by Bapsi Sidhwa
‘I know who’s getting too fresh for his own good,’ says Azra, and swiftly snatching the ladle from Khushwant, springs to her feet. Caught unawares Khushwant falls back on his elbows. Azra whacks him with the ladle and his white kurta is stained yellow with turmeric. Khushwant scrambles quickly to his feet, and Azra chases him over the sand into the shallows.
‘I told you they get along,’ whispers Joanne.
But Mrs Khan frowns. Everyone has noted the little escapade and by the time Azra returns, swinging the ladle, the carefree mood of the picnic has shifted ominously. Mr Khan has solemnly filled his plate and withdrawn to eat at a little distance from us. Azra at once notices the reserve and becomes subdued. When Khushwant and Pratab bring their plates over to our durrie, she turns away and keeping her eyes averted, responds to their queries in stern monosyllables.
I get up, stretch, and amble over to Sikander.
The still-warm parathas and the delicious food revive our appetites. Sikander again heaps his plate with mutton curry and, crossing his legs like an inept yogi, sits down by me. We both lean against an outcrop of rock, and I finally broach the subject that has been obsessing me: I would like to use his family’s experiences during Partition in the novel I am writing, I tell him. Will he share them with me?
I gathered from the remarks Mrs Khan let slip on the night of the party that Ammi-ji was kidnapped. But I want to know what Mrs Khan was about to say when she checked herself. I feel the missing information will unravel the full magnitude of the tragedy to my understanding and, more importantly, to my imagination. Instinctively I have chosen Sikander Khan, and not Mrs Khan, to provide the knowledge. His emotions and perceptions will, I feel, charge my writing with the detail, emotion and veracity I am striving for. As we eat, sucking on our fingers, drinking Coke out of cans, I ask Sikander about the attack on his village—trying, with whatever wiles I can, to penetrate the mystery surrounding Ammi-ji.
Seeing that we are engaged in serious conversation the others leaves us alone. Sikander’s replies to my questions are candid, recalled in remarkable detail, but he balks at any mention of Ammi-ji.
I don’t remember now the question that unexpectedly penetrated his reserve, but Sikander planted in my mind a fearsome seed that waxed into an ugly tree of hideous possibility, when, in a voice that was indescribably harsh, he said: ‘Ammi-ji heard street vendors cry: “Zenana for sale! Zenana for sale!” as if they were hawking vegetables and fish. They were selling women for fifty, twenty and even ten rupees!’
Later that evening, idling on our durries, watching the sun sink beneath the pollution-crimsoned clouds on the horizon fade, I ask Sikander how he can be close friends with Khushwant and Pratab. In his place I would not even want to meet their eye! Isn’t he angry at the Sikhs for what they did? Don’t the Sikh cousins know what happened in his village?
‘Why quarrel with Khushwant and Pratab?’ he says quietly. ‘They weren’t even born …’ And then, his voice again taking on that hard, harsh edge, Mr Khan says: ‘My uncles, who crossed the border in a caravan of Muslim refugees, brought with them a stable of kidnapped Hindu and Sikh women … I saw them only a few times … I’ll never forget their eyes … We Muslims are no better. We did the same things … Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, we are all evil bastards!’
Mr Khan calls. His mother has arrived from Pakistan. He has asked a few friends to dinner to meet her on Saturday. Would I dine with them? Ammi-ji appears to remember me as a little girl!
I get into the usual state of panic and put off looking at the map till the last hour. It is major trauma—this business of finding my way from place to place—missing exits—and often terrifying motorists as I swerve, hazard lights blinking, precariously shifting lanes as I pull up to the shoulder, to consult the map. Thank God for alert American reflexes: for their blasphemous, chastising, wise, tooting.
I find my way to Mr Khan’s without getting lost. It is a large old frame house behind a narrow neglected yard on a road between Montrose Boulevard and the Rothko Chapel.
Sikander, resplendent in a raw-silk salwar and kurta brought by his mother, ushers me into the house with elegant formality. Uttering phrases in Urdu, which translated into English sound like this: ‘We’re honoured to have you visit our humble hovel. We can’t treat you in the manner to which you are accustomed …’ he presents me to his mother. ‘Ammi-ji this is Joy—our neighbour from a long time ago. Recognize her?’ he says, grinning, obviously not expecting her to.
Ammi-ji, a buttery-fleshed, kind-faced old woman, her grey hair covered by a blue nylon chaddar, strokes my arm and, peering affectionately into my face through clouded eyes, saying, ‘Mashallah, you’ve grown healthier. You were such a dry little stick,’ steers me by the elbow to sit next to her on the sofa.
Through my polite, bashful-little-girl’s smile, I search her face. There’s no trace of bitterness. No melancholy. Nothing knowing or hard. Just the open, acquiescent, hospitable face of a peasant woman who is happy to visit her son and greet his friends. It is difficult to believe this gentle, contented woman in home-spun clothes was kidnapped, raped, sold.
As more guests arrive, the sisters line up opposite us on an assortment of dining and patio chairs carried in for the party. The living room is typically furnished, Pakistani style. Small, carved tables, bearing onyx ashtrays and plastic flowers in brass vases, are scattered between the armrests of chairs. Hand-woven rugs with floral patterns and geometric designs lie in front of fussily upholstered sofas. The drapes are thick and dark, and the atmosphere is permeated with the sterile odour of careful disuse.
Vijay, princely and fey in tight churidar pyjamas, cream kurta and curly-toed slippers, arrives with his mother and Joanne, bringing with him a snooty-looking couple who barely glance our way and who he has only recently met. Joanne looks languorous in a navy sari with a gold border.
There is a loud exchange of pleasantries. Vijay notices me across the length of the entrance lobby. ‘You found your way okay?’ he calls from the door, teasing. ‘Didn’t land up in Mexico or something?’
‘No … of course not!’ I yell back.
The couple are of South Asian origin, but their ‘attitude’ sets them apart. They could be from Uganda or South Africa, where their ancestors served as indentured labour in the colonies to begin with and then became millionaires at Independence: that could explain their ‘attitude’. They are both fair, plump and smug. They talk exclusively to Joanne, the only White American in the room, and to Vijay, husband of the status symbol and the person who invited them. They toss a few remarks to Mr Khan, their host.
The sisters, condescended to a couple of times and then ignored, drift to the kitchen and disappear into the remote and mysterious recesses of the large house. I become aware of muted children’s voices, quarrelsome, demanding and excited. Mrs Khan and the older sister return. Lumpish with jewellery, quiet and sullen, they drag their chairs to huddle about a lamp standing in the corner. Azra soon joins them. She is stunning in an emerald green ensemble. She brings her hair forward over her shoulder to scrutinize her braid, and I notice the diamond nose-pin has been replaced by three emeralds set in gold.
Dinner is late. We are waiting for Khushwant and Pratab. Mr Khan says, ‘We will wait for fifteen minutes more. If they don’t come, we’ll start eating.’
Hungry guests with growling stomachs, we nevertheless say, ‘Please don’t worry on our account … We are in no hurry.’
Conversation dwindles. The guests politely inquire after the health of those sitting next to them and the grades of their children. We hear the doorbell ring and Mr Khan springs up from his chair, saying, ‘I think they’ve come.’
Instead of the dapper Sikhs, I see two huge and hirsute beggar-fakirs—the kind of unpredictable holy-men we see in India and keep our distance from. Their dishevelled ash-streaked hair, parted at the centre, bristles about their arms and shoulders and mingles with their spiky black beards. They are wearing muslin kurtas over white singlets and their
broad shoulders and taut muscles show brown beneath the fine muslin. I can’t be sure, from where I sit, but I think they have on loose cotton pyjamas. They look indescribably fierce. It is an impression quickly formed, and I have barely glimpsed the visitors, when, abruptly, their knees appear to buckle and they fall forward.
Mr Khan steps back hastily and bends over the prostrate men. He says, ‘What’s all this? What’s all this?’
The disconcerted tone of his voice, and the underpinning of perplexity and fear, gets us to our feet. Moving in a nervous bunch, displacing the chairs and small tables and crumpling the carpets, we crowd our end of the lobby.
The fakirs lie face down across the threshold, their hands flat on the floor as if they are about to do push-ups. Their faces are entirely hidden by hair. Suddenly, their voices moist and thick, they begin to cry, ‘Ammi-ji! Ammi-ji! Forgive us.’
The blubbering, coming as it does from these fierce men, is unexpected, shocking; incongruous and melodramatic in this oil-rich corner of the pragmatic Western world.
Sikander, in obvious confusion, looms over them, looking from one to the other. Then, squatting in front of them, he begins to stroke their prickly heads, making soothing noises as if cajoling children. ‘What’s this? Tch, tch … Come on! Stand up!’
‘Get out of the way.’ An arm swings out in a threatening gesture and the fakir lifts his head. I see the pale, ash-smeared forehead, the large, thickly fringed brown eyes, the set curve of the wide, sensuous mouth and recognize Khushwant Singh. Next to him Pratab also raises his head. Sikander shuffles out of reach of Khushwant’s arm and moving to one side, his back to the wall, watches the Sikhs with an expression of incredulity. It is unreal. I think it has occurred to all of us it might be a prank, an elaborate joke. But their red eyes, and the passion distorting their faces, are not pretended.
‘Who are these men!?’
The voice is demanding, abrasive. I look over my shoulder, wondering which of the women has spoken so harshly. The sisters look agitated; their dusky faces are flushed.
‘Throw them out. They’re badmashes! Goondas!’
Taken aback, I realize the angry, fearful voice is Sikander’s mother’s. I turn around.
Ammi-ji is standing behind me, barely visible among the agitated and excited sisters, and in her face I see more than just the traces of the emotion I had looked for earlier. It is as if her features have been parodied in a hideous mask. They are all there: the bitterness, the horror, the hate: the incarnation of that tree of ugly possibilities seeded in my mind when Sikander, in a cold fury, imitating the cries of the street hawkers his mother had described, said, ‘Zenana for sale! Zenana for sale!’
I grew up overhearing fragments of whispered conversations about the sadism and bestiality women were subjected to during Partition: what happened to so-and-so—someone’s sister, daughter, sister-in-law—the women Mrs Khan had categorized as the spoils of war. The fruits of victory in the unremitting chain of wars that is man’s relentless history. The vulnerability of mothers, daughters, granddaughters, and their metamorphosis into possessions; living objects on whose soft bodies victors and losers alike vent their wrath, enact fantastic vendettas, celebrate victory. All history, all these fears, all probabilities and injustices coalesce in Ammi-ji’s terrible face and impart a dimension of tragedy that alchemizes the melodrama. The behaviour of the Sikhs, so incongruous before, is now essential and consequential.
The men on the floor have spotted Ammi-ji. Their voices weak, they mumble, ‘Ammi-ji, forgive us: Forgive the wrongs of our fathers.’
Behind me Azra says, ‘Oh my God!’
There is a buzz of questions and comments. I feel she has voiced exactly my awe of the moment—the rare, luminous instant in which two men transcend their historic intransigence to tender apologies on behalf of their species.
Again she says, ‘Oh God!’ and I realize she is afraid that the cousins, crawling forward with small movements, are resurrecting a past that is best left in whatever recesses of the mind Ammi-ji has chosen to bury it.
‘Don’t do this … please,’ protests Sikander. ‘You’re our guests …!’
But the cousins, keeping their eyes inches off the floor, say, ‘Bhai, let us be.’
The whispered comments of the guests intensify around me.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘They are begging her pardon …’
‘Who are these men?’
‘… for what the Sikhs did to her in the riots …’
‘Hai Ram. What do they want?’
‘God knows what she’s been through; she never talks about it …’
‘With their hair open like this they must remind her of the men who …’
‘You can’t beat the Punjabis when it comes to drama,’ says the supercilious guest. His wife, standing next to me, says, ‘The Sikhs have a screw loose in the head.’ She rotates a stubby thumb on her temple as if she is tightening an imaginary screw.
I turn, frowning. The sisters are glaring at them: showering the backs of their heads with withering, hostile looks.
And, in hushed tones of suitable gravity, Mrs Khan says: ‘Ammi-ji, they are asking for your forgiveness.’ Silence, save for the swish of cloth as we turn towards Ammi-ji.
Then, addressing the men on the floor, speaking on her mother-in-law’s account, she says: ‘She forgives you, Brothers.’
Azra and her older sister repeat Mrs Khan’s magnanimous gesture, and, with minor variations, also forgive Khushwant and Pratab on Ammi-ji’s behalf.
‘Ammi-ji: come here!’ Sikander has the military air of an officer determined to stop this nonsense.
We shift, clearing a narrow passage for Ammi-ji, and Vijay’s mother darts out instead looking like an agitated chick in her puffed cotton sari. She is about to say something—and judging from her expression it has to be something indeterminate and conciliatory—when Vijay, firmly taking hold of her arm, hauls her back.
Seeing his mother has not moved, Sikander shouts, ‘Send Ammi-ji here. For God’s sake, finish it now.’
Ammi-ji takes two or three staggering steps and stands a few paces before me. I suspect one of the sisters has prodded her forward. I cannot see Ammi-ji’s face, but the head beneath the grey chaddar jerks as if she is trying to remove a crick from her neck.
All at once, her voice, an altered, fragile, high-pitched treble that bears no resemblance to the fierce voice that had demanded, ‘Who are these men?’, Ammi-ji screeches, ‘I will never forgive your fathers! Get out, shaitans! Sons and grandsons of shaitans! Never, never, never!’
She becomes absolutely still, as if she will remain there forever, rooted, the quintessence of indictment.
They raise their heads to say, ‘We will lie at your feet to our last breath!’
In a slow, deliberate gesture, Ammi-ji turns her face away and I observe her profile. Her eyes are clenched shut. The muscles in her cheeks and lower jaw are quivering in tiny, tight spasms as if charged by a current. No one dares say a word: it would be an intrusion. She has to contend with unearthed torments and private demons. The matter rests between her memories and the incarnation of the phantoms resurrected at her feet.
The men reach out to touch her slippers and they lay their heads at her feet in the ancient gesture of surrender demanded of warriors.
‘Leave me! Let go!’ Ammi-ji shrieks, in her shaky, altered voice. She raises her arms and moves them as if she is pushing away invisible insects. But she looks exhausted and, her knees giving way, she squats before the men. She buries her face in the chaddar.
At last, with slight actions that suggest she is ready to face the world, Ammi-ji wipes her face in her chaddar, and rearranges it on her untidy head. She tucks the edges behind her ears and slowly, in a movement that is almost tender, places her shaking hands on the shaggy heads of the men who hold her feet captive. ‘My sons, I forgave your fathers long ago,’ she says in a flat, emotionless voice pitched so low that it takes some time for the
words to register. ‘How else could I have lived?’
On my way home, hanging on to the red tail-lights of the cars on the Katy Freeway, my thoughts tumble through a chaos of words and images—Azra’s face, pale and drawn, her head bowed; Ammi-ji’s weary capitulation; the sisters’ frozen stares … Perhaps the surreal gestures of these young men will go some way to ease the ancient animosities … allow Azra and Khushwant to marry. During dinner I notice Khushwant’s complex contrite glances, stealthily seeking hers …
Joanne is right: living in America changes people—I can sense the changes in myself … yes …
And then fragments of a poem by the Bolivian poet Pedro Shimose churn up to drown the images. The words throb in an endless, circular rhythm:
Defend yourself against me
against my father and the father of my father
still living in me
Against my force and shouting in schools and cathedrals
Against my camera, against my pencil
against my TV-spots.
Defend yourself against me,
please, woman,
defend yourself!
Author’s Note
I have to admit that I am a novelist by inclination and not a short-story writer—even my short stories, as you will no doubt notice in this collection, tend to be lengthy.
My first short story, ‘Breaking It Up’ was published by Serpents Tail in Britain in the 1980s. Amanda Conquay, who was then at Heinemann, UK, liked it and persuaded me to expand it into a novel. Youth allows one to blithely undertake what one might balk at in later years, and I turned the short story into my novel An American Brat. In the year it took me to do this, Conquay left Heinemann and the new editor rejected the novel. The considerably changed and polished version was published by Milkweed in America in 1994.
‘Defend Yourself Against Me’ was the second story I wrote. It contained material that I wanted to include in my novel Ice-Candy-Man. Novels, however, determine a path all their own and it was only after I finished ICM that I realized there was no room in it for my fateful meeting with Mr Sikander Khan at a party in Houston. His horrific experiences as a nine-year-old, when his village was attacked during the 1947 riots, had provided the crucial chapter titled ‘Ranna’s Story’ in ICM. The dramatic material that I was unable to include thus shaped itself into this short story.
