Their Language of Love

by Bapsi Sidhwa

  ‘Don’t they, Mum?’ asks Ruby wryly.

  ‘Your father loved me,’ asserts Sehra-bai with startling certitude. ‘He would never deliberately hurt me.’

  Ruby is not about to argue with her. She remains quiet.

  ‘I know you don’t believe me,’ Sehra-bai says. ‘He wasn’t the type to show it, but I was the only one he loved. The only one he trusted. He could have left his estate to a trust, but he left everything to me. He knew I would do as he wished.’

  Ruby thought back to those times when Mother needed her complicity in handling Father. They would gang up on him. It used to be either to help Mother unearth something he had hidden, or to wheedle money out of him. Those were happy, lighthearted occasions, devoid of the tension and the state of alertness Father’s presence in the house increasingly generated. In fact they were moments of release—akin to bolts of lightning dispelling negative charges. Father might have hidden a bracelet or ring Mother had neglected to put away, or he was being coy parting with money. Her mother’s dire need gave her an unerring instinct—Sehra always knew when Rustom stepped over the threshold with cash. Not small change, but substantial sums from the provisions store, or from some deal in scrap metal or cotton he had struck. Then it was ‘Janoo, don’t tease me … I know you’ve brought money: where is it? You’ve hidden it!’ and they’d go through his pockets, which were more numerous in winter, and launch a search of the rooms under his wary, almost mischievous eyes. The moment they were ‘hot’, Rustom would jump to the rescue of his secreted loot.

  When unhappy, Sehra took to her bed. Ruby recalls a long stretch—a period, perhaps, of some months—when her mother stayed in bed most of the day. With intuitive certitude Ruby links it to the horror of that anonymous phone call in the dead of night. It occurs to her that when Dr Bharucha visited their house so frequently during that time he was more a friend to her parents than a physician. Sehra emerged from this period of semi-hibernation as from a cocoon. Changed.

  But it wasn’t Sehra who had so abruptly changed, Ruby now realizes—it was her father who was transformed.

  Moderate-looking in all respects, neither tall nor broad nor fair of face, and at one time unappealing to all women save his wife, Rustom had suddenly blossomed into a creature of irresistible attraction when it became known that he had, with characteristic quietude and reticence, become one of the wealthiest men in the land.

  Faced with his unforeseen and formidable attraction—as Sehra’s once almost-unappetizing husband burgeoned with allure and confusing appetite—Sehra rallied with whatever random means she had at hand. Nature had already endowed her with a provocative figure and a lovely face and, rising to the occasion, she acquired an American bra through an American friend. It was a special cross-over bra and the satin bands criss-crossed in a way that left Sehra-bai’s nipples uncovered. The snug fit of Sehra’s sari-blouses accomplished the desired effect. Artfully embellishing her various attributes with similar ingenuity, Sehra succeeded in invoking a spectacular aura of glamour. Thinking back, Ruby believes what made her mother so irresistible to the endless line of valorous men who befriended her was not just her beauty and glamour but their auspicious conjunction with the childish innocence and make-believe that formed the bedrock of her personality.

  The more mesmeric Rustom’s hooded eyes became behind their thick rimless glasses, the more they compelled other lotus-eyed women to lure him to their beds. And the more seductively Sehra’s innocence bloomed, the better it engaged illustrious men of immaculate reputation to abandon themselves to their discreet passion to help and befriend her.

  That she was often distressed, Ruby knew. But as to its cause, she didn’t have a clue. Becoming adept at shielding her daughter from her worries, her young mother withdrew from her. Withdrew into herself. So that even in her happier moments, even when her splendid teeth flashed in duplicitous smiles, she concealed herself from Ruby. Ruby inhabited the same joyless house with an aloof, remote and beautiful woman who was so wrapped up in the excess of her misery—and the desperate stratagems she deployed to hang on to her increasingly mute, unassailable and furtive husband—that she had little time or energy to spare for her daughter. Except at a most rudimentary and perfunctory level. But kept from this knowledge by the neurotic, thrift-driven austerity of their lives, and an unyielding rectitude that voided all conversation within the family, Ruby had no means of understanding what was happening around her.

  How did she view her mother then? From the distanced and yet necessarily foreshortened perspective of a scrawny and angular child looking up at the radiant flesh and face of a beautiful and inaccessible woman. A mysterious woman, who cried out on some nights ‘Janoo, you can’t go to her. I won’t let you.’ A child who heard the muted bursts of hushed altercations accompanied by ominous thuds—as if heavy objects were being flung about in the dark. The thump-thump of what she grew up to realize were furtive blows.

  Mr Jariwalla’s visits—with their concealed intimacy—can also be dated to that period.

  Of unimpeachable repute and principled character, the confidant of the moment sits by Sehra’s bed. He leans forward on the Spartan desk chair he has brought from the writing desk to hear her better—and the better to be heard. Sehra and Jal J converse in low voices so as not to be overheard by servants or children. Little Ruby hears only an indecipherable stream of sibilant whispers, an interminable murmur that issues from the bedroom like the burble and hiss of some unspecified animal. Once she heard Mr J say: ‘You must pull yourself together, Sehra … brooding on such thoughts can destroy you … plunge you into depression you may never get out of.’ His voice was unexpectedly strong, sustaining. So uncharacteristic of him that it had made an impression.

  Did he actually say the words she recalls so clearly, or was it Dr Bharucha? Is her memory playing tricks?

  Although Sehra’s bedroom door was often shut, it was seldom locked. It was locked only when she opened the secret compartment in her cupboard to stash away jewellery, or the documents and cash Rustom might have instructed her to. Occasionally there was a lull in the conversation, or it was carried out in such low voices that Ruby, thinking her mother was alone, blundered into the room. She always found her mother as she might have expected to: decently clad, covered by a sheet, discreetly made-up and fetchingly prostrate with misery.

  Ruby’s sudden appearances put a stop to the discourse and, depending on her reception, whether she was greeted heartily or hollowly, she beat a hasty and awkward retreat. She could tell, of course, from the expression on their faces and the intimate gloom-doom ambience of the curtained room—hushed confidences still lurking among the shadowy rafters of the receding twenty-foot-tall ceiling—that Sehra’s select advocate of the moment had been gravely listening, offering comfort and sage advice.

  Sometimes Jal J dragged the square ottoman-stool—which still squats in a corner next to the door—and pressed it into service by Sehra’s bed. Its stuffed lid opens on an array of sewing-thread reels. Wood rises six inches above on either side to proffer armrests—provided the sitter is narrow-hipped enough to fit—which Mr Jariwalla still is, and Dr Bharucha wasn’t.

  And later, in their turn, Mr Bankwalla? Or Mr Singh? Or Cooper? Or Justice Salamat? Or Dorab Patel? Ruby imagines it would be a snug fit for them all—except for Mr Cooper who is as slight as Dr Bharucha was corpulent.

  So successfully did Sehra shield her daughter from distress, so discreetly did she deploy her confidences, that Ruby had felt shut out of her mother’s life. And in her progressively bewildered isolation, shut out from life itself. By the time Ruby turned eleven, she had migrated to the charged world of romance-tinctured fantasy.

  Did she judge her mother harshly then? Not then. She did not have the experience or a standard of comparison by which to judge—if one is ever qualified to do so.

  But later, yes.

  It takes decades, and an illness that causes Sehra-bai to confide the emotional turmoil of her past, before Ruby is at
last able to unravel the mystery of her mother’s despair; to decode the preoccupation that appeared to turn her mother cold and remote and absent from her.

  And now, how does Ruby view her now? From the condescending and bullying perspective of a woman trundling an aged mother in a wheelchair?

  Sehra-bai was having tea on the front veranda with Mrs Cooper when Mrs Cooper shouted: ‘Ruby! Ruby! Come at once. Something’s happening to Sehra-bai.’

  Ruby had cried when her mother was in hospital, and she cried after she came home. She cried in the bathroom during the day, and at night in her bedroom upstairs. Her friends tried to console her, but they didn’t know why she was crying. Did anyone know why others mourned? She mourned that her mother had been taken from her just when they had made their peace. She had returned from America to be with Sehra-bai, and Sehra-bai looked forward to doing things with her. She took Sehra-bai shopping, to the hairdressers and to Chinese restaurants. They parked before the city’s unsanitary lean-tos and were served flaming kebabs and curries through their car windows. They licked their fingers clean. They called on Sehra-bai’s friends, and invited her friends to lunch. Perhaps they were bonding only because she had moved so far away, Ruby thought. Resentments nursed since childhood had evaporated as if they were nothing. Ruby was flooded by feelings of tenderness and love. She was gratified to do all the little things Sehra-bai asked of her, and Sehra-bai beamed her pleasure and her approval. Ruby’s existence was cushioned by contentment. Isn’t that what children want? No matter what their age? Their mother’s praise and approval?

  And the stroke came along and snatched her mother away. Sehra-bai was drifting away from her, again withdrawing, and this time with a finality that would not be denied.

  Defend Yourself Against Me

  (In memory of Venkethash Kulkarni)

  They are my grandparents,’ says Vijay.

  I peer at the incongruous pair mounted in an old gold frame holding an era captive in the faded brown photograph. I marvel. The heavy portrait has been transported across the seven seas; from the Deccan plateau in India to the flat, glass-and-aluminium-pierced horizons of Houston in Texas. The tiny, sari-clad bride, her nervous eyes wide, her lips slightly parted, barely clears the middle-aged bridegroom’s ribs.

  ‘Your grandfather was exceptionally tall,’ I remark, expressing surprise. Vijay is short and stocky. But distracted partly by the querulous cries of his excited children, and partly by his cares as a host, Vijay nods so perfunctorily that I surmise his grandfather’s height cannot have been significant. It was his grandmother who was either exceedingly short or not yet full-grown. I hazard a guess. She could be ten; she could be sixteen. Marketable Indian brides—in those days at least—wore the uniformly bewildered countenances of lambs to the slaughter.

  We hear a car purr up the drive and the muted thud of Buick doors. The other guests have arrived. Vijay, looking sharp in a white sharkskin suit, tan tie and matching silk handkerchief, darts out of the room to welcome his guests loudly and hospitably. ‘Welcome! Welcome! Arrey bhai, we’ve been waiting for you! Kitni der laga di,’ he bellows in the mix of Urdu and English that enriches communication between the inheritors of the British Raj, Indians and Pakistanis alike. ‘I have a wonderful surprise for you,’ I hear him holler as he ushers his guests inside. ‘I have a lady-friend from Pakistan I want you to meet!’

  I move hesitantly to the living-room door and peer into the hall. Flinging out a gleaming shark-skinned arm in a grand gesture of introduction, Vijay announces: ‘Here she is! Meet Mrs Jacobs.’ And turning on me his lustrous, intelligent eyes, beaming handsomely, he says, ‘Sikander Khan is also from Pakistan.’

  Mr Sikander Khan, blue-suited and black-booted, his wife and her three sisters in satin shalwar-kameezes and heavy gold jewellery, and a number of knee-high children stream into the living room. We shake hands all round and recline in varying attitudes of stiff discomfort in the deep chairs and sofas covered, Indian style, with printed bedspreads to camouflage the stains and wear of a house inhabited by an extended Hindu family.

  Vijay’s diminutive mother, fluffed out in a starched white cotton sari, smiles anxiously at me across a lumpy expanse of sofa. His two younger brothers, unsmiling and apathetic, slouch on straight-backed dining room chairs to one side, their legs crossed at the ankles and stretched right out in front. Joanne, Vijay’s statuesque American wife, her brown hair falling in straight strands down her shoulders, flits to and fro in the kitchen. As comfortable in a red silk sari with a gold bolder as if she were born to it, she pads barefoot into the room, the skin on her toes twinkling whitely, bearing a tray of potato samosas and Coke, the very image of dutiful Brahmin-wifedom. A vermilion caste mark spreads prettily between her large and limpid brown eyes.

  I know her well. Her other-worldly calm and docility are due equally to her close association with her demanding Indian family, and the more private rigours of her job as a computer programmer in an oil corporation.

  I make polite conversation with Mrs Khan’s sisters in hesitant Punjabi. They have just emigrated. The differences from our pasts remain: I am an English-speaking scion of Anglican Protestants from Lahore; they, Muslim village belles accustomed to draw water from wells to the rhythm of Punjabi lore. They know very little English. Their jewellery glinting like armour, they are on the defensive; blindly battling cultural shock waves in an attempt to adapt to American ways—an environment as different from theirs as only a McDonald’s hamburger can be from a leisurely meal of spicy greens eaten in dung-plastered village courtyards redolent of water-buffalo and naked children.

  Observing their bristling discomfort and the desultory nature of our conversation, Sikander Khan moves closer to me. He is completely at ease. Acclimatized. Americanized.

  Our conversation follows the usual ritual of discourse between South Asians who meet for the first time on American soil. Sikander moved from Pakistan nine years ago, I seven. He has an Indo-Pak grocery store in Hillcroft uptown, I teach English at the University of Houston downtown. Does he have US citizenship? Yes. Do I? No, but I should have a green card by December.

  Mr Khan filed his mother’s immigration papers two years ago: ‘They should be through any day now,’ he says. ‘One of my cousins will bring Ammi-ji. It will be my mother’s first visit to America.’

  Mr Khan speaks English with a broad Pakistani accent that is pleasant to my ears. ‘I went to the Dyal Singh College in Lahore,’ he says courteously when he learns I’m from Lahore. ‘It is a beautiful, historical old city.’

  All at once, without any apparent reason, my eyes prickle with a fine mist, and I become entangled in a web of nostalgia so intense that I lose my breath. I quickly lower my lids, and—the demeanour of half a lifetime standing me in good stead—I maintain a slight smile of polite attention while the grip of sensations from the past hauls me back through the years to Lahore, to our bungalow on Race Course Road.

  I am a stringy child playing hop-scotch outside the kitchen window. The autumn afternoon is overcast with shadows from the mighty sheesham trees in the front lawn. There is a brick wall to my right, a little crooked and bulging in places, and the clay in the grooves is eroded. I keep glancing at the wall.

  Spellbound, I sit still on Vijay’s lumpy sofa, my pulse racing at the memory. Then, clearly, as if she were in the room, I hear my mother shout: ‘Joy, come inside and put on your cardigan.’

  Startled by the images I snap out of my reverie. I search Mr Khan’s face so confusedly that he turns from me to Vijay’s mother and awkwardly inquires of her how she is.

  I have not recalled this part of my childhood in years. Certainly not since I moved to the smoothly operating country of my adoption. Too enamoured by the dazzling shopping malls and technical opulence of the USA, too frequent a visitor to Pakistan, I have not yet missed it, or given thought to the past. Perhaps it is this house, so comfortably possessed by its occupants and their Indian bric-a-brac. It takes an effort of will to remember that we
are in the greenly-shaven suburbs of an American city in the heart of Texas, only minutes away from the Interstate 10 highway that runs clear through to California.

  Bending forward with the tray, smiling at my abstraction, Joanne abruptly brings me to earth. ‘Joy,’ she asks, ‘would you like some wine?’

  ‘I prefer this, thanks,’ I say, reaching apologetically for a glass of Coke.

  ‘I used to know a Joy … long, long ago,’ says Mr Khan. ‘I spent one or two years in Lahore when I was a child.’

  Joanne has moved on to Mr Khan. As his hand, hesitant with the burden of choice, wavers among the glasses, I watch it compulsively. It is a swarthy, well-made hand with dark hair growing between the knuckles and on the back. The skin, up to where it disappears beneath his white shirt sleeve, is smooth and unblemished.

  There must be at least a million Sikanders in Pakistan, and several million Khans. The title ‘Khan’ is indiscriminately tagged on by most Pakistanis in the USA who generally lack family names in the Western tradition. The likelihood that this whole-limbed and assured man with his trim moustache and military bearing is the shy and misshapen playmate of my childhood is remote.

  But that part of my mind which is still in the grip of nostalgia, with its uncanny accompaniment of sounds and images from the past, is certain.

  Selecting a glass of orange juice Sikander Khan leans forward to offer it to a small boy whimpering at his feet. I glance obliquely at the back of Mr Khan’s head. It is as well formed as the rest of him and entirely covered with strong, short black hair.

  My one-time playmate had a raw pit gouged out of his head that couldn’t have grown hair in a hundred years! Still, the certainty with me remains and, not the least bit afraid of sounding presumptuous, I ask, ‘Was the girl you knew called Joy Joshwa? I was known as Joy Joshwa then.’

  Holding the glass to the child’s lips, Sikander looks at me. My body casts a shadow across his face. His dark eyes on me are veiled with conjecture. ‘I don’t remember the last name,’ he says, speaking in a considered manner. ‘But it could be.’