Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (32 page)

“How can you say that, Nimmo? We are Sikhs, our relatives live in Punjab, it matters to me what happens there. You lost your family and your property because of what happened in Punjab. Now my family is also getting affected. Manpreet says that because of Sunny’s involvement with all these political groups the police are harassing them all the time, and you say it’s not our problem?”

Nimmo strained the leaves and stirred milk into her tea, sipping it resolutely. Yes, she cared what happened, and no, she did not want to be involved. All she wanted was to be safe. To live without fear.

Satpal rose to his feet. “I can’t understand you. What is happening to you these days?”

“Nothing is happening to me.” Nimmo snapped, annoyed with him for infecting her morning with dark fears.

Satpal headed for the door and paused. “Sunny is coming to stay with us for a few days. Okay?”

“Kamal will be having her exams, she has to study. Having people in the house will be disturbing.”

Satpal gave her an irritated look. “Every time Manpreet wants to send her son here, one of your children has an exam. I am beginning to think that you don’t want him to come at all!”

Nimmo did not respond. She was afraid of the politics that Sunny would drag with him into the house, but you could not refuse to host your own relatives, especially not your older sister’s son.

“And when I come back from Modinagar,” Satpal said, the irritation still in his voice, “I will get that extra room built on the roof. That way anyone can come and stay, exams or not.”

Nimmo handed him one of the lunch boxes and said in a pacifying voice, “Okay, okay. Don’t leave the house angry. How many years have you been saying you will build that room, anyway? I will write to your sister and tell her to send Sunny to us. But it will have to be next week, after Kamal’s exams. At least allow one child to finish her studies well!”

The rest of the day was tarnished as Nimmo brooded over the prospect of Sunny’s visit, which filled her with nameless worries. She wished that Satpal’s nephew would stay away. Not that she wasn’t fond of him; she had good memories of him. But he had changed in the years since that dreadful Emergency, which, Nimmo had been forced to admit, had been a terrible mistake on the part of Mrs. Gandhi. She had seen Sunny turn from a cheerful, open youth into a secretive, hard-eyed man whom she barely recognized. She worried that he might drag the impressionable young Pappu into the politics of Punjab, fill
his head with ideas of fighting to create an independent country called Khalistan.

The last time Sunny had visited them, a few years ago, Nimmo was in the kitchen, cooking dinner. Kamal and Pappu were in the front room with their older cousin. She heard them laughing over something that Sunny had said, and then Kamal’s voice, begging Sunny to tell them stories.

At first she hadn’t paid attention, assuming they were the same ones he had told before—amusing folklore about animals, or the famous Akbar and Birbal tales that Kamal had loved. Then her daughter’s voice pierced through her fog of thoughts.

“I don’t like your stories anymore, Bhai-ji,” Kamal said. “They are so scary.”

Nimmo had started to listen more carefully—he must be telling them those silly ghost stories he was so fond of. Like the one about the four-winged nightbird that made those who heard its song go mad. Only those people who were about to die could hear this deadly bird. She remembered hearing this story as a child and being terrified by it. But now what were these other things Sunny was telling her children?

“The police always burn the bodies,” she heard him say. “It is the best way to get rid of them. Sometimes, though, a body part does not burn fully. Perhaps it hasn’t been doused properly with kerosene; perhaps the police have run out of firewood, for so many corpses need a lot of wood to roast well. Once my friend found a skull in his field, partially covered in skin and soot. Another time, his dog Blackie brought home somebody’s hand.”

Kamal had run to Nimmo, covering her ears with her hands, and Nimmo had scolded Sunny for scaring the girl. “Stop filling their heads with rubbish,” she had said.

“But it is not rubbish, maami-ji,” Sunny protested. “It is all true, every word of it. Everybody should hear about the things that are going on in Punjab. Kamal and Pappu as well.”

“No, I don’t want them to know.” She weighed her next words before uttering them. “Maybe you should go home,” she said evenly. “As soon as possible.”

Sunny had left the next day, giving a puzzled Satpal an excuse about having to meet someone in Jullundur.

Nimmo hadn’t told Satpal about this incident. She was certain he would be annoyed by her rudeness. Sunny hadn’t showed up at their door for the next four years. Now, Nimmo was certain, he was coming here to get away from the police, or worse. He was bringing Trouble to her home, and she couldn’t think how to stop him.

I
t was a quiet day at The Bay’s shoe department, and Leela spent most of it listening to Erin’s woes. In the sixteen years since she had started working at the store, Leela had seen her sales manager through three boyfriends and two marriages. She had often wondered why Erin had decided that she, Leela, married for twenty-six years to a man whom she had met only once before her wedding, should be an authority on affairs of the heart.

“I told him he’d better watch out,” she said to Leela, fluffing her already high hair with her red fingernails. She leaned against the countertop. “I am not, I repeat
not,
going to take crap from anybody. You know me, Laila. You know I don’t take crap, right?”

Erin persisted in calling her Laila. Once, exasperated, Leela had even written it down in big black letters and waved it in front of Erin’s nose—LEE-LA—but to no effect. It wasn’t that Erin didn’t care for her. She had shown Leela many kindnesses, often going out of her way to drive her home, bringing her small gifts every Christmas and remembering her birthday as well as Preethi’s and Arjun’s. Leela suspected that she had merely decided that Leela could not possibly be a name because she had never heard of it, while “Laila” was the host of an American television talk show Erin watched faithfully. She was now resigned to being the more dashing Laila at work and mundane wife and mother-of-two Leela at home.

“Yes,” Leela said doubtfully. Recently there had been signs that her sales manager’s latest relationship was in trouble—Erin came late to work, sighed more than she sold, didn’t wear the bright make-up of which she was so fond.

“Would you take crap from your guy, Laila? Tell me honestly, would you, as a self-respecting woman, take any old shit?”

Leela thought about it for a few moments. She wasn’t sure what rated as crap in Erin’s book. She had met Erin’s boyfriend, and he had not seemed the sort to give anyone crap. He was a mild-mannered man with a shy smile and seemed to adore her.

She caught Erin looking anxiously at her through mascara-ringed eyes. “Well, would you? Take crap from your husband? Or would you leave him?”

The thought of leaving Balu had never entered her head, so Leela could only nod and say judiciously, “Well, it depends on the crap. I mean what
kind
of crap is Don giving you?” Hearing herself speak, she marvelled at the variety of tongues she had acquired—one that made her sound just like Erin, another a soothing, in charge-of-things tone for the customers who came to her like helpless children holding out pairs of shoes in confusion, a third for her home, the children, Balu, Bibi-ji and the wide circle of friends and acquaintances she now had. How enormous her world had become that she needed so many languages to negotiate it.

“Laila, are you listening?” Erin tapped her nails on the counter.

Leela widened her eyes at her colleague and nodded. “Yes, I am, Erin.”

Erin was looking closely at her. “I just noticed, Laila. Your eyes are the same colour as mine.”

“You
just
noticed?” Leela exclaimed. “And how long have we known each other?” She began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Erin asked, looking puzzled.

“Never mind. It’s a long and complicated story,” Leela said. She shook her head and chuckled again. “I’ll tell you some other time.”

It was seven in the evening by the time she finished her shift and took the bus home. She settled into her seat with a sigh, noticing two teenaged girls sitting in the back of the bus. With their copycat hairstyles, dark lipstick, fishnet stockings and short leather skirts, they looked, to Leela, like a new singer called Madonna who appeared on
television a lot these days. They were having a conversation that involved the repetition of a favourite word in a variety of tones and volumes.

“Fuck!” said one of them, shaking her head and rolling her eyes.

“Yeah, like
fuck,
man!” said the other, more verbose one.

“So I told him to, like, fuck
off!”

They got off the bus at the next stop. Watching them as they sashayed down the sidewalk, Leela thought back to the first time she had heard their favourite word. A driver had spat it at them the day they arrived in Vancouver.
Fucking Chinese
was what he had called them. He had pointed his middle finger at the sky and she had wondered what all those words and gestures added up to, afraid of the dislike implicit in them. Now it all seemed so long ago and of little consequence.

Fishing around in her purse, she pulled out a letter that had arrived the previous day from Vimala, Balu’s cousin in Delhi. It was full of news and gossip about their relatives. Leela liked rereading her letters until she had memorized them. She would reply in her spare time, writing a few words, a sentence or two, sometimes the entire paragraph between chores and during her lunch breaks at work. Somehow she could think of much more news to put into her missives when she wrote them piecemeal than when she sat down and tried to write about everything at once.

“Dear Leela,”
wrote Vimala.
“The photos you sent were very nice. How lovely Preethi is. We were glad to hear that she has got
into a prestigious university for her master’s degree. What a clever daughter you have, Leelu! As for Arjun, we were glad to hear he has found a job in Vancouver, this way at least one of your children is close by. He must be much in demand in the marriage market. A number of our acquaintances here are inquiring after him and want to know if he is thinking of marriage. There are lots of eligible girls here.”
Leela paused at that and wondered what her cousin would say if she knew about Arjun’s gori girlfriend, Fern. Leela had just found out herself, and after a night of tossing at the prospect of half-and-half—or indeed one-third—grandchildren, she gave up, defeated by fractions, and shrugged mentally. It had been difficult for her—even painful, she remembered, so painful that she had put away, in some dusty corner of her mind, her memories of her large, sad mother. But it would not be difficult in this world, where change and movement and hybridity were commonplace, for any children that Arjun and Fern chose to have. Not so difficult, anyway.

She continued reading.
“Every letter you tell me that one of your friends is coming to India, but when are you coming? Even your children we have not seen, except in photographs. It is time for you to come home, Leela.”

Her stop arrived and Leela got off the bus. Yes, it had been too long. Somehow, without her noticing it, seventeen years had gone by since they had left Bangalore. The world had come apart since then and had fitted itself together again with altered borders. Old countries had become two or three new ones, walls had gone up and had been torn down, ancient enmities had been buried and then renewed with greater rage. Even the
neighbourhood where she had lived for a decade and a half had altered beyond recognition. Mrs. Wu and JB Foods had long ago found themselves in competition with a dozen new stores that sold everything they carried, and then some. Korean, Indian, Sri Lankan, Chinese, Italian, Iranian and Greek grocery stores had sprung up or expanded into mini-supermarkets. Lalloo had sold Far Out Travels and was now in the real estate business. His former company now competed with three new travel agencies, each challenging the others with cut-throat pricing and aggressive customer service, offering cheap fares to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Middle East. In tiny offices over these stores, shady lawyers offered to make recent arrivals’ immigrant status legal for two thousand dollars.