Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

by Anita Rau Badami

  Two weeks went by. Satpal made inquiries in the local temple about Bibi-ji and Pa-ji and, through a complex string of acquaintances, discovered that they were eminently respectable and well liked in Vancouver’s Punjabi community. They were known for their generous hospitality and their heavy involvement with the temple there.

  “I told you,” Satpal announced as he delivered this information to Nimmo at home. “They are good and decent people. God-fearing too, I understand. And here you are, so suspicious!”

  In the days that followed, Satpal was repeatedly able to point out to Nimmo the many people they knew who had allowed their children to be brought up by relatives that were better off, to everyone’s advantage. He argued that the boys were his sons too, and surely he had a right to decide what to do with them as well. Not that he did not love them, he insisted—he did, and therefore he was wisely thinking of their best interests.

  Finally convinced, Nimmo went over to Asha’s house to phone Bibi-ji. Since Asha was in the room eavesdropping shamelessly, Nimmo kept her conversation brief, merely asking Bibi-ji to come over whenever it was convenient. The older woman arrived almost immediately in a flurry of purple clothes and jingling bracelets, her lips outlined in bright pink lipstick. She hugged Nimmo and patted Satpal on the back, deposited another consignment of fruit, sweets and savouries in the kitchen and settled into a chair.

  “I was talking to my Pa-ji,” she began before anyone else could speak. “I told him about my offer and he scolded me. He said you would think that I wanted to buy the child with our money. He said it was wrong of me, and now I feel ashamed. I only want to do everything I can for you, Nimmo. Everything.”

  “No, no, don’t say that,” Satpal said, throwing Nimmo a reproachful glance. “We don’t think badly of you, do we, Nimmo? We have decided to send our Jasbeer with you. But you will please promise to bring him back to us every year during school holidays.”

  “Of course,” Bibi-ji said, her face radiant.

  “It will be a lot of money for you to spend, Bibi-ji, but I don’t know how I could bear to be away from my son …” Nimmo said.

  “Every year,” Bibi-ji promised. “Every year your son will return to you. I will bring him myself.”

  There was much paperwork to be done: legal sponsorship forms to be filed, a passport for Jasbeer, a visa, all kinds of travel details, but Bibi-ji, in a fever of joyous excitement, had no doubt that it would all be accomplished. Pa-ji’s various contacts in government and the bureaucracy were phoned and matters arranged with Bibi-ji energetically directing operations.

  In the middle of this flurry of activity Nimmo gave birth to a baby girl, whom she named Kamal Kaur. She was glad that Jasbeer would be able to spend a few months with his sister before leaving for Canada.

  One evening Satpal told his older son how his future had abruptly been changed. Nimmo, who regretted her decision a little more each day, kept her eyes fixed on the small face, not sure how Jasbeer would react. To her surprise, at first, Jasbeer was proud that he and not his brother had been chosen. He strutted around the house speaking broken English and ordering an awed Pappu around. Bibi-ji took him out alone—just him, and not his brother—a few times, and he seemed pleased to be the focus of attention, delighted with the treats that his newfound great-aunt bought for him, thrilled with the places she took him.

  But as his departure drew near, he began to balk at the thought of leaving his parents and his home. Now, when Bibi-ji sang out his name and asked if he wanted to go to this park or that fair, he shook his head and stuck out his lower lip. No, he did not wish to go anywhere. Because his stomach was aching. Because he had hurt his leg. Just because. And when Nimmo scolded him gently for being so unaccommodating, pushed him into Bibi-ji’s extended arms, allowed him to be crushed against her bosom, Jasbeer grew even more fearful and moody.

  Then the day arrived when all the paperwork was done. Bibi-ji arrived triumphantly with the visa, passport and tickets for the flight to Vancouver. But after she had left for the night, Jasbeer turned his dark, hurt eyes on Nimmo. “Why do I have to go?” he asked. Was he being sent away so that his mother could focus on Pappu and the baby? Was she angry with him? “Why me and not Pappu, Mummy?”

  Because he is younger, putthar, Nimmo wanted to say to the child standing so stiff and accusing before her. He needs me more than you do. But the words would not come. How could she have agreed? Would Jasbeer ever forgive her?

  “Because you love him more than me?” Jasbeer asked in a small voice.

  “That is not true, putthar,” Nimmo said beseechingly. “I love you both equally. Your father and I want you to get the best opportunity in the world, and Bibi-ji will take good care of you.” She reached out to hug Jasbeer, but he burst into tears.

  “Don’t send me away, please, Mummy, please,” he cried. “I promise I will be a good boy. I won’t fight with Pappu.”

  Nimmo held her son close. “Don’t cry, putthar, it is all for your own good,” she consoled, pushing away the doubts that assailed her.

  A week later, at the airport, Jasbeer clung to his mother’s hand while Bibi-ji checked their luggage. Feeling like a criminal, struggling to control her emotions, Nimmo peeled the boy’s small fingers off her own one by one. Wordlessly she kissed his face again and again, and then handed him over to Bibi-ji. She watched Bibi-ji smooth a long strand of hair off Jasbeer’s flushed cheek with a tender palm and she saw him walk reluctantly into the passenger lounge, his sturdy body trotting beside Bibi-ji’s large, brightly coloured form. Before he disappeared into the crowd he gave her a forlorn, backward glance that pierced her to the heart.

  It’s for his own good, she murmured, leaning against Satpal, who stood rigidly beside her. For his own good.

  PART FOUR

  HERE AND THERE

  TWELVE

  EDUCATING JASBEER

  Vancouver

  January 1971

  In the kitchen of her Taj Mahal, Bibi-ji sat at the table, an island of quiet in the sea of sound that filled her home as always. She looked up briefly as Jasbeer stamped into the house and up the stairs.

  “Jassu, have you done your homework, putthar?” she called after him. There was no response. She sighed and returned to the letter she had begun more than an hour earlier.

  Dear Nimmo, Jasbeer is doing much better at school this term. His best friends are Preethi Bhat, the daughter of the woman who gave me your address, and two other children who live close by. I wanted him to include a letter in his own hand to you, in English, so you could see how well he writes. But he says to tell you that he will not write until his handwriting is perfect. He says to tell you that his mummy and daddy deserve only the best.

  She paused. It was not easy to fabricate the fiction that she created every month for Nimmo and Satpal. The truth was that Jasbeer was not doing well at all. He refused to write to his parents, rarely mentioned them. When Bibi-ji tried to read Nimmo’s loving, anxious missives out loud to him, he ran from the room. If she insisted he stay and listen, he stood stiff and silent. He was an angry child and a destructive one. He hated his school and inspired complaining letters from his teachers almost every week. His only real friend was Preethi Bhat. Bibi-ji was consoled by the thought of the active, gregarious little girl who had more or less taken over the business of introducing Jasbeer to her own friends, translating the English-speaking world to him when he had first arrived—though she was younger and just as much a newcomer—and generally watching out for him.

  Bibi-ji had taken Jasbeer back to Delhi a year later, in 1969, as promised, but the visit had not gone well. He fought constantly with his younger brother, kicked his mother, refused to go near his baby sister and, on the sixth day, earned a thrashing from his father. He wanted to return to Vancouver with Bibi-ji and Pa-ji immediately, he said, and threw a tantrum when Nimmo insisted tearfully that he was to stay with them for the rest of the holidays as planned.

  “You are not my mother,” Jasbeer said, his smal
l face intense with spite. “She is.” He pointed to Bibi-ji, who wriggled uneasily in her chair.

  “No, putthar, I am not your mother,” Bibi-ji felt obliged to say, although she was gratified.

  “But I love you,” Jasbeer said. He gave her a disarming look and hugged her as far as his arms would go around her bulk. “I don’t want to stay here with them.”

  Bibi-ji had left him with his family and returned with Pa-ji to their hotel room.

  “Leave him here,” Pa-ji had urged. “We made a mistake taking him from his parents, but it is not too late to correct it.”

  Bibi-ji had maintained an obstinate silence. She didn’t think they had made a mistake. It would work out; this child was hers.

  A few days later, they received a call from Satpal. “Could you please come over? The boy has not eaten anything since you left.”

  As Bibi-ji had rattled back to Nimmo’s house in a taxi, Pa-ji looking worried and not too pleased beside her, she felt quietly vindicated. She got out of the car in front of the modest house that had become as familiar to her as her own, and hurried inside. An unsmiling Nimmo opened the door to her. No sooner had Bibi-ji entered than Jasbeer ran up to her and cried, “Take me back home. I don’t want to stay here.”

  She had looked helplessly at Nimmo and then at Satpal. Nimmo had avoided her eyes, but Bibi-ji knew she was upset.

  “I don’t know why he is behaving like this.” Bibi-ji had spread out her hands. “He was so happy to get on the plane and come home. He told me so himself. Didn’t you, Jassu? And he helped me choose the presents for Pappu, didn’t you?” Bibi-ji turned to Jasbeer, who kicked the wall. “Putthar, is this any way to behave?”

  Nimmo heard the maternal tone in Bibi-ji’s voice and was jealous.

  Pa-ji took Bibi-ji’s hand in his and squeezed it. “Maybe we should leave him here where he belongs,” he said.

  “If that is what you wish.” Bibi-ji looked steadily at Nimmo. “But think, is that what is best for him? Is that what you really want?”

  “What do you expect me to say?” Nimmo demanded, her voice catching.

  Bibi-ji said softly, “I was trying to help, that’s all. But he is yours, nothing can take that away from you. If you want him here, I won’t take him back.”

  “No!” shouted Jasbeer, gripping Bibi-ji’s hand tight. “I want to go with you.”

  She and Pa-ji had returned to Vancouver with Jasbeer a month earlier than planned, promising a silent, distraught Nimmo that they would bring him back the following year.

  But she had not kept her promise. Jasbeer had fallen ill with chickenpox just before they were to leave, so the trip had to be cancelled. She knew she was looking for an excuse she could use this year. She looked down at the letter she had begun writing to Nimmo in response to one that had arrived from her last week.

  “We have not seen our son Jasbeer for over a year now,” Nimmo had written in her neat Punjabi script. Bibi-ji could hear the stiff indignation behind the words. “We wish you to bring him home soon. I am also enclosing a draft for some of the money that we owe you. God willing, we will pay off the rest soon. Yours, Nimmo.”

  She used to write Love, Nimmo or Your affectionate niece, Nimmo, Bibi-ji remembered with a pang.

  The enormous colour television in the living room blared to life, startling her. Lalloo was changing channels fast and, with a brief pause at the news, he stopped at the soap opera of the day, and then Bibi-ji heard the latest instalment of new immigrant arrivals settling back into the sofas and armchairs with a collective sigh. They would be waiting for Lalloo, their cultural and linguistic interpreter, to begin his translation of the antics unfolding before them on the television.

  “The dame in the green nightsuit is in love with the red-haired one’s husband, and the golden-haired one is a vamp,” she heard Lalloo’s voice raised authoritatively. “Like our own Helen-ji. And the other one had a child nobody knows about—an illegitimate child. No, not the blonde, the one with short red hair. And the fat guy is the red-haired dame’s lover. Enh Bibi-ji,” he called. “Why did the blondie leave the fat guy? I am not remembering her name, Sandy or Cecily or something.”

  “The one who looks like Helen?” Bibi-ji thought all soap-opera blondes looked like her favourite Hindi film actress.

  “No, the one who looks like Marilyn Monroe.”

  “She fell in love with somebody else, maybe,” Bibi-ji said absently. She rarely watched the soaps but always seemed to give the correct replies. She reasoned that sooner or later the women would fall in love with somebody else. Bibi-ji had come to the conclusion that these daytime dramas were simply about women who were either in or out of love with different men. They were slippery creatures, like soap—hold them too tight and they would fly out of your hands. That’s why the shows were called soap operas. Nobody could persuade Bibi-ji that her reasoning might be flawed. Soap was the centre of most of the problems of life, as far as she was concerned. Lavender soap in particular. Look at what it had done to her own existence and her sister’s.

  In the kitchen, three women were busy making stacks of parathas. Bibi-ji watched absent-mindedly as two of them squatted on the floor, their knees bent, their chins resting on their knees, their hands spinning as they rolled out the dough into circles and triangles. A third woman stood at the stove slapping one paratha at a time into a hot pan and frying it rapidly. The smoky odour of cooking flour and oil filled the kitchen. Their movements were mesmerizing, their gold bracelets set up a rhythmic chink-chink-chink and gossip bubbled and frothed around the kitchen like a small river.

  The mailbox clattered, and Bibi-ji caught sight of the red-haired mailman—Tom or Bob or something—cutting across her carefully tended lawn. She got to her feet as quickly as she could and slapped an imperious palm against the window. He turned around at the sound, and she waved her arms to tell him to get off the lawn. Giving her a cheeky grin, he continued blithely onward, leaping over one of her flowerbeds, his big boots narrowly missing the heads of her beloved pink roses, before squeezing through the cedar hedge into the neighbour’s house.

  One of the women in the kitchen went out to retrieve the mail and came back with a handful, which she handed to Bibi-ji. She riffled through it quickly, pulled out a letter from among the bills and flyers, and frowned at it. It was from Jasbeer’s school. Again. She opened it unhappily. It seemed to Bibi-ji that the school principal had nothing better to do than send her a stream of complaining letters every second week. They all said more or less the same thing: Dear Mr. and Mrs. Singh, we regret to inform you that your son Jasbeer Singh has been indulging in inappropriate behaviour. We would like to set up a meeting with you in order to discuss this.”

  She tapped the table with her fingertips. Was there something wrong with the school, or was it the way she and Pa-ji were bringing up this boy? Should she perhaps not have taken him away from his mother? Were they perhaps too old to be taking care of a noisy, wilful, angry eleven-year-old boy? Were they too indulgent? Or was there something else: was he teased or bullied at school for the colour of his skin or because he wore his hair in a topknot like all good Sikhs? Should she ask Nimmo whether they could cut his hair—the marker of his Sikh identity—as so many other Sikh parents in their community had done for their sons, so that Jasbeer could blend in?

  Perhaps it was because he did not have enough of a sense of his cultural roots in this western country. No, that was hardly possible, Bibi-ji thought grimly. It was the other way around, more likely. The boy had too much of a sense of history instilled into his head by Pa-ji. Too much of ancient stories of wars and warriors. In her mind’s eye, Bibi-ji saw the long rows of photographs that adorned her husband’s study, the ones he claimed were all his relatives, and she thought of the number of times she had, at Pa-ji’s insistence, told Jasbeer of her own father’s aborted journey on the ship called the Komagata Maru, turned away by this very city. And each time Pa-ji would comment at length on the injustice of the whole episode. Had the
y burdened the boy with an impossible load, a feeling of grievances unresolved? In addition to the dark well of anger that he nourished within himself?

  Truly, she thought, Jasbeer was proving to be a greater handful than she had imagined. She reread the letter slowly. It was indeed the same as the others that had arrived with monotonous regularity. She smacked it down on the table and yelled, “I’m fed up with this!” It felt good to raise her voice.

  In the living room Lalloo leaned over and switched off the television. It wasn’t often that Bibi-ji shouted. The young men stopped talking. The women who had taken over the kitchen stopped stirring and fell silent.

  “What happened, Bi-ji?” Lalloo called, shortening her name affectionately. “Any service I can do for you?”

  “There is a letter,” Bibi-ji began. “Another one. From Jasbeer’s school!”

  Lalloo got up and came into the kitchen. He tutted and shook his head. “You should change his school,” he declared. “Those people are always picking on our Jas.” He had a soft spot for Jasbeer, whose willingness to fling himself into a fight and come out of it bruised and triumphant reminded Lalloo of himself at that age.

  “We have already changed two schools, Lalloo! And he is only eleven years old.” Bibi-ji frowned again. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Why is the boy needing to go to school? Henh? What has school done for him? Look at you, me, Pa-ji—no school-vool, teacher-veacher, but full-time success.” Lalloo raised a satisfied finger. “The world was my textbook, Bibi-ji. When a man has this world to learn from, why he should sit in the classroom and listen to some boring madam going a-b-c-d and one-two-three-four? You don’t want to listen to Lalloo, then at least listen to Churchill, na. What is it he was saying? Open the quotations: I never allowed my schooling to be interfering with my education. Closing the quotations.”

  Lalloo had a particular genius, Bibi-ji thought wryly, for discovering quotes that supported his efforts to eradicate education from society.