by Amrit Chima
“Smoke, Gharwala,” she shouted.
Manmohan sat up and sniffed the air. Eyes widening, he threw off his blankets. “Get the children,” he said. “Go!”
But she was already through the door and sprinting down the hall.
Shoving aside the bed sheets, Manmohan scrambled across the mattress and jumped toward his safe. Spinning the combination lock, he flung open the door and grabbed the lease papers for the mill, the contract for his extra thousand acres of land, and the delivery logs. The documents tucked under his arm, he then circled the room frantically searching for more valuables. In the dresser, he pulled out his wife’s gold jewelry and a wad of Fijian dollars. He threw everything onto a crumpled bed sheet, then hastily wrapped it into a makeshift knapsack before running down the hallway shouting, “Fire! Fire!”
From the living room he could see wildly sputtering shadows through the kitchen door, a flurry of orange and yellow light reflecting in the glass of the framed family photos. The hot wind gusted and the flames roared. Ahead of him, Jai dashed out of Livleen’s room, the girl in her arms. He was startled by how quickly she moved with their daughter. She was screaming at him, but dazed, he could not hear what she was saying.
“Get out!” he finally heard Jai’s words take shape in the confusion as she ran toward the back door. But he could not move. The horror on Livleen’s wide-eyed face as she clung to Jai’s neck caused him to freeze. The magnitude of her terror weakened his knees. In that moment he knew they would all burn, that they were already burning.
Mohan jumped out of Livleen’s room, nothing in his hands as he quickly darted outside. Navpreet bolted from her room and raced after her brother with a bulging sack flung over her shoulder.
“Gharwala!” Jai shouted from the doorway, cupping her free hand so he could hear her through the tunnel of the hallway. “Get out!”
Her voice finally rousing him, he began running, the breeze outside a cool rush as he descended the stairs two at a time. At the bottom he found his nearest neighbors, Dev, Kalyan, and Paandu, tossing water onto the outer kitchen wall. Having seen the flames and heard shouts of alarm in the distance, they had already been to the river to fill their buckets.
“Is everyone safe?” Kalyan shouted as he hurried up the stairs to fling water at the house.
Manmohan dumped the blanket of valuables in the dirt. “Yes, everyone is out!” he shouted and dashed under the house with Jai and Mohan close behind him, weaving through the stilts to find more buckets. He saw his hose, but that would not work. Not enough pressure. Snatching up a pail, he ran toward the river, seeing Navpreet and Livleen sitting a safe distance away. In the light of the fire, he saw Navpreet laying out the contents of her sack, accounting for all her dolls and carved wooden toys.
Halfway to the river, Jai suddenly cried out, “Where is Darshan?”
Manmohan and Mohan had already filled their buckets and were running toward the house, but both turned to her in shock.
Eyes darting back and forth in the dark, Manmohan searched for some sign of his son. But he was not there. He whirled around to face Mohan, sloshing water from his bucket. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” Mohan said. “I didn’t see him. Didn’t you get him?”
“Me?” Manmohan said, his voice pitched loud with panic as Dev, then Kalyan ran past toward the river to refill their pails. “You didn’t get him?”
Breathing hard, Jai said, “Mohan was in Livleen’s room, and Navpreet was in the hallway. I never saw Darshan.”
Manmohan tried to piece the frenzied string of moments together. He dropped his bucket and grabbed Mohan’s arm. “If you were with Livleen, why didn’t you get her? Why did you wait until your mother got there? Why didn’t you tell her you had Livleen so she could check to be sure everyone else was out?”
Mohan pointed to the sack of valuables at the foot of the back staircase. “While you were getting your valuables you didn’t save anyone!”
“Those papers are our lives,” Manmohan shouted, as the neighbors raced once more up the stairs to empty the water onto the flames.
“There!” Jai said, pointing toward Darshan standing on the back porch.
“Bebeji, Bapuji! What are you doing?” Darshan yelled. “There is a fire up here! We have to put it out!”
“Darshan!” Manmohan cried out, his heart still pounding. “Darshan, get down from there!”
The boy descended the stairs, jogging over to stand before the towering figure of his father. Manmohan brushed soot from his son’s shirt. “I did not have time,” he said, kneeling in front of Darshan. “There was no time. I don’t know how it happened, how any of this happened, but I couldn’t. It was not possible.”
Darshan did not speak. He remained still, a small figure framed by the looming, smoking shadow of the house. He glanced around as if slowly realizing they had all left him for dead.
Voice shaking with outrage, Mohan said, “If I had known, I would have gotten him out. Everyone here knows how much I love my family.”
“Oh God,” Navpreet exclaimed, wringing her hands and looking frantically down at her dolls. “I hope nothing is ruined!”
Mohan turned desperately to Livleen, shouting over to her. “No one can say I do not love my family, right Livleen? Don’t I love you?”
She looked at him from the ground where Jai had left her. Dev called urgently to them, “We need more! A few more buckets!”
The fire was nearly out, but in the fading light of the flames Manmohan could see that Livleen was still frightened. Nodding carefully, hugging her shoulders, she said, “Yes, Mohan, you do.”
~ ~ ~
The commotion of that night amplified the quiet of the following days. This was a new and different quiet. Not forced upon them, but necessitated by exhaustion.
The pounding of Paandu’s hammer striking wood echoed throughout the clearing and bounced off the river. “Can you believe they are saying that we hate the British? They are saying we went on strike because of hate,” he told Junker Singh.
The strike had ended a few days after the fire, Fiji subjugated by another influx of troops from New Zealand, but the island, too, was hushed, sulking and slow to resume business.
Manmohan watched his neighbors work. They were all so at ease after everything that had happened: Paandu, Kalyan, and Dev. They worked on the house like its repairs were merely cosmetic—a nail there, a piece of wood here—like there was not a gaping hole in it, exposing its insides.
“Many people do hate them,” Junker Singh replied, pulling a nail out of his mouth. “Including you.” He was lying down on his large stomach on top of the corrugated-iron roof. His head was near the edge so he could look down over the side to watch the men putting up new posts. He should have been at Suva Auto Repair, but since reopening no one had come in.
“Maybe that is true,” Kalyan said, shrugging, taking the nail from the mechanic. “But it was not about hate. It was about fairness, getting what is appropriate for hard work. Now they have turned it into another issue. There are Europeans on this island who fought for the same reasons the oil workers did. It was never anti British. It was anti poverty.”
“Now they are saying we will have separate trade unions for each race,” Dev said, straining to hold a piece of wood in place so that Kalyan could secure it.
Shaking his head, Paandu replied, “Now that it is over, they want to keep everyone segregated, make sure it never happens again.”
“I cannot believe it is over,” Kalyan said. “Seems like it just started. I went to bed last night thinking we were making progress, woke up this morning feeling like the union just gave up. The oilmen got almost nothing. And everyone else truly did get nothing.”
Manmohan murmured his agreement. From his position on the ladder, he saw Darshan carrying pieces of wood through the clearing and into the jungle.
“How much damage?” Junker Singh asked, knocking his fist on the iron roof to get his friend’s attention. “Did you lose a
nything important?”
Manmohan leaned into the ladder so he could free his hands for a moment, his grip causing his fingers to ache uncomfortably. He rubbed them together. “Just this wall and the stove. Nothing of value.”
The pantry was intact, all of Jai’s spices and foodstuffs still neatly stacked. The rafters had been untouched except for the small hollow behind the chimney. Baba Singh’s chest, the old gramophone, the cabinet radio, and the plywood box were unharmed, only dusted in a thick coating of ash. The rest of the house was fine.
Dev pursed his lips. “The way they were arguing when we were calling for more water, I am surprised the house is still standing.”
“Arguing?” Junker Singh asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Never mind,” Manmohan said. “It was just the confusion.”
“Where is Mohan today?”
“I never know where he goes.”
Junker Singh passed Kalyan another nail, and Dev released the post that had been secured into place.
Darshan’s small figure wove through the stacks of lumber, wood scraps in his arms. He had come to see Manmohan in the mill yesterday to ask if he could have them and some tools to borrow.
“Why do you need them?” Manmohan had wanted to know. “Are you building something?”
“Yes,” Darshan replied.
“A fort?”
“I suppose it will be.”
Manmohan licked his dry lips uncertainly, reaching out to lay a heavy hand on his son’s thin shoulder. “About the fire, there was not time. I thought—we all did—that you were out.”
Darshan silently nodded, but he did not seem convinced.
“Where will you build it?” Manmohan asked.
His son pointed at the line that separated the clearing from the jungle, a place where the mill and their home ended and the palms and ferns began.
Manmohan had felt a sudden impulse to ask Darshan not to leave, not to go out there where he could not be seen or heard. It seemed to him that something had finally risen to the surface and bubbled over. He could almost feel the sticky, starchiness of it seeping into the cracks and crevices of his life. And despite scrubbing up the mess, sweating with the effort, no matter how hard he worked, it was impossible to fully clean it.
From the ladder, Manmohan glanced at the mill, remembering how quiet it had been in there yesterday with his son. No ringing noise of saws scoring through dried logs, it was just him and Darshan, surrounded by peace and warmth and shafts of yellow light coming in through fissures in the wood, softening the look of everything, their spirits chilled through.
Ankylosing Spondylitis
1960
Family Tree
Colonial War Memorial hospital had an airy feel, like the best days of summer. Sea breeze and the scent of plumeria gently tunneled down the cool, linoleum-floored hallways. Black-and-white photos of Fiji islanders partaking in joyful rituals hung dusty and crooked on the soft yellow walls, as in an abandoned museum. Rays of sunlight poked through patient rooms. The paint was chipped—on the walls and on the wood-trimmed doorways and windows. But that was its charm. It was relaxed; the photos, the glass cabinets behind the reception desk, the waiting-room chairs, the very walls were all lounging and comfortable rather than standing stiffly at attention. It was a lovely place except for the rush of scuttling nurses, the occasional moan of patients abandoned in the hallways on rusty gurneys, and the Fijian and Indian physicians striding past them with purpose.
The doctor had just left for another appointment, and now Manmohan sat in examination room three, alone. Shirt off and hanging on the back of a chair, he peered down at his stomach, noting without either satisfaction or distaste that it was still relatively flat at forty-four years of age, but no longer firm. The lingering cold circles of the doctor’s stethoscope on his back and chest bothered him. They felt like disconnected parts of his body, like unwelcome strangers touching him too familiarly. Placing his hands on his stomach and chest to warm his skin, he enjoyed the sensation of soft hair between his fingers. The cold circles soon faded.
His arthritis was mild, which was not uncommon at his age. It was not this, however, that troubled him. It was the doctor’s other diagnosis, the Ankylosing Spondylitis that had been discovered in his back. Over time, perhaps in the next ten years, his upper body would be forced forward, the disease leading to the eventual curvature of his spine. He imagined himself an old man with beady eyes that struggled to look up against the downward pull of his body, his forehead etched deeply with wrinkles as though he was perpetually surprised.
He was afraid. To flush this fear out of his system, to let it drain away, he stood, appreciating his full height of six feet, two inches. He momentarily reveled in the beauty and strength of his naked upper body, noting the muscles along his spine that contracted and released with each movement, allowing him to be straight and dignified. He adjusted his trousers before reaching for his shirt, swinging it around over his shoulders with an exaggerated slow whirl, feeling the rotation of his scapulae before stretching his arms through the sleeve holes. He buttoned the shirt, tucked it into his slacks, then picked up his broken watch from the table and put it on, making sure the old leather strap was secure. Leaving the examination room, he trod down the hallway toward the exit, oblivious to the nurse who ducked into a room just ahead of him, and only vaguely aware of the Fijian woman stretched out on a gurney, sweat beaded on her upper lip, her once kinky hair now mutinously lifeless, oppressed by whatever illness had invaded her body.
In the parking lot, he climbed into his truck and sat for a moment in the hot cabin, staring at the electroshock therapy facility across the street where he would receive his preventative treatment. It was a square building, once intended for a schoolhouse but later converted into an extension of the hospital. The sight made him feel stifled in the truck cabin, and he cranked the driver’s side window down. Still, the air did not move. He leaned over to crank down the passenger side window for a cross breeze, relieved by the pressure that released when he opened it. Then he saw, resting in the sun on the bench seat, the latest letter from Vikram.
His brother had gone off to England, writing that Oxford was bitterly cold and that school was often a frustrating challenge. “They do not like Indians at Oxford,” Vikram had said. “They would run me out, but it is because they have trouble admitting that we Indians have more life in us, more color and vitality, perhaps even more intellect.” He wrote that the family was well. Of their father and Satnam, Vikram never said more, and although curious Manmohan never asked. He imagined their lives in India now, Baba Singh sleeping alone, shuffling aimlessly about the village, Satnam working the land while Priya cared for the house, cooking from the clay oven, laundering the clothes in the canal. This was the life of Barapind. There was no other. But it was not their life. They had forced themselves into it, squeezed their existence into circumstances that no longer fit. Manmohan knew there was no way for Vikram to write this.
Faced now with the task of responding to this latest letter, Manmohan suddenly understood why his mother had chosen never to write. The last time he saw her she represented the unruffled strength of motherhood, and she stayed that way in his mind. But the reality was that she had gotten small all alone in that house, had shrunk to a little being and could not bear for her sons to know it. It was the same for him now. He did not want to mention this latest news. In his letters to his father and brothers, he wanted to always be tall.
Firing up the engine, Manmohan pulled out of the hospital parking lot and drove through Suva back home to the mill. He moved slowly, crossing town by means of a more circuitous route, avoiding Victoria Parade. Finally entering his property, the truck lumbering over the wood-plank drive past the diesel tank and petrol pump, he pulled reluctantly into the carport.
Shutting off the ignition, the truck sputtered into silence, and he could hear Mohan’s angry voice echoing across the clearing, as had become normal these past months. Resting his forehead on
the steering wheel, he closed his eyes, futilely covering his ears.
“Shut your mouth!” his son shouted. A woman began crying, and an infant wailed.
Sighing, Manmohan got out of the truck, kicking a pebble and squinting up at the house. Through Mohan’s bedroom window, he saw his daughter-in-law bent over, arms protectively covering her head.
Their marriage had begun in scandal. Raj the sundry shop owner had discovered his daughter Lehna against the back wall of his storage room, her skirt hiked up around her waist, legs locked around Mohan, breasts gripped fiercely in his hands while he bit her neck, his buttocks pumping disgracefully. They had only been missing for five minutes before he found them, but her torn shirt and splintered back had provided enough pleasure for a lifetime of change. There were moments when Manmohan could not put the image of it out of his mind, the flesh and violence of it, their joint pain. He had never loved like that.
He had arranged their marriage shortly after the unfortunate realization that Lehna was with child. He had intended to restore honor to Raj’s house, had hoped that two people so passionately engaged would find happiness together, that this would perhaps revive Mohan’s lost faith. The wedding night, however, had been an angry tussle, furniture knocked over, a broken oil lamp, Lehna’s cut lip. Manmohan understood too late that it had never been love, only loss, only hate. Most afternoons since that day Mohan took a bottle of alcohol to his room, and by nightfall, his voice could be heard across the mill.
Manmohan had tried once to reason with his son before the baby arrived, rushing down the hallway to discover Lehna curled on the bed, sobbing hysterically, shielding her belly.
“Leave it be, Bapu,” Mohan said dangerously, spinning around to face his father. “She is my wife.”
“But look at her,” Manmohan said.
Mohan refused, covering his face, muffling his words when he spoke. “It is not what I wanted. I cannot do it. I did not know she would do this.” He had slammed the bedroom door, leaving Manmohan staring at varnished wood and Lehna screaming within.
