Rawalpindi, Pakistan, August 1947
“Sh, sh, bachaa.”
Her voice was a whisper, dark words to comfort her child.
“Sh, sh, bachaa. I will sing you a song.”
New Delhi, India, March 2005
A young woman deplanes in New Delhi after traveling for twenty hours and is greeted by a throbbing sea of taxi drivers. They all demand to be the one she chooses to take her to a place where she will rest her head until the lag mends itself. She has come to India because she hears the lullaby; the mother song sung by filial myth draws her in like a siren. She does not speak the language. She is a foreigner counting on the idea that the kindness of this country will escort her safely. This is the archetypal fallacy, one that I could not avoid hearing in my mind as I rubbed my eyes and walked into the warm night air of New Delhi. I hoped I would not appear so obviously incongruent.
I woke to the soft cry of the bulbul bird. Its haunting pea-ahhh echoed through the New Delhi flat. There was a knot in my neck from the hard living room sofa that was my bed. My grandmother’s home had two small bedrooms and my parents slept in one of them, Baji in the other. I opened the burgundy curtains that were thick to protect against winter’s chill and looked out of the window for the first time in daylight. I could see that the bulbul was singing about the heavy clouds that covered the sky. I heard thunder. He cried again. I walked out onto the balcony and felt a great silence settle around my ears. The square shaped stucco silhouettes of the houses sat darker against the canvas of the tall eucalyptus and grayish brown sky. The sky rumbled, pigeons fluttered and cooed. I looked down to the side of the dusty road and saw a sweeper gently scratching the street with his collection of branches. He squatted like he had always existed a few inches from the ground. He made it look easy. I know I would crumble under the muscle burn.
The city woke. I heard the purr of motorbikes and the honking of three small automobiles attempt to overtake one another. The crows chimed in to remind us that the sky was becoming even darker, again. I wondered if it would rain.
The hot air pressed down on the earth and made even subtle movement difficult. Monsoon was late this year and many in the village believed this to be a sign, a punishment for some unknown sin. Bagvinder, however, did not believe in such things. She believed that every year it became hot and every year the villagers cursed the sun and begged for the rain. But once the rains began and two or three weeks of the monsoon’s furious torrent drowned the earth, every person demanded for the return of the sun and all its fiery glory.
I walked to the adjoining room that doubled as both kitchen and dining room. The window looked out at an odd angle toward the building that sat on the lot behind us. Everything looked brighter against the gray— a woman walked past on the dusty street below wearing a yellow saree tied with a knot around her waist; the turquoise and lime green salwar kameez that hung on a line in the backyard of the building behind Baji’s house, our house, the Singh’s house; the thick green leaves of a banana tree that stretched two stories high. The structure that sat behind us was once beautiful, four stories, but decades of neglect corroded its frame and the wall that faced me had crumbled into piles of concrete blocks, rocks, and steel rods. Baji said tenants did not live there; only servants in that house. This was an interesting idea, the squatting of property when it became available. I asked her if she minded the squatters and she said that this was how it was done, and that if you wanted to keep your house, you shouldn’t leave it alone for other people to take. Baji smoothed my long brown hair with the palm of her hand; even as an adult I was still merely a child to her.
Bagvinder believed that sometimes it was easier to react fiercely to the unexpected rather than accept it. Like her cousin Manjit who lost her child in her third month of pregnancy—she embraced her tragedy completely. Bagvinder watched her cousin, pale and weak, study the lines on her palm, as though the life she had been promised was translated incorrectly by their psychic Auntie Satwant who read the palms of all children in the family. ‘Sometimes,’ Bagvinder’s mother told her, ‘it is best not to see everything.’ With the physical distance that now separated Bagvinder from her family she almost wished for the sight to give her some sort of reassurance of her future. She wondered when she would see her husband Gagan again.
“Rupae kitthe?” Bagvinder asked the fourth wall of her small house. Her fingers felt the wall for any protrusions or inconsistencies, but found none. She then stepped back from the plaster wall and made the knot in her white saree tighter around her waist.
“Sháh de qábú àe, gharon gháton jáe.” She laughed aloud as she heard the proverb that Satwant Aunty quoted every time money came into a conversation: Those who go in to borrow money from the moneylender leave homeless. Bagvinder had no means of borrowing money and what money she found, she hid in the wall. At this moment she couldn’t find even those carefully placed notes. She wished she had something to trade for money. Sweat ran down her chai colored cheek. The hot summer sun had its way with everything beneath it this year and mid-day was the worst time.
“Wáhe gúrú,” she whispered.
“Wáhe gúrú,” Baji lifted her head and slid a few rupees into my hand, and before I could protest she again praised the gurus—making any remonstration futile, so I smiled.
Out of the window, below the line of hanging fabrics covering the broken rocks of the once complete building, I saw piles of reclaimed bricks and a small wheelbarrow waiting at the ready. It appeared that the squatters were rebuilding the dilapidated structure. The men, thin and tanned from the strong Indian sun, took some of the materials from the house to build a wall around a well. I thought perhaps they were planning to tap the aquifer deep below; after all, summer would come in a few months and the fresh water would make it more tolerable. I walked back into the living room to fold my blankets. The teak coffee table was a haven for a full half-centimeter of white dust; a relentless blanket of powder. Pamila, Baji’s servant girl, poked her head into the room and asked with a big toothy smile, “Ok?” But before I could answer she came in and began to sweep tirelessly with a broom that she used perpendicularly against the earth rather than parallel. She beat the lounge chair and the pillows to free the desperately clinging dust. The dust went up and came straight down. I sneezed. “Karab. Kamaal hai. Good sleep?” She said as she beat.
“Yes, fine, thanks.” I started to fold the sheets but Pamila hit me on the hand as though I committed a tragic offence.
“No, me.” She folded the sheets and smiled.
I walked through Baji’s bedroom toward the kitchen area and Baji was sitting at the table reading her Japji Sahib with her head covered by a dupatta.
“Wáhe gúrú,” she whispered three times before she closed the book, uncovered her head, and lifted her body, stiff with arthritis, up from the kitchen table to hug me, her granddaughter.
Much of this life was new to her. Bagvinder’s marriage was arranged by her parents just a year and a half earlier. They told her that Gagan Singh was an engineer, tall and strong, and that his family had no history of mental or physical illness. This reassured her because Bagvinder’s family was khatri, landowners, and her high cheekbones were a sign of beauty. The marriage would be an agreement of equal standards. They met on the wedding day for the first time, mere months after her sixteenth birthday. They sat beside each other and faced the Adi Granth, but did not touch. She wore a red saree, her hands decorated in mendhi, head covered with a dupatta, and lips painted red. He wore a simple kurta; the edges of the long shirt and slim pant were painted gold. A turban the color of a blood orange covered his uncut, braided hair, and a beaded mask covered his face to keep the evil eye from touching him until the ceremony was complete. It was only when the bhaijis finished the ceremony and they closed the book and covered it with a simple cloth that the couple could finally look at one another. She found a relief she hadn’t known in weeks. He was tall, with kind eyes, and though his soft features were unlike any prince of whom she had heard, he warmed her.
Shortly after the ceremony, Bagvinder said farewell to her family and the couple began the journey from outside of Peshawar to the engineering compound just outside of Rawalpindi. They traveled one hundred miles by train. She looked forward to her new life, but did not know at the time that money would be scarce in her household. Gagan sent his impoverished parents virtually all of his small paycheck. Before he would return from building a canal in a city far away, Bagvinder would sneak a few notes from his moneybox. She would then bore a hole the width of a toothpick in the wall in the kitchen area, and slide the tightly rolled rupee deep within. “There.” Bagvinder brushed her hair from her face. A spec of a hole was now apparent. She extracted the money from the wall with a surgeon’s precision. She heard a faint cry and
s
instinctually attended to her baby, Nishaan, who lay on his mat against the other wall in the one room house. “We will buy milk today, Nishu.” She caressed his soft black hair.