Their Language of Love

by Bapsi Sidhwa

  Realizing she could keep an eye on the arrivals point from there, Roshni pushed her cart towards a dumpy little grey-haired Indian woman sitting in the front row, her slippered feet stretched out to a small bag on her cart.

  Smiling timidly, Roshni glanced at the vacant seat next to her. The woman made a small accommodating movement in her chair, and said, ‘Sit, sit. I’m also waiting … For my son. Who’s coming for you?’

  ‘My husband,’ Roshni said, shifting to Gujrati. She guessed from the woman’s accent and the drape of her sari that she was from her own home province, Gujrat.

  But the way Roshni had said ‘my husband’, and the rush of blood to her dusky face, caused the woman to lower the dangling heels of her slippers to the floor and turn to her with an indulgent grin. ‘Achaaa,’ she drawled, employing the versatile word to declare her pleased comprehension. ‘So, you’re a brand new bride! How long have you been married?’

  ‘Almost a month.’

  ‘Congratulations! Live long. See much-much happiness. Where are you from?’

  ‘Bulsar.’

  ‘I’m also from Gujrat,’ the woman announced on a note of triumph, delighted by a coincidence that, given the population explosion of Gujratis all over the planet, was not so surprising. ‘From Ahmedabad. It’s quite close to Bulsar,’ she said, getting specific. ‘What does your husband do?’

  ‘He’s a computer analyst.’ The crisp English words imbued Roshni’s speech with unintended primness.

  ‘Aachaaa,’ the woman said dragging the elastic word with a wry but amiable touch of wide-eyed awe. ‘Then he must be verrry clever!’

  Roshni smiled and nodded her head in bashful concurrence; and, believing she may have sounded as if she was putting on airs, compensated for it by chattily volunteering more information. ‘He’s just got a job with an American company in upstate New York, in Albany. He’s going to show me around New York for a few days and then we’ll go to the small town where he’s working. He told me that I would like it. Once we get there he will teach me to drive a car.’

  The woman studied the girl. Her gaze lingered on the wide, gold-embroidered sari border, the red bindi on her forehead, the centre parting in her hair that lacked the red powder customary to Hindu brides. ‘You know,’ she said, shaking her head from side to side, ‘at first I thought you were Hindu.’

  Roshni flushed. She knew she sounded exactly like a Gujju. In fact Roshni, who was dark for a Parsee and self-conscious about it, had decided during her teens to use her small-featured chocolate looks to her advantage the way the south Indian girls did. She took to wearing vividly coloured saris with contrasting borders that complemented her sultry beauty, and coiled her long hair in a silken knot at the back.

  Dressing this way had changed the way Roshni saw herself. It also influenced her conduct and attitudes. And her sense of identity with the majority Hindu community had imbued her with a confidence she lacked in the company of her siblings and cousins; brash, lighter-skinned creatures who wore miniskirts and dresses, played the piano and affected Western mannerisms. Roshni had taken to practising classical Indian ragas on the sitar.

  Observing the girl’s acute discomfort, the woman shifted ground and made a series of sympathetic clicking noises with her tongue. ‘It’s not right,’ she said pursing her mouth reprovingly. ‘Your husband shouldn’t keep you waiting like this … But he’ll come, don’t worry. One has to drive such long distances here. If there is a problem, my son and I will help you.’

  Roshni looked at her gratefully. After a few minutes of further chatter she asked, ‘Could you mind my luggage while I go to the toilet?’

  ‘Go, go,’ the woman said, nodding. ‘Freshen up.’ She made a small, kissing sound with her lips.

  Roshni had barely returned to her seat when she spotted Nav. She shot up from her chair, and pitching her voice discreetly, called, ‘Nav, Nav.’

  Nav’s worried face cleared with relief when he saw her. And as he strolled over to her, Roshni’s heart stilled. He looked so attractively at ease and debonair in his jeans and striped T-shirt. Now that she had the chance to observe him neutrally, without the critical assessment of her relatives and friends who had found him alternately too tongue-tied or too patronizing, too tall or too pale, he looked startlingly handsome. More in his natural element here than he had been in dilapidated and dusty old Bulsar. A happy catch in her lungs stopped her breath.

  ‘Hello,’ Nav said, and bashful about hugging his wife in public, lightly touched Roshni’s shoulder. Then he placed his hands in a ‘can-do’ businesslike way on the cart.

  Roshni glanced at the Gujrati woman with a smile of leave-taking, but the woman, her short legs once again stretched to the cart, was peering at Nav through narrowed and contentious eyes. Clearly she was not about to permit any leave-taking without venting her feelings.

  Following the trail of Roshni’s disconcerted gaze, Nav also looked at the woman. And, lying in wait for him to do just that, the old woman promptly said: ‘Is this good? Your bride comes all the way to America for the first time, and you make her wait like this? It is shameful!’

  Nav’s laid-back American pose at once vanished and he became as polite and contrite as was expected of an Indian youth being chastised by an elderly woman.

  From the corners of her eyes Roshni observed the change in Nav’s personality as he made his excuses. She was pleased; the man she was married to still cared about what people from their part of the world thought of him.

  In the taxi Roshni said: ‘I thought you weren’t coming.’

  ‘You knew I’d come.’

  ‘I was frightened.’ Roshni sat sullen and huddled in her corner.

  ‘Don’t be silly. There were hundreds of people around you. This is New York, not Bulsar. You’ve got to learn to be strong-hearted and independent if you want to survive in America.’ He made a disgusted noise. ‘That interfering old Gujju woman got you all worked up.’

  ‘But I was frightened.’ Roshni was emphatic. She looked stonily out of the window. A tear trickled down her cheek.

  Nav slid across the seat and diffidently draped an arm around Roshni’s shoulders. ‘I’m sorry. I did my best to be on time. I was longing to see you. I put the alarm on for five o’clock to catch the earliest train … I’ve had to come a long way, you know.’

  But Roshni turned her face away and became as stiff as a bristly reed-broom in his embrace. She sniffed.

  Nav raised his skinny buttocks to awkwardly dig into his jeans pockets. He handed Roshni a tattered tissue. Then, exerting more pressure, he drew her closer.

  Roshni maintained her approximation of a rigid reed-broom. But her heart, that Nav had so peremptorily ordered to be strong and independent, fluttered and pounded helplessly.

  Sensing that her behaviour reflected her fear and confusion at being so far from home—and entirely dependent on a man she scarcely knew—Nav was swept by a wave of tenderness and sexual excitement. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said, surprised at how easily the unaccustomed endearment tripped off his tongue. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude or bossy … Please, forgive me … Please don’t be like this,’ he pleaded until Roshni was reassured and her resistance crumbled. She buried her wet, reproachful face in his bony chest and her travel-exhausted body gradually grew languid and trusting in his arms.

  Nav gently stroked Roshni’s back and slender neck. He kissed her forehead and her fragrant hair—all the way to the Catholic Seminary on 108th Street and Broadway, where he had booked a room for their week-long honeymoon in New York.

  In the next few days many of Roshni’s fears and misgivings regarding her husband—whom she scarcely knew despite their nervously and ineptly consummated marriage in the small bedroom reeking of whitewash in Bulsar—had been replaced by cautious trust, and a burgeoning passion. And when, in the throes of lovemaking he felt every fibre in him aglow with delight and his blood sing, he would whisper: ‘God, I love you … I will give you the moon and the stars … don’t ever
leave me …’ Roshni’s delighted womb, too, would sing, and she would cry out for love. For Nav was as ardent and tender a lover to the exotic girl he had married as he was an instructive and informative guide to her in New York. After all, he had chosen Roshni above all the other girls shown to him in Navsari, Surat and Bulsar.

  They visited the Statue of Liberty, the zoo at Central Park and stood braced against the exhilarating gusts that made it difficult for them to hear each other speak atop the Empire State building.

  But the bossy aspect of Nav’s personality, which had provoked Roshni in the taxi, kept rearing its aggravating head like a leery squirrel. Roshni became resigned; Nav was a compulsive instructor, and there was little she could do but accept his peculiar brand of benevolence.

  Always prepared to enlighten the country bumpkin from Bulsar, which he grandiosely assured Roshni was as removed from worldly ways as it was remote from New York, Nav drew upon a reservoir of experiences and mishaps in the United States to forewarn and forearm his bride.

  And if Nav was an indefatigable instructor, his bride was an astute judge of character. Roshni had it within her realistic and sympathetic grasp to intuit the fragility of Nav’s buffeted ego. She registered, almost by osmosis, the assaults it had endured. From her own reactions she gauged the bewildering nature of the culture-shock—the adjustments demanded of newcomers to this opulent land. She grasped that the challenges Nav had already faced shielded her, and she had the native intelligence to bolster his frail ego in order to strengthen her spouse for their mutual benefit. It was a challenge demanded of the new country. Even though Nav was teaching her to adjust to it, he was also a newcomer to the life outside the university that had sheltered him for four years.

  Nav soon discovered within himself a surer strength, and was privately thankful for his unexpectedly diligent and, if not appreciative, at least understanding pupil.

  On a bright Saturday afternoon, the fourth day of their honeymoon, Nav proudly paraded his wife, radiant in an emerald shot-silk sari with a plum border, on Madison Avenue. Nav’s chest swelled. Strutting beside her he noted the admiring and approving glances she drew their way. And when Roshni had had her fill of gazing at the captivating window displays, and became restive to go into the stores, Nav tactfully navigated her into a bus instead.

  While Roshni excitedly looked out of the window at the deep gorge the immense buildings made of the road and the cosmopolitan carnival of camera-toting tourists, Nav gazed covertly at the amiable stranger, colourful as a tropical butterfly, who had become his wife. In the lottery of fate that allotted wives, he felt he had picked a winner.

  The bus took them all the way to Lower Fifth Avenue, and deposited them at the gates of Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Roshni took hold of Nav’s arm as they sauntered through the throng of holidaymakers, surprised by the range of activities going on, all of them competing for their attention.

  They stood before small tables, watching speed chess and backgammon. ‘Why don’t you try?’ Roshni asked, and Nav prudently replied, ‘I’m not good enough.’

  His humility took Roshni by surprise. She pressed his arm closer, and the yielding softness of her flesh pulsed through Nav’s blood like feathery threads of happiness as they watched skateboard experts show off by jumping over three trash cans set out in a row, and graceful Frisbee enthusiasts perform amazing feats.

  At first they only heard the preacher.

  They drifted closer and Roshni spotted, through a shifting screen of other idle drifters, a respectably suited, middle-aged preacher, energetically waving a Bible and belting out God’s Word through a mike attached to two small amplifiers.

  ‘He’s a Protestant proselytizer,’ the knowledgeable husband informed his wife. ‘Let’s watch him for a bit. They can be quite funny sometimes.’

  Roshni lowered her thickly fringed lids and glanced at her spouse from the corners of her dark eyes. At this moment Nav sounded as insufferably stuffy and patronizing as Roshni’s family had been at pains to point out to her in Bulsar.

  But how could they determine, in a few hectic days, the finer aspects of a personality she was herself only just discovering? The tender, passionate and vulnerable facets that were beginning to shimmer for her like the diamonds cut by the famous artisans of Gujrat.

  Meanwhile, the man of God appeared to be in a frenzy. The muscles in his brown face were bunched in tight knots that jumped as he yelled: ‘Jesus Saves! I’ve found the Lord! Amen! I’m a genuine Holy Ghost. I got the Holy Ghost power! Hallelujah! Repent sinners, repent. The end of the world is coming! Now is the time! The end of the world is coming.’

  Roshni stared at him, fascinated. People were ambling past them and except for a few children and a young, well-dressed couple who looked like European tourists, nobody paid him much attention. The preacher’s fierce oratory and obsessive style reminded Roshni of an eccentric priest who occasionally visited Bulsar to exhort the twenty-odd bewildered Parsee males gathered at Kharegat Hall—for want of anything better to do—to march straight to the United Nations headquarters in Geneva and wrest back Iran, the land the Parsees had fled fourteen hundred years ago, with their importunate demands.

  ‘Jesus saves! Glory to the Lord! Hallelujah! The end of the world is coming!’ roared the preacher, ‘The Jesus people are coming!’

  ‘He is funny,’ Nav said, and Roshni, smiling, concurred.

  ‘Repent! I have found the Lord,’ bellowed the preacher. ‘The Lord will find you, sinner!’

  And the proselytizer made a smart little turn on patent leather heels and unexpectedly pointed a long and rebuking finger at Nav.

  Believing that the condemning finger was directed at some unfortunate sinner behind him, Nav glanced swiftly over his shoulder. No one stood behind him.

  Nav turned his scarlet face to the preacher and said—with commendable calm considering his shock—‘I’m not a sinner.’

  ‘Everyone’s a sinner. The Lord knows. Repent! The Lord will show you the Way. Accept Jesus into your heart. He died for your sins. Amen. Glory, thank the Lord. Repent!’ And since great truths bear reiterating, the preacher, tirelessly repeating himself, exhorted: ‘The end of the world is coming! The Lord Saves! Amen!’

  ‘Zarathushtra will take care of my sins, my good man. I’m a Parsee. I believe in my Prophet Zarathushtra!’

  Nav sounded very like a fabled uncle mentioned by Roshni’s father. The uncle had irritated a New Yorker some years ago with his sermon that Zoroastrians didn’t smoke because they venerated fire, and thus couldn’t give him the cigarette money he had asked for. The aggravated New Yorker had snarled: ‘O yeah?’ pulled out a knife and relieved the uncle of his wallet, and nicked his testicles.

  ‘Thou shall not place false Gods before me!’ thundered the preacher, who had by now turned a swarthy red. ‘There is only one path to our Lord. Hallelujah! Turn to the Saviour or you’ll burn in everlasting hell. Repent before it’s too late! The end of the world is coming! Glory to the Lord!’

  Nav made a slight, reflexive movement that rippled through his muscles, readying him for combat, and Roshni let go of his arm.

  ‘It’s fundamentalists like you who are causing all the trouble and violence in our world,’ Nav shouted in a voice as terrible as the proselytizer’s and, swiftly glancing at Roshni for approval, continued, ‘If you did a decent day’s work we’d all be better off.’

  ‘I work in the vineyard of the Lord! I seek lost sheep to return them to the fold. I’m a genuine Holy Ghost—I got the Holy Ghost power! Hallelujah! Glory, thank the Lord. Repent. The end of the world is coming!’ boomed the twin speakers.

  Thinking up a storm of responses, Nav waited for a pause in the preacher’s prattle—and became vaguely conscious of a quiet but somehow menacing presence near them. At the periphery of his distracted vision Nav got the impression that the presence had an abnormally bulky scarf wrapped round its neck and shoulders.

  And then, saying ‘Ho!’, Nav staggered back. He
tripped over a stone and his legs flying out from under him, fell on his scant buttocks. Roshni shuffled reflexively to help her husband, but was startled at once by the same sight that had sent Nav to the ground.

  The distracting presence had a thick, eight-foot-long boa constrictor wrapped round his neck and shoulders, and for all Nav had shouted ‘Ho!’ and fallen flat, the lean man with the boa remained as still and detached as a statue of Buddha, if one could imagine a six-foot four-inch African American Buddha with freckles, a pencil mustache and running shoes.

  The crowd that had gathered round Nav and the preacher during their spirited exchange at once shifted their attention to the stationary figure with the huge constrictor wreathing, pleating and slithering round his chest and arms. The boa, as thick as a man’s arm, as splendid in its sophisticated designer coat as a model, raised its sleek head, flicked out its forked tongue to examine the man’s moustache, and curled around sinuously to explore what was going on in the back.

  The preacher, looking distraught at having the rug pulled out from under his act by the reptile, shifted his attention. Grasping the opportunity to beat a retreat, Nav and Roshni stumbled headlong into the welcoming centre of a Three-Card-Monte card game.

  A burly black dealer, displaying a fuzz of cropped hair and a flattened nose, was bent over the three cards he was expertly sliding on an improvised table made up of two cardboard boxes stacked one on top of the other. He was slick, fast, intent, and as he juggled the cards he talked up a storm to attract an audience. ‘Twenty-dollar twenty-dollar—which is the Ace of Spades, pick out the Ace of Spades. Twenty-dollar twenty-dollar—watch the Ace of Spades, pick out the right card.’

  A player, so thin and tall and young that he appeared to have outgrown his jeans, fixedly followed the movements of the dealer’s quick hands which were, for all their size, as supple as a conjurer’s. The skinny young player rubbed his chin and deliberated for some seconds; then he hesitantly picked out a card.