Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (12 page)

“I will go and come back,” she shouted tearfully, “I will go and come back.” A farewell and a promise repeated for generations.

“Is that true, Amma?” Arjun asked. “Will we really come back?”

And Leela replied firmly, “Yes, of course we will. We will.”

“When?” Arjun wanted to know.

“In two years,” Leela promised, confident that it would take only that long for Balu to give up on his dream of Canada, for they were after all, the Bhats of Bangalore.

Their brief stay in Delhi with Vimala and her husband passed sooner than anyone had wanted and once again it was time for goodbyes.

Leela looked at the battered black taxi that Balu’s cousin had procured to take them to the airport. “Will we all fit in there?” she asked. It didn’t seem strong enough to carry its own weight, let alone six people, six suitcases and an assortment of carry-on baggage.

“Don’t worry, madam,” the tall Sikh driver assured her. He managed to fit one more bag into the trunk, then jammed the lid down as far as it would go, tying it to the fender with a thick rope. “This car can carry ten people, no problem. Believe me, I have taken passengers all the way to Simla and back. What is the airport with a little luggage after that, tell me?” He smiled at her and piled the rest of the suitcases onto the luggage rack on top of the car, tying them down with more rope.

He turned out to be a friendly, chatty sort and gave them a running commentary on tourist spots along the way, though it was too dark to see anything properly. Leela sat between Preethi, who was pressed against the door, her small hands clutching a last-minute present of a book from Vimala, and a silent Arjun. Leela stared out the window wishing it was morning so that she could capture last glimpses of the country of her birth. She had blithely told her son that they would be back in two years, but now doubts were beginning to swarm in.

The driver’s voice broke into her reverie. “Where is madam going?”

“To Canada,” she replied.

“Ah! Canada!” exclaimed the cabbie. “Many people from our community are in that country. I am told the life there is a good one.”

“I don’t know. This is my first time.” Now Leela wanted to cry.

“Which city you are going to? Trontoo?”

“No. Vancouver.”

The driver was silent for a few moments and then turned around to look at Leela without diminishing his speed. “May I ask you a favour, madam?”

“Keep your eyes on the road, ji!” Vimala exclaimed.

“Small favour,” the Sikh said. The car had not swerved off its straight path.

“What is it? Tell me and I will see,” Leela said reluctantly.

“It is nothing much. My wife has an aunt, her dead mother’s sister, somewhere in Canada. My wife does not
remember much about her, she was very young during Partition. Only that her name was Sharan, and that she was married to a gentleman from Vancouver. If you meet someone by that name, please, will you give her our address and tell her to write?”

Leela laughed. “There are millions of people in that country. You think I will be able to find your wife’s aunt? When I myself know nobody there?”

“Anything is possible in this world, memsahib,” said the Sikh. “Without that hope, how can we live? I do this airport route occasionally, and every time I take somebody who is going to Canada or Britain—there are a lot of Sikhs there also, you know—I tell them about my wife’s aunt. If Guru-ji wills it, we will find her one day! The world is not such a big place. It is a possibility, is it not?”

“Yes, baba, everything is possible,” Leela agreed, thinking of the coincidences that had propelled her own life forward to this point.

“So madam, will you take my address with you, just in case?” The driver swung into the airport and joined the long line of taxis inching forward into a general chaos of people, baggage and exhaust-belching vehicles.

“All right,” Leela relented. “I will take it with me.”

After the driver had loaded the bags into a cart that Vimala had managed to commandeer, Leela wrote down the man’s wife’s name and address on a piece of paper.

Nirmaljeet Kaur, daughter of Kanwar Kaur (sister of Sharan), Dauri Kalan village.

What was the harm, Leela thought as she scribbled, what was the harm in keeping someone’s hope alive? For a
moment the anxiety, the annoyance with Balu for having ripped them all away from their home soil, the fear and sadness, all of it lifted. Leela wasn’t sure why this Sikh taxi driver’s request should so lighten her own mood but it did, and when she waved goodbye to Balu’s cousin and to India, it was without too much pain. She would be back soon, she thought, and then everything would be all right.

“I will go and come,” she said, hugging Vimala.

“Don’t forget to write to me as you promised,” Vimala insisted, holding her tight.

“And you too. Every bit of news from here, you understand?”

She waved once more, and then she and the children were inside the warm airport.

In the airplane, Arjun covered himself with his blanket and went to sleep. Leela turned to Preethi, who had cornered the window seat and was poring over the book Vimala had given her.

“Amma,” she said, leaning against her mother’s shoulder, “what does node mean?”

“It means where two or three things cross,” said Leela. She examined the book curiously. “What are you reading?”

“About Indra’s Net,” Preethi said. “Do you know this story, Amma?”

“No, I don’t.” Leela stroked the child’s soft hair. “Why don’t you read it to me, very softly, so we don’t disturb anyone, hanh?”

“Indra the god of heaven flung a net over the world,” read Preethi, with Leela helping her along when she
stumbled over the more complex words. “Its shining strands criss-crossed the world from end to end. At each node of this net there hung a gem, so arranged that if you looked at one you saw all the others reflected in it. As each gem reflected every other one, so was every human affected by the miseries and joys of every other human, every other living thing on the planet. When one gem was touched, hundreds of others shimmered or danced in response, and a tear in the net made the whole world tremble.”

Preethi stopped reading and looked out the window. Far below, from out of the pitch darkness, a long string of brilliant lights stretched like gems into infinity. The plane was crossing the India-Pakistan border, which was lit up in vigilance, echoing the line that had been drawn on maps in London and Delhi little more than two decades ago to mark the beginning and end of a pair of young nations at war with each other from birth.

“Amma, look, look!” she whispered excitedly. “It’s Indra’s Net!”

Leela leaned across her daughter to peer out the window. She gazed down at the brilliance scattered across the darkness, imagined the mountains, valleys and plains cut by that rope of light. Perhaps, she thought drowsily, reluctant to dampen her daughter’s excitement by telling her the truth, perhaps it was indeed Indra’s Net. And their movement, their migration from one world to another, had set it in motion, causing a series of tremors. How it would all end, she did not know.

“T
his,” Balu said proudly, waving his arm out the car window as they drove away from the airport, as if he had created it himself,
“this
is Vancouver.” He waited expectantly for his family’s reaction to the sweet mid-afternoon air, the sun-drenched expanse of land leading, on one side of the road, to a low range of mountains still hazy with cloud cover, and on the other to grassy fields. “Well? Isn’t it beautiful?”

“Actually, it smells just like Cubbon Park after the rains,” Leela declared.

“But nice, hanh? It smells
nice?”

“I don’t know,” Leela said. She would not allow herself to be beguiled. She was feeling the oddest mix of
emotions, agitation and anger, for no particular reason. Disappointment, yes, that’s what it was. She was
disappointed
that Vancouver was not something she could readily and immediately hate. And it did not smell like Cubbon Park at all. It was different—a wonderful, clean smell of tree resins and new rain. Leela had to admit it, she
liked
the smell.

They passed a wide green field and she said, “See, like our own paddy.” She spotted a low arc of mountains beyond the field. “Just like our Western Ghats, only smaller,” she remarked.

“Leela, those are the North Shore mountains,” Balu said, getting a bit wound up now. “They look nothing like the Western Ghats.” He braked ferociously several car lengths behind another vehicle.

“I don’t know about North Shore and all.” She sounded childish and obstinate, even to herself, but couldn’t help it. “Those are the Ghats.” And the river that glinted down there through the trees, that was the Cauvery.

Balu clutched the steering wheel, deflated and angry. A silence fell over the family, and the car moved along the roads in spurts and starts, for Balu was an uncertain, nervous driver. A cyclist narrowly missed climbing the pavement as a result of Balu’s manoeuvres and stopped to give him a dirty look. A bald man wearing glasses leaned out of a red car that roared alongside theirs after almost rear-ending them, thanks to Balu’s abrupt braking, and, sticking his middle finger up in the air, yelled, “Fucking Chinese drivers! Go back where you came from!”

“What did
he say?” Leela asked, startled out of her silence.

“He called us fucking Chinese drivers,” Preethi announced happily.

“What cheek! And you, Preethi, don’t use that word again,” Leela said, annoyed equally with Balu for inspiring such wrath among so many because of his driving and with the rudeness of the people shouting at them. “Do we
look
Chinese? He is blind, that lout!” She was particularly offended by the Chinese reference. “Because of them poor Jawaharlal had a heart attack!” she muttered.

“What?” Balu was bewildered.
“Who?”

“Our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Killed by the treachery of the Chinese.”

“Leela, honestly, for a clever woman you say such rubbishy things sometimes. Nehru died of a heart attack, period!”

Leela fell silent again. It
wasn’t
rubbish, she thought mulishly. She had admired Nehru just as much as she now admired his daughter, Indira Gandhi, the current prime minister of India. And the Chinese
had
broken his heart when they invaded India in 1962.

With a final slam of brakes, Balu brought the car to a halt outside a small house. It was white with a blue roof and reminded Leela of the cottages pictured in the English books she used to read to the children. It didn’t look very different from the houses on either side: four windows downstairs and four upstairs, and a small lawn on either side of the walk leading up to the front door. It wasn’t as
big
as their home in Bangalore had been. She climbed out and breathed in the clear air.

“Well?” Balu asked, coming up to stand beside her.

“Hoonh, it is not bad,” she said, unwilling to give too much away. It still rankled that Balu had decided to drag her all the way here without even a proper discussion of the matter.

Balu opened the front door with a flourish and bowed low, pretending to sweep an imaginary hat off his head. “So glad it meets with your approval!” he said.

Leela smiled and shook her head. At least they had all reached this place in one piece. At least their luggage hadn’t been misplaced or lost. She composed a letter to her mother-in-law and Vimala.
Vancouver is not a bad place. It looks a lot like our Bangalore with many large trees and clean roads. It is naturally not as big as Delhi and there are very few people. The house is very nice also.
She would never write anything but positive words in her letters. It wouldn’t do to let people know that she was in any way dissatisfied.

Preethi ducked past her, ready to charge inside so that she could claim the nicest room, but Leela seized her arm and pulled her back. “Right foot first,” she commanded. “Otherwise we will have bad luck.”

“Even in Vancouver?” Preethi asked.

“Even here,” Leela said. She carefully put her right foot forward and crossed the threshold into the house, her family close behind. “And don’t stop in the doorway,” she called over her shoulder. “Remember, it’s an in-between space. Neither here nor there. It is dangerous.”

Doorways between inside and out, sea foam that was neither wet nor dry, dusk, dawn, these were all zones of
dis-ease, where wicked spirits lurked waiting to carry you away into sorrow, madness, ill health, death.

Her nose wrinkled slightly at the smell of cleaning fluid and floor polish. She would have to light some incense sticks as soon as possible; that way it would smell more like Home. She would hang up her pictures, she would set up her gods. She would cut this New World into the shape she wished it to be, pull at the edges that didn’t match the pattern of her memories and rename it. She would redraw maps and mythologies like the settlers who came before her, those men and women from Europe who had taken a land already scored by earlier populations and marked it with their own symbols and meanings, owned it with their namings and words. Like them, she would make this corner of the world her own until it was time to return home.