by Amrit Chima
Junjie stroked his brush across the canvas. “Because they are not angry with me. They are angry with you. We are not on the same side, Baba.”
~ ~ ~
Whatever side Baba Singh had been on, it was not the wrong one. That much was obvious. People died on the wrong side. Or went missing. He crawled onto his charpoy in the mud hut’s second room and closed his eyes for an afternoon nap. He was so sick of righteousness. He had not gone missing. He was here. He was home.
Tired, he tried to rest. After the widow had disappeared down Suraj Road, he spent the entire day helping Khushwant, Simran, and Desa clean and organize the blacksmith shop. Tomorrow he would be in the fields with Prem and Manmohan. He was reentering his routine, settling back into his life.
“Bapu?” he heard Satnam ask from the doorway. “Are you sleeping?”
Baba Singh peeled his eyelids open. “You are back from school early.”
“I wanted to show you. Look what I made.” Satnam came closer, holding a new carving in front of his father’s face. “Do you like it?”
It was a man. Or it looked like it might be one. It was at least human.
“It is you,” his son said, smiling.
Pushing himself up onto his elbows, Baba Singh looked more closely. “Is that a lathi?” he asked.
Satnam’s face dropped. “Yes,” he said. “I thought it was obvious.”
Baba Singh sat upright, setting his feet on the mud-paved floor. “Can I hold it?”
Satnam wordlessly gave him the figurine.
Baba Singh turned the carving over in his hand. He thought of Junjie. Every one of the artist’s pieces had been an experience, a tiny life, a contained universe. He could not explain that to his son. He did not have the words to express how he had felt when, long ago in his own childhood, he had drawn on a slate board, or when he had stared at a wooden block until an elephant had emerged. It was clear Satnam would not understand.
Baba Singh returned the man figure. “Maybe you should do something else with your time,” he said, but his son did not fully grasp his meaning.
“I knew it,” Satnam said, crestfallen. “I am no good at people. But I can do another animal.”
“No, son,” Baba Singh replied.
He heard Manmohan and Vikram toss their bikes against the mud hut before coming inside.
“Maybe a frog,” Satnam said, brightening. “I have not tried that yet.”
Baba Singh sighed. “Come with me.”
He took Satnam to the main room. Vikram was sprawled on Prem’s charpoy whistling tunelessly, and Manmohan stood over him, hitting him with a small pillow, laughing.
Sada Kaur smiled at Satnam from where she was stirring a pot of cooking onions. “Did you give it to him?” she asked.
Before his son could reply, Baba Singh picked up the bucket, walked the small length of the room over to Satnam’s shelf of figurines, and swept everything off and into the pail, including Avani’s wooden elephant. They landed, one by one, with a hollow, metallic thud.
“Bapu?” Satnam asked. “What are you doing?”
Baba Singh knelt beside his son, the bucket between them. “Too many people have ruined themselves with this kind of frivolous thinking. It is better you know now so you can focus on something you are good at.”
But Satnam still did not understand.
Sada Kaur rose from her stool. “You did not like it?” she asked her husband.
“I did not.”
“It is just for fun,” she said, wiping her hands on her salwaar. “There is no harm.”
Baba Singh clutched the bucket to his chest and slowly stood to meet his wife’s strict gaze. “He is still young,” he replied resolutely. “But he is old enough to hear the truth. I will not tell him that the world is easy or good. It is not. It is a hard, horrible place. It is much better to be realistic, to see things how they really are. He should not waste more of his time.”
“Please give them back, Bapu,” Satnam said, nearly in tears now.
Baba Singh glanced down into the bucket, his face bleak. “I will not.”
When he again looked up, he saw that Vikram and Manmohan were both staring at him. They were disappointed, which he had expected, but they also pitied him, which he had not.
~ ~ ~
A horde of men pushed against Baba Singh, and he stepped backward, groaning against the pressure.
“Push them back! Use your lathi!” another officer shouted.
They had been assigned to defend the docks, to reopen the supply ship flow that had been suspended by a raging and discontented labor force. Khushwant’s face was red with strain. He gripped his baton horizontally, shoving it hard against the front line of the mob.
Baba Singh felt a tug on his belt. Someone had taken his pistol. Shots were fired. “Stop!” he shouted to the rioting throng.
“Baba!” Khushwant called, pointing to a Sikh officer on the ground. The world froze momentarily. There was a swell, and then the masses trampled the body, surging forward.
Baba Singh whirled and finally pulled out and raised his lathi. “Stop!” he said again. But the crowd melted around him and swarmed the docks. “Khushwant!”
“I am here, Baba! Come this way!”
Baba Singh forced his way through the mob toward Khushwant, the crowd thickening around him like a swarm of violently buzzing hornets. A Chinaman leapt in front of him and screamed madly, spraying Baba Singh’s face with spit, “Better pay, better pay!”
Without thinking Baba Singh cracked his baton over the man’s head. A line of blood dribbled down the Chinaman’s forehead and off the tip of his nose. Eyes wide with shock, he fell backwards into the swarm of the mob and was dragged away by his shoeless, white-socked foot.
Baba Singh ran. He heard the sharp pounding of Khushwant’s boots behind him as they abandoned their post.
“Baba, we have to go back!” Khushwant said, panting.
“I have to find Junjie,” Baba Singh replied, still running, slowing only when they turned onto Des Voeux Road.
The thoroughfare had been rampaged. Many storefront banners were ripped. A trolley had been tipped over. It lay like a wounded lion. Paper and torn banners littered the street. Baba Singh stumbled over a telegraph machine and a spray of glass shards. The machine had been thrown through a window.
Junjie’s corner was desolate. The artist’s paints, pencils, paintings, and charcoal drawings were scattered, stomped on, ripped, and broken.
He was gone.
~ ~ ~
Baba Singh held Avani’s wooden elephant and raised his head to the open, night sky. There was a good chance Junjie survived. For one’s life it was such a little thing to abandon everything and run.
Baba Singh shook his head. No, Junjie would not have done that. Like his sisters, like Ranjit, he would have clung on, to his lofty devotion to art, to a girl who had never really loved him, and to the pain of his parents’ rejection. And then he would have been ripped away and mangled, lost like the rest of them.
He set Avani’s elephant aside and lifted the bucket of Satnam’s wooden figurines, dumping them into the hole he had just dug. He gathered dirt into his palms, like cupping water, and let it trickle over the carvings. Then, with wide sweeps of his forearm, he packed in the soil, patting the mound firmly when he was done.
Better for Satnam to let it go, for a better life.
Picking up the elephant, Baba Singh dusted it off and held it tight as he stood and began the long walk to Hotel Toor, where he would replace it in his father’s chest.
Heaven Bound in Brown Leather
1932
Family Tree
There was another place where Baba Singh imagined he existed. Another him. Another life. It was not far, close enough to be felt, visible just in his periphery, but also so far that it vanished when he turned to see the whole of it. Sometimes he sensed it in his nightmares, a beacon of shelter where nothing bad happened, but where he was not allowed to go.
There was
a book in his lap, unopened. He sat in his chair, his palms pressed down flat on the tattered, brown leather cover while his family prepared for bed, his sons laying out their mats. He had already looked through the book earlier in the day, had already stamped onto his mind the star maps contained within, the vastness of space calling to him, dimly familiar. Geography of the Heavens, a line in handwritten Punjabi script read at the bottom of the inside cover. The rest was printed in the slanted flourishing swirls of English, which he could not read.
He had acquired the book from the astrologer, although books of any kind were not common on his shelves. Opiates and pendants were his specialties, as well as answers about the inscrutable minutiae of existence, of senses and second lives, of karma and God, of all things possible beyond human reason. Or so the astrologer often claimed. Perusing the shelves of elixirs and animal skulls, Baba Singh had searched for the answers to his problems in this otherworldly realm, but they were not forthcoming, stubborn as a hot, overworked bullock. Then he had come across the book, tucked away on a lower shelf, forgotten.
It was a shop rarity that had apparently been tossed away some months before by a British man, donated with what Baba Singh imagined was a condescending snigger, a sneer at the backwards, countryside people of India who would not be able to understand it, but let them try. It was true that Baba Singh could not read the book, but he nevertheless did understand it. Some knowledge was far more significant than that which could be articulated or transcribed. The maps told him of greater distances beyond his imaginings where he was certain he had been before, long, long ago when time had no meaning. Petrified of moving forward, he had bought the book to serve as hard, tangible hope that all was well despite the disgrace of his wretched life. Indeed, a great wisdom worth achieving was the knowledge that all events—however monumental they may seem—were categorically trivial down here on this humble Indian earth, even murder.
The book, however, was no match for the guilt he had accumulated over the past decades, and he could not so easily dismiss himself. Tethered to an unfortunate episode of brutality, he was still the same boy he had been after bringing Mr. Grewal to an untimely end. It had seemed to him like such a courageous effort to marry and move to Barapind, but truthfully he had never really moved here. His growth stunted by remorse and shame, he remained, even now, at Hotel Toor, living in the whitewashed walls of his bedroom where he had slithered off after leaving the moneylender crumpled on the floor, the man’s spectacles twisted by his head.
Baba Singh slid his palms over the embossed title, curling his fingers around the edge of the book. Earlier that day, Khushwant told him that he wanted to sell the hotel, that it was time for them all to release the demons of their past, but there were over twenty years between the thirteen-year-old boy he still was and now. It was such a long, perilous journey to catch up.
“Simran is pregnant, Baba,” Khushwant had told him. “I cannot start my family here.” He put his hand tiredly to his forehead. “We have been living with ghosts. None of us has ever really said goodbye.”
It was the tone of his brother’s voice that stopped Baba Singh from protesting, that resonance of a childhood fraught with perils and devastating losses. “I will try,” he had said softly, unable to suppress a conflicting sensation of betrayal washing over him like the river flooding the banks during monsoon season.
The edge of the book pressed hard into the soft, padded flesh of his palms as he now thought about his future cut loose from his past, about the strength that would be required to purge his particularly foul demons.
“Bapu, can I see it?” Manmohan asked, breaking his father’s reverie.
Slowly removing his hands, Baba Singh allowed his son to slide the book away.
“An astronomy book,” Manmohan said, opening the cover and running his hand over a picture of a constellation, enchanted by the dulled luminosity of stars on the yellowing, worn paper. “It is about the universe.”
“What do you know of the universe?” Baba Singh asked, his voice quiet, but gruff, resentful at the narrowly scientific assessment.
Manmohan lowered his eyes. “Not very much.”
Vikram and Satnam crawled under their blankets for the night, whispering conspiratorially. Vikram laughed, then with a sharp look at his father, covered his mouth.
Baba Singh ignored them. He glanced at his wife kneading roti dough, her forearm muscles flexing as she pressed her fists into the sticky mix of flour, water, and ghee. She would not look at him. She never did anymore.
His sleep was fitful that night, like the days when his nightmares had begun, before he learned to steel himself against them. The collective mass of stars crushed him beneath their omniscient eyes as he plunged his sword into the faceless man’s chest. Beams of light flickered behind his eyelids, the whole night sky flashing with lighting and squeezing down upon him as he struggled to chop open the coconut at his feet.
He woke with a start.
Light sputtered from the other room. Climbing out of bed, his heart beating rapidly, Baba Singh found his son’s oil lamp still burning, hissing quietly. Manmohan was sleeping, his sharp, beautiful features softened by shades of fiery orange.
Son of a murderer.
Geography of the Heavens was open across the boy’s chest. Baba Singh eased it out from underneath his arms, sitting cross-legged with it on the floor. He ran his forefinger around the centerpiece map, moving from one star to another, constructing bridges, links in space, from the bottom of the page to the top, searching. When he had touched every star, he let his finger move beyond the page, until it hovered in the air. Then his arm went limp and he slouched over the map.
Just before dawn, he set the book by Manmohan’s head, turned the knob on the lamp, watched the flame die, and went back into the other room.
~ ~ ~
The months rolled by relentlessly, bringing to fruition all the change that Baba Singh had been dreading. He avoided his brother and sister during this time, remaining in Barapind, toiling in the fields, his back aching as he tended his spring crop, sweat dampening his clothing. His return to the hut in the evenings made him uneasy; it was an empty, long walk through the village to his hovel of tension where his wife and children treaded so softly around him. Yet it was preferable to suffer through such endless days of discomfort than go back to Amarpur where so much of his history was disappearing. Postponing the inevitable, he waited until it was necessary to resupply their sundries before visiting the emptied Hotel Toor to see the renovations Simran, Desa, and Khushwant had made to Yashbir’s, where they would now live.
It was much worse than he had imagined. Working in collusion with the unrelenting, forward course of time, Khushwant had made insufferable modifications to things that should have remained eternal. He had built a second story above Yashbir’s, in the process altering the lower floor almost beyond recognition. This was made harder to bear when faced with the actuality of Hotel Toor’s sale, which had been finalized. Desa and Simran had packed everything, had moved whatever of Ranjit’s furniture they had not given away into the blacksmith shop where Baba Singh could no longer recognize it. How would he be able to find Ranjit now that his brother’s spirit had been shifted about? How would he know which charpoy had been Kiran and Avani’s?
“I am glad you came, Baba,” Khushwant said, leaning against the doorframe of Yashbir’s old room where Desa was sweeping. The room would be hers now. The curtain had been pulled aside, her things, most not yet organized, lined up against the far wall.
Baba Singh soberly surveyed the shop. There was now a staircase where Yashbir’s desk once was. “You have changed everything,” he said bleakly, yet trying his best not to sound accusatory. Walking slowly across the room, he picked up the sledgehammer from the corner where it had been moved with the anvil, too far from the iron stove. “This does not belong here. Yashji had a place for his things.”
Desa continued cleaning. She would not be baited. “He is not here anymore.”
> “Neither of you understand what this place meant to him. You could never understand unless you had the talent with metal that he had.”
Stopping to look at him directly, she replied, “You do not have it either.”
Baba Singh put the sledgehammer down, suddenly exhausted. “He believed I did.”
“You threw it away.”
Khushwant shot Desa a piercing look, shaking his head.
Baba Singh closed his eyes momentarily. “What have you done with his things? There were metal plates. His art.”
Desa set her straw broom aside and approached him, taking his arm. “Baba, it is all here. Stop fussing.”
“You did not have to change everything.”
Whatever sympathy she had for him instantly melted. She turned back to her task. “Just go away, Baba. Whenever you are here I feel like I am moving backwards. We all do.”
When he turned to Khushwant and saw a similar sentiment reflected in his brother’s eyes, he could not speak. The swords, still crossed above the entryway to the bedroom, cautioned him with a silent reprimand, asking him to leave.
Out on Suraj Road, he wandered to the places of his past. Some, like Yashbir’s, had been renovated. The train station platform had been rebuilt, the wooden planks still raw wood the color of golden wheat. The station had a new master. The old one had taken his family to South Africa where he had been given a promotion serving just second to a white superintendent. Baba Singh would never understand the British, their loathing one moment, their regard the next. And Mr. Grewal’s money-lending establishment had been whitewashed, the exposed brick no longer reminding Baba Singh of what he had done. The changes were hateful, especially this last, asking him to forget. He did not deserve to forget.
Other places had entirely crumbled. Dr. Bansal’s was gone, the building demolished, the empty lot lying bare, exposed to weeds and the elements. The doctor’s name and his tale of intrigue were no longer whispered along Suraj Road. His mark upon this town was thinning, vanishing as the years passed.
