The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters

by Balli Kaur Jaswal

  “Come on, you guys,” Jezmeen is saying. “This is ridiculous. She must be loopy or something.”

  “She’s not,” Rajni insists firmly. “She’s in pain but she’s got her senses about her. I don’t think it’s a bad idea.”

  “But we’ll be—”

  “We won’t.”

  “—abetting a suicide.”

  The word hangs in the air like a thick plume of smoke. Rajni crosses her arms over her chest. “And what are we if we stand by and let Mum suffer? I don’t think it’s that easy to decide what’s wrong and right anymore, Jezmeen. There are circumstances . . .”

  “Don’t you want Mum’s suffering to stop?” Shirina asks Jezmeen. “It’s a humane and dignified way to go, if this is what she wants.”

  Jezmeen looks cornered. Her eyes flit back and forth between her sisters and Mum. “Of course I do,” she says. “But this is wrong. It’s not the right way to go about it.”

  “What’s the right way, then?” Rajni asks.

  “Didn’t the doctors say they’d make you as comfortable as possible?”

  “Does she look comfortable?” Rajni retorts. “She’s suffering. There’s only so much they can do when cancer is spreading through a patient’s body. It’s excruciating—they’ll give her enough morphine to stop the pain but that will be the quality of her life: depending on a drug to numb her just enough without killing her.”

  “Jezmeen, please try to understand,” Sita murmurs, but she is half-hearted in her attempt to placate her daughter. The pain is beginning to build again and soon it will be surging through her like an electric current. She braces herself for it by clutching the sheets. All three of her daughters notice this movement.

  “Mum?” Rajni says. She reaches out to stroke Sita’s hand but before she can make contact, Sita flinches. The worst thing somebody can do while she’s anticipating this pain is touch her.

  “Leave me alone,” Sita whispers. “All of you, just go away for a while.” She shuts her eyes and listens to her daughters’ feet shuffling against the linoleum floors. A memory comes to her—little Jezmeen and Shirina creeping around the house in the early hours of a Sunday morning, trying not to wake anybody. Sita would hear the muffled noises and debate whether to get out of bed or simply stay where she was. It was always tempting to stay in bed, especially in those dark days after her husband died and then afterward, when rumors began to circulate. They’re not true, they’re not true, she wanted to scream, but who would hear her? Eventually something, like an invisible string, would draw her out from under the sheets and lead her down the stairs, where Jezmeen and Shirina would be giggling on the sofa or prancing about the kitchen.

  Sita’s memory is interrupted by a short, sharp scream. She knows right away that it is Jezmeen, but she doesn’t open her eyes because the pain is roaring now, and about to shut out all of her senses. She twists and whimpers and presses the call button to summon the nurse. There is the pounding sound of shoes down the hallway but they stop outside her room. Hurry, Sita thinks. Help! She doesn’t know whose assistance she is invoking here—her daughters, the nurses, or God himself. The jewelry case is in her dresser. Jezmeen had shut the drawer as soon as she understood what Sita was asking of her. It is agonizing for Sita to lean toward the dresser and pull open the drawer, but after canceling the call for the nurse, she is able to do it. She touches the case with her fingers, and says a prayer for her daughters.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Rays of morning sun caught the gently rippling water of the sarovar and held it to Rajni’s eyes. Miracle water. She limped toward the bathhouse. Jezmeen and Shirina were still serving but Rajni needed a break. The heat and clamoring noise in the kitchen, just like the one in the gurdwara in Delhi, had become stifling and standing at the sink was making her ankle worse. She told herself that she just wanted to dip her feet into the water for the cool relief. There was no need to hope that the sarovar would take her swelling away and fix her old injury.

  It was only 7 A.M., but women were already lining up outside the bathhouse when Rajni joined them. There was some excited chattering, just like yesterday, but this morning there were many more teenagers. There was a group wearing matching white T-shirts with blue lettering, their long rope-like braids hanging down their backs. One girl shook her head and her braid swung, revealing the title on her T-shirt: Youth Leader: International Sikh Youth Summer Camp. Rajni caught the accents then—some Americans, some Australians, and a few that she could not distinguish, probably from Southeast Asia and Africa.

  The line inched forward. The girl in front of Rajni began to roll up her tracksuit bottoms, revealing her sturdy ankles. Rajni felt the pain throbbing in her own leg. It was starting to travel to her knees and her hip now, signaling that something worse was happening. Of course, of course, she thought about Mum’s pills. They clattered in a metal tin in her mind, even though the jewelry case had soft sides and was silent like the secret Mum wanted them to keep. Rajni looked over her shoulder in the direction of the langar hall, where she had left Jezmeen to deal with the dishes. Did Jezmeen really think she was the only person who suffered from guilt? That it had been easy for Rajni to sit with Mum and look through the brochures for those fancy facilities in Switzerland where terminally ill patients checked in to die? Every conversation had exhausted Rajni. She’d come home to talk to Anil and Kabir and realize that they had gone to bed, their lives so easily continuing without her. On some nights, she’d return home and see the slice of light under Anil’s door and she’d hesitate outside, wanting to knock and say hello but also afraid of being rejected. He was always so eager to get back to his phone, to leave the house.

  Once they stepped into the bathhouse, the noise and excitement of chatter became amplified. Voices bounced across the walls. Rajni’s own silence felt out of place here—everybody else was celebrating but she was alone. She glanced around to search for other solitary women and spotted one older lady methodically peeling off her garments and folding each one—first the tunic, then the salwar. The old lady winced at the piercing noise of the girls’ high-pitched giggles but once she stepped into the water, a look of calm washed over her.

  Rajni rolled up the cuffs of her salwar, knowing that it wasn’t possible to be healed by water. As her feet made contact with the water, she breathed out a sigh nonetheless. It was involuntary—the cooling of her soles after they had been pressed against the hot tiles outside. Rajni inched her way to a wall to keep herself steady as the girls began to pile into the pool. Some were completely unclothed, others had just stripped down to their tunics and were wading across the length of the pool. Rajni’s ankle still ached but the water was distracting her. She shut her eyes and was even able to shut out the voices of the girls. She wanted to block out everything, to see a black canvas of nothingness, but all she could see and hear were Mum, Kabir, and Anil. The three people whose expectations she had spent her entire adult life juggling.

  She didn’t know what overcame her—at one moment, they were arguing in heated whispers, and the next, her hand was clenched in a fist and knocking her sister’s cheek so hard, her head snapped back and nearly hit the wall.

  Why did she do it? Jezmeen had said to her: “You’re crazy if you think this is going to work.” Rajni had replied, “Just think about it, just for a moment. You’ll see how much sense it makes.”

  The water lapped at Rajni’s feet, a ripple created by another stream of pilgrims. These women were not part of the Youth Camp—they had arrived separately and they were older. Completely stripped of their clothes, they heaved their hefty bodies into the water and strode confidently through, creating their own current. One woman submerged herself completely and broke through the surface after what seemed like minutes, although it was probably seconds. She made eye contact with Rajni. It was the briefest contact, but Rajni felt self-conscious immediately about how she was standing so stiffly.

  “Raj.”

  She turned to find Jezmeen standing at the edge of the
pool. “What are you doing?” Jezmeen asked.

  “I just wanted to cool off,” Rajni said. The truth was, her ankle was feeling better. The gentle waves had soothed the swelling and distracted her from the pain. She didn’t want Jezmeen to know this, though.

  Jezmeen began rolling up the cuffs of her salwar as well. As she waded into the water, the elderly woman who had glanced at Rajni looked up and gave her a nod. “You were here yesterday,” the woman said.

  “Yes,” Jezmeen said.

  “Was that your sister with you? The girl who slipped and fell?”

  Jezmeen nodded.

  “She’s okay now?”

  “I think so.”

  The woman rubbed some water over her face and said, “Good. She should take care of herself.”

  “Who is that?” Rajni asked, watching the woman wander off.

  “That’s the woman who helped Shirina up yesterday,” Jezmeen said. “She said something that seemed to spook Shirina.”

  Rajni shrugged. “She seems nice enough. Just watching out for her.”

  Jezmeen bit her lower lip and watched the woman for a while. “I guess so,” she said.

  “Is Shirina still in the kitchen?”

  “Yeah. I told her I was going to the sarovar but she wasn’t interested.” Jezmeen swished her feet in the water a few times. “You know, your ankle still looks a bit swollen.”

  Rajni looked down. “Well, I wasn’t expecting to find a miracle cure here.” She regretted her words instantly, or at least the volume of her voice. A few women looked up sharply. Clearly, everybody else was here for a miracle.

  “I’m just saying that you shouldn’t put too much weight on it.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “Do you think you’ll need to see a doctor or something?”

  The concern in Jezmeen’s voice seemed overwrought. “I’ll be fine,” Rajni said.

  “Because if you need to see a doctor, or . . . I don’t know . . . take it easy over the next few days—”

  “Okay, what’s going on?” Rajni asked irritably.

  “What do you mean?” Jezmeen asked. She was all wide-eyed innocence but Rajni was already able to figure out that Jezmeen was looking for a way out of the next leg of their journey.

  “I plan on continuing with this pilgrimage no matter what,” Rajni informed her.

  Jezmeen swallowed. “Do you know HC Kumar?”

  “Is he an actor?”

  “He’s a director. My agent has set up a meeting with him for tomorrow. In Delhi.”

  “You’re not going to be in Delhi tomorrow. We’re doing a trek to Hemkund Sahib to meditate about Mum and scatter her ashes in a lake,” Rajni said calmly.

  “No, but I was thinking . . . we’ve done most of the pilgrimage already. We’ve connected with each other, we’ve spent time together, and I know I’ve thought about Mum throughout this journey. Is it really necessary for us to do the mountain climb? And, um . . . all bodies of water lead to the same source, so really, if we just scattered her ashes in a river, it would be the same thing in the end, wouldn’t it?”

  Just the thought of that arduous walk intensified the pain in Rajni’s ankle. But they could hire transport, improvise the pilgrimage a little bit. Canceling an entire two days was out of the question. They had to finish what they’d started, or this trip would be another botched effort to bring a resolution to Mum’s existence. Where were they going to find another river? Was Rajni going to have to bring Mum’s ashes back to London and bury them in her backyard?

  “It’s necessary because it’s what we came here to do,” Rajni reminded Jezmeen. “You didn’t come to India to go for auditions.”

  “But Shirina? She’s not coming.”

  “What do you want me to say, Jezmeen? Go ahead? Shirina decided to make her own plans, so you should too?”

  Jezmeen straightened her shoulders. “I’m not asking for permission, I hope you realize that. I can go wherever I want.”

  “Then why are you here?” Rajni asked. “Why try to make it sound like I’d be better off abandoning our plans?”

  “I don’t want this trip to end with us fighting again,” Jezmeen said. “I’m tired of that. It’s not what Mum would have wanted.”

  Rajni snorted. “I think we’re well past the stage of considering what Mum would have wanted, Jezmeen. Do what you want.” She turned around and began to wade out of the water, when to her surprise, Jezmeen caught her by the arm.

  “Rajni, this could change everything for me.” Jezmeen’s eyes were bright with hope. “It’s that important.”

  “So go, then, Jezmeen. You don’t need me telling you what to do.” Who listened to what Rajni wanted anyway? Anil certainly didn’t care. Kabir wasn’t interested. Sometimes she felt like she was underwater while the rest of the world carried on above, oblivious to the fact that she was drowning in expectations and responsibilities.

  A look of anger flashed across Jezmeen’s face. “You know, sometimes you can be so—” She appeared to struggle to find the word she was looking for, and instead let go of Rajni’s arm. With both hands, she drew a square frame around Rajni’s face. “Rajni,” she said triumphantly. “You can be so bloody Rajni that you actually out-Rajni yourself.”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “This passive aggression. You say everything’s okay and your face betrays an entirely different emotion. It’s transparent. Everyone can see that what you say is not what you think.”

  “That’s because when I say how I feel, I get told off for it. Suddenly I’m the uptight one, the one who can’t be flexible or take a joke.” How many times had she noticed work colleagues looking skittishly in her direction before making jokes? “Oh, go ahead, I’m not going to be offended,” she’d say breezily, but her head throbbed from the sound of their laughter after somebody made a comment about female bosses or immigrants running England into the ground.

  “What’s going on with you?” Jezmeen asked. “You’ve been on edge ever since we came to Punjab.”

  “I’m fine,” Rajni said. It was an automatic response. “None of this is easy. Coming here to honor Mum while not wanting to actually think too hard about why we’re here.”

  The water rippled at their feet. The women were wading out of the pool and drying themselves off. Another stream of women entered the bathhouse—tourists from some East Asian country; either Japan or Korea, Rajni decided. Their reverent whispers and tentative steps made Rajni self-conscious about speaking at all, let alone discussing Mum’s suicide in this holy place.

  Jezmeen peered at Rajni. “Do you still think it was the right thing to do?” she asked softly. “Leaving her in the room like that?”

  “We didn’t have a choice. We were asked to leave the hospital right away,” Rajni pointed out. “I was so shocked by our fight that I didn’t even think to go back to Mum. I just wanted to get out of that building and drive home.”

  “Start over the next day,” Jezmeen said. “That’s what I thought would happen. We’d come to the hospital at the same time the next day. The letter, the jewelry case, all of it would be a silly story from the day before.”

  Rajni nodded. What she never expected was for Mum to wait for the lights to go down and the nurses to do their final checks for the evening. She never expected Mum to ask for a tall glass of water to be placed at her bedside, and for the inexperienced nurse to cede to her request despite the fact that most of her fluids were being given intravenously. She could picture it now, almost as clearly as if she had been there—Mum waiting, just to be sure that nobody was around, and then gently reaching over to pull out the jewelry case. She unzipped it and stared at the accumulated pills, hesitating perhaps to say a prayer. Her first few sips were dainty, one pill reserved for each intake of water. Then she became more daring and began popping three, four into her mouth. How many could she swallow? She didn’t want this to go slowly anymore.

  “I didn’t think she’d take the pills either,” R
ajni said. “When I found out, I thought she did it because she was afraid you’d tell the nurses what she was planning to do.”

  Jezmeen’s eyes widened with surprise. “You think it was my fault?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said—”

  “She probably wouldn’t have gone through with it if you hadn’t agreed,” Jezmeen retorted. “She was seeking permission from us, not just telling us to stand guard. It didn’t even matter in the end that we weren’t there.”

  Rajni held up her hand. “I don’t want to argue about this, Jezmeen. It doesn’t matter whose fault it was. Anyway, from Shirina’s outburst on the train, it looks like she thinks Mum took the pills because she didn’t want us to fight anymore.”

  “Why does it have to be anybody’s fault, then?” Jezmeen asked. “Mum died. Whether she died because of us or despite us—it doesn’t matter, does it?”

  Rajni saw Jezmeen’s point but she couldn’t help feeling guilty. In her dreams, she saw herself feeding the pills to Mum while Jezmeen stood behind the locked door of the hospital room, shouting and banging her fists.

  I should have been a better daughter, she wanted to say. All of her efforts to help Mum to put an end to her misery were about making up for another loss many years ago. Jezmeen wouldn’t understand it because she wasn’t there when Rajni and Mum came to India together. She had no idea how different things could have been for her and Shirina if Rajni had just stayed out of trouble.

  Chapter Sixteen

  As you prepare to leave Amritsar, I hope that you girls are feeling strong and ready to support each other on the next stage of the journey. The climb to Hemkund Sahib requires individual resilience, and cooperation. You need to stick together, and support each other more than ever during this final stage.

  Shirina folded the last of her clothes and pressed them neatly into her suitcase. Next were her toiletries, and after that, her shoes. Then the hotel room would be as empty as she found it. Out of habit, she even made the bed. She never understood those people who said that the pleasure of staying in a hotel was leaving the sheets rumpled and having somebody else straighten them for you. Just tucking the corners and plumping the pillows made the whole place look tidier, and she needed that. Her mind was cluttered with information—the driver’s name, the name of the clinic, which she kept on the tip of her tongue, afraid that she’d lose it again. She even had the address memorized—that complex combination of numbers and letters that felt a bit like a secret code, or coordinates on a map.