“Beti, I am so happy you’re here. I am so happy, boht khush.” She truly looked pleased. We finally went through with it. My parents and I made it to New Delhi. “Chaa, beti’?”
“I’ll make it, Baji.”
“S’okay.”
I located the gas burner that was connected to one small metal tank beneath the counter. I thought for a second how easily the whole place could go if the small hose came loose or worse, burst. I put the steel bowl of milk on the burner just in time to have my back tapped by Pamila.
“Chaa taiyar karna.” She looked upset, but still smiling with her big teeth. I could not seem to find her age anywhere in her persona, except for in her eyes. She was petite, but her eyes were deeply set from, it seemed, a life of hard work. I smiled at her and backed away from making the tea. Though I knew she wanted to do her job well, I was unaccustomed to being waited on. I would try to open myself to these customs.
I went to the living room, closed the adjoining doors, and got dressed. As I slipped on a loosely fitted long sleeve cotton tunic and jeans I thought about seeing the border, one of the main reasons I had traveled so far. India’s Independence from the British came as a slow culmination of a long-term movement. India’s Partition, however, an invisible line that drew and quartered the country, was not so expected. It dropped like a hot sword across thin paper, igniting a cataclysmic division that pushed neighbors to kill one another, trains to carry mutilated corpses back and forth through the Punjab, and families to separate forever. This history, too large for me to grasp through familial myth or metaphor, would only become real through my own eyes. I had to come. It had taken me years to prepare for the trip. At this moment, as I stood in the living room of my grandmother’s house on a warm spring day in March, I could feel the need building, the need for answers. We would leave soon for Amritsar, then the border of Pakistan.
I looked out the window. Subzi carts passed, a man called “Kela. Kaaaaaayla.” He sounded like a vendor at a ball game when I was a child. His product: the banana. This gave a whole new turn to the phrase home shopping.
A man called from the bottom of the stairway “Salaam! Salaamji!” I walked toward the voice to see who it was.
“Indir Kaur?” A voice echoed in the empty house. It was Bashaer Auntie, an older woman who lived nearby. Bagvinder tucked the rupae into the folds of her saree.
“Sat Sri Akal, Auntiji.” Bagvinder carried Nishaan to greet her guest and hugged Bashaer Auntie with one arm. She offered her an old wooden chair and they both sat down.
“How are you, my child?” Bashaer Auntie asked in Punjabi.
“Fine, all is well.”
“Good, good. I see Nishu will walk soon.”
“He is strong willed, like his father.” The baby was swinging his feet in the air.
“Good, good.” Bagvinder noticed something strange in Bashaer Auntie’s voice; it seemed she was hurried.
“Auntiji, would you like some water?”
She nodded her head in response. Bagvinder gave Nishaan to her and filled two tin cups with well water she kept in a bucket in the kitchen area.
“Gagan, have you heard from him? When will he return?” Bashaer Auntie took the cup from Bagvinder. v
“He sent a telegram. About six more weeks.”
“So long? Achha, that’s too long. He should build a canal here, for our village.”
“He asked permission to do so, but the process takes a very long time. Too many hands in the áttá.”
Bashaer Auntie put her cup on the wooden tabletop and placed her hand, rough and browned from work, on Bagvinder’s. “Betí, we heard some troubling news this morning.”
“Is it Gagan? What happened? Tell me.”
She shook her head. “Government has sent a message on the radio. This land is now Pakistan. It finally has happened.”
Bagvinder dropped her cup and let it spill on the tile floor. Nishaan whimpered from the noise. She touched her fingers to her forehead and said, “Wáhe gúrú, sat nam.”
“May your gurus help us all,” Bashaer Aunty whispered.
Baji passed me and called for my father who followed her to the entry room. Where I came from, some ten thousand miles away, when someone knocked on our door we peeked through the hole and wondered what snake oil they wanted to sell to us, or ignored the knocking until the person left. I have (in an attempt to make myself invisible) turned off lights, muted televisions, and even closed the shades tightly out of some fear of the unknown outside. The borders that we set up between our insides and outsides appeared for the first time in my mind to be so precariously weighted in fear: misoneism, America’s newest cult.
News had traveled about our presence in the house; the prodigal family returned to the place of my father’s youth. All morning local vendors entered the flat without warning, asking if we needed their Kashmiri purses, bananas, or SIM cards for our mobile phones. We were new and there was history here, even in this home in a New Delhi suburb far away from the Punjab. I could feel the past like dreams that I thought I had a long time ago, but were never mine. There was laughter, and though my presence wasn’t requested I followed the sound. My father’s face was cheerful, his beard shone black in the foyer lighting. An old man dressed in white, bent and curled by age, stood chatting like a teenager with Baji.
“Ibrahimji—you’ve lived there all this time?” My father pointed to the quaint house across the street.
“Achha. Over fifty years now. You look like your father, Nishaan.” The old man adjusted his glasses.
Baji’s eyes were glassy—she kept her gaze on my father, intently watched his expression.
“Oh, puttar, come here. This is my daughter.” My father waved to me. “From the States.”
“A long way. Will you stay?”
“We are traveling up to the Punjab, to Wagah Border.” I said.
“Achha.” The old man seemed to fall deep into his own thoughts and silence filled the room. Pamila called from the kitchen to ask if we were ready for breakfast and with that cue, our awkward moment ended.