by Amrit Chima
Manmohan faltered.
“But she is smiling,” Mohan told him, holding open the bedroom door. “She wants to go to school.”
Livleen was sitting up in her bed, encircled by white pillows and fresh-smelling sheets, her complexion pallid. Her dark hair had been combed and hung loose about her shoulders, a young royal amongst her devoted subjects, bestowing blessings and well-wishes with her encouraging smile. Jai was beside her, cleaning out the hairbrush. Her eyes had sunk deep, were dark and haunted, but there were signs of optimism in them now. She only needed rest. Junker Singh sat at the foot of the bed, Navpreet and Darshan beside him, leaning into him, both uncertain and bewildered.
“I hear you are already determined to go to school,” Manmohan said, smoothing down the front of his beard with both hands, astonished by the resilience of youth, the bright, sharp eyes, the determined will.
Livleen nodded rigidly against the still painful rheumatoid lingering in her joints. “I missed the first days. Now everyone knows more than I do.”
Manmohan stood next to Jai, placing a hand on her shoulder. “It is a very long way to school. You are not strong enough to walk that far.”
“I will be,” she said quickly.
“We will see,” he told her, and this seemed to satisfy her. She snuggled into her pillows, her eyelids heavy, sweat glistening around her hairline. Jai squeezed a sponge into a bucket and dabbed the sweat clean.
“I can carry her,” Mohan said. He spoke with such pleading that Manmohan saw a different sort of fever, of anguish and hope churning together, of a desire to be smarter, to have made different choices, to return to school, to open books, to read with fervor, his cheeks flushed with a desperation to be important, his spirit made cold because he did not believe he was.
~ ~ ~
A squeal in the distance jerked Manmohan from his reading chair.
“Stay calm,” Junker Singh told him.
Bolting for the window, a sense of dread dropped like an iron ball in Manmohan’s stomach as he cursed his friend who had convinced him that young people recover quickly when they are happiest. “Just let the boy carry her,” the mechanic had said. “Let them enjoy it.”
But there had been small riots in recent days—short, angry bursts of indignation against the British. The Fiji Times made events worse with its reports, escalating fear and panic. Although there had been no incidents of violence and the riots had been contained near the docks, Manmohan worried that the children would be caught on the streets at the wrong time, swept up into a rush of protesting men and women.
The mechanic joined his friend by the window and said, “There is no reason for alarm.”
Pressing his face close to the pane of glass, Manmohan searched the curve of the wood-paved drive that turned toward the main road until he finally saw Mohan come around the bend, approaching the house with Livleen in his arms like a stack of firewood. Her legs dangled limply, and one of her arms was flung around his neck, her head thrown flaccidly back. Oh God, he thought.
But she was laughing.
Inhaling slowly with relief, Manmohan stepped out onto the porch to greet them. The aroma of cut lumber and wet earth from the river was strong. A cacophony of sounds came from the clearing in front of him and from the house behind him: the men chatting while working around the disorganized piles of plywood littered everywhere, the squabbling chickens, the roosters who seemed to think every hour was dawn, the barking dogs, the bleating goats, the clamor of steel and aluminum pots from the kitchen as Jai prepared tea and meals for the workers.
“What is the joke?” Junker Singh called down, placing his hands on stiff, sun-dried clothing hanging over the rail.
“My shoes are still shiny!” Livleen shouted up to the balcony, grinning. “All the other girls got theirs dirty.”
The staircase creaked as Mohan climbed up. “She has a personal mule,” he said playfully. Grunting, he set his sister down in a chair by the front door. “Heavier than she looks,” he smiled. “You comfortable?”
She nodded.
“How was school?” Manmohan asked. “What did you learn?”
“We have an English teacher,” she told him. “And I pet a lizard. And we had math.”
Mohan sat on the top step of the porch, placing his forearms on his knees. “We had fun, too.”
Livleen stuck out her red tongue. “See?” she showed them. “Mohan bought me a frozen juice stick on the way home. I was worried about passing Penitentiary Hill, but he told me that the men in there will never hurt me. He knows the person who keeps the keys, and that person would never open those gates without Mohan’s permission.”
Manmohan touched his daughter’s limbs, examining her elbows and ankles. “How do you feel?”
“Fine.”
He gently pressed her knee. “A little swollen,” he murmured.
She mimicked him, reaching forward to press his knee. Junker Singh nodded at her with approval.
“What is happening in town?” Manmohan asked his son.
“The streets seemed a little quiet, and the bus took longer than usual.”
“I don’t blame the oilmen,” Junker Singh said. “They know a fair wage. They know they are not getting it.”
“They are spreading their complaints, making the British angry,” Manmohan said resentfully. “Everyone is affected. People are going mad.”
Junker Singh raised his finger in disagreement. “My shop has no parts because they are too expensive or not coming on the cargo ships. That is not their fault. Smells like the British. People deserve to go mad.” He paused, considering. “But they leased you extra land. Perhaps it is not all bad.”
“Perhaps, ji,” Manmohan replied, still uncertain. The logging rights for an additional one-thousand acres in the backcountry had been very good for the mill. With the additional income, Manmohan had bought two more Caterpillar tractors, four more electric table saws, and a brand-new Bedford flatbed, seven tons of hauling power he filled with petrol from a pump he had installed next to the diesel tank. He built two more carports for all his vehicles. And the benefits of good business began to reflect on the house. He added rooms, creating a maze of corridors roofed with corrugated-iron panels held down by an abundance of heavy, loose lumber. He bought seeds for a number of new fresh vegetables in his garden—cucumbers, squash, taro, pepper—and planted fruit trees at the back of the house by the river: tamarind, with their stiff brown pods of sticky sweet and sour meat, apple, guava, and mango. Jai kept busy with the additional livestock, feeding the animals, milking the recently purchased cows and goats, and slaughtering chickens for curry.
The undercurrent of unrest on the island, however, concerned Manmohan. The additional lease had not been easy to obtain. He had to petition the British administrators in Suva’s government buildings three times, threatening to cut their lumber supply before they had finally relinquished the land. The officials argued that Indians were thriving too much on the island and that the local Fijians needed some say about how their land was distributed. But whenever Manmohan had to stand in line with roomfuls of people, he heard them all muttering darkly under their breaths, Indo-Fijians and natives together, saying they were sick of the abuse, of being forced to accept insufficient payment for their hard work, of being suppressed when they wanted to grow.
“It is like 1943 again,” Junker Singh said, “when the Colonial Sugar Refining Agency went up against the British.”
“We should do something like that,” Mohan said. He held up a flyer from the Wholesale and Retail General Workers’ Union. “‘Never before in the history of this country has the need for unity been so great,’” he read. “People are tired of being underpaid. First the cane farmers, now the oil workers. In a few years it will be others if we do not do something.”
“I have seen that,” Junker Singh said, indicating the flyer. “But those cane farmers protested by burning all their cane. What good was that protest when they had nothing left to sell? In any case, it
would not matter. The Fijians have never been interested in uniting with Indians on political issues.”
Manmohan shook his head. “That seems to be changing.”
“People should not take less than they deserve,” Mohan said. “That is what happened with Dadaji’s dairy farm. They took it away, a family’s hard work.”
Manmohan glanced at his son, surprised by his vehemence.
Mohan lowered his voice. “People should be treated with fairness.” He looked at the flyer one last time, then folded it in half and placed it on the small table near where he was sitting.
Junker Singh responded with a slow, tired shrug.
The smell of cardamom being boiled in milk drifted into the living room.
“That is very nice,” the mechanic said to no one in particular, a hint of a smile on his lips as he took a deep breath, enjoying the scent. “These things always have a way of working themselves out. There must be a balance. Sometimes people can push too hard and then there isn’t anything anyone can do to ever make it right again, like trying to fix a broken vase. I was young, but I remember India. I am tired of that sort of thing.”
~ ~ ~
In the days and weeks that followed, however, Junker Singh was proved wrong. The tension around the island finally heightened to a call for action. That December, just days before Darshan’s twelfth birthday, the union organized three hundred workers employed by the Shell and Vacuum oil companies into a full-scale, peaceful strike. Much to Livleen’s disappointment, Suva’s schools and businesses were closed when police assaulted the protesters with tear gas grenades and the strikers subsequently retaliated by stoning the police. The violence further escalated when anti-police protests led to the shooting of a section leader when two Indians and two Fijians tried to snatch his rifle. The union’s focus lost, nearly the entire population was now on strike, refusing to provide services, and many rampaged through Suva, damaging property.
The industry-wide strike put a full stop to business on the mill. Petrol and diesel were inaccessible, making logging and deliveries impossible. Concerned for his friends in the city, Manmohan used the last of his fuel reserves to take one of the World War II trucks into Suva. Driving through the city, he saw the many marching troops that had recently arrived from New Zealand to aid the British and stifle the strike. Men screamed for their rights and slammed bottles of alcohol into the pavement. Others scuffled with the soldiers, who wrestled them to the ground with batons. Fijian villagers and Indian farmers lined up by the open market, freely handing out money, rice, and sugar to the strikers, demonstrating an unprecedented cooperation between the two races, another clear indication that the island as a whole was outraged by Colonial abuse.
Spencer’s was closed, the windows boarded, the doors chained. Stores that had once sold Matsushita transistor radios, hi-fi sound systems, cassette players, and smokes were now trashed and empty. Motherland Books, owned by Manmohan’s friend Upinder Balil, had been ransacked. Torn pages were scattered on the sidewalk outside the open window like confetti, which Manmohan found more upsetting than all the glass shards and blighted storefronts. The value of books was the knowledge they contained to store in the mind. He could understand—if not condone—stealing them to read. There was not much purpose in taking them simply to tear them apart.
Following an alternate route and parking several blocks away from the main streets, Manmohan walked toward the road-blocked Victoria Parade. He did not encounter trouble, these side streets quieter than some others, conflicts isolated in certain pockets around the city. On the main thoroughfare, Manmohan found Raj’s sundry shop abandoned. But Junker Singh was out in front of his auto parts store, the glass doors boarded with large pieces of plywood. His friend had a bucket of dried beans at his feet.
Only mildly surprised at seeing a familiar face approaching, Junker Singh momentarily raised his brow, then glanced down into his bucket. “I will have to get more soon,” he said. “The last strikers who came through here took most of this one.”
“Junkerji, go home,” Manmohan said, annoyance skirting the edges of his voice. He felt ineffectual, and he did not like seeing his friend this way.
“No.”
“It is not safe.”
“I was lost without my shop. I thought all the bad days of India were returning. But when my wife filled this bucket and I saw how much she wanted to give to other people who needed it, I understood that this is not the same, that this is a simple thing. It does not have to be a fight, and we do not have to run away.”
Junker Singh had not intended to be admonishing, but Manmohan nonetheless felt shamed by the truth of his friend’s words. He bent, cupped some beans in his hands, and stood next to the mechanic to wait with him. They remained there until the next wave of rioters sped through, hungrily emptying the bucket, fearfully looking behind for patrolling police. There was some dignity in the doling out of food to men who appeared to have been ravaged by defeat.
The two friends did not speak again that day, not on the walk back to the truck, not even when they saw the fresh dent on the hood, made perhaps by a hammer, and not on the way to Junker Singh’s house, where Manmohan dropped him off. They had both lived through enough of these events to know that talk was unnecessary, that saying little or nothing at all said more.
The strike dragged on for the better part of December. Onkar had retired earlier in the year, and Manmohan’s many workers, including his favorite loggers, Chandan, Sabar, and Vasant, were at home waiting like he was, waiting like the rest of the country for some sway in the strike’s standstill.
Every morning Manmohan bathed, dressed, combed and twisted his hair into a bun; wrapped up his turban; and tucked his long beard into a net. Though it was pointless, he then stepped outside for his routine walkthrough of the mill. He checked the generator first, which had not been running since the final logs had been cut into lumber and run through the kiln. Then he checked the oil in all the trucks and tractors despite the fact that none of them had been driven since their fuel gauges dipped to empty. The quiet allowed him to notice details he had not seen before. The World War II trucks were older than he realized, the strain of deliveries worn on their scratched and dented frames, and the bodies of the flatbeds were rusted through with holes. They had seemed healthier with the motion of business.
The futility of his routine usually struck him mid-morning, after he had wandered around the undelivered piles of lumber, their tags reading, “Ba” or “Nadi,” cities on the other side of the island. He would then head back to the main house to read one of his many books, perhaps a science or religious text because they were his favorites. But even reading, something he had always loved passionately, had become tedious. The redundancy and inertia of the days drained Manmohan’s energy, and like the trucks, he noticed his body aging. At forty-three, his joints had begun to ache. He felt it mostly in his wrists when he tried to keep busy with repairs, twisting a wrench under the hood of one of the trucks, or slicing lumber with the handsaw to make a new piece of furniture.
The only element of his daily life that had not been affected by the strike, for which Manmohan was infinitely grateful, was Jai’s habitual movement around the house. She lugged clothes and dirty dishes to the river for washing. She carried water from the river to the house for cooking and bathing. She refilled the kerosene lamps at dusk, though now she rationed the kerosene, lighting the lanterns only when needed. She refilled glass and tin jars of grains and spices after grinding them in her new Steinfeld grinder, a clever wooden contraption with a crank handle and a drawer that collected the powder. She pickled mangoes from their trees, saving the green ones to serve with salt. She firmly pulled aside Darshan and Navpreet to scold them when they became too rowdy down by the river. She read to Livleen who stared wistfully outside her window from her confinement in bed. His wife appeared impervious to the strike, continuing inexorably on the same path daily, a beacon of the normal that he hoped would one day return to him.
&n
bsp; The strike continued on down a dark and endless passageway. Sometimes a flicker of light brought on premature hope when the latest union negotiations appeared promising, but these were quickly extinguished by the many accusations and insults that concluded each session. The monotony ate at them all, and even the very house seemed displeased, the hushed creaks in its joints, the air ringing hollowly with idleness, until finally they were pulled out of their stupor.
Creosote had begun to accumulate in the kitchen’s woodstove chimney. The black, oily residue silently and slowly thickened along the interior walls of the iron flue whenever Jai ignited firewood for cooking, collecting unnoticed for years at every meal.
One afternoon Manmohan wondered about the odd smoky odor and the burnt taste in the kitchen’s air of late, but distracted by an eagerness to do something, however futile, that would make him forget about the strike, he ran outside with the idea of organizing the perpetually chaotic piles of lumber strewn about the clearing. He spent the remainder of the afternoon outside, and the taste on his tongue faded in the humidity and with the heavy breathing of his labor. When night fell, he climbed wearily into bed next to Jai, rolling onto his side, a sense of satisfied accomplishment from the day’s work lulling him immediately to sleep.
While the Toor family slumbered, the remaining firewood in the stove, not fully extinguished, had been left to smolder. The embers flickered lazily, the blackened wood pulsating a reddish orange. A slight breeze crept through the cracks in the house’s timber walls, wafting gently through the kitchen, making its way to the stove. It caressed the cinders encouragingly until small licks of flame bloomed, then intensified, lengthening upward. Their tips grazed the chimney opening and ignited the creosote until the chimney’s interior was a contained cylinder of fire. The fire heated the flue that stretched up through the rafters, through the ceiling to the sky outside. It heated the metal until the outer wall of the kitchen caught fire, which was roaring by the time Jai woke up.
