Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (39 page)

Pappu crouched in the damp, narrow space and waited fearfully. “Who’s there?” he heard Shanti asking.

A male voice ordered, “Open the door. We need to talk to your husband.”

“He isn’t here,” she said.

“We want to see for ourselves, open the door,” the voice demanded.

“I told you he is not here.” Shanti’s voice held a tremor of fear.

A steady banging started up. “Open up,” an implacable voice said. “Otherwise we will break this door down.”

Pappu heard the door open. He glanced around the tiny bathroom thinking there was nowhere to hide, no exit other than that flimsy wooden door, rotting and ragged around the bottom edge where the water touched it constantly.

“What is the matter with you people? Hanh? I told you my husband is not at home. Is this any way to behave with a woman?” scolded Shanti.

“Where is the sardar?” a voice asked—the same one that had threatened to break the door.

Looking around in a panic, Pappu spotted Mohan Lal’s old-fashioned razor on the sink and grabbed it. He removed his turban and unbound his hair. Gripping the razor, he started sawing clumps of hair, cursing at its thickness.

Shanti shouted, “Ask anyone, this is a Hindu home! There are no sardars here. I will call the neighbours if you don’t leave right now.”

Someone laughed. “Arrey, Aunty, one of your neighbours told us that you had a sardar hiding here like a rat. We don’t like rats, so we are here to catch him.”

The man who had spoken first said in that same quiet monotone, “Is that the bathroom where you were just now? Why is the door closed? Who is in there?”

Pappu caught sight of himself in the flecked and spotted mirror above the sink. He had not even managed to get through half the hair. And his face, there was all that hair on his face. What was he to do with so much hair? And so little time?
God,
he prayed,
send me a miracle. I will do any seva for you, I will wash the floors of every temple in this country for a year, for two years, I will dedicate my life to the poor, oh God send me a miracle.
He attacked his face, scraping away at his beard and moustache, cutting himself all over in his haste. Blood flowered against his skin and flowed down his neck.
Never mind,
he thought,
never mind.

“In the bathroom?” Shanti’s voice was etched with tension. Pappu could hear it. He grabbed a bunch of his beard and pulled it hard, trying to wrench it out by the roots, his eyes filling with tears at the shooting pain. “My daughter is in there now. Who else would be there?”

“Your daughter? All of you are going into the bathroom one after another? Something you ate, hanh? Ask her to come out then. We don’t want to hurt innocent people, Aunty-ji,” said the quiet man.

“Yes, I will do that, but if she is bathing, it might take a few minutes.”

“Who takes a bath this late in the morning?” one of the men wanted to know.

“We poor people have to bathe whenever there is water in the taps,” Shanti said bravely. “Six o’clock, ten o’clock, who knows? This is the way in this part of the world! But I will tell her to hurry up. You can wait outside.”

“Oh no, Aunty-ji, it is cold outside. We will wait here, and you can make us some tea while your charming daughter is bathing,” the quiet man said.

Pappu heard Shanti approach the bathroom door and shout, “Daughter, these men want to make sure that there are no men in there. Finish your bath quickly and come out properly dressed.”

The bathroom floor was covered in hair. Pappu didn’t know what he was supposed to do. Turn into a woman? He looked at his square-jawed face in the mirror, half-shaved, bristly and bleeding where the razor had cut through skin, swollen where he had tried to tear the hair off his face, his long tresses unevenly butchered. And he gave up. It was no use, they would get him anyway. There was to be no miracle for him today, he knew that now. With a steady hand, he finished shaving his face, trying not to think of the sacrilege he was committing. Then he gathered his remaining hair into a ponytail. He pushed the mess on the floor to a corner, and emerged from the bathroom.

A silence met him as he stepped out followed by a crack of laughter. “Arrey, Aunty, look at what that bath
did to your daughter! She has turned into a man! Is there a demon in there doing magic?”

Laughing, they dragged Pappu out into the silent gully. One of the men jammed a car tire down over his body, pinning his arms to his sides, poured kerosene over him and flicked a match, setting him alight.

At the Modinagar terminus, the driver refused to let Satpal into his vehicle.

“Isn’t my money good enough for you?” Satpal demanded. He was tired and irritable. The previous evening, a passerby in the market where he had gone to eat his dinner had spat at him and shouted, “Murdering whore-son!” And when he had whirled around to confront the man, he had been surrounded by a group of men armed with crowbars and sticks. If some people on the street had not intervened, he knew he could have been seriously hurt. The incident had left him shaken and anxious to get home to Delhi as soon as possible. Indira Gandhi’s death had unsettled people everywhere, he told himself, and there were always thugs and malcontents willing to use the prevailing mood of anxiety for their own ends. He realized that his turban and beard made him a clear target.

He had reached the terminus as early as possible to catch the first bus. But now the idiot of a driver wouldn’t let him climb in.

“It’s not your money, Sardar-ji,” the driver said apologetically. “I don’t want any trouble. I hear there are people looking for turbans. You should go home!”

“But that’s why I am trying to get into your bus, sahib,” protested Satpal. “I live in Delhi. How else will I get there?”

“For your own sake I am saying no,” the driver replied. “I can’t guarantee that you will be safe on this bus. Find a hotel and stay inside. That is my advice, take it or leave it.”

Satpal turned away, angry and helpless. He waited for the next bus, and again wasn’t allowed to get on. A taxi would be horribly expensive, and if the road to Delhi was as unsafe as the first driver had indicated, perhaps it wouldn’t be a good idea either. Satpal left the terminus and started walking towards the market, hoping to find an inexpensive hotel room, when the first blow landed on his back. He turned around and found himself face to face with a gang of men, their faces filled with hatred.

“Killer!” they shouted. “Fucking murderer! We’ll teach you to kill helpless women.”

Satpal backed away only to find his path blocked by more men. He lowered his head and ran into one of them, taking him by surprise. He raced through the gap that opened up and across the road to a shuttered café where he had earlier noticed two policemen.

“Help!” he shouted, waving his arms to attract their attention. They did not seem to notice him. He reached them and grabbed one by his arm. “Help me,” he pleaded. “Those men are going to kill me.”

He looked over his shoulder. The group was strolling towards him. “Please, help!” he begged again.

The policeman he had grabbed gave him a considering look. “I have no orders to help,” he said.

“What?” Satpal cried, incredulous.

“I am not in charge of crime, Sardar-ji,” he sneered. “I am only here to direct traffic. For crime report you have to go to the police station. I am not authorized.”

The other policeman shrugged. “I am on duty only from ten o’clock.” And he turned away.

Satpal started to run. Not a single shop on the street was open. A few had been vandalized. He turned into a gully and knew instantly that he had made a mistake. There was nobody on the narrow street that ran between stinking drains and the backs of buildings, the walls dirty with graffiti and film posters. And there was no exit.

He turned to face the men. “I have children, I have a wife,” he pleaded, looking at the blank, implacable faces of his attackers. “I voted for Indira-ji. Please.” He folded his palms and fell to his knees. “I didn’t do anything, brothers, I didn’t do anything.”

A middle-aged man in a pale green kurta laughed. “Hey, look at this brave lady-killer on his knees! And these bastards call themselves lions! Does a lion grovel like this?”

“Let’s see what he keeps inside his turban. Definitely not brains!” remarked another of them. “Hello, Sardar-ji, remove your pagdi!”

“Please let me go. You can take all the money I have if you want,” Satpal begged. He scrabbled inside the pocket of his trousers and drew out a roll of notes. “Here, here.”

“The bastard is paying us bribes,” the first man said indignantly. He took the money and pocketed it. He grinned. “Evidence of bribery.” He turned earnestly to the
others. “Do you think Indira-ji had time to bribe those fuckers before they shot her? Hanh? Hanh?” He jammed the iron rod under Satpal’s turban and flipped it back hard, dislodging the carefully coiled blue cloth to reveal the knot of grey hair neatly braided and bunched with a rubber band. “Open your hair, sardar-ji!” He shoved the rod against Satpal’s chest, forcing Satpal to fall back onto his heels. “Let’s see how long you have grown it, eating the salt of this country.”

Silently Satpal uncoiled his hair and waited trembling to see what further indignities they would inflict on him before they killed him. He wished he had had the time to phone Nimmo again. He thought of her as he had last seen her, standing in the sunlight, leaning against the door of their home. He thought of the red parandhi she wore at the end of her braid when she wanted to dress up. He remembered the handprints on the wall of their little house, the ones she would never let him paint over.

He knelt while one of the men poured kerosene over his head, the acrid smell making him dizzy and nauseous. One man dropped a car tire over his head and jammed it about his shoulders, immobilizing his arms. Another lit a match to his streaming hair, wet with kerosene. The flames ate into his scalp, crept like a dreadful river down his face, licked at his eyebrows, his eyelashes. The heat burned his eyes and his last thought was that he could not even weep. He could not even weep.

O
n Main Street, there was no other news that mattered for weeks. Not the fact that a lantern-jawed man named Brian Mulroney had replaced the suave Pierre Trudeau as Canada’s prime minister, nor the fact that in the United States Ronald Reagan had just won a second term as president.

All that occupied the Indian community in Vancouver was the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the resulting murders of innocent Sikhs. Horror piled on horror.

On November 10th, the phone rang in the Taj Mahal and Bibi-ji answered. It was Leela. “Is Jasbeer’s family okay?” she asked. “Your niece Nimmo? I heard of the
terrible things that happened in Delhi, Bibi-ji. Monstrous. I’ve been worrying.”

“No news, Leela.” And Bibi-ji hung up. Over the next few days, she was increasingly conscious that the tension between the Sikhs and the rest of the Indian community, already high after the invasion of the Golden Temple, was now close to exploding. There were insults traded by both sides, subtle and overt. Fireworks were let off and sweets distributed on Main Street to celebrate the death of Mrs. Gandhi. Crowds of Sikhs disrupted traffic in the downtown area in front of the Indian High Commission on Howe Street, screaming fury at the massacre of their people in Delhi. Mrs. Patel’s car windows were smashed and the windows of The Delhi Junction spray-painted in retaliation. A Sikh lawyer’s head was bashed in with an iron rod because he protested Canadian immigration policies that, he claimed, allowed secessionists and extremists from Punjab safe haven in Canada. And the non-Sikhs in the desi community murmured that it served the bastards right, the turbaned hooligans who wanted to split an already-torn country once again. They deserved the army’s attack on the Golden Temple, they deserved what they got after Indira Gandhi’s death.

And finally one day came news of Nimmo from Delhi. Terrible news. Her brother-in-law Balraj called to say that Kamal and Pappu were dead. They did not know what had happened to Satpal. They were still hoping to find him, but the chances were not very good. Balraj and Manpreet were trying to get Nimmo to
move to their home in Amritsar, but she refused to leave Delhi. She didn’t want anyone to stay with her either. “Bibi-ji, she is in a bad state,” Balraj said. “We don’t want to leave her alone here, but she won’t listen to anyone. I think Jasbeer should come back to his mother. She needs him.”

How much more do we have to bear?
Bibi-ji thought, sitting beside Jasbeer in a house silent with grief once again.
How many more deaths?
“I’ll come with you, putthar,” she said, reaching out for Jasbeer’s hand, pressing it between her palms, glad to feel their living warmth.

“No, I want to see her first,” Jasbeer said. “She is my mother. I should have gone sooner.”

Bibi-ji was silent.

Lalloo oversaw the arrangements, as usual, contacting his travel agent friends to book a flight for Jasbeer. “Not Air India,” he said decisively. “There is talk that flights on that airline will be sabotaged.”