Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (17 page)

Nimmo wondered whether she should go down to the fruit vendor’s stall a block away and pick up some bananas. She decided not to; instead, she unfolded the letter that had arrived from Canada, and began to read it for what seemed like the hundredth time.

Nimmo pressed the letter against her breast and leaned forward to gaze in the mirror at her long, smooth-skinned face, secretive eyes and lips that she kept pressed together as if afraid of what she might let loose. She took a deep, calming breath, trying to quell those dark memories for which she could never prepare herself, urged as they were into life by the most unexpected things. Once it was a sudden breeze bearing the fragrance of champa flowers in bloom—that had happened near the flower sellers’ stalls in the market one day. Another time it was a woman calling for her son. They were like wicked spirits, these memories, changing, uncertain, leaving her reaching out hungrily. Which one was true?
A child runs through the rustling shadow of tall sugar cane, its syrupy smell mingling with the pungent odour of smoke from burning roof thatch.

Was that it? Perhaps not. Here was another one.
A five-year-old sulks near the well, angry because her father would not take her with him and her brothers to the fields that morning. She leans over the edge of the well and throws a stone in, waiting to hear the distant splash. From the echoing darkness a voice comes wafting upwards: run, run, run.

Not that one either. Set it aside. Here’s one that rings true. This is it, then:
A small girl plays in the dirt outside a low-roofed house made of bricks and clay, freshly whitewashed.
Nimmo was sure of that detail. There on the wall, beside the front door, had been the imprints of three pairs of small hands and, on the other side, two larger sets. She, Nirmaljeet Kaur, had made the smallest pair of handprints. The other two pairs belonged to her older brothers. Sometimes their names teased at the edges of her mind and she would reach out stealthily, across the shadowy landscape of memory, hoping to trap the names of her brothers between her hands. But they were always swifter. Sometimes she wondered whether she had had any brothers at all. She had no trouble recalling her mother’s name, Kanwar Kaur, and her father’s, Pardeep Singh. Village, Dauri Kalan. At least that’s what it said on that postcard from long, long ago, the one from Canada, with the picture of a looming black bear, fuzzy green trees rising behind it. But what proof that Kanwar was indeed her mother and Pardeep her father? There was not a single word in the postcard that proved Nimmo belonged to these two people,
Kanwar Kaur, c/o Pardeep Singh.
And what about the person who had sent the postcard:
Your younger sister, Sbaran.
Was this woman really her aunt? Everything about her past confused Nimmo.

She read a little more of Bibi-ji’s letter, a sheet covered with neat Punjabi writing from a woman thousands of miles away, and wondered if she had changed in any way since its arrival. She drew out the photograph of Bibi-ji that had come with the letter—the woman was large and smart in a bright yellow salwar kameez, her face made up like the posh women who drove cars and shopped in Khan Market.

Had her own mother looked anything like Bibi-ji? Nimmo couldn’t be certain. But she did remember standing with a woman she presumed was her mother at the door of their home, while a man, tall and stooped and with a green turban coiled neatly about his thick knot of hair, and two young boys walked away from them and towards the fields. The boys had turned to wave. Nimmo had felt her mother’s tall, solid bulk beside her, comforting in its strength and permanence. She had hugged the long legs, modestly covered in a coarse cotton salwar, and her mother had stroked her head absentmindedly.

The morning had drifted by in silence, a peculiar silence, when Nimmo recalled it from this distance in time—a waiting, shadowy quiet, as if even the birds had a premonition of the horror creeping towards them. Around mid-afternoon, there was a commotion at the far end of the mud lane that crawled past their house and into the heart of the village. Her mother went out of the house to see what was going on, came rushing back inside the house and locked the door. She picked up Nimmo and lowered her gently into the large wooden bharoli of grain that sat in a dark corner of the house.

“Don’t make any noise,” she said. “Don’t even
breathe
loudly. I will come and take you out in a little while.”

“Are we playing chuppa-chuppi?” Nimmo had asked, delighted that her mother had finally found the time to play with her.

“No, but you must be as quiet as if we are playing it. Understand?” Her mother lowered the heavy wooden lid
of the container, wedging a rolling pin under it to allow for fresh air.

A few minutes later, from her grainy hiding place, Nimmo heard fists pounding on their door.

“Who is it?” her mother asked. Her voice, normally deep and sure and comforting, now had an unfamiliar quiver.

Nimmo wasn’t sure what the people outside said in reply, but she did hear her mother unlock the door. The sound of footsteps entering the house and insistent male voices. Her mother’s voice grew higher and more angry. It altered and became pleading, and then abruptly she uttered a single scream, which turned into a sound like the one a stray dog had uttered when they found it dying in the gully behind their house. Then it ceased, that quivering animal whimper. A man laughed, and Nimmo heard receding footsteps.

She had stayed in the bin for a long time, waiting for her mother to pull her out. Time lost its shape and meaning as she sat hidden in the grain. She sucked on her fingers, consumed by a terrible thirst. But mindful of her mother’s warning not to make a sound, to stay until she was taken out of the bharoli, she crouched there until painful cramps overtook her legs and she changed her position slightly, hoping no one would hear the agitated rustling of the wheat beneath her shifting body. She tried chewing a few grains, but they tasted like chalk and made her even more thirsty. To her shame she felt her bladder open and the warm liquid spread around her bottom. She had fouled her mother’s stock of wheat—how could she tell her of this awful thing she had done? Nimmo began
to cry softly, less from discomfort than from a fear of what her mother would say.

When her mother eventually opened the lid and lifted her out of the bin, Nimmo hardly recognized the dirty, bleeding woman who held her and rocked her and wept with a soundless, juddering agony.

“Amma, I peed in the bharoli,” Nimmo whispered. “I couldn’t stop. I didn’t know what to do.”

Her mother didn’t seem to hear her confession. She shushed her, told her to keep quiet while she washed herself with the water stored in pots in the kitchen. She didn’t light the lantern though it was pitch dark inside the house. Even the soft splashing of water sounded unnaturally loud. A sweet fragrance came to Nimmo. Her mother, she realized, was using the pale violet-coloured soap that her aunt had sent from somewhere far away and that she used only on special occasions.

Still in the dark, her mother changed Nimmo’s soiled clothes and, pushing her into an inner room, drew the door shut. What was her mother doing on the other side? Nimmo had wondered, beginning to panic. She had pressed her ear to the door but heard nothing.

This silence returned to haunt Nimmo again and again. Had she buried another memory under this one? Had her mother really come back to take her out of the bharoli? Or had she crawled out of it herself? If it had indeed been her mother, where did she disappear to after she had washed herself and Nimmo? And where was she when Nimmo cautiously emerged from the dark room into which she had been pushed? She had joined a kafeela
heading for the Indian border and had walked for days in that enormous, ragged line of people, begging strangers for food and water, until a couple with two children a little older than Nimmo had taken her under their wing. They had wound their way across fields that hissed in the wind. Every time they heard approaching horsemen or car engines on the dusty road, they had hidden behind shrubbery or lain flat in sugar cane fields that had been burned down to stubble and still smouldered in patches. They heard trains chugging slowly a few miles beyond the fields, saw their dark trail of smoke. A rumour spread that the long metal caterpillars were full of dead bodies—of Hindus and Sikhs if the trains were heading towards India, and Mussulmans if they were going to Pakistan. They passed burning villages and villages that were unnaturally quiet, and sometimes more people joined their kafeela, all heading south, hoping to cross the new boundary line which had appeared like a wickedness in their innocent lives, into India. She saw men weeping for their losses. Bloated corpses floated in the canals that ran along the edges of the fields, and lost-eyed children like herself begged pitifully for food and water.

Her long journey ended in New Delhi, in a vast village of tents and shacks—a refugee camp set up by the government of the newborn India. Weeks, perhaps months later, some well-dressed women in pretty saris, with notebooks and pens in their capable hands, had arrived. They had asked Nimmo questions about her family. She had shaken her head shyly at their questions and sucked her finger. She had called her mother Amma. Her mother had
called her father Sardar or ji. She could not remember anything else. She did not show the women her discovery: a postcard picture of a bear she had found tucked into the waist of her salwar. Suppose they took it away from her?

Another month went by, and Nimmo found herself adopted by the Sikh couple who had rescued her in the kafeela. And soon, growing up in a busy city, playing with her adoptive siblings and going to school, Nimmo almost forgot her vanished family. She was eighteen when she married Satpal, and within a year she was pregnant with Jasbeer. Two years later Pappu arrived, and Nimmo found herself settled into an uneventful existence broken by nothing more disturbing than Asha’s daily battles.

Yet the chalky taste of fear that had clogged her throat since her mother had thrust her into the wheat bin remained with her even now, when she was a grown woman with a family of her own. Sometimes when she heard water running at night she was reminded of her mother’s furious washing, and her nostrils would fill with the smell of the pale violet soap. She hated waking up and not finding her husband’s body beside her. How would she live without Satpal’s gentleness and strength? How would she sleep without his arms wrapped around her to keep her nightmares at bay?

Her fear was a monstrous, silent thing that often woke her, sweating and shaking, from troubled sleep. It made her suspicious of everyone, even neighbours she had now known for many years, the woman who sold her mangoes in summer and cauliflowers in winter, the milkman, the
owner of the bidi shop, the electrician, the policeman— every single one of them was a threat to her security, her peace of mind.

“Sometime in your life you have to let the fear go, Nimmo,” Satpal had once said. “It is not good for your blood pressure otherwise.”

He had read an article in the papers about the dangers of high blood pressure and for a while found a reason to work it into everything he said. This gentle, unimaginative person she had married had no idea of the meaning of terror, Nimmo reflected. His greatest fear was illness leading to a doctor’s visit. How could she explain to him what it was like to have your life pulled out from under your feet, to wake up one day and find you have no family or home in the land your people had tilled for a hundred years? How could he understand the pain of not knowing whether these memories were in fact memories or only figments of her imagination? Of relying on unconnected bits and pieces to tell him who he was? Of knowing only half your story?

She had smiled up at her husband that morning, loving him for his sunny nature, his certainty that he could protect her. But inside her own heart she carried other, darker certainties: that she would never be able to rid herself of the dying-dog sound that a woman had made one night while a child sat uncomprehending and cramped in a bin of grain. And much as she tried, Nimmo could not rid herself of the memory of a pair of feet dangling above a dusty floor, their clean pink soles smelling delicately of lavender soap.

Nimmo had no idea how long she had stood there, holding the letter pressed against herself. She would reply to this. She would be honest, and she would tell this Bibi-ji that she did not know for sure if her mother’s name was Kanwar. She would tell her, “I called my mother Amma, I did not know her name.” She would show her the postcard and tell her that she had found the name there but did not know how she came to have it. It had not been much to keep—a pair of names that might or might not have belonged to her parents.

Nimmo took a sheet of paper from her son’s notebook and found a pen. In a neat hand, she wrote:
“Respected Bibi-ji, My regards to you and hope you are well. I am writing in response to your letter. I was very surprised to receive it and cautiously happy. I do not know whether we are indeed related, for I was a child when the sorrows occurred and I do not remember much. That my name is Nirmaljeet Kaur is the only thing I know for sure about myself …”

Nimmo wrote slowly, considering each sentence before committing it to paper, her hand cramping from the unaccustomed exercise, her back hurting from sitting hunched over the pad on her lap. She wrote about all the
fragments she remembered and the bits she thought were true. She wrote every detail of that last terrifying night in Dauri Kalan, except for her memory of a pair of lavender-fragrant feet suspended above the floor. At last she was done. Bibi-ji might or might not be related to her. It did not matter, really. By the simple act of writing to her, Nimmo realized, she had gathered up those shards of memory and looked straight at them for the first time.