Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

by Anita Rau Badami

  The other policeman shrugged. “I am on duty only from ten o’clock.” And he turned away.

  Satpal started to run. Not a single shop on the street was open. A few had been vandalized. He turned into a gully and knew instantly that he had made a mistake. There was nobody on the narrow street that ran between stinking drains and the backs of buildings, the walls dirty with graffiti and film posters. And there was no exit.

  He turned to face the men. “I have children, I have a wife,” he pleaded, looking at the blank, implacable faces of his attackers. “I voted for Indira-ji. Please.” He folded his palms and fell to his knees. “I didn’t do anything, brothers, I didn’t do anything.”

  A middle-aged man in a pale green kurta laughed. “Hey, look at this brave lady-killer on his knees! And these bastards call themselves lions! Does a lion grovel like this?”

  “Let’s see what he keeps inside his turban. Definitely not brains!” remarked another of them. “Hello, Sardar-ji, remove your pagdi!”

  “Please let me go. You can take all the money I have if you want,” Satpal begged. He scrabbled inside the pocket of his trousers and drew out a roll of notes. “Here, here.”

  “The bastard is paying us bribes,” the first man said indignantly. He took the money and pocketed it. He grinned. “Evidence of bribery.” He turned earnestly to the others. “Do you think Indira-ji had time to bribe those fuckers before they shot her? Hanh? Hanh?” He jammed the iron rod under Satpal’s turban and flipped it back hard, dislodging the carefully coiled blue cloth to reveal the knot of grey hair neatly braided and bunched with a rubber band. “Open your hair, sardar-ji!” He shoved the rod against Satpal’s chest, forcing Satpal to fall back onto his heels. “Let’s see how long you have grown it, eating the salt of this country.”

  Silently Satpal uncoiled his hair and waited trembling to see what further indignities they would inflict on him before they killed him. He wished he had had the time to phone Nimmo again. He thought of her as he had last seen her, standing in the sunlight, leaning against the door of their home. He thought of the red parandhi she wore at the end of her braid when she wanted to dress up. He remembered the handprints on the wall of their little house, the ones she would never let him paint over.

  He knelt while one of the men poured kerosene over his head, the acrid smell making him dizzy and nauseous. One man dropped a car tire over his head and jammed it about his shoulders, immobilizing his arms. Another lit a match to his streaming hair, wet with kerosene. The flames ate into his scalp, crept like a dreadful river down his face, licked at his eyebrows, his eyelashes. The heat burned his eyes and his last thought was that he could not even weep. He could not even weep.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  BIBI-JI

  Vancouver

  November 1984

  On Main Street, there was no other news that mattered for weeks. Not the fact that a lantern-jawed man named Brian Mulroney had replaced the suave Pierre Trudeau as Canada’s prime minister, nor the fact that in the United States Ronald Reagan had just won a second term as president.

  All that occupied the Indian community in Vancouver was the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the resulting murders of innocent Sikhs. Horror piled on horror.

  On November 10th, the phone rang in the Taj Mahal and Bibi-ji answered. It was Leela. “Is Jasbeer’s family okay?” she asked. “Your niece Nimmo? I heard of the terrible things that happened in Delhi, Bibi-ji. Monstrous. I’ve been worrying.”

  “No news, Leela.” And Bibi-ji hung up. Over the next few days, she was increasingly conscious that the tension between the Sikhs and the rest of the Indian community, already high after the invasion of the Golden Temple, was now close to exploding. There were insults traded by both sides, subtle and overt. Fireworks were let off and sweets distributed on Main Street to celebrate the death of Mrs. Gandhi. Crowds of Sikhs disrupted traffic in the downtown area in front of the Indian High Commission on Howe Street, screaming fury at the massacre of their people in Delhi. Mrs. Patel’s car windows were smashed and the windows of The Delhi Junction spray-painted in retaliation. A Sikh lawyer’s head was bashed in with an iron rod because he protested Canadian immigration policies that, he claimed, allowed secessionists and extremists from Punjab safe haven in Canada. And the non-Sikhs in the desi community murmured that it served the bastards right, the turbaned hooligans who wanted to split an already-torn country once again. They deserved the army’s attack on the Golden Temple, they deserved what they got after Indira Gandhi’s death.

  And finally one day came news of Nimmo from Delhi. Terrible news. Her brother-in-law Balraj called to say that Kamal and Pappu were dead. They did not know what had happened to Satpal. They were still hoping to find him, but the chances were not very good. Balraj and Manpreet were trying to get Nimmo to move to their home in Amritsar, but she refused to leave Delhi. She didn’t want anyone to stay with her either. “Bibi-ji, she is in a bad state,” Balraj said. “We don’t want to leave her alone here, but she won’t listen to anyone. I think Jasbeer should come back to his mother. She needs him.”

  How much more do we have to bear? Bibi-ji thought, sitting beside Jasbeer in a house silent with grief once again. How many more deaths? “I’ll come with you, putthar,” she said, reaching out for Jasbeer’s hand, pressing it between her palms, glad to feel their living warmth.

  “No, I want to see her first,” Jasbeer said. “She is my mother. I should have gone sooner.”

  Bibi-ji was silent.

  Lalloo oversaw the arrangements, as usual, contacting his travel agent friends to book a flight for Jasbeer. “Not Air India,” he said decisively. “There is talk that flights on that airline will be sabotaged.”

  “What do you mean?” Jasbeer asked. “Sabotaged? How?”

  Lalloo shrugged. “I don’t know. These are the rumours I have heard. There is something bad going down soon. Maybe just a boycott—symbolic because it is India’s national airline. In any case, I would feel better if you travelled on some other flight.”

  But Jasbeer never reached Nimmo. The last Bibi-ji heard of him—only a rumour—was that he had been arrested at Delhi airport. She heard other rumours, wispy and uncertain, that something was about to happen to avenge the invasion of the Golden Temple and the killing of Sikhs in Delhi. She felt as if the world that she had known for so long, the stable, safe world, had been blown apart, leaving only smoky puffs of whispering, poisonous rumours.

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE SAFEST PLACE

  New Delhi

  December 30, 1984

  The room was dark, even though it was a brilliant morning outside. Her windows still shut, Nimmo lay on her bed unable to bear the thought of another day. She glanced at the clock; it ticked the passing hours relentlessly, uselessly, reminding her that it was eight o’clock, time to pack her husband’s lunch box, nine o’clock, time for her daughter to leave for school, twelve o’clock, time for her son to arrive home for lunch.

  But there was no one to wait for. Pappu was dead-dragged out of Mohan Lal’s house and burned on the street. And Kamal …

  And Jasbeer and Satpal, they too were dead, she knew it, for otherwise why would they not come home to her? If she listened carefully, she could hear them both crying from the skies for their last rites. But how could she perform the required oblations when she had no bodies? How could she recite the Sohila, the last hymn of night to lull their spirits to sleep, or the Sukhmani, the psalm of peace for their eternal silence, without their bodies to pray over?

  She roamed the house, touching this and that. Although Manpreet and Kaushalya had cleaned the house for her, she was sure that she could see the bloodstains from the man she had struck with the iron poker. And there, clinging to the broken chair like a ghost, was the long pale yellow dupatta worn by Kamal that day. She noticed, once again, the imprints of two pairs of hands low down on a wall—blue hands on a white wall. She recalled the happy origin of those prints.

  A few pots and pans lay outsid
e, in the open washing area behind the kitchen, and she sat down to wash them. Ever since Manpreet and Balraj had left a week ago, her neighbour Kaushalya had made it her duty to bring hot meals twice a day. Nimmo barely touched the food. Every time she brought a morsel of it to her lips, she remembered that Pappu had not eaten anything before leaving home that day. Her boy had died on an empty stomach. Oh Wahe-guru, Nimmo murmured as she scrubbed the dishes harder and harder, oh beloved all-seeing God, why did you do this to them? And why have you done this to me? She rocked on her heels, wiping her streaming eyes with wet fists, weeping like a baby.

  A cold breeze started up when she was halfway through the pile of dishes. She sniffed the air with a faint stirring of pleasure, of half-remembered joy. She sucked in her breath, clung to the memory that had surfaced.

  A small naked child, gleaming with oil recently applied, dashed out of her arms into the front yard, laughing, leaping up and down in the wintry morning, ecstatic to be alive.

  It was the child of her heart, her Kamal, her third and last one—a daughter at last. Every mother has one child she favours if only a little more than the others, and this was the one Nimmo held closest. Was that why she had been so punished? For the sin of loving one more than the rest? It had only been a little more; after all, a daughter was a visitor in her parents’ home, soon to be sent away with tears and sweets to her husband’s. The child, naked as the sky, leapt to catch the sun, slipped and fell, scrambled up and raced towards her, weeping from the insult of mud on her small knees. The mother held out her arms and gathered air.

  Dishes done, Nimmo washed the clothes and went out in the front yard to dry them. Asha’s barbed-wire voice, which had earlier torn open the day, could now be heard haranguing someone inside her home. On the other side, Kaushalya called to her children. The sound of traffic, which had started at daybreak, had become a uniform roar punctuated by horns and beeps and clanging rickshaw bells.

  Nimmo scrubbed the kitchen, the front and back rooms, the bath, the upstairs room. By late afternoon all her work was done and the house was spotless once more. She bathed and wore her best salwar suit, a dark pink silk, which had burn marks all over it. It now hung loosely on her frame. She combed her thick hair and braided it carefully. She discovered, beneath the cot, a pair of embroidered slippers that her mother-in-law had had made especially for her wedding and that Satpal had removed with great tenderness before he kissed her feet, her ankles, her calves, his hot mouth working its way up, up, up. And she, lying there in a tumult of shyness, had stifled her giggles from the tickling of her new husband’s moustache on her young skin.

  She shut the front door, which was still weak from the battering it had received two months ago, and retreated into the inner room she had shared with Satpal Singh, owner of a mechanic’s shop, for twenty-seven years. She lowered her tall body, once lush with happiness and health, onto the bed, directly onto its ripped and charred mattress, for the murderers had used her sheets as wicks to burn her life down. She lay there supine in her best clothes and poured a bottle of yellow pills in her mouth. She swallowed with difficulty, gagging, but persisted. There was no safe place left in the world, she knew that now. Not a cupboard, not even a bharoli of grain.

  She felt her breathing slow, grow quiet.

  Brisk footsteps came to the front door. “Nimmo? Nimmo? Are you there?”

  Her ears were clogged with silence but she could hear the thin, caring voice. Kaushalya.

  “Nimmo?” sharper this time. “Nimmo?” A hammering on the door. Then a crash as it was pushed open. “Where are you?” Closer it came, that voice, closer and closer. Who would reach her first? Kaushalya or Yamraj the king of death? A hand on her shoulder, pushing hard. So far away that voice, Nimmo, wake up, what have you done, Nimmo?

  She was dragged upright. Kaushalya was trying to pull her off the bed. “Walk!” she said. “Nimmo, move your legs. Help me. Walk, walk.” But I don’t want to walk, I want to sleep, I want to go where my children are. I want to see my Kamal again, and my sons, like pillars on either side of me, and my Satpal who has left nothing but his handprint on the walls of this house. I want to go to them.

  A great heave of nausea. “Walk, Nimmo, walk.” A hand forcing Nimmo’s mouth open, fingers pushed inside, tickling the back of her throat, a thin trail of sour vomit. Again and again. The endless walking, dragging along, draped over the tiny Kaushalya, to the kitchen, where she glimpsed the clean pots and pans ranged shining bright along the walls. Opened her mouth again to swallow a glassful of salt water. In the backyard a spray of vomit this time, salt and sour.

  Another voice now. It was Kamal, her daughter. Mummy wake up, Mummy, I am here. Wake up.

  And Kaushalya saying, “Go quickly, get a taxi, we have to take her to the hospital. Hurry, hurry!” I am to live after all. She touched Kaushalya’s hand. “My child,” she said. “I am the one who put her in there. It was me, I know she will be safe.”

  Kaushalya stroked her hair away from her worn face gently, as if she, Nimmo, were the child. “You did the best you could, Nimmo. It isn’t your fault.”

  Nimmo was puzzled. What isn’t my fault?

  “Those men were responsible for Kamal’s death, not you,” Kaushalya said, still stroking the hair.

  Nimmo shook her head, no, no, Kaushalya did not understand. It was all a mistake. Kamal is at home, in the safest place of all.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  SILENCES

  Vancouver

  June 1985

  In the middle of June, Leela called Bibi-ji again, persistent as a fly. “Bibi-ji, listen, we go back way too. long,” she said. “Don’t put the phone down, please.”

  Silence from Bibi-ji, but at least she did not hang up. “I am so terribly sorry about what happened to your niece’s family. Balu got the news from Lalloo. I wish I could say something other than sorry. Really.”

  Silence.

  “Bibi-ji, how is Jas taking it? Preethi was asking about him.”

  “He has gone back.” Silence again.

  “Oh, I see,” Leela said, feeling uncomfortable about the long pauses. “I just wanted to tell you, Balu and I are going to India. Is there anything you would like me to bring to Nimmo?” There was no response, and Leela rushed to bridge the silence. “It was very difficult to get seats, but Lalloo’s friend who owns one of those travel agencies on Main Street managed to get me a seat on the twenty-second of this month and Balu one on the next day. He was very helpful, Bibi-ji. I am so excited. It has been eighteen years.”

  “To India?” Bibi-ji asked, her voice sharp. “On which flight?”

  “Air India for me and Air France the next day for Balu. Via Toronto and Montreal. Look, Bibi-ji, why don’t you and I get together for chai like we used to? Come here. I will make you masala-dosai and we can talk.”

  “There is nothing to talk about,” Bibi-ji said gently. She hung up the telephone and leaned her head against the wall. But Lalloo had said that it was not safe to fly Air India—economic boycott, his friend, the travel agent, had said. Perhaps sabotage. But what did Lalloo’s friend, the one who had sold Leela the tickets, know? And what did Lalloo know? He would have said something to the Bhats if there was anything to worry about, wouldn’t he? Perhaps she, Bibi-ji, should have said something to Leela. But it was none of her business what happened to them. No, it was not her business at all.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  AIR INDIA FLIGHT 182

  Vancouver

  June 22, 1985

  The night before she was to leave for India, Leela dreamed that she was in a plane, cutting through the infinity of space towards an unknown destination. Thousands of feet below, the ocean undulated silently. She could not see it but she knew that it was there. It was dark inside the plane and all around her she could hear the sussuration of her fellow passengers breathing.

  Leela too shut her eyes but was woken a moment later by the sound of someone approaching. She saw, coming down the cramped aisle of the plane towards he
r, Yama the god of death.

  “Leela Bhat, are you ready?” Yama asked, his deep voice resonating through her body.

  “No,” she whispered. “No, I am not. Can you not wait until I get home?”

  “Your time has come, Leela Bhat,” Yama said gently. “I am merely the collector of souls.”

  “Just another day or two?” Leela gazed up at him with an enormous confused sadness. But his lasso swung over her head and she reached out for it. A wind touched her skin, her eyes clouded and her voice tore out of her in a mournful ululation that climbed higher and higher into the thin air.

  She woke up startled, her face wet with tears.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” said a voice close to her ear. Balu’s familiar warmth seeped through her cotton nightdress. His stubbled face rubbed against her smooth one, the rasping sharpness dragging her out of her dream. “Leela, wake up. Just a dream, ma, don’t cry.”

  She swam to the surface of sleep, awake now, aware of some unpleasantness left behind.

  “I had an awful dream, Balu,” she said.

  “It was just a dream, don’t worry,” Balu murmured. “Now go to sleep, you still have a couple of hours left.”

  Leela slid back into an uneasy sleep and when the alarm rang at four o’clock she was bleary-eyed and tense with fatigue.

  There was already a long queue in the terminal at the airport. “The travel agent was right,” Leela observed. “My flight is packed.”

  “They might not all be connecting with the Air India flight, Amma,” Preethi said, noticing her mother’s consternation. She was home for the summer.

  “Yes, Leela, people do travel to Toronto for reasons other than a connecting flight to India, you know!” Balu chimed in.