Darshan (3 page)

“Thank you,” he murmured.

“I don’t want to live here,” Kiran said, watching Lal unlock the door. She pointed at Avani. “She doesn’t either. We want to go back to our goats.”

Khushwant jabbed a twig into the dirt. He had just started school in Harpind and had been excited about it. Baba Singh threw another pebble at the wall, and their older sister Desa pursed her lips. She was fourteen and had left someone behind in Harpind. There was supposed to have been a wedding next year.

Ranjit squatted on his haunches to face Kiran. He was tall, with his father’s high forehead and his mother’s almond-shaped eyes. “Don’t you like this place?” he asked her.

She tugged at her braid. “Does it have goats and a pond?”

Ranjit smiled encouragingly. The smile spread carefully across his mouth as though he did not want her to think he did not take her seriously. “Maybe not. But we should at least go inside and find out.”

Baba Singh took Avani’s hand. “Everything will be okay,” he said, looking at his brother for reassurance.

Lal pushed open the door, but quickly stepped back as the rank smell of stale urine escaped in a thick, malodorous gust. Harpreet gagged and they all turned away, covering their mouths and noses as Lal kicked the door the rest of the way open.

Feces were in nearly every corner of the closed-in space, debris scattered across the floors. To the right, Ranjit flung another door open. It led to a small outdoor courtyard where they found a cracked clay oven caked in dried grime and sticky cooking oils. At the end of the hallway, past six small sleeping quarters, the washroom’s ceramic basin was cracked. There was another door by the basin, and Baba Singh opened it, discovering the collapsed outhouse.

Harpreet clung to the doorframe of the front entrance, not able to enter. She pulled her
chuni
over her head with her free hand. The thin cotton shawl had fallen down around her shoulders, revealing her hair—frizzy that day—making her appear all the more exhausted. “It just needs to be cleaned,” she said, then made a face and clutched her stomach.

“What is it?” Baba Singh asked her in alarm.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just a small pain.”

Ranjit shook his head. “They told us that it was ready, that we could live here.”

“The British do not really care what happens to us,” Lal replied, defeated.

Ranjit looked at Kiran with sympathy. She was very distressed. “I am sorry about the goats and pond.”

“We should talk to Mr. Grewal,” Baba Singh said. “Maybe he—”

“That man is a liar,” Lal said, his voice rising. “There is no negotiating with liars.”

Sweat dotted Ranjit’s forehead just under the rim of his turban. He wiped it with the back of his hand. “Don’t worry, Bapu. I will find work.”

“We all will,” Desa said.

“What did Mr. Grewal do?” Kiran asked.

Lal turned to her, his expression so severe that she took a step back. He seemed to be taking her question into account, determining whether or not he should answer it. Finally, he replied, “He stole our land.”

“But isn’t land too big to steal?”

Lal frowned, a tinge of red coloring his cheeks. “Not for him.”

“Oi!” Khushwant shouted from down the hall. “Stay out of this room here!”

“What is it?” Baba Singh asked, hurrying over with Ranjit to discover a decaying dog corpse in one of the guest rooms at the back of the hotel.

~   ~   ~

That night, after a cheap meal of dhal and yellow maize chapatis from a steaming food stall on Suraj Road, the Toors slept outside on unfurled mats by the hotel’s entrance.

Ranjit removed his turban, undid his topknot, and shook out his long, wavy mane of hair. “Khushwant, Baba, come here,” he said as he briskly flicked his wrist, twisting his hair back into a bun. He shook out the yards of cloth that was his turban and held up one end.

Khushwant crawled over, and Ranjit handed him the turban. Baba Singh remained on his mat.

“Baba,” Ranjit said again, showing Khushwant how to begin wrapping the cloth in tight, layered pleats around his head.

“Later,” Baba Singh replied from his mat. Reclining, he could see the stars through holes in the murky patches of clouds. It was so dark and empty. He turned onto his side, wishing for home: the ambling storks cutting through the cluster of golden mud huts, frogs in the reeds, the scent of cattle and sweet chai tea, the distant swish of water flowing down the irrigation canals, the cawing crows in the neem trees.

His favorite time of day had been after school, in the afternoons when he escaped the rear room of the small gurdwara in search of play and fresh air, pardoned from the confining heat of the temple and the crushing, downward gaze of his teacher. He would race to the pond with Khushwant—and also Ranjit before he began working in the fields—to ride a bullock into the water. He straddled the animal’s steaming back as it stepped in, his brothers pressed up behind him, their legs tense with the thrill of anticipation for the game that was to follow. Standing on the bullock as it shifted and puffed out through its nostrils to settle itself comfortably in the cool water, one by one, the boys leapt high, balling their knees up tight, spreading their arms like wings, their palms cupped downward like steely trowels, willing their bodies to be heavy with force. The biggest splash-maker would win.

Ranjit was always the champion.

Afterwards, when the large orange sphere of the sun hovered over the horizon of potato and cotton crops, they would dry under the shade of the rosewoods. While Harpreet beat wet clothes on a slab of stone, Khushwant and Baba Singh wrapped their soaked dhotis around their heads, using the loincloths to look like grown men donning turbans. At dusk, just before the sky darkened, Harpreet would disperse with the other women, heading home to prepare the evening meal, and the boys would run to the outskirts of the village to greet Lal as he came in from the fields, taking his farming implements like proud attendants to a soldier.

From his mat, Baba Singh glanced at his father now, a shadowy figure in the darkness. Lal was leaning against the outer wall of the hotel, his forearm across his forehead, his eyes bright with moisture. Avani was there, half asleep against him, her wooden elephant hugged to her chest. Harpreet watched them, rocking Kiran in her lap.

~   ~   ~

His body sore, Baba Singh woke. He had been dreaming but could not remember his dream, only that he had been alone and his family had all gone missing, or some of them. He was not sure anymore. He looked around. They were all there. Except Ranjit. Panic hit him. “Ranjit,” he whispered, his dream once again taking shape.

The hotel door was open, and Baba Singh went inside. He should have been relieved to see his brother there but instead felt dread. “I thought you had left.”

Ranjit was tugging the leg of the dog corpse with one hand wrapped in the lower portion of his tunic and the other covering his mouth. “Why would I do that?”

Baba Singh shook his head. He did not know. It seemed so unlike Ranjit.

“You should be sleeping,” his brother said.

“Where will you take him?”

Ranjit released the leg and gazed down at the creature’s patchy hair and the snout that death had frozen into a growl. “To the back to bury it. It should not be here when they wake. I already dug a hole.”

Baba Singh nodded. The dread, and his already hazy dream, began to fade entirely. His brother would fix everything. He was brave that way and had always been like that. He once defied their teacher simply over a matter of principle. The bhaiji, who had been lecturing them on the history of the ten Sikh gurus, asked Ranjit to withdraw his statement that the caste system was still relevant to present-day Sikh society despite Guru Amar Das’s efforts to eradicate it. A thread of hostility silenced the hot, muggy schoolroom. Even the younger, usually boisterous children quieted.

“We Sikhs do not live by the caste system any longer,” the teacher said, his tone belligerent. “We have learned to be higher minded.”

“Then why is it that when I decide to marry, my parents want my wife to be a Jat?” Ranjit replied calmly. “Perhaps I might like to marry a non-Jat.”

“It is not a point of caste. Why would you
want
to marry someone not from a line of warriors?”

“I am not a warrior, so what difference would it make?”

“Because a history of warriors in the family is respectable. If you are from a line of warriors, why would you want to be husband to a potter’s daughter?”

“You have just proven my point, Bhaiji.”

The teacher snatched up a ruler from his desk. “I have done no such thing,” he said, grabbing Ranjit by the wrist and sharply whacking the back of his hand. He continued to slap the ruler down with sharp precision. Baba Singh had watched, open-mouthed, but his brother did not once flinch or move away. He absorbed the blow of each stroke as though his hand was made of cork. Only Baba Singh knew, by Ranjit’s mocking smile, that every strike had felt like fire.

His brother again grabbed the dog’s leg and dragged the animal toward the washroom. “I’ll take care of this, Baba.” And he was as good as his word.

After breakfast, Desa and Khushwant joined them inside the hotel. Lal went in search of employment, and Harpreet stayed outside with Kiran and Avani. She was feeling too nauseous and weak to help. Khushwant fetched bucketfuls of water from the pump in the center of town, and they used it to clean. Desa scrubbed down the clay stove and unpacked their pots and pans, readying the kitchen. Baba Singh scrubbed away the urine and feces in the six guest quarters, wiping down walls and tiles with old rags. He had never labored so hard. After watching Ranjit bury the dog, he had to. He had to help make it right for all of them.

The sun had set when Harpreet brought in their sleeping mats and laid them out in the lobby. She knew that none of them wanted to spread out in the rooms. They would stay together for now.

Kiran and Avani were already sleeping when Lal came home, his clothes dirty and his armpits sweat stained. “I found work,” he said stiffly.

Harpreet sadly appraised his clothing.

“As a farmhand.” He would not look at her. He would not look at any of them. “I am tired. Have you all eaten?”

Harpreet nodded.

“I am not hungry,” he said.

Baba Singh moved toward his father. “Let me get you some fresh water.”

“Whatever is in there is fine,” Lal replied, pushing past and walking down the hallway toward the washroom, an opium pipe in his hand.

He had taken his
chappals
off at the door, but still, his feet were coated with mud from the fields, and he left a trail along the freshly cleaned ceramic tiles. Baba Singh stared at the impressions on the floor, the half footprints, like a ghost’s, like only a shell of a person had left them, a man who had lost his land to a cheat and now worked another’s.

~   ~   ~

There was one widow living in Amarpur in those days, before the coming wars widowed many more. She was middle aged and had no remaining family nearby. Her kin had abandoned her, claiming that her shadow was a particularly malevolent
manhoo
, bringing them bad luck by the elephant load. When residents in town discovered that Ranjit had begun to work for her two mornings a week—sweeping the front of her home and delivering sundries—mutterings of criticism pitched like bats along Suraj Road. One man felt it his civic duty to rap on the Toor door and caution the family against such blind and careless undertakings.

Amarpur had still not fully recovered from the monsoon disaster of last year, the man told them, just before which this very same widow had stepped outside wearing not the white of perpetual mourning, but
blue
, gold bangles tinkling shamelessly on her wrists. He shuddered. And she had the temerity to walk about without her chuni, revealing the indecency of her recently oiled, tumbling hair, making a lewd spectacle of herself with the men folk.

“Everyone knows widows are bound to keep their heads clean shaven, for what man can resist such seductive curls?” he asked them, gratefully sipping tea Harpreet had delivered into his trembling hands. Doubtless the deluge that followed, sweeping away homes and livestock and heirloom family trinkets, was a direct result of her manhoo. The town nearly crucified her after that. “See for yourself,” he begged them. “Her house still bears the scars, dents in the wood from many swinging batons.” She only survived, the man insisted, because she had opened her second-story window and chopped off her hair in a display of contrition.

“He is exaggerating,” Ranjit said after the man left.

Desa stared at her brother in shock. “What if he is right?”

“We have already had our bad luck.”

Ranjit also found employment as one of two tailor’s apprentices at India Quality Cloth—regrettably located next door to Mr. Grewal’s thin-bricked money-lending establishment. The proximity bothered him, but he told Baba Singh that it never hurt to watch the man. Someday, when all the farmers’ anger rose high enough and bubbled over like a boiling pot of milky tea, there would be retribution. He was happy to be close enough to watch.

Desa began to work for the administrator of the local two-room schoolhouse, washing his and his wife’s laundry, as well as keeping the school’s grounds tidy. Khushwant, who still had dreams of attending school, split his time between his duties as the street hawker’s assistant—selling cigarettes, tea, biscuits, and sweetmeats to customers along Suraj Road—and peeking through the schoolhouse window at the lesson board so he could practice his writing with a stick in the dirt.

Baba Singh was not as successful. He had found it more difficult to find employment, turned away from a number of places, including the main sundry store and the carpenter’s. He had found the courage to enter the astrologer’s shop with its shelves packed tightly with massage oils, aphrodisiacs, opium, and animal skulls, only to be sent out. And the telegraph operator would not have him either, shooing him away as though annoyed by a relentlessly buzzing fly so he could concentrate on his many gadgets and instruments.