Authors: Bharati Mukherjee
P
ITAJI
died the next May. He died horribly. He got off a bus in a village two hours west of us and was gored by a bull. He’d had the bus driver let him off in a country lane so he could take a shortcut through a field to a friend’s hut. The friend he’d gone to visit was another Lahori, someone he liked to play chess with. The horror was the suddenness. He used to say, lying on his charpoy in the courtyard, I can watch death coming from here. He’ll have to be a very sneaky fellow to catch me by surprise. I will die with my kurta buttoned and my glasses folded on my paper and all my prayers said. The bull attacked him from behind. He never saw it coming.
The Lahori friend consoled my mother. “Why cry?
Crying is selfish. We have no husbands, no wives, no fathers, no sons. Family life and family emotions are all illusions. The Lord lends us a body, gives us an assignment, and sends us down. When we get the job done, the Lord calls us home again for the next assignment.”
I know that sounds soft. “Very, very,
very
Indian, Jassy”—that’s what Taylor used to say, back in Manhattan. “You don’t believe that, do you? You can’t, you’re more modern than that.”
What it means is this: Grant the notion that there’s a God. Taylor agreed. For the sake of argument, then, if He’s God, His assignments are perhaps too vast for the human mind, even your very superior one, Taylor. Go on, he said, smiling his lopsided, I’m-amused-by-all-this smile. Then, I said, let’s make a bigger leap. Perhaps Pitajis life assignment was merely to crunch one small piece of gravel as he jumped out of the bus that morning, and once he did it, perhaps God took the form of a maddened bull, or God took the form of nettles that caused a perfectly harmless bull enough pain to charge. Perhaps my father’s assignment was to be just that: my father; to die in a freakish accident before he could marry me off so that I could be free to fall in love with Prakash. What if my father’s assignment was to hasten my eloping with Prakash, hasten my getting to New York! Maybe
my
assignment was to bring you enlightenment, Taylor. Taylor laughed. Enlightenment? I remember him quizzing. So you think I’m a
narrow-minded American bigot? I squeezed his squareknuckled fist to let him know I wasn’t accusing him of bigotry. Enlightenment meant seeing through the third eye and sensing designs in history’s muddles. I think now that maybe Pitaji’s assignment was to strand me in Iowa, to bring me to Bud and to make possible the baby I am carrying, or to bring Du and me together in America. How do I explain my third eye to men who only see an inch-long pale, puckered scar?
Taylor sulked. He said, “Please, please don’t ever call me a bigot.” We talked about the work he was doing for Amnesty International. I cried when he described some South African torture methods. I kept crying because I’d been unfair to Taylor. I’d been horribly egotistical. Perhaps I don’t count in God’s design. Maybe Pitaji’s assignment was merely to flee Lahore and provide a comfortable house for some Muslim gentleman and gold for someone’s former servant. Maybe Pitaji’s mission was to pluck a certain flower and release a certain seed. The scale of Brahma is vast, as vast as space in the universe. Why shouldn’t our mission be infinitesimal? Aren’t all lives, viewed that way, equally small? Only if we think of “assignment” as an important mission, something historical, was Pitaji a man unfulfilled.
I tried to explain this belief to Taylor, that a whole life’s mission might be to move a flowerpot from one table to another; all the years of education and suffering and laughter, marriage, parenthood, education, serving merely to put a particular person in a particular room with a certain
flower. If the universe is one room known only to God, then God alone knows how to furnish it, how to populate it.
Taylor was despondent that a grant application, to study the physical properties of a subatomic particle known to exist only in theory, had been rejected.
“I couldn’t live in a world like yours,” he said. “If rearranging a particle of dust is as important as discovering relativity, that’s a formula for total anarchy. Total futility. Total fatalism. Where’s the incentive to do anything?”
The incentive, I should have said, is to treat every second of your existence as a possible assignment from God. Everything you do, if you’re a physicist or a caregiver, is equally important in the eye of God.
When Pitaji died, my mother tried to throw herself on his funeral pyre. When we wouldn’t let her, she shaved her head with a razor, wrapped her body in coarse cloth, and sat all day in a corner. Once a day I force-fed spoonfuls of rice gruel into her.
10
P
ITAJI
died in the hottest month, when the topsoil is so dry it grays and crumbles like ash. Arvind-prar and Hari-prar, who quit their technical school in Jullundhar to come back and look after us, sold the desiccated thirty-acre family ground and opened up a scooter-repair shop. They didn’t talk anymore of going to Bahrain or Qatar. Like it or not, they were stuck in Hasnapur.
We didn’t know it at the time but the man who bought our ground had already bought neighboring ground, so he ended up with a huge rhombus-shaped farm. He had gone to agricultural school in Canada, people said, and was testing out scientific ideas. Maybe it was science—he did plant a new kind of wheat—but I think mostly it was luck.
I used to take a roundabout route to the river so I could watch the new owner (we called him Vancouver Singh) at work. The late June sky, rough as steel wool, sent him greening rains at just the right time. The wrinkled soil muddied and squelched. Storks waded through wet fields. Thatch grass soared, saplings thickened. I watched Vancouver Singh, in his funny foreign yellow raincoat and boots, walk the raised paths my father had once walked. I felt robbed. I felt disconnected. I made a bonfire of my books under the jasmine tree. Even the bookworms and red ants didn’t escape.
Sometime between winter and the next monsoon season, as the fields around us went from green to yellow to red and the air was fragrant with Vancouver Singh’s harvest, my brothers started to bring home friends and clients. The guests were mostly tall, pleasant-looking Jat Hindu unmarried men. I knew what my brothers were up to, but I didn’t let on. I served the sweet, frothy tea in heavy brass tumblers and snuck a look at them. I waited for sparks. I waited and waited.
What I liked was hearing the men talk. Their talk was always about vengeful, catastrophic politics. Sikh nationalists had gotten out of hand … The Khalsa Lions were making bombs… Kalashnikov- and Uzi-armed terrorists on mopeds were picking off the moderates, the police, innocent Hindus … Vancouver Singh’s farm was a safe-house for drug pushers and gunmen … Punjab would explode in months, maybe even days… Hindus would be smart to get out while they could … The whole country
was a bloody mess … In the sooty ocher light of clay lamps, impassioned men brought me the outside world of fatal hates. Evening by evening I felt less isolated. I started listening to the All-India Radio English-language newscast again, the first time since Pitaji died, and borrowing Vimla’s father’s copy of
The Hindu.
How much English, how quickly, I’d forgotten!
Even in Hasnapur things started to happen. A transistor radio blew up in the bazaar. A busload of Hindus on their way to a shrine to Lord Ganpati was hijacked and all males shot dead at point-blank range.
One day my brothers brought home a man from our village whom they’d known in school, and then in Jullundhar, a baptized Sikh who wore his beard the way the Khalsa Lions did, long and full and stiffly combed out over his chest. Masterji had always worn his rolled and netted. The man had unforgiving eyes, maybe that’s what made me wary of him right away. I brought him a glass of water and a glass of sweet tea, but he didn’t touch either, as if drinking anything in our impure, infidel home would contaminate him.
Hari-prar and Arvind-prar didn’t seem to feel the same way, and they got started on their boisterous political arguments about the future of our state more quickly than usual. I felt, though, that the talk that night had more ferocious threats, interruptions, curses than jokes and laments, so I went indoors and tried to comfort, or at least reach, Mataji, by massaging her razored-rough head.
But even indoors I couldn’t shut out the flat, authoritative voice of the new guest. The Khalsa, the Pure-Bodied and the Pure-Hearted, must have their sovereign state. Khalistan, the Land of the Pure. The Impure must be eliminated. My brothers laughed. “How, Sukkhi? You’re not going to kill brothers from your own village.”
“You must leave, then. Leave or be killed. Renounce all filth and idolatry. Do not eat meat, smoke tobacco, or drink alcohol or cut your hair. Wear a turban, and then you will be welcome.”
“What kind of choice is that? That’s worse than the Muslims gave.”
“Is there anything else you want us to do, Sukkhi?” asked Arvind-prar.
“Yes. Keep your whorish women off the streets.”
I expected a fight—people had died over less—but my brothers must have been in a good mood. Maybe they just didn’t believe what they were hearing. “Sukhwinder, where do they teach you such nonsense?”
“I have visited Sant Bhindranwale in the Golden Temple.”
“The Sant’s an idiot.” Bhindranwale was the leader of all the fanatics.
Later that night I heard a scooter roar into our courtyard. The arguments became more personal. The new voice spoke without rushing and exclaiming, and when it said, “You’re a fool, Sukkhi,” which it did quite often, a laugh prologued the indictment.
Sukhwinder didn’t tire, he just grew louder. He called all Hindu women whores, all Hindu men rapists. “The sari
is the sign of the prostitute,” he said. And “Hindus are bent on genocide of the Sikh nation. Only Pakistan protects us.”
The new man, whom my brothers called Prakash, kept pushing. He said, in that sharp laughing way of his, “Sukkhi, there’s no Hindu state! There’s no Sikh state! India is for everyone. Have you forgotten what the Muslims did to Sikhs in Partition? What the Moghuls did to your own Ten Gurus? Have you forgotten what Emperor Aurangzeb did, what Emperor Jehangir did?”
I fell in love with that voice. It was low, gravelly, un-fooled. I was prepared to marry the man who belonged to that voice.
“They were Moghuls, not Muslims!” Sukhwinder could only register helplessness and peevishness.
“Not Muslims, Sukkhi? I don’t think they worshipped Jesus Christ,” said the new man.
“They were Afghan slaves, not true Pakistanis. True Pakistanis are Punjabis, like us. If they were cruel to Sikhs, it’s because of Hindu influence on them. Many of them had Hindu mothers and Hindu concubines who taught them to kill Sikhs. Pakistanis were Hindus who saw the light of the true God and converted. So were Sikhs. Only bloodsucker banyas and untouchable monkeys remained Hindu.”
The man I meant to marry snapped back, “What absolute rubbish you speak. You’ve lost your mind. Don’t talk nonsense about the light of the true God. They had to convert or have their heads chopped off.” Then he must have turned to my brothers, because he said, “This man is a danger to us and to himself.”
Sukhwinder did some saber-banging and cursing, then whooshed off on his scooter. The other man stayed on. There were cracks in my door, but the light was too low to see anything. Only a very tall, very strong man could have a voice like that.
That rowdy insomniac evening I didn’t leave the hut, and I didn’t see Prakash, but I learned more facts about him. He was a city boy from Amritsar, the city of the Sikhs’ Golden Temple, which meant he’d seen more Hindu-Sikh clashes than we had in our little village. He was a good student, about to graduate, about to send away job applications to Germany and the United States. “You can keep the Emirates,” he said dismissively. “When I go to work in another country, it’ll be because I want to be a part of it. Can you imagine working in a place like Qatar? That’s blood money they pay you. You come back a rich slave. I wouldn’t go just to be a guest worker, and I wouldn’t go because I was afraid of the Sukkhis putting bullets in our heads.”
Then they went on to shoptalk. Prakash seemed to have a special talent for fixing televisions, VCRs, computers. My brothers, muscled and uncomplicated mechanics, liked to lug big greasy machine parts, and afterward quaff down quart bottles of Kingfisher beer, while Prakash sounded more like a surgeon, a confident professional in starched white, lifting microchips with wire forceps.
Love rushes through thick mud walls. Love before first sight: that’s our Hasnapuri way.
11
T
HE
next morning I packed my brothers’ tiffin carriers more indulgently than usual—extra dal, extra chapatis, extra pickles and chillies and lemon wedges—and slipped in my most important question: “The friend who came over, not the Sardarji, does he speak English?” I couldn’t marry a man who didn’t speak English, or at least who didn’t want to speak English. To want English was to want more than you had been given at birth, it was to want the world.
“First-class English,” Hari-prar said. “You think he has a little sister to translate manuals for him?”
Arvind-prar added, “Prakash isn’t a dunderhead like us. He’ll move to America in a year or two. He already has friends in New York. He knows ways.”
After that for almost two weeks they said no more about Prakash. I didn’t even know his last name.
I went about the day trying not to show how I felt. I wouldn’t redden, I wouldn’t hum film songs under my breath. I boiled the milk, cleaned the chicken coop, supervised the Mazbi maidservant, shopped, cooked, bathed, and fed Mataji, did the chores I had to do. And in the siesta hour I sat with old copies of newspapers and practiced English phrases. “The time has come for this great nation to be a greater nation by eschewing indiscriminate use of foreign expertise and technology.” I liked the word “eschewing.” I copied it several times over in the exercise book I hadn’t taken out of the shallow-shelved, built-in cabinet since I’d abandoned Masterji. Red ants had gotten into the book’s binding. I felt ready to leave for Germany, the States. It didn’t occur to me that Germans didn’t speak English.