Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (25 page)

“What are you watching, Arjun?” Leela asked, looking over at her son.

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean,
nothing?
Obviously it is something that you are watching. It looks like
The Brady Bunch.
Is it?”

“So if you know what I’m watching, why are you asking me?” Arjun demanded.

“I was just … never mind. Did you finish your lunch?” Mundane details were comforting. They could be answered with a simple yes or no, could make Leela feel she was still in control, could still take care of her children. Are you hungry, are you sleepy, did you brush your teeth, do you need money for bus fare? Any other topic took her into the pre-adolescent’s territory, a place that seemed to be filled with nebulous, lurking disasters, sourceless anger, confused sadness, all those depthless rivers of emotion that Arjun had to traverse before reaching the larger confusion of adulthood.

“Yes, Amma, I ate my lunch,” Arjun replied. “Now will you leave me alone?”

He rarely went out, Leela thought fearfully; he seemed to have no friends. Leela had snooped in his room, checked his schoolbag and his trouser pockets; for traces of what, she wasn’t entirely sure. She knew Arjun’s unhappiness as soon as it began. But the searching told her little about the reason for his present melancholy.

Her anger with Balu for bringing them here flared—if he hadn’t, she would not have had to get a job, she would have been at home round the clock keeping an eye on her children, she would have had her mother-in-law to share her worries. At the thought of the old lady, Leela’s mood became even darker. Six months ago, a
telegram had arrived from Vimala urging Balu to come home immediately as his mother had suffered a stroke and was not expected to last much longer. Balu had left for Bangalore, reaching the city only a day before the old lady died. It hurt Leela that she and the children had not been able to afford to fly back home to see her one last time.

She set the vegetables to cook on the stove and joined Arjun in front of the television to watch a program about death rituals in ancient civilizations. She felt absurdly happy when she drew him close to her and he made no protest, not even when she stroked the hair off his forehead. Her moment of peace came to an end as three pairs of feet clattered down the stairs and hurried out of the door. A moment later Preethi came down and flung herself on the couch. “What are you watching?” she demanded.

“An educational program,” Leela said, thinking that television had some advantages. “About Egyptian death rituals.”

“Why did they make such a fuss?” Arjun muttered. He yawned and pretended boredom even though he had been watching intently enough before his sister’s arrival. “What does it
matter
what happens to you after you die?”

“Of course it matters!” Leela squeezed her son’s bony shoulder gently. “I hope you will do all the correct rituals for me when I die.”

“Amma, I don’t want you to die,” Preethi said, wrapping her arms around her mother’s body.

“Everyone has to die
sometime,”
Leela replied. “But I won’t go for a long, long while yet, I promise. Not until you are an old lady yourself.” She kissed each forehead
and hugged her children closer. “Although, when Yama the Death God comes for me, I want all the ceremonies,” she said firmly. “I want to be cremated with wood from the mango trees in the grove behind our house in Bangalore. And don’t forget a small piece of sandalwood to scent my journey.”

“Like they did for Ajji?” Preethi asked.

“Yes.”

“I miss her, Amma.”

“So do I, baby,” Leela said.

“And what if the Death God cannot find his way to you here in Canada? What if he doesn’t have a map of the world?” Arjun joked.

“That’s why I’m saying I have to go home to die. No confusion and lost roads for Yama-raja.” Leela hugged both her children to her again. She would never let them forget that other place, home. They would soon be returning, and until then it was her duty to keep it alive in their minds. She would show them the photo albums that she had carried away with her and say to them:
This is the house that Rama Bhat built. This is the ghost that lives in the house that Rama Bhat built. This is the swing that hangs from the tree in the house that Rama Bhat built.

Beside her Preethi sat up excitedly. “Amma, can I go dressed as Yama tonight? Can I, Amma? It’ll be so cool!”

“Go? Where?” Leela asked, confused.

“Today’s Halloween, remember?” Preethi reminded her. “Everyone’s going—Jas and Matt and Wendy. So can I?”

“Yes you can, but not as Yama. It might be an insult to him,” Leela said firmly.

“Then what should I wear?” Preethi asked in a resigned voice. She knew that Leela did not believe in wasting money on costumes. One year she had been a monster in a Rajasthani sheet with green elephants running around brown and black lotuses and roses and other flowers—an exotic monster, her mother assured her. The next year she was a garbage-bag monster.

Leela stood up and looked thoughtfully at her diminutive daughter, so like her in build and appearance, but with Balu’s brown eyes.

“I know!” she exclaimed. She went to the kitchen, rummaged around in one of the cupboards and emerged triumphantly with a box of aluminum foil. She pushed Preethi into a chair and wrapped some foil around her head. She extended one long piece and twisted a few more bits about it so that it stuck out like the spout of a teapot. Then she went to the shoe cupboard and pulled out an unopened box. It contained a pair of gaudy silver slippers—Bibi-ji would love them, Leela thought—that she had bought for Preethi because they were eighty percent off. Preethi had flatly refused to wear them, and they had lain in the back of the cupboard ever since.

“Here, put these on,” Leela said.

“What am I supposed to be?” Preethi asked, surveying herself in the hallway mirror, resigned to her mother’s parsimony.

“I don’t know. How about a saucepan? Yes, that’s it, you are a saucepan. And do you remember the rules?”

“Yes, Amma.”

“Tell me?”

“Don’t leave the street, don’t enter people’s houses, don’t leave the group, don’t eat anything until I come home and show you what I got.”

Restricted zones and Lines of Control were applied firmly. It seemed to Leela that the edges of a ten-year-old’s life were as fraught with danger as that of a country at war.

“Good girl!” Leela said. “You will be only on this street?”

“Yes, I promise, Amma. Nowhere else.”

“Hand on my head? What will happen if you break your promise?”

“You will die and I will be dragged off to hell.”

“
I
will die, that’s all. This hell-well is Christian business, I don’t know all that.
I
will die and you will have to pay for it in your next birth. And most important of all, if someone tries to touch you anywhere at all, scream and run away, understand?” She looked sharply at her daughter.

“Yes, Amma,” said Preethi. “Now can I
go, please?”

At that moment there was a banging on the front door. Leela opened it and walked her saucepan daughter out to meet Bibi-ji with Jas dressed as Frankenstein in tow, and a rather solid Matt as a spaceman.

“And what are you supposed to be, Preethi?” Bibi-ji asked, touching the foil wound around the girl’s head.

“My mother says I am a saucepan,” Preethi said.

“Oh, I see,” Bibi-ji said, suppressing a smile.

“Well, I am not going to waste money on a costume,” Leela declared.

“I agree,” Bibi-ji replied. “But Pa-ji insists on getting the boy something new every year. He says it is to help him settle
in better. I don’t understand it, though. Jasbeer has to dress like a monster and go knocking on doors to settle in?”

The three children bunched together to give each other confidence, and clutching their pillowcases they headed next door to Elena’s.

“Look at them,” Bibi-ji said. “So sweet they look, no, Leela?”

“Yes, they do,” Leela agreed, gazing after the children with equal fondness.

“But your Preethi is a good girl. My Jasbeer is always in trouble. I am so tired of seeing that principal, Mr. Longbottom, every other week.”

“Passing phase, Bibi-ji. Don’t worry,” comforted Leela. “He will grow out of it. Arjun is also going through the same thing. Not in trouble at school, but so quiet, no friends, you know?”

“That’s what you said last year also, Leela. When is this passing phase going to pass?” Bibi-ji asked plaintively.

“I think part of the problem—and don’t mind my saying this, Bibi-ji—is that you spoil him,” Leela said, looking severely at her friend. “You buy him too many things— everything he demands—regardless of whether he has been good or not. He does not have a sense that his actions have consequences.”

“I know, I know. I can’t seem to help it. But the presents, that’s Pa-ji’s fault. He likes buying things for the people he loves. I have told him a hundred times, but will he listen to me? No, not at all.” She jingled her keys and then said, “Perhaps it is inside the boy, something he was born with and that we cannot change.”

“His
uyir,”
Leela said.

“And what’s that?” Bibi-ji asked.

“A Tamil word—it refers to something a person’s soul has brought with it from a distant place in the universe— not inherited from the parents, nor acquired from the place, or the food, or air, or earth, or water even.
Uyir
is the mystery in every one of us, the thing that makes us move and grow, the thing that makes us alive. Sometimes this
uyir
is good and sometimes it is made bad. It all depends on the circumstances and the position of the stars at birth.
Maybe.”

Bibi-ji nodded and was silent for a few moments. Then she jingled her keys again and said, “Well then, Leela. I hope and pray that my Jasbeer’s
uyir
isn’t bad.”

“Don’t worry, Bibi-ji,” Leela said, touching her friend’s arm. “He will be fine. Believe me.”

She walked Bibi-ji to her car and waved as she drove slowly down the road, looking for the three children. As she did each year, she would follow them to make sure they did not get into any trouble and then drive them home for cake and milk.

Back inside the house Leela descended to the basement, her India, where the fragrance of incense lingered in the still air, the water pipes had been camouflaged by a false ceiling and the unfinished walls were draped with an assortment of colourful cotton bedcovers. Her gods were waiting for her there, their silver faces impassive as she rang a small silver bell loudly to catch their attention—to summon Brahma back from wherever he was busy writing fates on newborn foreheads, to wake Vishnu from his
eternal slumber, to get Shiva to stop his dallying with Parvathi and listen to her, Leela Bhat, wife of Balachandra Bhat of Bangalore. She offered the obligatory flowers (a couple of clematis blossoms, a blue mop-head hydrangea) and fruit purchased the previous day from Mrs. Wu’s shop, lit a fresh stick of incense and went on the offensive. “Why?” she demanded. “Why are you making my son so unhappy? Have I not taken care of you? Have I not prayed to you twice a day every day of my life? And is this how you reward me for my faith?”

She wept some, she grumbled some more, she flattered the movers and shakers of heaven, and earth, and purgatory and all the unseen places between Here and There. Then, satisfied that she had laid her case before them as best she could, she returned up the stairs to the other world, with its battered and borrowed sofas, the chattering television, the print of a Degas dancer hanging lopsided on one wall and the batik print of a busty Bharat Natyam dancer striking a challenging pose on the opposite wall. Arjun was sprawled where she had left him, but it seemed to her that her swift appeal to the gods had wrought a change in his demeanour. He was smiling at the television screen, which cast blue spasms of light on the walls, and Leela was content. The gods were on her side after all.

“M
ore refugees from East Pakistan coming into Calcutta,” Satpal announced, shaking out his newspaper and folding it in half. He continued to read the news out loud while Nimmo, working in the kitchen, listened with one ear. Earlier that year, in March, after Mrs. Gandhi had swept into power on a thundering majority, East Pakistan had declared itself the independent nation of Bangladesh. Immediately, the animosity that had been simmering between East and West Pakistan exploded into all-out war. For the better part of that year millions of refugees had crossed over from East Pakistan into India.

“Indira Gandhi is ordering Pakistan to stop massacring
its citizens,” Satpal said. “Why is she poking her long nose into other peoples’ affairs?”

“Arrey, how can any decent human being stand by and watch murders taking place? She is doing the right thing, our Indira-ji,” said Nimmo staunchly.

“Even the USA is not saying anything,” Satpal replied.

“They never say anything to massacres in other countries, only when it affects their own interests.”