by Bali Rai
‘What’s up?’ he said, as I tried not to look him in the eye.
‘Nothing . . .’
‘You sure?’ he asked, doing this thing where he raises an eyebrow, something he does whenever he’s genuinely concerned.
‘Yeah . . . I think I’d better get going though . . . I need to meet Nat at her house.’
‘Ten more minutes,’ said Sukh, tracing an index finger gently down the bridge of my nose and over my lips.
I grabbed his hand and pulled it away, looking at him. ‘So you’d still love me if I was old and grey and smelled?’ I teased.
‘Dunno ’bout the smelly bit. Nothing about being old that says you can’t have a shower.’
‘Good point – but you’d still love me . . . ?’
I looked right into his eyes and he didn’t even flinch, holding my gaze as he spoke.
‘No matter what happens – I’m always gonna love you.’
I took in what he’d said for a few moments and then I grinned. ‘You know I’m taping this conversation. It’s gonna be up for sale tomorrow – to all your mates. Imagine what they’re gonna say about you and your soppy—’
Only I didn’t finish because Sukh grinned and then bit me somewhere very rude . . .
I got in after eight that night and my mum was waiting for me. I put my bag down in the hallway and walked into the kitchen, which was split into two, a dining area and the main kitchen. My mum was sitting at the table, and when I walked in she gave me a filthy look.
‘Where’ve you come from?’ she asked in Punjabi, her tone stern.
‘Natalie’s,’ I said without thinking. If I had thought about it I would have made up someone with a Punjabi name.
‘Someone saw you in town today,’ she said quietly.
My heart sank. I looked away and then back at my mum. My mind was racing. What was I going to say? I started to get really scared.
‘Well?’
I walked over to the fridge, trying to stay cool and calm. ‘I wasn’t in town,’ I lied, taking out a carton of apple juice.
‘Someone saw you, Rani . . .’
I took a glass from the cupboard and poured myself a drink. ‘They can’t have,’ I told her. ‘I was at school and then I went to Natalie’s. I even rang Dad to tell him.’
‘So the person that said they saw you in town, with a boy – they were wrong, were they?’
I walked over to my mum and sat down. ‘What do you want me to say?’ I asked her. ‘That I was in town when I wasn’t?’
‘I want you to tell me the truth,’ replied my mum, looking me in the eye.
‘I was at Nat’s house. Why don’t you ring her mum and ask?’
‘She’ll just take your side – you know what these goreeh women are like.’
I bit my lip to keep from shouting at her. ‘Where’s Dad?’ I asked, looking away.
‘In the living room.’
‘Well go and ask him,’ I said, my voice rising slightly.
‘I’m asking you, and don’t raise your voice to me—’
‘Oh for f—’
My dad walked in and saved me from getting a slap. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked my mum.
‘Nothing . . .’ she lied.
‘Mum says that someone saw me in town today – with a boy,’ I told him, hoping that he would take my side and get angry at whoever was spreading rumours about his little girl. My gamble worked because he was slightly drunk and he just snorted.
‘They must have seen someone else’s girl,’ he said, ‘because my girl was at her friend’s house studying.’
‘They were sure it was her . . .’ continued my mum as my heart came close to giving way.
‘Who?’ asked my dad, raising his voice. ‘You tell me who said that and I’ll tear out her hair.’
‘A woman from the gurudwara,’ admitted my mum. ‘She rang earlier. She was on the bus and saw Rani holding hands with a boy.’
‘Is this true?’ my dad asked me.
I gulped and then turned on the acting skills I had developed over the years to deal with my backward parents. ‘Who you going to believe?’ I asked. ‘Some woman from the gurudwara or your own daughter?’ I had tears in my eyes.
‘Beteh, don’t cry – it may just have been a mistake,’ said my dad, putting his hand on my shoulder.
‘No! It’s just some interfering old hag! Causing trouble because she ain’t got nothing better to do . . .’
My dad turned to my mum. ‘See?’ he said to her. ‘You think that our girl would do such things? Don’t you think she knows? If I ever found out that she was doing the dirty things that goreeh girls do, she knows that I would kill her and then kill myself.’
He was looking at me by the time he’d finished his sentence and my heart was beating really fast. I was scared of his threat because I knew that it was real. My fake tears were joined by real ones as I took in what he had said.
‘Go on,’ he said to me. ‘Go to your room and wipe your face.’
I stood up.
‘And remember – I believe you. But if I ever find out that you are lying . . .’
I looked right into his face.
‘ . . . I will throw you out into the streets like a dog.’
I turned and ran upstairs to my room, locking the door, still crying. Putting on a CD, really loud, I lay down on my bed. After two or three songs I picked up my mobile and rang Natalie, my dad’s threat ringing in my head.
RANI
I WAS EXCITED, and apprehensive too, about meeting Sukh’s sister. Parvy sounded like the kind of woman I wanted to be. Independent and successful. Not like a lot of Punjabi girls I knew who, like me, had to hide what they did under a veil of secrets and lies. Maybe it’s a fault of mine, but I always hope that the new people I meet will like me. I go to great lengths to be nice to them, laugh at their jokes, smile brightly, that sort of thing. Usually this means that I don’t end up being my real self, which is probably wrong of me. I’d told all of this to Sukh, hoping that he’d give me some pointers about his sister and what she was like, but Sukh just smiled and told me to be myself.
‘She’ll like you, Rani,’ he said as we were walking through town to her flat.
She’d been back in the country for a few days and I was nervous as anything, what with trying to keep an eye out for snooping auntie-jis who might tell my mum that they’d seen me and attempting to put a brave face on my apprehension.
‘How do you know she’ll like me? What if she doesn’t think I’m good enough for you or something?’ I said, as we ran across a busy road to avoid being mown down by a bus.
‘I’ve told her all about you . . . she said – Watch the bus! – she said that you sound lovely.’
‘Yeah, but she might not think that I’m lovely when we meet,’ I moaned.
Sukh just ignored me and five minutes later we were standing outside Parvy’s door. I’d been there countless times in the previous few months but that didn’t help. I had butterflies and my mouth was dry. I was really nervous – so nervous that I felt like puking. Sukh got out his keys and started to unlock the door.
I followed him in, the nerves coming back even stronger. I mean, Parvy obviously meant a lot to Sukh and I’d never been in this kind of situation. The way he’d described her made her sound really great. I just hoped she would like me . . .
‘In here, Sukh,’ shouted his sister from the living room, where some R & B CD was playing.
We went through the door and Parvy stood up to greet us. She was tall and fair, with long, straight hair, and wore bootcut jeans, Nike trainers and a little red T-shirt with a henna motif. She was stunning. Instinctively I touched my face and straightened my clothes before smiling at her. She smiled back, her eyes studying my features.
‘Parv – this is Rani,’ introduced Sukh. ‘Rani Sandhu.’
‘Hi!’ I said, all chirpy, likeable girl, smiling even wider. I was doing it again. Please like me . . . please like me . . .
Parvy looked at
Sukh and then at me and then back to her brother. ‘What was your surname again, Rani?’ she asked, in a friendly voice that disguised what a strange question it was.
I smiled back anyway. ‘Sandhu,’ I told her.
She looked at Sukh as though something was wrong. I straightened my clothes again. Touched my nose and hair. Was something wrong? Did I look silly? Had I said something wrong?
‘Your old man – your dad – what does he do . . . ?’ she asked gently.
I was puzzled now and just stared at her. What did my dad—?
‘He owns a factory and some shops – hosiery and that, Parv,’ Sukh interjected, replying for me.
Parvy sat down and swallowed. She looked at Sukh. Looked at me. Looked at her hands. Then she turned to me and tried to smile. But it just didn’t happen. I felt like a child in the middle of a supermarket suddenly unsure of where her mum was. Lost. Confused.
‘Bloody hell . . .’ she said, looking at me.
‘Parvy?’ Sukh was glaring at his sister. ‘Are you gonna tell us why you’re acting so funny?’
I looked at them both and felt tears welling in my eyes. She didn’t like me. I hadn’t even had a chance to sit down and she didn’t like me . . .
‘I think I should go,’ I said, close to tears. Why was she being such a cow to me?
‘No,’ said Parvy, looking at me. ‘It’s not you, Rani – honestly. It’s just . . .’
She looked away again and then asked me another strange question. ‘Your family – they’re from Moranwali originally, aren’t they?’
I told her they were but wondered what that had to do with anything. I wanted to get out of her flat. Run away and never go back there again. I couldn’t understand why she was—
‘You better have a fucking good reason for upsetting Rani,’ said Sukh to his sister, glaring at her.
‘Please don’t argue because of me,’ I said feebly. ‘I’ll go . . .’
Parvy got up and walked over to me. She put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how to tell you this—’
‘Tell us what, Parv?’ asked Sukh, getting angry.
‘I’m sorry but there is something you should both know,’ she said, taking my hand and smiling again, only with a hint of sadness this time.
‘Sit down,’ she told me softly. ‘This could take a while.’
MORANWALI, PUNJAB
EARLY 1960s
IN A SQUARE of disused land to the south of the village of Moranwali, Mohinder Sandhu and Resham Bains stood by the weathered stone wall of a well, peering down into the darkness, telling each other stories as the burning sun fell in the sky like an orange disc and the late-afternoon breeze cooled their perspiring brows.
‘There is a snake,’ Resham told his best friend. ‘Down there.’
Mohinder tried to peer harder into the gloom as if, by some magical twist of fate, the snake might appear from the depths.
‘It is as long as a summer day and as black as night,’ Resham continued.
Mohinder looked up at his friend. ‘My father has told me all of this,’ he said dismissively. After all, who didn’t know about the snake? It was the talk of the village. Of the whole shire.
Resham looked annoyed. ‘Did your father tell you that the snake appeared when the goreh first came with their red uniforms and their guns?’
‘No,’ admitted Mohinder.
‘Well then, bhai-ji – shut up and listen to my story.’
Mohinder continued to look down into the darkness of the well shaft, wondering how long the snake might be if its length matched that of a summer’s day. As long as him perhaps. As long as the road that led to Banga, the nearest town, maybe. And if it really was as black as night then how could anyone see it, down there in the gloom?
‘The snake stayed after we threw the engrezi out of our land, to act as a warning to us to be good people.’
‘And the people who do bad things fall down into the well?’ asked Mohinder.
Resham swore at his friend. ‘If you know the story, why did you let me tell it to you again?’ he asked.
‘Because you wanted to, bhai-ji,’ answered Mohinder.
Resham peered into the void. ‘Those who commit sins and steal and kill – they always seem to find their way to this place.’
‘Is it some kind of jaddu – like magic?’ wondered Mohinder aloud.
‘Yes, bhai. You remember, last year, when Mohan Singh, from the next gully, ruined the izzat of Darshan Singh’s wife.’
Mohinder smiled. ‘Bhai, I saw them out by the gurudwara – rutting like water buffalo. Darshan Singh’s wife was bent over a plough—’
Resham cut his friend’s recollection short. ‘Well – they disappeared. No one knows what happened to them but it’s obvious to me.’
‘What?’ asked Mohinder, already aware of the answer. It was a story that Resham told every time they came out to the disused well.
‘They were drawn to the well. They fell in,’ he said in a whisper.
‘And the snake ate them?’
‘Ki pattah?’ said Resham. Who knows? In fact, who really knew if there was a snake down there at all?
‘That’s what my father tells me too,’ confirmed Mohinder. ‘So it must be true.’
The two friends stood for a while longer, peering down into the snake’s lair, wondering if the well really was magic, and whether it really had taken the lives of Mohan Singh and that whore of a wife of Darshan Singh.
Mohinder and Resham made their way back to the village, along a dusty dirt track and through fields of corn, passing weary neighbours and friends along the way. The sun was low in the sky now and dusk beginning to fall. They passed a spinney, bordered on all sides by fields. A rustling sound came from the clump of trees, and then Kulwant Sandhu, the younger sister of Mohinder, emerged, her beautiful features disturbed, her eyes downcast as soon as she saw her brother and his friend.
‘Kulwant – where have you come from?’ asked Mohinder.
‘Bhai-ji – I was delivering tea to our father, out in the fields, and as I was returning to the village I saw something go into the trees,’ she said, not looking up and therefore failing to see the longing in the eyes of Resham Bains as he gazed at her golden hair and milky skin.
‘What did you see that made you go in there?’ asked her brother, nodding towards the spinney.
‘It was a bird,’ lied Kulwant. ‘It had injured its wing. But when I followed, it disappeared.’
Mohinder smiled and then took his youngest sister by the arm. ‘You mustn’t go into such places by yourself,’ he told her. ‘People have a habit of making up tales about young girls who do such things.’
‘Yes, bhai-ji,’ replied Kulwant. ‘It won’t happen again.’
‘Come, favourite sister, let’s walk home together,’ suggested Mohinder.
Resham waited a moment for the brother and sister to walk on, enchanted by the way Kulwant’s hips moved under her salwaar, so that her buttocks swayed slowly. The way her rounded and full breasts rose and fell under her kameez, with the lightness of her breathing. He felt a warming within himself and smiled. His friend’s sister was the most beautiful girl in the village, truly an angel from Heaven. Even her voice, melodic and childlike, caused his heart to race. Perhaps when his time came, for he was still only sixteen, Resham’s father would choose Kulwant Sandhu for him. After all, she was only a year younger than he, the same age as his brother, Billah. The possibility that they might marry Kulwant was the hope that kept many a young man in the village awake during the night.
In the midst of the trees Billah Bains watched his brother and Mohinder Sandhu walk on, leading his love home. He breathed easier now, the fear of being caught out with his beloved gone. He sat on a tree stump and put a hand to his chest, just over his heart, and heard it thumping as it pumped blood around his body. Racing away. He smiled to himself and began again the long, lonely vigil that he endured each time he was parted from her. Who knew if it was to be
an hour, a day or a week before they touched each other again, felt each other’s breath, smelled each other’s scent. As he sat he realized that there was but one joy in parting from his jaan, his life, and that was the pure and overwhelming delight in rediscovering her touch, her taste, her smell.
He waited for a while longer, cooled by the soft breeze, before leaving his hiding place and heading for home. As he followed the path beaten a while earlier by his love, he looked up into the darkening sky, streaked as it was with bands of cobalt and midnight, and saw the stars begin to open their eyes and look down upon the Earth. He knew the star that he was looking for, had watched it every night as a child. It was his star, his guide, his light. And now it was theirs. His and his beloved’s. A celestial charm which embodied their love and their passion and their fated union. As darkness chased the light of day away, he weaved and wandered his way home, entering the courtyard moments after his father.
‘Where have you come from?’ shouted Gulbir Bains, breaking into Billah’s dreamy imaginings like a bullock through ears of corn.
‘I fell asleep,’ Billah told his father.
‘Asleep? Salaah bhen chord! Are you man or a woman?’ swore Gulbir, wondering what was wrong with his youngest son. What godforsaken affliction affected him that did not affect his brothers, Tarlochan, Juggy and Resham.
Later, as the family gathered to eat in the flickering light of oil lamps, and the moths fluttered and the insects buzzed, Billah sat by himself, barely touching the saag and maakhi di roti before him, dreaming of the day when he would be able to spend all his time with the girl he loved. As Billah sat and smiled to himself, his brother Resham wondered what was wrong with his younger sibling. Billah had been dead to the real world for a couple of months now, so distant and often wearing a look of bewilderment when spoken to. Always staring out at the Heavens as night fell and seemingly incapable of helping with the crops and animals. And very occasionally smiling to himself like a man possessed . . .
Kulwant looked up from her chores and saw the local priest walking towards her. Gianni-ji, as he was known throughout the village, smiled as he caught her eye, his short, stout frame weighed down by the mass that comes with healthy appetite and hours spent sitting, reciting stanzas first uttered by the gurus. An affable, constantly smiling man, Gianni-ji greeted Kulwant as if she were his own and placed a paternal hand on her head.
