, and you wouldn’t listen. Just ran away like a crazy person. Eight months pregnant. Do you know what could have happened to you? To our baby? How did you think we would’ve lived without each other?”

  His words brought me suddenly to myself. “Tej, you want to put me on the defensive with questions like that,” I said, holding him at arm’s length. “But it won’t work. I’ve had a lot of time to think in the past two weeks. I’ve reached a measure of peace here. I’ve come to decisions about the future, the baby’s and mine.…”

  “What do you mean, the baby’s and yours?” he said angrily. “It’s my baby too; don’t forget that. Its future is as important to me as it is to you.” He paused for a moment and added in a quiet voice, “As a matter of fact, your future is as important to me as my own is.”

  “Life in Majra is impossible for me,” I went on, slowly picking my way through words, and hoping by the very saying of them that some magic might be wrought to make everything all right again, to turn back the clock; wipe out the time between then and now. “You and I and Dilraj Kaur locked in that impossible relationship. I was never able to get you to understand what was happening. You never listened to me. And now, even if the things that happened the other night were as you say, I still couldn’t go on like I have.”

  “Talk about not listening, you refused to hear me out then,” he said. “The least you can do is hear me out now.”

  I waited for him to go on.

  “When I came back from the harvesting, I stopped by her room because she called me. I wanted to see if she was okay.”

  “And …?”

  “I didn’t know what to make of her. She was getting ready for bed; she was half-undressed. I’ll tell you frankly it wasn’t the first time I had seen her like that. We did play at being ‘married’ for a little while before I left for the States. But she soon discovered that neither I nor anyone else could ever take Hardev Bhaji’s place.”

  “And what did you discover?” I asked.

  “I was put off. It was like making love to an older sister. We couldn’t get used to each other as husband and wife. I thought going to California solved everything.”

  “But then you were in her room that night, and …”

  “She wanted to put this charm around my neck. I thought, okay; let her do it, and let me get out of here.”

  “And then I came ‘bursting in’; that’s how you described it. As if I had no business there, and you did.”

  “Well, you know the rest,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “And Hari has told you what things have been like at home ever since?” he asked, willing me, with his eyes, to understand.

  “I still can’t come back, Tej. Not to that,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t you see? It’s that whole Dilraj Kaur scene,” I said, looking him straight in the eye. “I don’t know how I could make my meaning clearer: I’ve quit the place.”

  “But …”

  “I’ve quit the place, that’s how strongly I feel. She’s taken over. First it was the kitchen. And that’s okay. Then she turned the family against me, or tried to. Now she’d like to shove me out of my own bed. Yours and mine. Of course, she probably still thinks of it as hers and yours. When does a marriage between two people cease to be? Does it ever? She’d like to reclaim the place she feels I usurped.”

  “You make the bedroom into a political arena with this talk,” he said. “Every word you say makes our life together nothing compared to the maneuvres of a desperate woman. I wish you’d shut up.”

  “Have I said anything that’s not true?”

  “Maybe not. But you have left out a whole world in your thinking. Our world. Yours and mine. And you’ve left me out!”

  “Have I?”

  “If you don’t know it now, you never will. Do I have to nail a declaration on the wall every time you have a row with Bhabiji that I love you, want to be with you, can’t imagine life without you?”

  We needed time to breathe, back away for a minute. Tej turned away to study the calendar pictures. Krishna was still playing the flute, as he had eight months ago, for an adoring Radha, and Shiva sat in meditation while the Ganges poured out of his hair.

  “You didn’t give me a chance to tell you,” he said, breaking the silence. “Bhabiji will be going away soon. I’ve talked to Mataji and Pitaji, and I’ve written to her brother Arjun Singh in Faridkot. I’ve told him she needs a rest, a long one, and a change of scene.”

  “She’d have to come back some day. And the whole thing would begin all over again,” I said. “We need to start a life of our own, Tej. Just you and I and the baby. In our own house. Or flat. Or whatever. If we continue to stay on in Majra with Mataji and Pitaji we’ll always be irresponsible children. Depending on them for everything. We’d never have a chance to grow up.”

  “Are you making your return conditional on our moving out?” he asked.

  “If you want to look at it that way, yes. Job or no job; money or no money. We can’t wait. We’ve got to give ourselves a chance on our own.”

  “You feel that strongly then?” he said. He looked surprised, a little bewildered. “I never realized how you felt until you ran off like that.”

  “But you know now,” I said.

  “All the same, Helen, you can’t have it all your way. You have to give a little, take a little. Trust me. We’ll work things out.”

  What the compromises were had to be thrashed out later, because Hari was back from his rounds
, the Babaji had got up from his nap, and a fresh batch of pilgrims was due any time now.

  25

  The idea of keeping my reentry into Majra low-key didn’t work out. I went into labor the very night of our return, an event that threw the already excited household into top gear. Since no one wanted the baby to be born on a bullock cart on the way to the Ladopur Mission Hospital, Ina Mae Scott was called in. She arrived by jeep half an hour after she received Pitaji’s urgent message, her medicine bag and her driver-helper in tow.

  That night a few splatterings of hot raindrops sent up the great pungent earth-odor I remembered from the previous year. They settled the dust that whirled through the sky as the winds relentlessly transferred the Rajasthan desert, grain by grain, to East Punjab. Through the long hours of the night and early morning I counted these drops of the first premonsoon shower one by one.

  Dilraj Kaur was there when I came out of labor at daybreak. She entered the room as if nothing had happened between us and played out her role as a woman in the house with diligence and detachment. I wondered if anybody other than me noticed her thinness and the feverish look in her eyes as some fanatical fire consumed her from within.

  We called our son “Bawa” until the time we’d have the leisure to choose a name for him from the Guru Granth Sahib, and hold a proper namegiving ceremony.

  During the next few days Pitaji sent off telegrams to relatives in far-flung villages in Punjab and Rajasthan and distributed baskets of sweets to local friends and acquaintances who arrived by the score to congratulate the family and have a look at Bawa. The Tehsildar and his wife were the first to arrive, in their horsedrawn carriage, at ten o’clock, the morning after Bawa’s birth. Mataji saw to it that I drank lots of ginger tea and ate plenty of butter, dried dates, and sweets rolled in sesame seeds and almonds. She also regaled the women, each fresh arrival, with the story of what a difficult birth it had been.