The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters

by Balli Kaur Jaswal

  Rajni understood obligations, but Shirina’s lack of remorse felt inexcusable. Look at how she was wolfing down that ice cream. “And what happened today? Jezmeen and I had a lovely time reflecting on Mum’s life by the water, but you went off on your own.”

  “I told you, I was finding Sehaj’s family’s—”

  “I know you were, but that’s the point. Since when did your husband’s family’s needs come before ours?”

  Shirina stared at her. The ice cream was beginning to melt from her spoon. Rajni wanted to hear her say it: Sehaj’s family was better. They were richer, they were more sophisticated, they showed up to the wedding and whisked her away into a life of comfort that she never had, and she was loyal only to them. But Shirina said nothing, and this was even more infuriating because it made Rajni feel petty.

  Jezmeen came bounding up the stairs, waving a pamphlet at them. “We get picked up in an hour,” she said breathlessly. “He’ll stop at a good dinner place on the way back.” She looked at Shirina and then Rajni, whose gazes were locked in a staring contest.

  “I hope you didn’t pay for me, because I’ll be spending the evening in the hotel,” Shirina said. She stood up and left, taking both her ice creams with her.

  Chapter Eleven

  I also want you to experience the familiarity of our ancestral state. You girls are British, yes, but all the previous generations of our family lived in India. It is in your blood—the language, the food, the way things are, these things are not erased just because you grew up elsewhere.

  “It’s about making time for your family, isn’t it? How often do we get to see each other? Never,” Rajni said.

  They had been on the road for twenty minutes and it was Rajni’s third rant about Shirina’s poor participation in the pilgrimage. Jezmeen still didn’t know what to say. She was used to Rajni railing against her; Shirina never got into trouble. It was clear that Rajni’s feelings had been festering for a while.

  “It’s those in-laws of hers,” Rajni said. “She’s like their puppet.”

  “Isn’t that how it always is?” Jezmeen asked. “Especially in the first few years of marriage. She’s got all these people to pay respects to. Surely you had to do the same thing.”

  “I traveled with Kabir. Where’s Sehaj? Why are his family visits encroaching on our time together? It’s bad enough that she left so quickly after Mum’s funeral. She went running back to Sehaj as if spending any more time with us was that unbearable.”

  Maybe it was, Jezmeen thought, remembering Shirina’s outburst on the train yesterday. Although Jezmeen and Rajni had managed to put aside their differences about the funeral arrangements, the resentment over their fight had still hovered over their interactions.

  Rajni wasn’t through with venting. “And you should have seen how she said that thing about being humble when I asked her about her wedding ring. It was a backhanded brag.”

  Jezmeen looked out the window. It wasn’t as enjoyable as she’d thought, being on Rajni’s side. Her mouth was twisted in that expression of distaste like she’d just sucked on a lemon. Fragments of a dream Jezmeen recently had about Shirina floated in her mind. They were talking, but the distance between them became wider as the conversation continued and eventually, one of them hung up.

  They passed a wide expanse of fields dotted with farmhouses and livestock. The highway was coated in golden dust. On the side of the road, there was the occasional canteen or restaurant with plastic outdoor furniture. Away from the city of Amritsar, the sky did seem bluer and less smoggy. Jezmeen could feel the warmth of the afternoon sun on the window, which made her grateful to be in this air-conditioned car. Their driver had given them his card earlier: Tom Hanks, he said his name was. “What’s your real name?” Jezmeen had asked. He shook his head solemnly and told them he wanted to be known as Tom Hanks.

  “Uh, excuse me,” Jezmeen said now in Punjabi, leaning toward the driver’s seat. “Could you pull over at a rest stop in the next ten minutes?” She looked out the window at a filling station with a rusted and gutted car propped up on breeze blocks. A dark and blurry cloud of flies hovered over something in the hollow where a wheel had been. “Maybe a restaurant?”

  The driver nodded. “Tom Hanks will bring you to the cleanest rest stop,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Jezmeen said. “You know, you could really tell us your Punjabi name. We’re not complete foreigners. We can pronounce it.”

  “Tom Hanks,” he said.

  “Tom? Thomas? That’s what your parents named you at birth?” Jezmeen asked.

  “Tom Hanks.”

  “Okay,” Jezmeen said, defeated. She sank back in her seat and glanced at Rajni, who was still fuming. “Raj, maybe Shirina’s just not feeling so well. Travel does different things to people. She might just want to be on her own.”

  “She’s been on her own this whole time,” Rajni pointed out. “Hasn’t she had enough time to rest?”

  The car switched lanes and slowed down as it approached a restaurant: Ravi’s Punjabi Dhaba. “One of the best,” Tom Hanks said with a flourish as he yanked back the hand brake.

  “Good food?” Jezmeen asked. The restaurant was set back behind a fountain and two tents for outdoor seating. Children chased each other between tall potted plants in the front garden.

  “Food is not bad. Seven-out-of-ten rating, if you ask me. Toilets, however, are excellent,” Tom Hanks said.

  “That’s all right with us,” Jezmeen said.

  Tom Hanks was not exaggerating about the bathrooms. They were spotless, with hand-soap dispensers and gleaming sinks. The lock on the door clicked right into place, a luxury that Jezmeen had already started to think she could do without, considering the times she had used toilets with flimsy or nonexistent locks in the temple and on the train from Delhi. “Our driver sure knows how to keep his customers happy,” Jezmeen remarked to Rajni at the sinks as they both washed their hands.

  “He probably carts around people like us all the time,” Rajni said.

  “I wonder what that’s like,” Jezmeen said. “He’s aware that we have different standards but somewhere inside he must be thinking that we’re a bunch of prats.”

  “We haven’t been so bad,” Rajni protested. “I only gasped that one time when he overtook that bullock because I thought we were going to run the poor animal off the road.”

  “Not that,” Jezmeen said. “Don’t you think about it sometimes? About how different our lives would be if we had grown up here? We wouldn’t be tourists. We’d be . . . I don’t know. I’d be married off to some eligible guy in the village by now. If you find a husband with lots of land, he’s a catch, isn’t he? I’d like to think I would have been matched with a man with a few acres to his name.” She fluffed her hair in the mirror and fluttered her eyes at her own reflection.

  Rajni didn’t play along with the joke. Her expression hardened, a look Jezmeen recognized from earlier when they were at the Golden Temple. Something was upsetting her about this trip and it was more than Mum’s death, more than Shirina’s attitude. “Raj, are you all right?”

  “Hmm? Yeah, fine,” Rajni said. She became busy all of a sudden with drying her hands. The automatic dryer roared and drowned out all of Jezmeen’s thoughts.

  As they left the restaurant, a busboy dressed smartly in a white and gold-trimmed kurta came running up to them. “Madam, please, your bill.”

  “Bill?” Jezmeen asked. “You’re charging us for using the toilets?”

  The busboy shook the bill at Jezmeen and she had a look. One aloo paratha, one small cup of chai. Tom Hanks was sitting at a table near the fountain, taking a luxurious sip. “That’s fine,” Jezmeen said. She paid the bill and they returned to wait in the car while he finished his meal. The air-conditioning was left on at full blast and a bhangra beat pulsed from the stereo speakers. When Tom Hanks returned, he thanked Jezmeen and Rajni for the meal.

  “Not at all,” Jezmeen said.

  “It would have been nice if
he’d asked, though,” Rajni pointed out in a whisper.

  “It’s not a big deal,” Jezmeen whispered back. She could feel herself bristling again at Rajni’s constant suspicion of Indian people. How did she live her life, thinking that everybody was out to rip her off?

  “Is he going to do that at every rest stop, then?” Rajni asked. “Order himself a meal and charge it to us?”

  “So what if he does?” Jezmeen asked. “He probably had to anyway, because the restaurant wouldn’t let us use their toilets if we weren’t customers.”

  Rajni was dissatisfied with this response, but she dropped the subject, leaving Jezmeen to focus on the landscape. Along the edges of the dual roadway, large patches of farmland were fronted by sprawling gated properties, the types of homes that she’d mostly seen in photographs that aunties and uncles would pass around at family functions. “This is the house we built, cost a fraction of a flat here in London,” they’d say with equal measures of pride and scorn, as if the Indian economy should really know better. The houses were furnished with Italian leather sofas that ran along the living room’s edges, and the kitchens were taken straight from the catalogs, down to the crockery sets and the “Home Sweet Home” embroidered onto tea towels. They were English homes in India, unlike their distinctly Indian homes in England. Everywhere people went, they had to remind themselves that they were somebody else. The houses sat empty all year until the summer visits, when some servants could be hired to grease the hinges and dust off the counters, and the families would live in the luxury that they had left this country to afford.

  “We still have family in Punjab, don’t we?” Jezmeen asked. “On Dad’s land?” She only had a vague understanding of where Dad’s ancestral village was. Mum had brushed off her questions when she tried to ask about it for a history project for school. “Choose a different topic,” Mum replied. “So many things have happened in the history of the world, and you want to talk about some farm in India.” Jezmeen was disappointed. From the way Mum dismissed her question, it was clear that Dad never owned sprawling acres of land in India like the patriarch of a Hindi drama that Jezmeen had been following at the time.

  “Did you ever get to see Dad’s village?” she asked Rajni. There it was again, Rajni clenching her jaw. It seemed that nothing Jezmeen said was right.

  “Not sure where it is,” Rajni said.

  It wouldn’t be too difficult to find, Jezmeen thought. They just needed to contact one of those aunties or uncles in England—they weren’t blood relatives, but they would be able to provide a village name or a phone number. “We probably won’t get another chance to see it again,” Jezmeen said.

  “It’s really not something Mum would want us to do,” Rajni reminded her.

  “Why not?”

  Rajni turned to face her. “Mum expressly didn’t mention any of Dad’s relatives in her letter. Why would we go and seek them out, then?”

  “I don’t understand that,” Jezmeen said. “Did they fall out?” Jezmeen remembered that brother of Dad’s being unpleasant when he visited them all those years ago. Sensing the tension in the house, she had asked Rajni when her uncle would leave, but she didn’t know what happened. It was all between the adults and Rajni, who was a teenager then and understood more than she did.

  “I guess so,” Rajni said.

  “What falling-out could be so terrible that Mum wouldn’t want us speaking to Dad’s family?”

  “Only Mum knows the answer to that question,” Rajni said, but Jezmeen didn’t buy it. Rajni knew something, even though she acted as if she didn’t. The trip that Rajni got to take here as a teenager while Jezmeen and Shirina were left in Auntie Roopi’s care—she had known Dad’s family, dined with them, seen them.

  “They’re the only family we have left,” Jezmeen pressed. “Wouldn’t they welcome us? Let bygones be bygones and all that?”

  “It’s probably not that simple,” Rajni said.

  Jezmeen pictured herself venturing through the villages with a crumpled piece of paper bearing a penciled map and a scribbled address. She’d knock on doors and eventually come upon her ancestral home. They’d embrace her; they’d have to, after she came all this way and seemingly traveled across time. While she sat and exchanged stories over tea with her long-lost aunts and uncles, a withered old woman would appear, bearing Jezmeen’s very features beneath layers of wrinkles. “You look like her,” the others would say. And Jezmeen would have a reference point, a prototype of sorts. “I take after my paternal great-aunt,” she would tell people. “I have her eyes. People say she had a sense of theatrics as well, but the dementia has taken that away now.” It was a story that gave Jezmeen roots; it would be harder to keep criticizing her as shallow and callous if she had an ancestral connection.

  Jezmeen was rudely jolted from her reverie as the car swerved to avoid grazing another car that had wandered into its lane. She grabbed the sides of the passenger seat in front of her. The other car, a gleaming black minivan, was racing ahead now.

  “Mother fucker,” Tom Hanks muttered. He glanced at Jezmeen and Rajni in the rearview mirror and gave them an apologetic smile. Then his foot hit the accelerator so hard, Jezmeen and Rajni were thrown back against their seats.

  “What are you doing?” Rajni asked, panicking.

  “Madam, that driver needs to learn a lesson,” Tom Hanks said.

  “No, he doesn’t,” Jezmeen said firmly. “We don’t want to get in an accident—just ignore him, please.”

  “You don’t understand, madam,” Tom Hanks said, still focused on the car. “He did it on purpose.”

  “I know we all take these road incidents personally, but—” Before Jezmeen could finish placating Tom Hanks, he made a sharp and sudden swing into the black van’s lane. Rajni let out a long, operatic shriek.

  “STOP IT! STOP IT NOW!” Rajni shouted. Jezmeen’s words were frozen in her throat. “TOM HANKS, YOU ARE GOING TO GET US ALL KILLED!”

  The car slowed down. Jezmeen looked behind her and saw that the black van was meekly following behind now, having learned its lesson. “Why did you have to do that?” she asked. “It was very dangerous.”

  Tom Hanks did not reply. His lips were set in a grim line and his eyes stared straight ahead. “These people think they own the roads,” he finally said.

  “Which people?” Jezmeen asked.

  He didn’t answer her question. People like us? she wondered. People who came back to India from abroad and pulled up to their empty mansions in their fancy cars and treated everybody like they were servants? People who could afford drivers to transport them to be entertained by a show of power between two countries that had actually cost lives and spilled blood? Jezmeen looked over at Rajni. Worry lines had appeared on her forehead. She could tell they were thinking the same thing.

  Nothing had changed. Rajni drew this conclusion as she stepped out of the van and her feet hit the dusty ground beneath her. Unpaved and rocky, bits of gravel flicked her ankles and rolled into her sandals as she and Jezmeen walked away from this dirt-road car park.

  “Take my card,” Tom Hanks told them. “In case you can’t find me on the way back.”

  “You’ll be in this same spot, though, right?” Rajni asked. She heard the sternness in her own voice and she didn’t care. He had nearly killed them just now, so she felt justified in making everything sound like a preemptive reprimand.

  “I’ll be here, madam,” he said. “Don’t worry. But there are lots of cars and it gets confusing when everybody is wandering around afterward. You don’t want to get into the wrong car.”

  No, she certainly didn’t. All around her, drivers leaned against their vehicles, their eyes following the tourists. Rajni took the card and tucked it into her purse. It was suddenly the most important thing she owned.

  She felt a flash of cold on her hand and looked down to see a boy with a palette of paints and a brush. In one quick stroke, he had given her a streak of orange, one third of the colors needed to create an In
dian flag. “I don’t want this,” she informed him. “No, thank you.”

  “Oh, come on, Raj,” Jezmeen said. “It’s less than fifty pence and it’s fun.” She was squatting next to another boy and tucking her hair behind her ear, letting him paint the flag on her cheek.

  “You look like you’re at a carnival,” Rajni said when Jezmeen’s face painting was finished.

  “It feels like a carnival,” Jezmeen remarked. Popcorn vendors and drinks carts were scattered along the crooked boundary between the car park and the wide main road. The little boy with the paintbrush persisted, following Rajni and Jezmeen and repeating his prices. When he started humming the Indian national anthem Rajni decided to give up.

  “Just a small one,” she said, putting out her hand. “It’ll wash off right away, yes?”

  “Of course,” the boy said. With a flourish, he swept the brush across her hand in three confident strokes: orange, white, green. They were wavy, as if the flag were caught in the wind.

  She paid him and they continued, following the crowds toward the main security entrance. Here, they were separated by gender—“Men here, women there,” a guard called out, waving his arms to indicate each designated line. Everybody was patted down but the women were allowed to have it done in a curtained booth, by a female guard. When Rajni’s turn came, she watched the guard poke her flashlight in her purse and raised her arms to let her feel for weapons. She remembered the story of an elderly relative who came to London from Punjab, her first-ever visit on an airplane. During the routine airport security pat-down, she thought they were hugging her farewell.