Darshan

by Amrit Chima

  He hailed a cab and went to the hospital where Dr. Gerard was expecting him.

  “I was sorry to get your call,” the doctor said when Darshan closed the door to his office.

  “I know it’s sudden. I’m very sorry I wasn’t able to give you more notice.”

  “Dr. Levi says you belong here in the lab, drawing blood, interacting with the live patients,” Dr. Gerard said smiling. “Such a waste on the dead, he says. I think he’s right.”

  “He once told me the same thing,” Darshan replied, also smiling. “I will write to him.”

  Dr. Gerard nodded. “Does your sister know?”

  “I left her a note. Please tell her that my parents are waiting for her at home.”

  “How long will you be gone?” the doctor asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Call me when you come back. You are always welcome here.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “I mean it.”

  “It’s good to know,” Darshan said, shaking the doctor’s hand on his way out.

  There was a travel agency down on Geary Street. Darshan had seen the storefront every day since starting work at Kaiser, never really noticing it until now, those faded posters of faraway places, of palaces and mountain pinnacles. The bell sounded as he entered. He sat down with a travel agent, absently noting the smiling family photos on the desk, the glass paperweight containing a fossilized insect, the blue-haired troll doll. The agent offered him several brochures, which Darshan refused, asking for an open-ended plane ticket from San Francisco International to New Delhi where he would catch a train to the Punjab.

  ~ ~ ~

  Darshan made his way through Amritsar in the back of a rickshaw, through Hindustani motorcar traffic jams and past bicyclists weaving precariously in the spaces between cars, tinging their bells. The air perhaps drier, Amritsar was a macrocosm of Suva, the closest he had come to home since he had left Fiji nearly nine years ago: the smell of food stalls; the vivaciously musical chatter; the rich, bright hues of cloth and food; the spice in the air.

  “Twelve rupees,” the rickshaw wallah called back over his shoulder, narrowly avoiding a bicyclist. “No trickery,” he added heatedly.

  “Of course,” Darshan agreed mildly.

  It was a sunny day. Nothing stirred. No wind, no clouds. Only lucidity, a precision of angles and corners. The Golden Temple rose up before them, a brilliant auriferous yellow, its dome sharply lined against the cerulean sky. The rickshaw wallah deposited Darshan near the banks of the surrounding manmade lake where the temple reflected crisply in the mirror-like water. The tiles shone radiantly and with so much reassuring warmth that Darshan’s toes tensed in anticipation of walking barefoot along them, the skin of his soles ready to receive the soothing heat before stepping into the coolness of the lake.

  “Twelve rupees,” he counted, handing them to the driver, adjusting his duffle on his shoulder. The man held his palm out, insistent on a few extra coins. When he received none, he grunted and melted back into traffic.

  The sun only one hour above the horizon, the temple was relatively quiet. Darshan sat cross-legged on the tiles observing the small number of people bathing in the water, pressing their hands together in prayer. Strange to think that Ranjit had died here in a torrent of bullets. It was impossible to imagine now, the chaotic flight of men along these banks, the splatters of blood and heaps of bodies. It had taken great courage to challenge such a tyrannical system of governance, but Darshan suspected that his great uncle had also meant to escape the family, to both lose and find himself in a purpose greater than the Toors, with whom life was often a futile grappling and sputtering for air.

  He lingered for several hours, taking his lunch of garbanzo bean curry and chapatis on a bench, watching as the crowds began to thicken around the temple, pilgrims exiting from the morning service. A Hindu priest with long hair sectioned into braids and dressed only in an orange loincloth sat beside him. “Spirit reading?” he asked, smiling serenely, pushing the braids back behind his shoulders. His bare chest was stained with red powder.

  Darshan placed his palms together to respectfully decline. “Not now, ji.”

  “You are most certainly in need of spiritual advising,” the pundit insisted, holding out his small tray of turmeric paste.

  “It is a strange place for a Hindu priest,” Darshan told him.

  The man nodded with the same serene smile. “I suppose that is true. But it is nonetheless God’s place.”

  Knowing the priest would not leave without a few rupees, Darshan set his food aside. The pundit dipped the tip of his middle finger into the yellow paste and smeared a small circle between Darshan’s eyebrows. He placed the tray on the bench and took Darshan’s hand.

  “You are very discontent,” the pundit observed, then said with a sly twist of his head, “But I admit this is nothing new. In any case, there are always second chances. You have been here before. There is an opportunity for you.”

  Something vaguely familiar alighted deep within Darshan’s mind, reawakening that same chronic dread he had battled to repress since he was ten years old and Baba Singh’s bleary eyes peered intently into his.

  The pundit took a moment to study Darshan’s palm, then cleared his throat. “You had a brother.”

  Darshan shook his head. “I have one.”

  “Perhaps there is no difference,” the man said. “When is not important.”

  “I do not understand,” Darshan said. His fingertips were cold.

  “He will make you understand.”

  “He does not know anything.”

  “He knows everything,” the pundit replied. He bowed and stretched out his hand.

  “Is that all?” Darshan asked, pulling ten rupees from his wallet.

  “There is nothing more,” the pundit replied, taking the money. He gathered his tray, the veins in his arms thick beneath the muscle, and walked toward the lake, his bare feet painted with turmeric, his pace deliberate, supple heel to toe, heel to toe, vanishing into the crowd of Sikh men and women, humming folk songs and accosting no others.

  ~ ~ ~

  Listening to the train’s wheels screeching along the tracks, Darshan perceived Amarpur on the horizon. Behind his head, the warm wind whipped a yellow-aged window curtain against his hair, and the smell of earth and dust brushed against his nose. A charge of anxiety—a sense of wrongdoing, of trespassing—gripped his chest as he thought of his father, who had not spoken of Amarpur or Barapind since before Baba Singh had returned there. Darshan had the impression that something horrible had happened in this place, that family secrets had been buried but not forgotten, that he himself had played a part in it.

  The train slowed as it approached the town, settling to a stop next to a short platform, the engine hissing like doused fire. Amarpur looked much like the deserted gold-mining settlements of California, a single strip of dusty road lined with wood- and tin-roofed buildings. There were few people outside. They glanced dolefully at the train before retreating from the midday sun. Many shops were boarded shut.

  Duffle on his shoulder, Darshan descended the staircase at the end of the platform, appraising the town, disappointed by its lack of vitality. Wiping dirt from his face with a spare shirt, he entered the telegraph office, greeted by the curious and wary stare of a middle-aged Hindu man.

  “Yes?” the man asked, revealing a mouthful of rotten teeth, his gums stained by paan.

  Darshan courteously inclined his head. “I sent a message. My grandfather once lived in this town. I would like to find his home.”

  The young man’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, I received your message. It has been almost five years since his death. No one came.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Not well, but I know it was not proper.”

  “I believe he wanted to be alone,” Darshan told the operator. “He did not explain himself, but he had his reasons.”

  “His brother’s family lives there, in the black
smith shop,” the operator said, pointing down the street. “I told them you would be coming.”

  “Thank you ji,” Darshan replied.

  There was no name on the shop front, but through the hazy window Darshan identified shelves of farming and gardening implements, tools, hammers, boxes of nails, buckets, and cooking utensils. He knocked gently, slowly opening the door. An older woman sitting behind a desk turned to look at him. Her forehead glistened with perspiration in the warm room. Her skin was very brown and far more leathered than Jai’s. She wore a blue salwaar kameez, her chuni lined with pink trim. She pulled the shawl over her hair, rising, confusion in her furrowed brow.

  “Was that today?” she asked. “I thought it was next week’s train.”

  “Sat sri akal, Neena Auntiji,” Darshan said. “I am sorry. I do not want to impose.”

  She smiled kindly, approaching him. “The time slips from me.” Squinting, she touched his face, a tiredness in her skin, in the tense muscles of her shoulders. “We were very glad to hear from you.”

  “I was not sure anyone would be here.”

  She turned toward the stairs. “Gharwala!” she called to her husband. She took Darshan’s bag. “Your grandfather spoke about you. He said you would come. I had almost forgotten. I thought he had just hoped for it.”

  A man descended the stairs. “Sat sri akal,” he said, looking as if he had been slumbering, his turban askew, his clothes wrinkled.

  “Shamsher Uncleji,” Darshan said, bowing his head.

  “Was that this week?” his uncle asked.

  Neena put Darshan’s duffle on a cot at the back of the shop. “Come,” she said then, drawing him toward her desk. She removed paraphernalia from a few spare chairs, dumping it on the floor. “Sit.”

  Shamsher filled a pot with water from a bucket. He set the pot on a small corner stove and shook some tea leaves into it.

  “Where is your father?” Neena asked. “We thought he would have come.”

  “He cannot travel,” he told her apologetically. “And he does not know that I am here.”

  “Is he angry?”

  “I do not believe that is what kept him away.”

  “Yes,” she murmured, sighing. “Your grandfather did not want Satnam or Vikram here either. He was infected by too much pride and darkness, like he was the only one who ever suffered, as though nothing good ever happened. My own father remembered it differently.”

  “This place was his?” Darshan asked, gesturing at the shop, noticing two crossed swords with intricately carved metal hilts hanging above a door at the rear. They were oddly out of character in this sea of tools. The door appeared to have been sealed shut with mortar.

  “Until his death. It once belonged to a man named Yashbir Chand.” She waited then, for some sign of recognition, then blinked sadly, sighing. “It is a shame your father never spoke of him. He was very important to this family.”

  “I am sorry, Auntiji.”

  “And what do you know of Desa, Ranjit, and my father?”

  “I have heard some, but very little.”

  Neena’s chuni dropped, revealing her high forehead and austere grey hair. “I was born later,” she said, “but I know many stories.”

  “Will you tell them to me?” Darshan asked her, smelling cardamom and milk brewing on the stove.

  She paused, seeming to wonder at his sincerity. “Perhaps,” she replied. “We have some time. The train will not come again for a week.”

  That evening, Neena took him upstairs to a cramped one-room apartment. Three charpoys were lined along the far wall, a pipe stove in the corner, and next to it a shelf cluttered with bowls and pots. Neena’s mother, wife of Khushwant Singh Toor, was lying on one of the charpoys, staring unblinkingly up at the ceiling, a cool, wet cloth on her forehead.

  “Bebe,” Neena said gently. “Someone has come to see you.”

  “Who is it?” the old woman asked hoarsely.

  Darshan sat beside her. “Sat sri akal, Simran Auntiji,” he said, speaking softly.

  “Gharwala?” she whispered.

  “No, Bebe,” Neena said, her voice soothing.

  Simran’s eyes sharpened, a fog seeming to lift. “Darshan?” She stared at him a long while. “It is good to finally meet you.”

  “Did you know I would come?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Because he told me. He told all of us. He remembered you very well.” She closed her eyes.

  “She is always so tired,” Neena told him. “She should sleep now.”

  Darshan murmured his agreement, but was unable to move. He stroked Simran’s hair, course and silver with age, and she smiled as though enjoying his touch. She had seen him. She knew him. As he looked up at Neena, who waited patiently, he realized they all knew him.

  But he did not know why.

  ~ ~ ~

  Mornings were different in Barapind village, the quiet more pervasive than in town. It was a sacred silence, the silence of peace and pigment, found in blades of grass and clods of soil, in slumbering creatures not yet awake. The Toor house resided in this tranquility, a monument to an end of things, slowly crumbling in its return to the earth, sagging under its own weight like the skin of an old person hanging on bones.

  Several villagers gathered around inquisitively, regarding Darshan with warmth. A young boy kicked a rock toward him, giggled and ran away. Taking their offered hands Darshan murmured, sat sri akal, sat sri akal.

  “We knew your grandfather,” one of them said. “My grandfather was Onkar Singh. They were very good friends. You must come to us for tea.”

  “Of course, ji,” Darshan replied. “I would like that very much.”

  Pleased, the man sent a girl in search of her mother to make preparations.

  Shamsher indicated the house. “It is not safe,” he said when Darshan put his hand on the door. “You should not go inside. There is nothing left.”

  “I will not be long,” Darshan told him.

  Pieces of plaster crunched under his shoes as he entered the main hall. Above him, a cracked ceiling beam bent downwards. Upstairs, the roof had collapsed. He found an empty burlap sack in the pantry, the cement floor stained the color of brown, red, and gold spices. He paced the main hall for a time, searching, dragging his hand along the walls, touching crevices and jutting nails where pictures had once hung. Finally he squatted in the center of the room, his head in his hands, making one final effort to rouse some feelings of regret, of connection and loss. He thought perhaps he might remember why he had really come here.

  Disappointed, he rose, shutting the door behind him as he went back outside.

  Another villager, breathing hard as if from the exertion of running, wordlessly gave him a bundle bound in a piece of dirty cloth that contained several figurines carved in wood.

  “I had these in my house,” the man said, pity in his eyes. “They were his. I saw him sometimes, speaking to them.”

  Running his fingertips over the rough splintery curves and etched lines of each figurine, a horse and cow, a policeman and farmer, a bullock cart, Darshan suddenly saw the truth of his own life, the many sacrifices he had told himself were necessary, the willing victim he had allowed himself to become. He saw his own future, his decline into old age, the years passing in solitude so that one day he too would be pitied.

  “Do you still believe in God?” he had once asked Elizabeth.

  “Not that one,” she told him. “I have perspective now. I’m smarter. It isn’t possible to learn all that we need in this one life, to earn heaven or hell in only seventy some odd years. It’s ridiculous. It’s beneath us to think so.”

  “Then what do you believe in?”

  “Nothing,” she replied, perhaps too quickly. “Everything.” Exasperated, she had shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I’m trying to figure it out.”

  Darshan turned to the villager. “Please keep these,” he said, rewrapping the figurines. “They
do not belong with me.”

  He sat for tea with Onkar’s family, listening to what he already knew, that Baba Singh had long ago fled the village with promises to come back, and although he had returned in body, in spirit he had not. For some years he had wandered the lanes of Barapind with an expression of horror on his face, speaking to no one, mumbling only the name of his wife.

  ~ ~ ~

  Elizabeth’s ruffled, loose-fitting sundress pressed against her body in the hot wind as she glanced around the New Delhi tarmac, the long line of passengers ahead of her already crowding the entrance to the terminal. As if feeling Darshan’s eyes, she looked up, shielding her face from the sun with a magazine, squinting at him. He waved through the window.

  She entered the terminal, a medium-sized suitcase in her hand. She took her time, walking slowly, and as she stopped before him, she regarded him circumspectly. “I was surprised by your telegram,” she said, releasing the bag and letting it drop heavily to the floor. She pulled a small piece of paper from her purse. “I never expected this.”

  “I didn’t think you would come,” he replied, sitting against the slim, metal edge of the windowsill.

  “After the last time I saw you, Stewart and I weren’t the same. I thought maybe you would come back. I tried calling, but you disappeared.”

  “Everything fell apart.”

  “Do your parents know?”

  He shook his head. “But it doesn’t matter. They will be angry with me in any case.”

  “Were you serious about it?”

  “I would not ask lightly.”

  She took a moment to consider this, creasing the telegram in half, folding it over again. “I thought so,” she finally said. “That’s why I came. But I was married once before, to God. We had rings, meditated on his image. It was very symbolic. As it turned out, He was full of shit.”