by Bapsi Sidhwa
‘Allah, have mercy on us,’ says Mrs Khan, echoing her evocation, and in resounding Punjabi again asserts her authority as chief speaker. ‘His mother had a bad experience … very bad,’ and when she has our full attention, again lowers her voice: ‘Ammi-ji never talks about it, but those who knew her when she was recovered, say …’
Here Mrs Khan stops short. Having second thoughts about disclosing what her mother-in-law never talks about, she makes a deft switch and in a banal, rhetorical tone of voice says, ‘She saw horrible things. Horrible. Babies tossed into boiling oil …’
Sikander Khan, who has bought his pack and smoked his cigarette outside, quietly comes into the sitting room.
Halfway through dinner two handsome, broad-shouldered Sikhs in grey suits join us. I gather they are cousins. Their long hair is tucked away in blue turbans, and their beards tied in neat rolls beneath their chins. Again there is an explosion of welcome: a flurry to feed the latecomers and a great deal of hand-slapping and embracing among the men. Considering what I heard just a few moments ago, I am a little surprised at the cordiality between Sikander Khan and the young Sikhs. I hear one of the men say in Urdu, ‘Any further news about Ammi-ji’s arrival?’
His back is to me—but the sudden switch from Punjabi to Urdu, the formality in his voice and his mode of address, catch my attention. There is no apparent change in the volume of noise in the room, yet I sense we have all shared a moment of unease: an incongruous solemnity.
And then the two young Sikhs move to greet the women from Mr Khan’s family in Punjabi, inquire after their health and the health of their children and indulge in a little lighthearted teasing. The unease is so abruptly dispelled, I wonder if I have not just imagined it.
‘You haven’t invited us to a meal in almost a month, Bhabi,’ says the stouter of the two men to Mrs Khan. ‘Look at poor Pratab … see how thin he’s become?’ He pulls back his cousin’s decently muscled arms at the elbows the way poultry dealers hold back chicken wings, and pins him helpless in front of Mrs Khan. ‘Have we offended you in some way?’
‘No, no, Khushwant Bhai,’ says Mrs Khan, ‘It isn’t anything like that … It’s just that I …’
‘It’s just that she’s concerned for your health, Brother,’ pipes up the eldest of her three sisters. ‘You’re getting a bit too fat for your own good!’ She is probably in her late twenties.
‘Too fat and too fresh,’ says the middle sister, Azra, saucily tossing back her long braid. Azra is at least five feet six inches tall and the braid long enough to bounce on her butt. The expression on her face is confident, intelligent, and suddenly I realize that the girls are not the gauche yokels my hasty assessment of them has led me to suppose.
Khushwant releases his cousin good-naturedly and the sisters, hiding their smiles in their scarves, start giggling. They have perked up in the presence of these young men who share their Punjabi language and rustic ways, their religious antagonisms and obligatory reserve in the presence of men dissipated on American soil.
On surer ground, the eldest sister says, ‘What about the picnic you and Pratab Bhai promised us? You’re the one who breaks promises, and you complain about our sister!’ Her face animated, her large black eyes roguish, she is charming in a pleasantly plump Punjabi way.
‘When would you like to go? Next Sunday?’ asks Khushwant Singh gallantly.
‘We’ll know what’s what when Sunday comes,’ says Azra, raising her head in a half-bullying, half-mocking gesture. She has a small, full-lipped mouth and a diamond on one side of her pert nose. ‘You’re good at making promises Brother, but not so good at keeping them. It doesn’t cost to just invite.’
‘I’ll take you to the beach at Galveston next Sunday, Azra-ji … it’s a promise,’ says Khushwant Singh, trying to conceal his pleasure at being so freely addressed by this attractive person from a conservative family. ‘But only if Bhabi makes parathas with her own hands.’
‘What’s wrong with my hands?’ the pert Azra asks, holding aloft her slender brown arm agleam with gold bangles. ‘Or with Shehla’s hands?’ She indicates their youngest sister who promptly buries her face in her scarf. Shehla is not yet married. My guess is that she is fifteen or sixteen years old.
‘Have either of you given me occasion to praise your cooking?’ Khushwant Singh asks.
‘We’ll give you occasion on Sunday,’ intervenes Mrs Khan. ‘We’ll bring biryani and parathas. But, tell me Brother,’ she says, ‘what will you bring? Why don’t you bring chicken korma to go with the parathas?’
‘No chicken korma till you find me a wife.’
‘Lo!’ says Mrs Khan. ‘As if you’ll agree to our choice! There are plenty of pretty Sikh girls I’m sure, but I know your type—you fuss!’
‘I want someone just like you, Bhabi,’ says the handsome Sikh to Mrs Khan, and turns so red at his gaffe that no one is offended. ‘A girl who knows our ways.’
‘That’s what you say, but you’ll end up marrying a whitewashed memsahib!’ At once realizing her folly Azra springs up from her chair and, abandoning her dinner, hugging Joanne and holding her cheek against hers, says, ‘Unless it is someone just like our Joanne Bhabi—she’s one of us. Then we won’t mind.’
Joanne takes it, as she accepts the smaller hazards of her marriage to Vijay, in her twinkle-toed and sari-clad stride. She told me about a year back, when we were just becoming friends, that she felt content and secure in her extended Indian family. She tried to describe to me her feeling of being firmly embedded in life—in the business and purpose of living—that she, as an only child, had never experienced. Joanne comes from a small New England University town where her father teaches medieval history. I haven’t met her family but I gather they are unpretentious and gentle folk.
Joanne collects the empty dishes and as she retreats to the kitchen she indicates she wants to talk to me. I pick up some platters and follow her. As I help load the dishwasher she looks over my shoulder to make sure we’re alone, and says: ‘Aren’t they something else?!’
I know she’s referring to Mrs Khan and her sisters.
I nod.
‘That Azra! She blurts whatever comes into her head … I don’t mind, at least she’s honest,’ says Joanne.
‘The tall one with the diamond nose-pin?’ I ask, recalling how pretty the girl looked, and how unaffected, as she hugged Joanne. ‘Once you get over the satin pantaloons, she’s stunning,’ I admit.
‘I think Khushwant’s taken a fancy to her,’ Joanne says. Then, with a conspirator’s gleam in her eye, she adds: ‘They could use a bit of help from us … at the picnic perhaps?’
I’m taken aback. I presumed from Azra’s bold manner and the child bobbing at her knee that she was married. Besides, doesn’t Joanne realize the magnitude of the religious chasm that separates a Sikh man from a Muslim woman?
‘Isn’t she married?’ I say aloud.
‘She was. Her husband died in a tractor accident in their village three or four years ago.’ Her tone is uncharacteristically short. ‘She can marry again, can’t she?’
Joanne ought to know me better. I’m offended.
‘Khushwant has a green card. That will take care of Azra and her son … they need help,’ she says. Then in a tone of voice I find particularly irksome, she adds: ‘As a widow she has no future in Pakistan, you know.’
‘Joanne,’ I say, precise and angry. ‘I’m not the type who objects to widows re-marrying. But she’s Muslim and he’s Sikh, for God’s sake!’
‘So what?’ says Joanne. ‘They both speak Punjabi, eat the same kind of food so far as I can see—and they obviously come from the same cultural background.’
‘Just because they have the same rustic ways and share country-bumpkin attitudes,’ I say, affecting a snotty convent school accent ‘doesn’t mean they have the same background. She’s from a part of Punjab that went to Pakistan, he’s from Indian Punjab. The Punjab was also divided during Partition, you know.’
‘You think
I don’t know that? After being married to a Hindu for ten years? What I do know,’ Joanne counters ‘is how much living in America changes people.’
There it is: the incorrigible ‘can do’ American ethos! ‘You naive, American nitwit,’ I say, laughing. ‘You’ll have the families at each other’s throats. You just heard what the Sikhs put Mr Khan’s family through. If they flirt a bit it doesn’t mean that they can marry!’
I call Joanne a ‘naive American nitwit’ when I feel the need to assert my right to be critical of dominant American ways and mores. Joanne accepts it in the spirit it is meant, and is not offended. But the sudden slick of moisture shining in her eyes alarms me. Looking at me out of those affecting brown eyes she pleads: ‘Let’s give it a try, Joy. Don’t you think they’re too civilized to go around killing each other—at least in America?’
‘You’d be surprised,’ I say, but the edge of my anger is dulled. I suspect she’s right. I doubt either Mr Khan or the Singh brothers will set to immediately sharpening scythes and meat-cleavers as their forebears might do in their villages back home.
It is the Sunday of the picnic. Vijay and Joanne give me a ride in their rattling Chevy. Followed by Khushwant’s massive old Cadillac and Mr Khan’s only slightly less massive Buick, we roll on to the sandy dunes of Galveston. Our Chevy is pretty well-stuffed: Vijay’s brothers, mother, children, hampers, us. But the gaudy stream of humanity pouring from Mr Khan’s and Khushwant Singh’s cars is a tribute either to the space available in the cars, or to the passengers’ ingenuity in accommodating themselves to the space available.
Mr Khan and his family begin their drift towards us, the women navigating a difficult passage through the silvery dunes in their stiletto heels. Mrs Khan and her sisters are dressed as if for a wedding. Mr Khan greets us affably, but the exchange of pleasantries between the women and us is eschewed. Instead we gawk at each other in polite consternation and embarrassment: I at their high-heeled sandals, satin pantaloons and embroidered chiffon scarves, and they at my brown legs brazenly exposed in shorts.
That Joanne’s are exposed is accepted: but the sight of my naked legs, coming as I do from a puritanical culture, is for them scandalous and disconcerting. In the last Punjabi film I saw in Lahore the entire audience, composed mostly of men, burst into applause and utterances like ‘O, God! She’s killed me!’ when the buxom actress raised her skirt to briefly flash six inches of calves.
To make matters worse Mr Khan irately remarks: ‘Didn’t I tell you to wear household clothes? I knew you’d be bloody overdressed and uncomfortable in this heat.’
Their sullen faces growing set and defiant in their alien surroundings, the sisters again bristle with manifestations of the dark inferiority I had previously noticed. Sensing their ugly mood the nervous children begin to fidget and whimper. The eldest sister spanks her little daughter’s hand from her mouth saying harshly: ‘How many times must I tell you not to stick your fingers in your mouth!’
Moved by her sister’s disciplinary spirit, Mrs Khan lunges at her son and as he tries to escape between the shimmering forest of his aunt’s satin pantaloons lifts him clear off the sand and begins paddling his wiggling behind. ‘I told you not to move from my side!’ she scolds. ‘You’ll come to your senses when the ocean snatches you up!’
The pert sister and the other women from Mr Khan’s family also begin tormenting the children. They issue warnings of dire consequences and spank the heads and backs of those within easy reach.
Resolving to let my bathing suit remain safely concealed beneath my shorts and T-shirt forever, I turn warily towards Mrs Khan and her sisters. Smiling and beaming in an effort to draw their censorious eyes from my offending legs, I greet them in Punjabi. We had become so comfortable with each other that day at Vijay’s dinner that I feel it is up to me—more at ease in this alien culture and having learnt to be less self-conscious of my body—to put them at ease. As they respond to my efforts, they courteously withdraw their eyes from my legs.
Children, hampers, aunts, uncles, sisters—we drift in a noisy procession to the beach, startling the broiling Texans in varying stages of undress and sun-burnt torpor. Joanne is in high spirits. ‘Have you noticed,’ she remarks ‘how people from India move only in bunches … even if it’s just a trip to the cinema, or to the shopping mall, they’re never alone.’
Their heels sinking in the sand and ankles twisting, the women at last remove their shoes. Coiling their long chiffon scarves to form cushions on their heads they place their sandals on them, and hitching up their shalwars to mid-calf, overcome by curiosity, they run to the edge of the inviting ocean. They come to an abrupt halt to eye the foaming line of receding waves suspiciously.
Mrs Khan has been to the beach before and slowly ventures in up to her knees.
Holding their children with one hand, and their hitched-up shalwars with the other, the sisters finally drag the protesting offspring into the water until the waves froth about their knees. I wade past them, conscious of my bare legs amidst all their clothing and stop a little ahead. The waves cover my shorts. Joanne, in her black swimsuit, is already much further in, her head bobbing above the swells.
Vijay, his brother and the young Sikhs, move in among the women. They are coaxing the children to be less afraid—and let go of their mothers—when a wave, catching the women unawares, soaks them to their thighs; screaming they let go of their pantaloons and their sputtering children, and in his cheery, authoritarian manner Vijay steers the choking, dazed and whimpering kids into the shallows. While he minds them, Khushwant and Pratab, having shifted their attention to coaxing the sisters not to be afraid, tug them a little way towards me. The gold bangles on Azra’s arm flash as she tries to shake her hand free from Khushwant’s grip. I drift backwards, beckoning them, and, reluctantly, her eyes wide with trepidation, Azra permits herself to be led.
Holding on to each other, inching deeper and deeper, the sisters slowly accustom themselves to the movement of the sea. There has been a storm the day before and, in the aftermath of the storm, the sea is unnaturally calm. A smattering of dead fish litter the wet sand. Emboldened by the somnambulant ocean, the sisters reach to where I stand, waist-deep in water.
I feel something brush against my legs. Azra squeals, and almost losing her balance shouts: ‘Something’s grabbed my legs, hai!’
Having sneaked in amongst us, delighted at having scared his sister-in-law witless, Sikander surfaces, and after spewing a fine mist from his mouth, gleefully remarks, ‘You’ll drown like stones with all that gold weighing you down.’
The sisters splash his scarred body—the scars barely visible once you get used to them—and say, ‘Shut up, brother,’ and the bold big sister says, ‘So what? You’ll be happy to be rid of us!’ and even the shy, unmarried Shehla teases, ‘Yes—admit it, brother,’ and Mrs Khan tells them, ‘Hai, how can you say such things—he would give his life for you all,’ and Azra, the diamond in her nose flashing as she mischievously tosses her plait, says, ‘He thinks we eat too much … too many mouths to feed.’
Having abandoned themselves to the mood of adventure and frivolity imparted by the ocean they are giddy with delight.
‘I wouldn’t like to lose all of you at once,’ says Mr Khan, feigning a lunge at Azra. ‘Just one sister at a time.’
Azra screams, and tries to shelter behind Mrs Khan, when I notice a sudden change in her expression—a startled look of disbelief and terror. The other sisters too have caught sight of the swell that is coming at us like a moving mountain. I feel the familiar grip of panic; even though in the past two years I have learned that something about the movement of the ocean against the sky distorts the proportions and the mountain will resolve itself in a buoyant and manageable bulge by the time it reaches us.
Having no way of knowing this, the sisters scream and rush from the advancing menace. The wave breaks behind them in a churning wall of foam and they go under in a blue and red billowing of wet satin. Coughing and sputterin
g they try to right themselves, and grabbing hold of each other’s arms and legs, they go under in pairs. Blinking their inflamed eyes and painfully coughing, they crash towards the shore as if chased by bull buffaloes in their village.
And all this time I am guffawing, tears rolling down my cheeks. Sikander watches me intently, his initial mirth and broad grin thinned to a quivering line. He must think it strange that I should laugh so immoderately. I turn away. How can I explain that I’m laughing more at myself than at the village-belles? Laughing at remembered follies, crushing embarrassments and comical social gaffes when I reacted—not so long ago—with as much panic and confusion to the new environment, to the alien situation.
After a while the sisters, drawn irresistibly by the sense of abandon and freedom of motion bestowed on them by the ocean and by the presence of the handsome Sikhs, re-enter the sea.
Later in the sultry afternoon we converge on the durries spread on the sand. The sisters flop like exotic beetles on our striped durrie, their wet kameezes clinging to them in rich blobs of colour.
Khushwant and Pratab stagger across the sand, gallantly conveying pans of hot chicken-korma, mutton curry and spicy biryani. They busy themselves undoing the knots from squares of cloth in which the large copper pans are wrapped to keep the food warm. We hold out our steel platters and they begin ladling the food into them.
Immediately there are outcries of ‘Enough, enough, Bhai,’ and we hold out our hands to prevent the ladles from serving more.
Azra suddenly squeaks: ‘What’s this brother? You want me to die of hunger?’
Khushwant is squatting in front of her empty platter, making an elaborate pretence of shaking the last drops of gravy from the ladle into her plate.
‘It’s for your own good. I don’t want you to get fat,’ he says. ‘I like you the way you are.’ He has the good sense to blush.
‘Stop picking on her,’ says Mrs Khan only half joking, and I too notice the stern frown on Mr Khan’s countenance.
