Home To India (11 page)

There was a moment like a blacked-out motion picture screen before the M.G.M. lion roars or the 20th Century Fox klieg lights scan the sky. Then the stills flashed by in my mind like rushes from a hastily filmed sequence. They needed editing, but there they were: scenes of Tej and me in Berkeley.

Actually, Carol and me at International House, to begin with. By the time we were graduate students we moved in, I the better to find out about India and, more to the point, to meet Indians living there.

One Saturday night Carol and I took the F Train to San Francisco, along with a couple of Hungarians from the International House. They had recently arrived from Shanghai where they had got bogged down while awaiting their U.S. visas. For eight years. I had a photographic assignment to cover for the college newspaper, and the others came along because there was nothing else to do in particular. Carol and I were made to feel somehow inadequate, since we did not share the Hungarians' passion for bridge, which they played two-handed on a little board as we sped along in the train. Besides, years of travel with uncertain documents across hostile borders had made both understandably gloomy and prone to lapse into Magyar in the midst of conversations. Mama would have declared them too old for Carol and me. But I wasn't dreaming of marrying either one, nor was Carol. They had simply turned up looking adrift in the International House dining hall a couple of days earlier, and Carol and I had introduced ourselves. When we suggested the jaunt to San Francisco to hear a Berkeley student, a musician recently arrived from India, play an instrument called the sitar, they seemed to think it was a good, if puzzling, idea.

Our destination was a small hall that had once been a neighborhood theatre in North Beach. Once inside, we discovered a Sikh in a pastel blue turban and pinstripe Nehru coat about to occupy a raised dais in the middle of the stage where a snug group of expectant listeners was waiting to be enthralled. There were plenty of empty seats in the rest of the auditorium.

The Sikh musician had just made his entrance and was acknowledging the applause. He sat down and settled his right ankle over his left knee, and with the face of the sitar toward the audience, he began to tune it, plucking the strings, and making adjustments. No unnecessary gestures; everything deliberate and sure. He sat with the instrument resting against the outer part of his right thigh. The long shaft of the instrument's neck, held at an angle, crossed his left shoulder and extended above it. He played a few notes. The fingers of his left hand moved along the strings while he strummed with the right. Details I devoured!

The Hungarians soon became bored and shifted around in their seats. Carol was working hard at enjoying herself for my sake. Of our group only I sat captive in the web of music that came spinning out of the exotic instrument. It was full of beginnings with no endings I could discern. There were exciting shiftings of tempo and rhythm, especially when the accompanist on the drums joined in. But I felt somehow suspended somewhere between pleasure and puzzlement. I was so lured away by those sounds insinuating themselves into my ears, that I nearly forgot what I had come for.

As soon as the concert was over, I left the others to wait for me in the lobby while I got to work. I went up and introduced myself to the musician, busy all the while figuring out what shots I'd attempt. He was on his feet, getting ready to pack his instrument away. All movement of his hands were controlled, with an economy of motion, an absence of fussiness. There was a precision about everything he did that proclaimed he knew exactly what results he intended. Close up, it was the eyes I settled on, not the hands, nor even the sitar, for that matter. They were direct and half-smiling and enigmatic all at the same time. How did one fly into the life of one such as he, I wondered, getting ahead of myself somewhat. How did one find out what made such a one tick? What fueled the powerhouse, charged the batteries? Was he wondering the same about me? Something in his look made me check myself out to see if everything was all right. I had my arms and legs on straight, but what was I doing with my hands? Having them full of camera helped. Gave me something to hang onto. And something to talk about, as it turned out.

“So you're a photographer, a lady photographer,” he said, with a nod at the Rollei and a reference to my gender which I didn't know whether I liked or not.

“Yes. For
The Daily Californian,”
I said. “Mind if I take some pictures?”

“Go ahead,” he said, sitting down again. The accompanist sat wrapping his drums in cloth, ready to pack them away, and a faithful handful of admirers still hung about the stage. “Do you want a picture of the instrument? The sitar's made of a gourd; a neck of wood; some strings. Simple.” He got aside so that I could focus on the instrument and turned it so that the intricate design in ivory inlay was shown to advantage.

“No. I want you in it too,” I said, waving him back into the viewfinder frame.

And so this is Tej. Tejbir Singh. I've got him so that his face, black-bearded and moustached, fills up the frame with a wonderful smile, the sitar nowhere in sight. He's amused at something I've said about how difficult such an instrument must be to learn. I don't know whether he's amused at my naïveté or at the way I worded my remark. But it's a good laugh, a surprised laugh, about something unexpected that he's enjoying. When I lowered the camera again, I found him, the smile gone, staring at me with the exactness of a photographer lining up a shot.

“Well, thanks,” I said.

“My pleasure,” he answered in what sounded like a clipped British accent. Except there was nothing brisk about it.

I wanted to go on hearing that voice, but there wasn't anything else to say that didn't seem inane, so I said good-bye and hurried out to find the Hungarians and Carol.

After that first meeting I used every means I could devise to scrape up an acquaintance with Tejbir Singh, to know him, gain the intimacy of his thoughts. But I had to wrest him away from his friends first. He would be in the midst of them, laughing, gesticulating, speaking Punjabi, if it were a Punjabi group, telling jokes that sent the others into seizures of laughter while I smiled uncomprehendingly on. Or he would be playing the sitar in the midst of students he had acquired by the dozen. His presence was enough to occasion a gathering. Girls in shoulder-length bobs, white buck saddle oxfords, and pleated skirts, their faces made bright with red lipstick, sought him out, wanted his company, dragged him away, smiling and protesting.

Here's a sequence from last spring. I've managed to maneuvre Tej away from all these people. We're on the Berkeley campus, sitting in the sunshine amidst a Milky Way of pink-and-white daisies on the dark green grass of Faculty Glade. Beside us Strawberry Creek gurgles past.

All this is to put us against a backdrop: we were acting out our lives in a particular time and place, and this was it. There were innumerable cups of coffee in the International House coffee shop and lots of time spent sitting around in the Great Hall. For two people with no home to go to, no car, and no money, a lot of time is spent in restaurants, parks, theater lounges.

When June arrived, casual dates turned into weekend trips. By the time we went to Yosemite, we were moving into each others' lives with the speed of light, and our time was running out. Tej had to go back to India before month's end. The engineering scholarship that supported him was almost over.

We watched El Capitan levitating in the moonlight, its rock face stark white and shadow-racked. It was freezing up where we were, sitting on a bench in front of the hotel, on top of everything. We bent to the breeze, cheeks stinging with the cold, breaths barely inches away as we talked. Feeling like conspirators and using fictitious names, we had taken separate rooms at the hotel. Between kisses we stared down at the shadowed valley hundreds of feet below and talked about the future.

During the silences, I tried out some possibilities, ran them through, saw how they worked. But they didn't. I couldn't see myself continuing with my studies at the university. I couldn't see myself at home again. Lots of friends from International House were heading for Europe, and visions of the cold German towns, battered by the North Sea and six years of bombing, sent shivers through my blood.

“Will you get married,” I said into the darkness. “When you get home?”

“I don't think so,” he said.

“I thought all Indians got married.”

“I don't think I will.”

“Why not?”

“Because …” He hesitated while the wind through the pine trees filled the empty spaces where his words should have been.

“Go on,” I said, not wanting to listen, but having to.

When he spoke again, his voice came from the other side of Saturn. “I don't know what to say,” he said, looking straight at me.

“Just say why not,” I said. “Tell me why you don't think you'll get married.”

“Because I already am,” he said. “I already have a wife.”

I awoke from sleep with a start if indeed I had been asleep. Had I been talking to myself? The rain had stopped. A puff of steamy, sulphur-laden air came blowing through the Ranikaran ashram window as the boiling springs rebounded from the cold river water into which they plunged. I turned over, pulled the blanket close around myself, and closed my eyes.

“Ho! Over there! Look!” Tej cried out in his sleep.

9

All night I dreamt I was awake. Maybe I was. I never lost conscious contact with the slant of the floor and kept flinging my arms outside the blanket when I felt hot, tucking the blanket around myself when I felt cold. It was always damp; I was always listening for the restless presences that whirled and stomped through our space. The sulphurous sighs and breathings. Were they from underground? From the boiling powerhouse below us? What grand events were going on beneath Earth's mild crust to send these forces to the surface? What busyness? Down there, whole continental plates were shifting and sliding like moveable burners slammed around by a cosmic hand. Down there, it was molten rock, furnace-fiery. Volcanic torrents struggling to break through: A soup cauldron set over a fire. What a miracle we tread on it, this earth, I thought; dare lie down to rest on it, without fear of going up in flames, without terror at losing our balance on the shifting crust!

Or were these beings made of the air above us? Did they sweep down from the wild range of icicle peaks that loomed on the northern horizon? We had held them before us in our vision as we trudged up to Ranikaran through the rain. They had been just visible between the clouds and the steep rock walls of the lower range of mountains that closed off the northern end of the valley. Miles away. They had stood, substantial and three-dimensional, behind the veil of gathering mist and spray from the river like jagged sentinels guarding the edge of the world.

It was later than we thought next morning when we got ourselves together to leave. All around us were the sounds of the others rushing to pack, and running down to the pool for a perfunctory bath before going back down the hill to the bus stop. The frail old man was busy again, this time collecting the bedding that had been borrowed from the ashram by the other pilgrims. The Aggarwal youngsters, their bare feet thudding on the hollow-sounding floor boards, raced up and down, taking a last look at the place.

The adults were down by the pool, all lined up, drinking tea on the veranda. The Malgaonkar girl, neither adult nor child, sat reading a Nick Carter thriller. A little shadow of downy hair darkened her upper lip as she pronounced each word silently to herself. From time to time she looked up from her reading with quick black eyes and took a sip of tea.

The sky had cleared, and the morning was cloud-free bright. The three women sat appraising each others' saris and jewelry and exchanging addresses. The men were taking on the problems of the planet and were already up to their waving arms in a political argument in English. Fresh American troops had landed in Korea! The news was just now coming over the Babaji's radio. It diverted everyone's attention momentarily away from Tej and me as we all strained to hear the details of this two-month-old war over All-India Radio, Jullundur. The news came in crackles and spurts like one of Admiral Byrd's nightly broadcasts from Antarctica of more than a decade earlier. There was a sense of something historic and momentous taking place, but we couldn't pinpoint what. I leaned toward the set for more facts, but by then the news bulletin was over, and Tej and I were being offered tea by a little girl from Ranikaran village who had come to help the hefty Sikh with the job.

By morning light, he looked even more carelessly thrown together than he had the night before. His wiry grey hair sprang out from under his hastily wrapped turban, and his beard bristled every which way as he went about the business of preparing for lunch, now that morning tea was taken care of.

While Tej and I and the others sat there drinking tea, I tried to imagine what was happening in Los Angeles or San Francisco or wherever my friends might be—the ones who still remained to live their lives out on familiar ground—as news of the Korean war flashed. What supermarket turnstiles would they be passing through at that moment? Zooming out which freeway offramp? Going through which revolving door? Mama and Papa, Nicoletta and Gloria and Julia would be going across the street to Aunt Teresa's to watch the news because she was the only one with a television set. Lots of people in motion, going somewhere, on the move, not sitting still long enough for me to catch them in my mind's grip. Was there really going to be a Third World War after just five years of peace?

For the others in Ranikaran, the news had come as a brief, bright interlude between tea and leaving to catch the bus. For the makers and servers of tea it hadn't even been that. There was a war underway. Fresh troops had arrived this morning. It was all taking place in our part of the world. Yet Korea seemed more remote than the moon and the events there no more relevant to the people around me than a lunar event.