Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (21 page)

“Jassu, have you done your homework, putthar?” she called after him. There was no response. She sighed and returned to the letter she had begun more than an hour earlier.

She paused. It was not easy to fabricate the fiction that she created every month for Nimmo and Satpal. The truth was that Jasbeer was not doing well at all. He refused to write to his parents, rarely mentioned them. When Bibi-ji tried to read Nimmo’s loving, anxious missives out loud to him, he ran from the room. If she insisted he stay and listen, he stood stiff and silent. He was an angry child and a destructive one. He hated his school and inspired complaining letters from his teachers almost every week. His only real friend was Preethi Bhat. Bibi-ji was consoled by the thought of the active, gregarious little girl who had more or less taken over the business of introducing Jasbeer to her own friends, translating the English-speaking world to him when he had first arrived—though she was younger and just as much a newcomer—and generally watching out for him.

Bibi-ji had taken Jasbeer back to Delhi a year later, in 1969, as promised, but the visit had not gone well. He fought constantly with his younger brother, kicked his mother, refused to go near his baby sister and, on the sixth day, earned a thrashing from his father. He wanted to return to Vancouver with Bibi-ji and Pa-ji immediately, he said, and threw a tantrum when Nimmo insisted tearfully that he was to stay with them for the rest of the holidays as planned.

“You are not my mother,” Jasbeer said, his small face intense with spite. “She is.” He pointed to Bibi-ji, who wriggled uneasily in her chair.

“No, putthar, I am not your mother,” Bibi-ji felt obliged to say, although she was gratified.

“But I love you,” Jasbeer said. He gave her a disarming look and hugged her as far as his arms would go around her bulk. “I don’t want to stay here with them.”

Bibi-ji had left him with his family and returned with Pa-ji to their hotel room.

“Leave him here,” Pa-ji had urged. “We made a mistake taking him from his parents, but it is not too late to correct it.”

Bibi-ji had maintained an obstinate silence. She didn’t think they had made a mistake. It would work out; this child was hers.

A few days later, they received a call from Satpal. “Could you please come over? The boy has not eaten anything since you left.”

As Bibi-ji had rattled back to Nimmo’s house in a taxi, Pa-ji looking worried and not too pleased beside her, she felt quietly vindicated. She got out of the car in front of the modest house that had become as familiar to her as her own, and hurried inside. An unsmiling Nimmo opened the door to her. No sooner had Bibi-ji entered than Jasbeer ran up to her and cried, “Take me back home. I don’t want to stay here.”

She had looked helplessly at Nimmo and then at Satpal. Nimmo had avoided her eyes, but Bibi-ji knew she was upset.

“I don’t know why he is behaving like this.” Bibi-ji had spread out her hands. “He was so happy to get on the plane and come home. He told me so himself. Didn’t you, Jassu? And he helped me choose the presents for Pappu, didn’t you?” Bibi-ji turned to Jasbeer, who kicked the wall. “Putthar, is this any way to behave?”

Nimmo heard the maternal tone in Bibi-ji’s voice and was jealous.

Pa-ji took Bibi-ji’s hand in his and squeezed it. “Maybe we should leave him here where he belongs,” he said.

“If that is what you wish.” Bibi-ji looked steadily at Nimmo. “But think, is that what is best for him? Is that what you really want?”

“What do you expect me to say?” Nimmo demanded, her voice catching.

Bibi-ji said softly, “I was trying to help, that’s all. But he is yours, nothing can take that away from you. If you want him here, I won’t take him back.”

“No!” shouted Jasbeer, gripping Bibi-ji’s hand tight. “I want to go with you.”

She and Pa-ji had returned to Vancouver with Jasbeer a month earlier than planned, promising a silent, distraught Nimmo that they would bring him back the following year.

But she had not kept her promise. Jasbeer had fallen ill with chickenpox just before they were to leave, so the trip had to be cancelled. She knew she was looking for an excuse she could use this year. She looked down at the letter she had begun writing to Nimmo in response to one that had arrived from her last week.

“We have not seen our son Jasbeer for over a year now,”
Nimmo had written in her neat Punjabi script. Bibi-ji could hear the stiff indignation behind the words.
“We wish you to bring him home soon. I am also enclosing a draft for some of the money that we owe you. God willing, we will pay off the rest soon. Yours, Nimmo.”

She used to write
Love, Nimmo
or
Your affectionate niece, Nimmo,
Bibi-ji remembered with a pang.

The enormous colour television in the living room blared to life, startling her. Lalloo was changing channels fast and, with a brief pause at the news, he stopped at the soap opera of the day, and then Bibi-ji heard the latest instalment of new immigrant arrivals settling back into the sofas and armchairs with a collective sigh. They would be waiting for Lalloo, their cultural and linguistic interpreter, to begin his translation of the antics unfolding before them on the television.

“The dame in the green nightsuit is in love with the red-haired one’s husband, and the golden-haired one is a vamp,” she heard Lalloo’s voice raised authoritatively. “Like our own Helen-ji. And the other one had a child nobody knows about—an illegitimate child. No, not the blonde, the one with short red hair. And the fat guy is the red-haired dame’s lover. Enh Bibi-ji,” he called. “Why did the blondie leave the fat guy? I am not remembering her name, Sandy or Cecily or something.”

“The one who looks like Helen?” Bibi-ji thought all soap-opera blondes looked like her favourite Hindi film actress.

“No, the one who looks like Marilyn Monroe.”

“She fell in love with somebody else, maybe,” Bibi-ji said absently. She rarely watched the soaps but always seemed to give the correct replies. She reasoned that sooner or later the women would fall in love with somebody else. Bibi-ji had come to the conclusion that these daytime dramas were simply about women who were either in or out of love with different men. They were slippery creatures, like soap—hold them too tight and they would fly out of your hands. That’s why the shows were called soap operas. Nobody could persuade Bibi-ji that her reasoning might be flawed. Soap was the centre of most of the problems of life, as far as she was concerned. Lavender soap in particular. Look at what it had done to her own existence and her sister’s.

In the kitchen, three women were busy making stacks of parathas. Bibi-ji watched absent-mindedly as two of them squatted on the floor, their knees bent, their chins resting on their knees, their hands spinning as they rolled out the dough into circles and triangles. A third woman stood at the stove slapping one paratha at a time into a hot pan and frying it rapidly. The smoky odour of cooking flour and oil filled the kitchen. Their movements were mesmerizing, their gold bracelets set up a rhythmic
chink-chink-chink
and gossip bubbled and frothed around the kitchen like a small river.

The mailbox clattered, and Bibi-ji caught sight of the red-haired mailman—Tom or Bob or something—cutting across her carefully tended lawn. She got to her feet as quickly as she could and slapped an imperious palm against the window. He turned around at the sound, and
she waved her arms to tell him to get off the lawn. Giving her a cheeky grin, he continued blithely onward, leaping over one of her flowerbeds, his big boots narrowly missing the heads of her beloved pink roses, before squeezing through the cedar hedge into the neighbour’s house.

One of the women in the kitchen went out to retrieve the mail and came back with a handful, which she handed to Bibi-ji. She riffled through it quickly, pulled out a letter from among the bills and flyers, and frowned at it. It was from Jasbeer’s school.
Again.
She opened it unhappily. It seemed to Bibi-ji that the school principal had nothing better to do than send her a stream of complaining letters every second week. They all said more or less the same thing:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Singh, we regret to inform you that your son Jasbeer Singh has been indulging in inappropriate behaviour. We would like to set up a meeting with you in order to discuss this.”

She tapped the table with her fingertips. Was there something wrong with the school, or was it the way she and Pa-ji were bringing up this boy? Should she perhaps not have taken him away from his mother? Were they perhaps too old to be taking care of a noisy, wilful,
angry
eleven-year-old boy? Were they too indulgent? Or was there something else: was he teased or bullied at school for the colour of his skin or because he wore his hair in a topknot like all good Sikhs? Should she ask Nimmo whether they could cut his hair—the marker of his Sikh identity—as so many other Sikh parents in their community had done for their sons, so that Jasbeer could blend in?

Perhaps it was because he did
not
have enough of a sense of his cultural roots in this western country. No, that was hardly possible, Bibi-ji thought grimly. It was the other way around, more likely. The boy had too
much
of a sense of history instilled into his head by Pa-ji. Too much of ancient stories of wars and warriors. In her mind’s eye, Bibi-ji saw the long rows of photographs that adorned her husband’s study, the ones he claimed were all his relatives, and she thought of the number of times she had, at Pa-ji’s insistence, told Jasbeer of her own father’s aborted journey on the ship called the
Komagata Maru,
turned away by this very city. And each time Pa-ji would comment at length on the injustice of the whole episode. Had they burdened the boy with an impossible load, a feeling of grievances unresolved? In addition to the dark well of anger that he nourished within himself?

Truly, she thought, Jasbeer was proving to be a greater handful than she had imagined. She reread the letter slowly. It was indeed the same as the others that had arrived with monotonous regularity. She smacked it down on the table and yelled, “I’m fed up with this!” It felt good to raise her voice.

In the living room Lalloo leaned over and switched off the television. It wasn’t often that Bibi-ji shouted. The young men stopped talking. The women who had taken over the kitchen stopped stirring and fell silent.

“What happened, Bi-ji?” Lalloo called, shortening her name affectionately. “Any service I can do for you?”

“There is a letter,” Bibi-ji began.
“Another
one. From Jasbeer’s school!”

Lalloo got up and came into the kitchen. He tutted and shook his head. “You should change his school,” he declared. “Those people are always picking on our Jas.” He had a soft spot for Jasbeer, whose willingness to fling himself into a fight and come out of it bruised and triumphant reminded Lalloo of himself at that age.

“We have already changed two schools, Lalloo! And he is only eleven years old.” Bibi-ji frowned again. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Why is the boy needing to go to school? Henh? What has school done for him? Look at you, me, Pa-ji—no school-vool, teacher-veacher, but full-time success.” Lalloo raised a satisfied finger. “The world was my textbook, Bibi-ji. When a man has this world to learn from, why he should sit in the classroom and listen to some boring madam going
a-b-c-d
and
one-two-three-four?
You don’t want to listen to Lalloo, then at least listen to Churchill, na. What is it he was saying? Open the quotations:
I never allowed my schooling to be interfering with my education.
Closing the quotations.”

Lalloo had a particular genius, Bibi-ji thought wryly, for discovering quotes that supported his efforts to eradicate education from society.

She shook her head in disgust. “If that is the case, why are you sending your own son to school?”

Lalloo shrugged. “It is not my idea, it is my wife’s. Sometimes for the sake of homely harmony, one must go against one’s principles.” Homely harmony was another of Lalloo’s pet themes, probably because his wife was known for her ferocious temper, her rich father and her
six ruffianly brothers who had warned Lalloo, in a straightforward way, that if their sister was unhappy, it was he who would suffer. Excruciatingly. Lalloo had no difficulty believing them.

Later, when the house was quiet and their many house guests had retired for the night to the bedrooms and the basement, which had been turned into a large living area, and Jasbeer too had fallen asleep, Bibi-ji walked across the corridor from her bedroom to Pa-ji’s office to tackle him about the letter. It was a large room lined with bookshelves. In the middle of it was his desk, which had papers stacked so high on, under and around it that sometimes even Pa-ji’s bulk was not entirely visible. This was where he conducted his business, sent out petitions to fellow Sikhs for funds for this or that charitable cause and worked on his book,
The Popular and True History of the Sikh Diaspora.

On one long wall of his office were pictures of Gandhi and Nehru and lithographic prints of the ten gurus of Sikhism. There was an enormous, gaudy painting of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who had created a united Punjab for the first time in history, in royal regalia. On another wall were a dozen framed photographs of people who Pa-ji claimed, to all those visiting or passing through the house, as his relatives.

“You have so many relatives?” a naïve young Bibi-ji had asked when she had first arrived in Canada and seen this photo gallery on the wall of their old apartment above the grocery shop. She had been deeply impressed by this fine record of her new husband’s past, and not a little jealous.
There was no one in her family she could point to and say, “That is my grandmother, famous for her sarson-da-saag,” or “This is my grandfather, whose dreams brought me here.” It was hard enough that her own father had simply vanished.