English Lessons and Other Stories

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  I leave out the part about being old when I repeat for her — she is younger than I, after all.

  Mem-saab gestures for me to offer him more of Khansama’s curry.

  “Your father told me never to move from this house,” she says. “You know, we built it together, selling the jewellery we escaped with during Partition. I can still see him walking with me through these rooms the first time, telling me this house would replace all we had lost. Perhaps you are right that I cannot decide anything, Balvir, but you know…” she smiles apologetically, “your father always decided everything for me.”

  Balvir scrapes the serving spoon around the bowl. He is too old for me to tell him not to be greedy.

  “If your business is not doing well, Balvir, I can give you money. What more do you and Jai need?”

  As always, she is too mild with her youngest.

  Balvir rocks back in his father’s chair, taking her measure through half-closed eyes. Then he lets its legs thump to the carpet, and he shifts. A mongrel, kicked away once, will attack afresh. And from behind.

  He mouths without sound, so that I too have to lip-read his words, “Today I made arrangements with a construction company. Tomorrow they will begin building two bedrooms on the terrace for Kiran and Manu and myself to move here and live with you.”

  Mem-saab looks at me; I shake my head as if I have not understood. He repeats it, mouthing clearly so she cannot mistake his words.

  She gestures for me to offer him a chapatti.

  “Why?” she asks, wary.

  Balvir’s strong dark hands close around the softness of the chapatti. He tears a small piece from its slack circle. Then another and another. Intent as a counterfeit yogi, he tears every piece smaller and smaller.

  “I will take care of you in your old age, Mama,” he says.

  She reads the words from his lips. They are what she wants to read, and she cannot hear the threat that vibrates in the promise.

  Her breath comes faster. “It will be nice to have company. I have felt so alone since your father left us.”

  White shreds of chapatti grow to a pile before Balvir. The handles of a silver salver I hold out to him feel as though they will burn through my serving cloth. I come level with his eyes. They are the grey-white of peeled lichees, with beetle-back brown stones at their core.

  Dinner is over.

  I return the salver to the sideboard with a clatter. I think I will give the rasgullahs to Khansama instead.

  *

  The next morning, Jai calls from abroad. I answer the phone and tell him Mem-saab is well. I say this though she breathed through the night as though a grateful child might emerge in the morning.

  I have always had a sleeping mat on the floor in Mem-saab’s room, but since the anti-Sikh riots two rains ago, she is afraid she will not hear a mob of Hindus breaking down the gates, so I sleep closer now, on a woollen foot-carpet beside her bed.

  In the evening, Sardar and Sardarni Gulab Singh come to the gates and they find them closed, though I have made Memsaab beautiful and she is waiting upstairs. I hear Khansama tell them Mem-saab went to tea at the Delhi Golf Club with her son, Balvir, and I start down the stairs to correct him.

  How nice of him, he’s looking after his mother. Such a fine son,” I hear Sardar Gulab Singh say. Helpless, I watch his Bajaj scooter putt-putt away, with Sardarni Gulab Singh seated erect and side-saddle behind.

  Khansama smiles as he turns from the gate, and I see him look at a new watch on his wrist. Balvir does not like poor relations.

  “He’s always been a generous boy,” Mem-saab says of the wristwatch. “What a misunderstanding. I’ll tell Balvir he must phone them to apologize. Put on the TV, Amma — tell me what other mothers and their sons are doing.”

  I watch Balvir for three days, but he does not call Sardar Gulab Singh to apologize.

  The construction men pound above us. The walls on the terrace rise higher and higher.

  A fine grey cement dust settles on the furniture and I tell Khansama to dust the painting of Balvir’s father above the mantle twice a day. I am still hoping the old man’s steady gaze will shame his son and his daughter-in-law, but last night, when Balvir was drunk enough and he thought no one was listening, he raised his glass to his father and said, “What does a widow need with all that money?”

  I heard him.

  Not once since Kiran and Manu arrived has the family sat at table with my Mem-saab. Khansama has orders to serve Balvir and Kiran morning tea in “their” bedroom. Kiran says she cannot accompany Mem-saab for shopping, because her taste is so different. Instead, she orders Mem-saab’s car and driver almost every day — to visit her friends, she says. Mem-saab gives the driver money for petrol and tells him to treat Kiran with respect. And she even admonishes me, though gently, as Kiran squeals that I broke all the plastic half-circles in her brassieres when I washed them.

  Every day at teatime Balvir tells her they are too busy to sit with her and talk. He’s not too busy to talk all day on the phone to Bombay. When the phone bill comes Mem-saab says nothing, but takes a taxi to Grindlays Bank to get the money to pay it. He’s not too busy to entertain every evening, buying whisky in cases on his mother’s account at the market. Every night Balvir makes Khansama bring them Mem-saab’s best crystal and all of them put their feet up on Mem-saab’s polished teak tables and her sofas. He and Kiran sit in Mem-saab’s drawing room with their raucous white friends — he calls them “buyers” — long after decent people have gone to bed. Once he made a buyer stay two hours longer just because Kiran gave a bad luck sneeze as the man rose to leave.

  Mem-saab sits in her bedroom for long hours at a time. Before her are martyr’s pictures: of Guru Tegh Bahadur, the Sikh guru executed by Aurangzeb for his defence of the right of all Hindus to worship, and of Bhai Deep Singh, whose tortured bleeding trunk straddles a white steed and who carries his severed head aloft in defiance. Her lips move, soundless, before the martyrs’ image. I think even Sikhs sometimes need images to witness their tears.

  “Shall I bring oil for your massage?” It is all I have to offer.

  “Not today, Amma. My chest is hurting.”

  When Kiran breaks a glass bangle, Balvir buys her a new gold one, saying, “You mustn’t bring bad luck to me by breaking bangles.” I begin to notice the disappearance of things familiar. Fine vases have found their way to “their” room, a china rose that Mem-saab brought back from abroad is no longer in the sideboard. A set of silver candlesticks vanishes. A mirror with a golden frame is replaced by a cheap Rajasthani silk painting smelling of the street-hawker’s bundle. An ivory miniature departs in gift paper for Kiran’s mother.

  When I tell Mem-saab, she says it must be Khansama, stealing again. Then she turns her head away so she cannot read my answer.

  “Go away, Amma,” she says. “I am going to write to Jai.”

  Once, I rejoiced with Mem-saab when Balvir called from Bombay to tell us he’d had a son. At Manu’s naming, I took him in my arms and I showed him proudly through the gates, to my Shiv. I had expected Mem-saab to send me to Bombay so I could massage his baby limbs or feed him gripe water, but Kiran was too modern for that.

  Visiting Mem-saab, he fell once — as children do — and I’d swabbed Dettol on his wound. Direct from the bottle, just as I always had for his father and Jai. Kiran confronted me, bottle in hand, scolding that I would kill him with pain, and didn’t I know Dettol must be diluted with water? How would I have known — the directions were written on the white label in English. She’d taken Manu from me to sit before the TV.

  And here the boy sits as though he’d never moved, just grown, so a sky-blue turban bobs above the sun-bleached gold silk sofa. A strange boy, still beardless, who needs video-boxes from the market to tell him stories of men and women pale as the Embassy-walla downstairs.

  He does not rise as she enters her own drawing-room.

  “Manu,” she says. “Go tell the driver to bring my car.”

&
nbsp; He shouts, facing her so she reads him, “Amma, tell Driver to bring the car.”

  Mem-saab says gently, “No, Manu, dear. You go and tell the driver to bring my car. The video can wait.”

  The boy turns his head, but he does not move.

  “You can’t order me around. Daddy says you’re nobody.”

  Offspring of a snake! I stand silent with shock.

  Mem-saab looks at me, “What… what did he say?”

  I turn to her and speak the words slowly, just as the boy said them.

  She comes around to face Manu. A small hand grips his arm above the elbow.

  “I said, go and tell the driver to bring my car. Amma has to prepare to go with me.”

  The boy shakes off her hand, but he goes.

  In the car Mem-saab says, “Amma, we are going to meet a lady-lawyer.”

  The lady-lawyer has an office in the one-car garage attached to her home. She wears a starched white tie dangling lopsided on a soiled string above the plunge of her sari-blouse neckline. Her skin would spring to the touch, like my Leela’s — she seems too young to have read all the maroon books that line the walls of the garage.

  The lady-lawyer listens to Mem-saab with weary though gentle respect; too many women must have cried before her. I sit on the floor while they sit in chairs, and I massage Mem-saab’s leg through her salwar as she speaks so she will know there is someone who cares.

  Mem-saab speaks in Punjabi, as she always does when there are private matters to be said. She ignores my usual signal to lower the strength of her voice and her outrage assaults us, drowning the rattle of the straining air conditioner. I content myself with interjecting a word or two in Hindi occasionally for the lady-lawyer.

  Though I am still her ears, Mem-saab has seen much that I — and maybe Balvir, too — had thought she denied.

  When Mem-saab has no words left, the lady-lawyer sees Mem-saab’s embroidered hanky has turned to a useless wet ball and she offers her own. She tells me to tell her, “Be strong. I will try to help you.”

  Mem-saab’s hand seeks mine and grips it. Her fingers are cold despite the close heat.

  Now the lady-lawyer talks directly to Mem-saab. She tries to speak slowly, but I have to repeat her words sometimes for Memsaab to read them from my lips.

  “You say your son now owns twenty-five percent of your house?”

  Mem-saab looks at her from beneath her black-pencilled arches, expecting reproach.

  “Yes.”

  “Then, legally, he can occupy the premises.”

  This is not what she wishes to read, so I have to repeat it.

  The lady-lawyer continues, “We can charge that he gained his rights by putting you under duress. And if you wish to stop him from building, we can ask the court to do that.”

  “Nothing more?” says Mem-saab.

  I want to tell the lady-lawyer to make Balvir and Kiran and Manu evaporate like the first monsoon rain on a hot tar road, but I am just a pair of ears for my Mem-saab, and this is her family matter, and now our triangular exchange has faltered.

  Nothing more.

  Mem-saab writes a check and signs a vakalatnama appointing the lady-lawyer to begin her mukadma. She leans heavily on my arm as I lead her back to the car.

  Mem-saab is lying on her bed. The effort of getting dressed seems to have exhausted her today.

  Balvir is angry. Through the keyhole, I see him waving the papers that the lady-lawyer caused to be sent him.

  “This is the thanks I get for giving up my business in Bombay, for moving my family to Delhi to live with you. How could three people live in Sardarji’s old room? If you didn’t want me to build, you should have just told me so.”

  I have locked Mem-saab’s bedroom door and he rages outside.

  “I’ll never try to help you again, Mama. You just wait and see. I’m going to have to defend this case and you’ll be the one to be sorry.”

  “Khansama,” I call. “Mem-saab will take breakfast in her room.”

  Now I see Balvir swallow hard, changing course. “Amma, tell her she has made a mistake, bringing this kind of money-hungry woman into our private business.” He means the lady-lawyer.

  I mouth his words for her, without sound.

  She turns her head away; there is refuge in deafness. Sometimes I think the old custom of burning widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres spared widows like my Mem-saab from the dangers of living unprotected.

  She is breathing fast and hard again. Time is not on our side of the locked bedroom door.

  *

  At the court hearing, the lady-lawyer wears a black robe that covers the swirl of her sherbet-pink sari, and her voice, in English, is shrill and indignant for Mem-saab. I sit beside Mem-saab on a chair, though keeping my distance so everyone will know her to be born high on the ladder of Karma.

  The judge is called Milord, just like in the Hindi movies we watch on Sundays, but the people in his court are not respectfully absorbed in the proceedings as they are in the films. I think the judge listens more attentively to Balvir’s lawyer, a ponderous man with spectacles and plenty of uniformed peons to bring him notes and files.

  I count eighteen fans humming on long slender stems, flowers twirled between unseen fingers, cooling the crowd in the high-ceilinged room. Mem-saab is waiting for Balvir to come to her, put his arms around her, say he will really look after her, say he and Kiran will be kind… but Balvir’s turban never tilts toward her once. No one can churn butter from soured milk.

  Afterwards, the lady-lawyer comes to my Mem-saab and takes her hands.

  “The judge has decreed there will be a stay order. Status quo.”

  Mem-saab looks at me but I don’t know how to say the English words. She turns back to the lady-lawyer and offers her a slip-pad and pencil so she can write them down.

  Mem-saab reads the English writing and draws her eyebrows together. The lady-lawyer writes some more. Mem-saab repeats the words aloud, in Hindi. “He cannot build the rooms but I cannot tell him to go back to Bombay?”

  The lady-lawyer nods. “His lawyer said he had no place to live in Bombay. Balvir said you gave him part of your house as a gift to entice him to Delhi — to look after you.”

  Mem-saab puts the slip-pad back in her purse. She shakes her head slowly. She does not have enough breath today to discuss Balvir’s lies.

  “What has been gained?” I ask.

  “Time,” says the lady-lawyer.

  She helps my Mem-saab to rise. I follow them out to the car, Mem-saab’s pashmina shawl on my forearm. There is some satisfaction in knowing Balvir will have to take a taxi.

  Every day, Mem-saab asks if there is a letter from Jai.

  “No,” I say, “no letter.” And since that one call the day after Balvir arrived, no phone call either. Now I am sorry I told him Mem-saab was well.

  The Embassy-walla sends Mem-saab a note asking if he may come to tea. She sends me to him with a note saying Yes. I tell Khansama to make cake and jalebis, and by now I know this means Balvir and Kiran will be notified as well.

  It takes her most of the morning to dress and prepare; she rests often to ease the pain in her chest. All afternoon, she sits waiting for tea as though the Embassy-walla were one of the relatives who no longer visit.

  Khansama wheels in the trolley as usual, but he doesn’t leave the room afterwards. He has to report back to Balvir. The Embassy-walla asks for tea without milk. Since he says it in English, I do not tell Mem-saab, and she pours it in his tea anyway. He should repeat himself often, and in Hindi, if he wants me to help him converse.

  “As you know,” says the Embassy-walla, “my lease is till the end of this month.”

  Mem-saab bows her elegant head and smiles. His lease has been till the end of each month for four rains now.

  “I have been told I will be posted back to Washington after that.”

  Mem-saab smiles again. “How nice.”

  She has not understood.

  “Posted bac
k to abroad?” I ask.

  He looks at me then. “Yes. Tell her I will be posted back to Washington — say, to America — after this month.”

  I mouth his words to her again. She smiles at him, but this smile is tinged with dread. “I see,” she says, quiet.

  He accepts a piece of dry sponge cake and declines the jalebis — crisp tubes oozing their red-gold sugar-water. Khansama will give them to his children tonight.

  Now who will stop Balvir — or Jai — from putting their belongings or padlocks downstairs? The judge said everything must remain the same, but some changes cannot be decreed away. Four rains ago, Mem-saab could ask her English-speaking sons to place an advertisement in The Statesman saying “foreign embassy people desired” so she didn’t have to lease to an Indian tenant. It takes a generation to oust Indian tenants, and they can never afford to pay. But now…? Who will listen to Amma if I ask them to write in their English newspaper that Mem-saab doesn’t want an Indian for a tenant?

  Mem-saab receives a note from the lady-lawyer; she reads it to me and begins to cry. The lady-lawyer says Balvir requested the court to restrain her from renting the downstairs “until a family understanding has been arrived at.” The judge has granted his request.

  “What will I live on?” she weeps.

  I remind her, “You are a rich woman, Mem-saab. You have money at Grindlays.”

  “But that is family wealth — stridhan — just mine on paper, for my lifetime. I use just a little for my needs, Amma.”

  I agree she keeps her needs to a minimum. She has always had a strong sense of duty, my Mem-saab. It is the reason we understand one another. We were taught that widows such as we cannot claim our men’s wealth. That our kismet dictates if our men be kind. But these are the days of Kalyug, and her men have forgotten their duty to be kind to their mother, or to me, who also raised them.

  So I tell her, “Your husband would not want you to live in poverty. That is for women like your Amma, we are accustomed to it. Besides…” and here I perform a joker’s mock pout like Amitabh Bachhan in the movies, “I don’t want to go back to Jagadri just yet.”