Home To India (7 page)

Pitaji, Tej, and Hari, and the cousins from Amritsar, gathered around the recent arrivals while Mataji, the girls, Dilraj Kaur, and I returned to the kitchen to relight stoves, warm up the curries, and make fresh rotis for their lunch. Udmi Ram was already mixing a new batch of flour-and-water dough for them. A dessert was hastily concocted of fried bread slices soaked in cardamom syrup and fresh cream. Furious flies, disturbed from their siesta, buzzed angrily as they searched out new places to settle down in.

Through the kitchen door I watched as the baggage was being taken down from the jeep and carried away to the main room of the house. Uncle Gurnam Singh came into view from time to time. Something Tej had said made him laugh. Casual, curiosity-driven neighbors had meanwhile joined the crowd around Uncle, who stood leaning on a walking stick, one foot thrust out in front of the other. His full, dark brown beard was glossy from recent brushing.

In the kitchen it was all orderly confusion. Doing the cooking at floor level while sitting on low stools beside the stoves was a procedure worked out over centuries. It suited the climate, and the tools and equipment at hand; it also operated on the premise that there would be servants to fetch and carry and to hand you things. But to my Western eyes this arrangement created a certain mess and inefficiency. In the midst of it, there was a conversation I felt I was not supposed to understand. Uncle was as usual the subject of it, and his sudden and unannounced presence in our midst added spice.

“It's a disgrace,” Mataji was saying to whoever had the time to listen.

Dilraj Kaur stopped what she was doing. “What, Mataji?” she said.

Mataji glanced around as if wondering whether to proceed. “It's Gurnam Singh,” she said with a meaningful glance at Dilraj Kaur, “and that woman in his village.”

Goodi and Rano looked at one another. Dilraj Kaur sat down on a low stool beside Mataji. Udmi Ram almost forgot the dough he was kneading for the tandoori roti, and Chotu dropped a plate he was wiping. The sudden crash of shattered porcelain broke the sudden silence that had overtaken the room and made everybody jump. It was the occasion for Udmi Ram to box the boy's ears.

“What are you slapping him for?” Mataji shouted to the cook. “He's a child. He makes mistakes. He just has to be more careful. Don't let that happen again,
beta
,” she said to Chotu.

Dilraj Kaur waited for Mataji to go on.

“I have to have it out with Gurnam Singh this time. I hear he sees that woman every day. He keeps her like a concubine,” Mataji continued in a voice meant for only Dilraj Kaur to hear.

Dilraj Kaur made a suitably discreet remark in reply, and glanced briefly in my direction in the abstract way she had come to adopt in recent weeks.

“And that is not all,” Mataji went on. “The woman is a widow with a small child. Can you imagine?”

“Some people are without shame … the woman, I mean,” Dilraj Kaur said, warming up to the conversation and at the same time eager to show where she apportioned blame. “Who can imagine such a creature?”

“It's all Gurnam Singh's fault,” Mataji said. “He needs to have some sense put into his head. When I think of what it must be like for Bhabi Gursharan Kaur …” she broke off to wipe her face with her dupatta … “I wonder how she stands it. She has given birth to five children for him, and this is all she gets in return in her old age: a husband old enough to know better, acting like a sixteen-year-old. Who does he think he is!”

Uncle's age was clearly a factor that made the entire business all the more crass. But other ideas were crowding in. I wasn't able to string them together; it was more in the way of a feeling that wasn't quite right. It had to do with the expression on Dilraj Kaur's classic face when she glanced at me. She who usually had no time for small talk, whose conversation typically consisted of practical matters like, “pass the salt”, or “hand me the ladle”, had found a subject to her liking.

“And that woman,” she said, “how old is she?”

“She must be too young for him, whatever her age is,” Mataji replied with a dismissive gesture that was as much of the Punjabi language as the words she was speaking.

Dilraj Kaur steered around to another point. “She must have cast a spell on him,” she said. “Such women go to any lengths.”

By now their dialogue was being listened to by everybody in the kitchen. Mataji was silent for a moment while she transferred the dessert into a serving bowl.

“But he hasn't actually taken her into his house, under his roof, has he?” Dilraj Kaur went on.

“I should hope not,” Mataji said.

“That would, of course, be worse,” Dilraj Kaur observed, almost to herself. She allowed a small silence to settle over the room.

When the conversation started up again, it took a philosophical turn and became too abstract for my meager Punjabi vocabulary, tightly confined as it was to a few basic words and close attention to body language. Like a deaf person, wearied of lip reading, I tuned out their talk and took off on my own thoughts of what Uncle's concubine must be like.

As lunch was being gotten on I thought about how the presence of a young woman in his life added to his image, at least as I'd received it during the past hour and through family gossip all along. He belonged, surely, to an earlier age when landlords lived their lives in a kind of security that would never be enjoyed again. His youth had been a time of unlimited money, influence, and family lands. He behaved as if all these feudal delights were still at hand and his to savor. Moreover, he was in a perpetual state of activity, finding himself either in the midst of a lawsuit or a village feud, or both. He was a champion of lost causes, and lately he had graduated from local to state politics.

How can anyone so devoid of social consciousness be so charming, I wondered. It didn't fit. He should be making everyone angry or resentful or envious. My liberal outlook should be offended. My liberal friends in Berkeley would be appalled. Ripped out of context, Uncle wouldn't do. He'd be an embarrassment, a denial of some of our most precious beliefs about human dignity, a throwback to a feudal age mercifully dead, in most places anyway.

But there was a spot for him here. I thought about it as I watched him hold the company in thrall at lunch (even Tej was upstaged for the time being), and I became convinced it was altogether appropriate that Uncle Gurnam Singh should have a concubine; why not? This would complete the picture. I wondered why Mataji was so exercised over the whole affair.

Even Mama would have liked to have her say, had some magic carpet brought her onto the scene here. “How can you approve of that man?” I could hear her ask. “It's bad enough for him to slight his wife and keep another woman. But don't you see anything wrong? I know you better than you know yourself, and I can't believe you could have grown up in our house, a Graziani, and still think that man's okay.” For a moment I wondered if all the values I had grown up by had deserted me. Have I changed? I wondered. Was I right then, or am I right now?

At the same time, the vague apprehensions that had been lurking around in my head earlier, trying to take on some coherence, were settling down into an idea I did not want to explore further, since I had a suspicion that where it led, I didn't want to go. I would get back to it later, and meanwhile get Rano to fill me in on the parts of the conversation I had missed.

As it turned out, Rano's job as translator picked up as Uncle's visit progressed. Something was always going on: an outing for everybody at the nearby canal headworks, a shooting party for the men at dawn, a side trip to a city in the next district that the cousins from Amritsar had declared famous for a particular kind of sweet Uncle fancied. There were anecdotes to share; verbal fireworks to listen in on; arguments about almost everything that quickly settled down, as Tej would say, “as fast as the bubbles on a pool of pee.” Even when we didn't go along, there was always someone of Uncle's original party who stayed behind.

Shiv Kanwar Singh, for instance. He had fought in the Second World War and at the merest prompting would take from the pocket of his saffron-colored kurta a much-worn snapshot of a blonde Italian girl he had once known, the two of them … he in the uniform of the British Indian Army, and she in a tight skirt and peasant blouse, smiling broadly into the camera. She had an uncle in Rappallo who had shot off his trigger finger to avoid conscription into Mussolini's army. A young fellow, called Brother John because of some private joke, stood or even sat at attention wherever he was, and except when eating, went around with a shotgun resting in the crook of one arm. His grandfather had fought in the Afghan wars, had brought back a tribal woman from the Frontier, and had installed her as his favorite wife. She lived to be ninety.

Their companion was Santji, an allegedly pious old man. His claim to the title of “Sant” was never quite made clear, but his dark blue tunic and carved wooden prayer beads gave him the external bona fides. He had lots of stories to tell, but none about himself or his family, if he had ever had one.

On the fringes of their circle hovered Ramu, a vague, sleepy boy who was Uncle's servant. We rarely saw Uncle's driver, Banwari Lal. His services were in perpetual demand as the jeep made repeated trips into town for one thing or another. He was short and wiry and resourceful, and his hair was cut long at the sides and short at the back.

Imagine us, then, sitting around, drinking tea and arguing about what to wash our hair with. It was one of those evenings when Uncle, Tej, and Pitaji had gone off on a visit to a neighboring landlord, leaving those who stayed back the job of entertaining themselves.

“No soaps at all should be used to wash hair,” Santji began. He waved his hand in a gesture that discouraged all opposition when the others seemed about to take issue. “Even water is bad enough.”

The cousins from Amritsar shook their heads doubtfully and gazed into their mugs of tea. For Sikhs, with uncut ropes of thick hair, the subject was one to raise debate, since everyone had his own theory about the best way to manage a shampoo. Ramu looked from Santji to the others. Uncle's little son, Surinder, and Nikku ran through the company bent on some chase game of their own. Mataji poured another round of tea and I passed the pakoras. The hot vegetable fritters turned out to be only a momentary distraction.

“Look at my hair,” Santji went on. He lifted his turban off like a hat, and showed everybody the twisted and coiled mass of healthy mane, then put the turban back on again, giving it a smart tug as he did so. “I have never poured water on my hair in all my sixty-three years,” he said. “Oil and lots of massage. That's all that's needed.”

One of the cousins—Jeet?—asked how that helped. He said the best thing was to rub chick-pea flour into dry hair before washing it in water, and to follow this up with a lemon or curd rinse.

“Curd stinks,” Brother John said. And that was that.

Shiv Kanwar Singh, ever ready to talk about his war experiences, regaled us with stories of washing his hair in diesel oil from the tank he drove in the North African desert. “There wasn't even water to drink,” he said. “So where was the question of getting water to wash our hair? We would just take some diesel from the tank, and it worked fine.”

And so the days passed. The real reason for Uncle Gurnam Singh's apparently impromptu visit did not come to light until his week-long stay was almost over. We were sitting on our charpoys after dinner one evening. A light breeze that had come as gently as the kiss of a mosquito scattered the dust-haze and revealed the rare sight of bright stars, soft glowing planets, the moon!

“Bhaji,” Uncle said to Pitaji and the whole company at large, “I'm trying for a ticket from the party headquarters to run for the State Assembly when the general elections come up.” He paused for the announcement to sink in.

Mataji was appropriately thrilled; her younger brother would be a Member of the Legislative Assembly of Rajasthan, an M.L.A.!

Pitaji looked uneasy. It was no secret that when funds were low, Uncle Gurnam Singh would take a loan from a relative (usually Pitaji) to tide himself over, and everyone knew that election campaigns cost money—the more so as this one would be the first in independent India. All that driving around from village to village through the Bikaner sand dunes in the diesel-hungry, trouble-prone jeep, all that entertaining and feasting to create a
political base
, as Uncle termed it! Party funds would cover only a fraction of what he would have to spend; the rest would have to come from his own (or some other individual's) pocket.

“I'm going to need your help, Bhaji,” Uncle Gurnam Singh went on. “I need smart workers, people around who can lend a hand with things. Do you think you could spare Hari for a few weeks?”

Pitaji leaned back on his charpoy against the still rolled up bedding he used as a bolster and gave a soft groan of relief. “Why not?” he said. “We can manage by ourselves for a few days, can't we,
beta
?” he asked Tej.

Tej said yes. What else was there for him to say? But I knew he was rapidly calculating how much more of his precious time looking up some newly-found musician friends in Ladopur or practicing the sitar was going to be usurped by the work he hated, when Hari would not be there to do his share. Hari of course brightened at the prospect of a few days away from the farm and the excitement of going along with Uncle. For my part, I wondered if Hari would indeed be back in a “few weeks,” in time for Tej and me to get on with our much-delayed wedding. It was to be a civil ceremony, and for that we needed to go forty miles away to the District Headquarters in Ambala. The date was not ours to choose, but waited on the convenience of the District Commissioner who was to officiate. In all these weeks he had not answered our letter asking for an appointment.