Darshan (58 page)

She did not respond, but he could sense her mulling it over. “Anand tried to teach himself once,” she said after a minute.

For some reason he found this flattering. “Did he? Why did he stop?”

She shrugged. “It made him angry to teach himself.”

As swiftly as he had been impressed, her words punctured and deflated him. They said no more during the drive.

The familiar smell of spice and clean linens embraced them as they entered Jai’s house a short time later. Darshan removed his shoes and went to his mother, that old and crinkled woman, grayed and toothless from age, memory ravaged by disease, but still the only one who had held him at birth, humming tunes in his ear. Seated on the edge of the sofa with the nurse, she smiled dreamily.

“I am here, Bebe,” he told her.

“Darshan?” his mother asked, pointing at Sonya, face darkening with sudden suspicion. “Who is that?”

“Sonya, Bebe. This is Sonya.”

She laughed then. “Sonya and Anand. Elizabeth and Darshan.” She clapped her hands to the music playing in her head, then raised her voice in sudden song.

“Sada chirian da chamba ve, babal assan ud jana. Sadi lammi udari ve, babal kehre des jana. Tere mehlan de vich vich ve, babal dola nahin langda. Ik it puta devan, dhiye ghar ja apne. Tera baghan de vich vich ve, babal charkha kaun katte? Merian kattan potrian, dhiye ghar ja apne. Mera chhuta kasida ve, babal das kaun kade? Merian kadhan potrian, dhiye ghar ja apne. Mera chhuta kasida ve, badal das kaun kade? Merian kadhan potrian, dhiye ghar ja apne.”

“What is it?” Sonya asked, clearly ill at ease. “What does it mean?”

Darshan listened.

Ours is a flock of sparrows, dear father.

We’ll fly away

on a long, long flight,

we know not to which land we shall go.

Through your mansion’s door, dear father,

the doli won’t pass.

I’ll have a tali tree uprooted.

Go, for that is your home, O daughter.

In your mansion, dear father,

Who will do the spinning?

My granddaughters will spin.

You go to your home, O daughter.

There is my leftover embroidery;

Who will finish it, father?

My granddaughters will do it, O daughter,

You must depart, for that is your home.

“A song about birds, and their flight to God,” Darshan told Sonya.

He sat on the floor, clapping with Jai, not aware if his daughter joined him, or if she retreated to the other room with the nurse. He clapped until his mother stopped singing, his palms throbbing with gratitude.

Jai passed away soon after that day, at the age of eighty-seven. Reflecting on her life, it bothered Darshan tremendously that he had been the one to visit her regularly and consistently, to cup her face in his palms when she grew afraid, to wipe her mouth after she ate, to hear the stories and burdens of her life. And still, he had not been there when she died, had been too late, the drive too long. She had spent her final moments in the hospital with Navpreet, Livleen, and Mohan positioned around her hospital bed.

During nights Darshan now shuddered in his bed as he foresaw a future in which there would be no one to caress
his
head, no one to cut his food and feed him, to wrap his neck with a shawl when the evenings were chilly, at the end left to die alone or with those who only meant to undo him.

His only consolation was that Jai had lost her memory, that she did not know he had not been there, that for her there was music and her voice raised in song.

~   ~   ~

For Sale
, the sign read, its post dug into Jai’s flowerbed, a wreckage of torn petals and snapped stems withering in the sun against the splinted wood. Her house had been emptied. Hastily, it appeared, by the scuffmarks along the walls, the debris of packing tape and the minutiae of life scattered about the carpet—stray buttons, safety pins, scraps of paper with long-forgotten reminders. The stench of Darshan’s siblings still lingered in all the things that were not there: his mother’s fine fabrics from India, the family photos, the paintings of gurus, her gold sets of jewelry, her furniture and linens, her spice jars and flour-coated rolling pins.

Sonya’s mouth hung slack with shock, her hands held open. She had come to help him retrieve Manmohan’s plywood box and chest, but those, too, were gone, as were all the tools and paraphernalia from Fiji, the whole of the garage archive swept away into trash bins. There had been letters, too, Khushwant’s letters, most still unread, their Gurumukhi script difficult and slow to decipher, records of their history now lost.

Darshan circled the barren landscape of the garage, his thin, cotton-socked feet unprotected from the cement cold, certain that nothing stored in this room had been preserved, that it had all been discarded, that somewhere in a field of garbage, the Toor heritage had been flung atop a heap, was now loosened and fluttering in the Bay breezes.

Curling his lip with disgust, he stood in the center of that frigid space, overcome by the profundities of this loss, stiff and hollowed out.

“Dad.” Sonya’s voice gently tugged at him.

He waved his hand, shooing her back.

“Dad, it’s okay. We don’t have to stay here.”

He shook his head. “No.”

Shivering, she reached to press the button to the sectional door, to let in some sun.

“Don’t touch that,” he said grimly.

She froze. “Dad—”

“Don’t touch anything. Get out of your dream world. Pay attention.”

“I was only cold.”

“This is not about you.”

She stood there, hand lowering slowly to her side. The look of baffled hurt on her face cinched between her eyebrows fueled his own stinging misery. “I gave you all so much,” he said, his voice like pebbles pelted at her. He gestured about the house. “
Them.
You and Anand. You all gave me so little in return.”

Her brow softened, as if more certain with her position, not shocked, like she had known something like this would come, like she was sorry for him. “We give, Dad. Me and Anand. A lot. You just never notice because you always want more, because you expect something different. We’re us. We aren’t you.”

~   ~   ~

Navpreet’s heels clacked on the pavement sidewalk in a foreboding rhythmic beat, the sound growing louder. Darshan surrendered to it, to the swing of her skirt, the haughty flair of her lashes thick with mascara, her dyed and wind-blown hair, to the grim hatred surging through her blood, which told him she hated herself much more.

“Hey,” she said, brisk, ready for business.

“So?” he asked her as Mohan and Livleen approached, not far behind.

“It’s on the market. We are waiting for a buyer.”

Darshan averted his eyes from the building. “Okay,” he replied.

Mohan tucked in the hem of his shirt, which insufficiently covered the expanse of his gut. He looked at the apartment complex with distaste. “You are the only one who wants to keep it.”

Navpreet flicked her finger against a tag of graffiti on the wall. “You can buy it, minus your share of the probate.” She removed a wet wipe from her purse and cleaned her finger. “We’ll give you a good price.”

Reaching into his pocket, Darshan took out a spare set of keys to the building and handed them to his sister for the real estate agent. “We’ve been through this already. I don’t know yet.”

“We won’t wait forever,” Navpreet told him.

Livleen stood off to the side against a parking meter, hands stuffed deeply into her coat pockets, her graying hair tossed up untidily. She would not look at Darshan.

They all turned to go. Darshan reached for Navpreet, touching her forearm. “Wait.”

She halted, the contact startling but not angering her. Passing her keys to Livleen and Mohan, she gestured down the block at the car. “I’ll meet you in a second,” she told them.

When they were gone, Darshan shoved his hands in his trouser pockets, his left folding around an old tape recorder he had long ago found in his father’s archive. “You threw away a box and a chest, from the garage,” he told her. “They were Bapu’s.”

“It was all junk.”

“It wasn’t junk.”

She tossed her wet wipe on the sidewalk and ground it into the cement with the ball of her foot. “Anything else?”

His hand squeezed more tightly around the recorder, his fingers caressing the buttons. “Why did you steal Bebe’s money?”

She smiled rigidly, scoffing. “I didn’t.”

“She told me once. She told me that she loved you.”

Navpreet’s face flushed. She turned to go, but instead spun around on one of her heels. “Bapu and Bebe would never have chosen me over you. I had to depend on myself. You would have gotten everything.” She stiffly clutched her purse, terror beyond the façade of her rage.

As he looked at her, he was struck by a swift and heated exhaustion. He released his grip on the recorder. “Maybe,” he finally said. “I don’t know.”

~   ~   ~

Moonlight inched across the living room carpet in Pacifica, penetrating through wisps of fog, creating eerie shadows in the dark. Downstairs, Elizabeth slept. “Don’t go,” she had sleepily beckoned when he first tried to slip away. Fitting his head in the crook of her arm, he had rested for a time, eyes pressed into the soft flesh of her bicep until her breathing again became regular. But he had not been able to stay, his mind aching with too much thought.

He tucked his bare feet up onto the sofa now, wrapped a throw blanket around his legs and gazed at the moonlit floor, his father’s tape recorder on the armrest. He listened to his mother’s voice, to the beat and measure of her words, her hum, her song.
I am empty
, she had said before forgetting again, before returning to her music.

With a click, he stopped the tape.

Turning on the end table lamp, the room was ignited with color, shadows dispelled. Untangling himself from the blanket, he rose, went to the kitchen, searching for snacks, for something to fill him. He rummaged through the pantry, dismissing the row of cereals, Elizabeth’s stash of chocolates, the dried fruit and nut mixes, the box of Indian sweets he had recently purchased in Berkeley.

He crossed the kitchen to the fridge, reached out and grabbed the hilt of the door. His eye snagged a corner of familiar handwriting behind a mess of menus, photos, and souvenirs held up by magnets. Gingerly, he shimmied the paper out from beneath the others and held it up under the halogen track lighting. He had forgotten about this, last year’s father’s day gift. Sonya’s gift, after she had returned from New York. A yearly calendar condensed onto one page,
Dad
written in blue felt on every weekend from June to December.

He had not given it more than a perfunctory glance when she gave it to him, this gift of time, of devotion, of nothing lacking.

Dad, Dad, Dad.

~   ~   ~

He slept. Flinching, he reached out to feel rough bark at his fingertips. Relaxing now, he then looked up at the deep blue Pacific sky from the base of his coconut tree. Tactically he assessed the bark for the best positioning of his feet. After blowing into his palms, he heaved himself up. Quickly and agilely he scampered to the top, grabbing hold of a palm branch, wriggling his way into the tuft. The tropical air filled his lungs as he settled into a comfortable position. Jungle plant life carpeted the island, spanning from the ocean to the inland volcanic ranges. The sparkling corrugated iron homes lay squat within the verdant foliage. In the distance the tops of Suva’s five-story buildings poked through the trees. Beyond the city the blue waters of the Pacific nestled against the coast.

Shading his face from the bright sun, squinting, he searched for landmarks: his school, Colonial War Memorial hospital, Penitentiary Hill, the roads he had traveled in his Falcon, the river where he had so often played, the tractor on which Navpreet had once tried to teach herself how to drive, his one-room shack in the jungle, the main house where he had once been left to die.

Smoke now rose from the cracks and seams of that house, the building’s walls aflame.

His entire family, miniature creatures, scurried outside shouting warnings. The smoke buffeted upward, a plumage of black rising toward his tree tuft, filling his nostrils with stinging ash. Navpreet was panicking, alone in her room, waiting for someone to save her. But no one came. She grabbed her dolls and fled. Jai carried Livleen, who was a rigid rod of arms and legs, unbending and unyielding to her mother’s protective touch. Jai shouted at her, but her cries could not penetrate the glassy stiffness of her daughter’s eyes. In the chaos Mohan absconded on a motorcycle, nearly colliding with Manmohan, who from a safe distance stared in horror at his house as it melted down into the soil. Mohan rode farther away down the road, the engine spitting angry fumes. He drove past Navpreet, who had climbed up onto the tractor, spinning it around in an endless circle, frozen in fear. Finally skidding to a stop, Mohan glanced behind him at the house with helpless and powerless love.

A man stood on the road nearby, face stern. Leaning forward, struggling to focus his eyes in the thickening smoke, Darshan recognized him.

Baba Singh held out his hand in a gesture of greeting.

Darshan began to cough, waving the acrid smoke from his face. The fire swelled, expanding. It ate up Manmohan’s books, consuming with greedy swiftness. It burned all the secrets in the rafters, moving beyond the house to the stacked lumber in the clearing. Jai ran furiously back inside to save her husband’s books, to rescue his secrets, and then Darshan could no longer see her. The fire liquefied the corrugated iron rooftop. It spread up the hill, incinerating Manmohan’s garden of breadfruit trees and chilies, yucca and taro. The flames ravaged the entire jungle, gathering at the base of the coconut tree, slowly working their way up, licking the soles of Darshan’s dangling bare feet.