Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (41 page)

The house is hollow with silence—the house guests have gone, hardly anyone comes here anymore. Now there are many other homes that have open doors and the money to afford kindness. Bibi-ji stands before her dressing table crowded with bottles and jars of creams and powders, the trays of lipsticks she has not touched since Pa-ji’s death, the silver-backed comb and brush set that was his last gift to her. She looks at herself in the mirror suspended over the dressing table and sees her mother staring accusingly back at her.

“Greedy girl, Sharanjeet Kaur,” Gurpreet says, shaking a thin finger at Bibi-ji. “One day you will pay for all that you have stolen from others. You will pay.”

“I have, Amma,” Bibi-ji whispers. “I have.” Not once, but twice. She has learned that for everything you gain, you lose an equal amount. She had grabbed her sister’s fate, and Fate had turned around and taken that sister away. Then she had taken Nimmo’s son, and he had so warped her sense of right and wrong that she had sacrificed her friend Leela to the gods.

Now Bibi-ji is an old woman living in a dead house on 56th Avenue in Vancouver, on the western edge of the world, with neither husband nor child nor friend, only ghosts and guilt for company. She gazes at her mother’s face, reflected beside hers in the mirror.

“Amma, you were right,” she whispers. “I have paid dearly.”

She pulls open a drawer and removes a letter that arrived from Jasbeer a week ago.

“Dear Bibi-ji, just to let you know. I am out of prison and will be home soon.”

Home?
She thinks. Her heart flutters with hope for a moment.
But which one?

Jericho Beach. A beautiful morning just like the one on which Leela had died, falling, falling thirty-five thousand feet into the Atlantic Ocean far from home. Either home, neither home.

Preethi stares out at the flat grey water. At this time last year, they had all come here for a picnic. They talked and joked and laughed. Preethi and Arjun had teased their mother about the things she was taking back with her as
presents: umbrellas—six of them—for each of Balu’s aunts, bottles of Oil of Olay for favourite nieces, watches for nephews, two transparent negligees without matching robes that she had found in a sale bin and planned to give to a relative who was getting married soon, egg beaters to whip buttermilk into a froth, sheets of stickers for the children in the family. Leela had shaken her head at her critics and defended her purchases stoutly. Balu had presented her with a pair of gaudy green and gold slippers that he had bought from Bela’s Boutique as a surprise pre-departure gift. “You can’t arrive in India wearing a sari and those running shoes, Leela,” he had laughed. “What will our relatives think?”

Preethi worries about her father. He has quit his job and spends his time travelling between their home in Vancouver and the family home in Bangalore that Leela had loved so much. He blames himself for her death. “She never wanted to come here,” he had said when Preethi asked him how he could have foreseen or prevented the disaster. “I was the one who insisted. If we hadn’t left Bangalore …”

She thinks of that terrible morning when Alok Majumdar had phoned them with the news. They had gone to Ireland to identify Leela’s body, but nothing had been found of her. Only the tapestry handbag that Arjun had given her as a farewell gift, with the freezer bags of food inside still intact.

She thinks about Brian Mulroney’s gaffe, calling India’s prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, to offer his condolences when it was a planeload of mostly Canadian citizens who
had died. How would Leela have felt? Preethi wonders. Even in death, neither country claimed her poor mother as its own. A Trishanku for all eternity, Leela used to say.

She glances at her watch. Her father will be here soon with Arjun and Fern, and together they will remember Leela.

The sun beats down on her back. Fishing around in her bag for a bottle of water, her fingers find an envelope. She draws it out and looks at it for a long moment. It is from Jasbeer, and had surprised her when it arrived in August last year. Even now, she is not entirely sure why he wrote to her after such a long silence—or why she has kept the letter. He had written it while he was in prison in India and, as he put it, “had plenty of time to think about my sins.” She opens it and reads a random passage.
Do you remember how we used to go from house to house on Halloween saying Trick or Treat and expecting nothing more terrifying than a handful of candy? We were dressed as monsters but we were only children. Now I am no longer a child but in the last few years I had become a monster. I didn’t bother to hide myself behind a disguise. I went around the villages of Punjab, banging on doors, holding out a cloth bag. The door would open and a frightened face would peer out. I didn’t need to say anything. They knew I was there to collect money. Trick or Treat, I wanted to say, Trick or Treat. Not that the person who opened the door had a choice. I expected a gift of money or gold. Both would be used to buy us food and more guns and grenades. This was how we found the means to fight for a free country. After a while I didn’t know what that meant anymore, really. Free country. Every single time I saw a frightened face putting the
last of their savings—perhaps a gold chain bought for a daughter’s dowry, perhaps money kept aside to thatch a roof or feed the family for a month—into my bag, I felt more wretched and unsure. These people were giving me their last pennies because they were terrified of me. All they wanted was to be left alone to live their lives. And all I wanted was to go home. I was sick of the violence and the killing.”
And then, on a single sheet of paper:
“Preethi, I read about the Air India flight in the papers. I saw your mother’s name. I am so sorry.”

She can read it no more. She begins to tear up the page, into tiny pieces. Then, page by page, she tears up the remainder of the letter and finally the envelope. She gets to her feet, walks over to the edge of the sea and tosses in a handful of torn paper.

The tide has retreated. She watches two children crouched on the sand flats intently poking at something in the wet mush with their fingers. She smiles as another memory, more pleasant than the last, of a different day on the beach, surfaces. Four children on the wet sand, their heads close together as they pushed a twig down into a geoduck.

There is a scuffle of feet approaching, and Arjun drops down beside her. “What are you thinking about, Pree?”

“Something that happened long ago,” she says. “Nothing important.”

As soon as she comes home, Nimmo collects Satpal’s turban cloths, which she had starched that morning and
hung out to dry—long strips of colour fluttering in the sun, reminding her of him, standing before the small mirror in the front room, winding his turban about his head, catching her eye as she watched, smiling at her. She carries the armload inside, folds them and puts them away. Then she begins to clean the already-spotless house for the second time that day. This is now her daily routine. Get out of bed in the morning after a sleepless night, clean the house of all the evil that she can still smell in it, go to the temple to help with the children in the nursery, visit the market to buy fresh vegetables for her family, clean the house again in case the wickedness has crept back in during her absence, cook for Satpal and Jasbeer, Pappu and her little Kamal, and wait for them to tell her how much they miss her. Then they will drift away, leaving her to another night of sleepless tossing.

The door creaks open and Kaushalya enters the house, her sari rustling. “Why is the door open, Nimmo?” she says. “It is not safe. How many times do I have to tell you?”

“What is there left to take from here?” Nimmo mutters. Why does Kaushalya keep repeating things? As if Nimmo does not know the difference between safe and unsafe. But she does not say anything. Her neighbour has gone beyond the call of friendship, beyond kindness. She has borne witness, talked to the social workers, the politicians, the newspapers and the useless policemen on Nimmo’s behalf, and now she comes because she cares for her, Nirmaljeet Kaur, a woman damaged in places too private to see.

“And don’t tell me you are cleaning again,” Kaushalya says. “Come here and sit down for a few minutes. I’ll make us some tea.” She goes into the kitchen, and soon Nimmo hears the clatter of kettle and tumblers. At one time she would have felt ashamed of her own lack of hospitality. She would never have allowed a guest to make tea for herself.

“They mentioned that plane in the news again today,” Kaushalya says, bringing in the tea and sitting down beside Nimmo. “The one that crashed last year. So sad, no? They still haven’t caught the people who did it. Do you remember hearing about it?”

Yes,
Nimmo thinks,
I remember.
A plane exploded out of the sky and plunged into the sea. Everyone on board died. Three-hundred-and-twenty-nine people. The plane was flying from Canada to India—from the place to which she had sent her oldest son, Jasbeer. For a few days, until the names were released, Nimmo was afraid that the child she gave away into Bibi-ji’s care was one of the dead. But his name was not there. She has no idea where he is or what he is doing, but until she hears otherwise, she knows that she has one living child. And two dead.

Rumours had immediately circulated that it was her people, Sikhs, who had done this deed: put a bomb in the plane and killed all those men, women and children. But why should she, Nirmaljeet Kaur, care? The world is full of news. She too was news in November 1984.

“What a tragedy,” Kaushalya says. “So many innocent lives.” She finishes her tea and rises to leave. She looks closely at Nimmo. “Do you want me to stay here with you tonight? Are you all right?”

Nimmo nods briskly. “Yes, don’t worry about me. I have lots to do.” She waits until her friend has left before beginning her preparations for the evening meal. She has planned an elaborate menu. But she will have to hurry, she thinks, chopping the bunch of fragrant coriander that she purchased on her way back from the temple. They will all be back anytime now. They always come without warning and it upsets her no end.
Give me some time to get ready,
she has said to them so many times, but no, does anyone ever listen to her? The onions sizzle in the hot oil, then the spinach and the paneer bits she had fried earlier. This is for Satpal, he loves her spinach paneer with hot parathey. And here is Kamal’s favourite, kheer studded heavily with raisins and cashews. It is expensive to put so many dried fruits in a single dish, but her daughter deserves everything she can make for her. Back to the kitchen to heat the oil for Pappu’s puris.

She turns on all the lights in the tiny house and lays out the plates, the bowls and the mats for her family to sit on, and waits. They will come back, she knows. She cannot possibly have lost her family for the second time in her life. Oh no, she is a careful woman, a fearful one, who is prepared for trouble. Not like her foolish mother, who left nothing behind except a small, frightened child and the smell of lavender soap. Nimmo lays out her banquet and opens the doors, and opens the windows, and waits in the stillness of the night.
They will come.

A tall man with a grey beard and a light blue turban walks slowly down the dark gully. The streetlights throw long
shadows of houses, shops and shrines, people and cows. The man walks past small stands selling cigarettes and bananas, Glucose biscuits and Monaco crackers, stopping now and again to peer at the house numbers, hoping that things have not changed too much in his absence. He shifts his backpack from one shoulder to another and passes a shop that he remembers visiting when he was a child. His heart beats faster. He is nearly home.