Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (31 page)

“That’s why he is going the wrong way, woman, that’s why!” Pa-ji said. “It is all your fault for not keeping an eye on him.”

“What has he done now?” Bibi-ji asked, pushing her irate husband back into his office and following him in. “Now sit. And tell me, what is making you so angry?”

Pa-ji refused to sit, preferring to pace around instead. He went back to the door of his room. “Jasbeer!” he hollered. “You come up here this instant!”

There was a sudden silence downstairs and then Jasbeer’s voice answered, “Yes, Pa-ji, coming.”

Pa-ji had arranged himself in his chair, Scotch glass in hand, a scowl on his face, by the time his foster son appeared.

“Yes, Pa-ji?”

“You close that door and come in here, boy,” Pa-ji ordered.

Bibi-ji went over and stroked Jasbeer’s arm. She knew why Pa-ji was so annoyed but could not bear to see him shout at Jasbeer and tried to slip out of the room. Pa-ji stopped her. “Where are you going? You are responsible for this. You spoiled him.”

“Oh?” Bibi-ji crossed her arms across her breasts. “And you did nothing except buy him all that
he
wanted and then some more
that you
wanted him to have, no? Spoiled him, he says! Who did the spoiling, is what I wish to know.”

“Okay, okay,” said Pa-ji, banging his glass down on the table. “I don’t want to argue with you. I want to say a few things to this fellow here. Now Jasbeer, putthar, have we not given you everything you have ever needed?”

“Yes, ji, you have,” Jasbeer said.

“Then why you are going after that foolish man who preaches death and destruction?” Pa-ji asked in a pained voice. “What is he giving you that you don’t get from us?”

Jasbeer gave the old man a level look. “He is not foolish, and don’t insult him like that in front of me.”

Pa-ji gaped at him. He looked at Bibi-ji. “Did you hear that? He is telling me not to insult that bastard, pardon my French, in my own house! Enh? Did you hear?”

“Don’t get so angry, my heart,” Bibi-ji soothed, but she felt like weeping, caught between the two people she loved most in the world, unable to help either of them. “Jasbeer, putthar, is that any way to speak to Pa-ji? Apologize at once, if you please.”

“For what?
He
is the one using foul language, insulting a great and good man who honours him by staying in his house, he is the one drinking alcohol and disgracing his Sikh name,
he
should perform an act of penance at the gurudwara.”

With a roar Pa-ji lunged forward, evading Bibi-ji’s arms which tried to restrain him, and slapped his large palm across Jasbeer’s face. “Look at this beggar! We bring him here to educate him, and now look at how he repays us!”

Jasbeer touched his face and, without another word, turned and left the room.

Bibi-ji turned on Pa-ji, near tears. “Look what you did! Hitting him like that. And did you see his face? I am warning you, if he decides to leave with that Randhawa, I will never forgive you. Never.”

She too marched out of the room, leaving Pa-ji alone. He heard her slam their bedroom door shut and turn the key in the lock. He sighed deeply. He would have to fold his body onto the couch here in his office for the rest of the night. He would find a way to make up with her tomorrow, he told himself. And with Jasbeer for having slapped him.

The next morning Jasbeer appeared in Pa-ji’s office,
solemn and respectful. He had traded in his jeans for a pathan suit. Standing before Pa-ji he announced, “I will be leaving with the Doctor-ji’s people next month.”

“Where are you going, putthar?” Pa-ji asked gently. He regretted his previous night’s anger, ready to forgive and be forgiven. He planned to buy Jasbeer a nice watch or dark glasses to make up for slapping him. He had even decided to bite his tongue and offer to host Randhawa for as long as he wanted to stay.

“To join the school in Bhinder, the Damdami Taksal. I wish to immerse myself in our scriptures. I wish to live like a true Sikh.”

Pa-ji felt his blood pressure rise. “True Sikh? And who decides that, may I ask?”

Jasbeer looked calmly at him. “That is not for me to say, Pa-ji. All I know is that I have not been following the correct path. I have been living a meaningless life, and now I have found a purpose.”

“Have you told Bibi-ji? Or your parents?”

“My parents gave me away and therefore do not need to be told. Bibi-ji knows.”

Two days later, Pa-ji drove their visitor to the temple for his talk. This time, the hall was filled to overflowing. Pa-ji was given a seat onstage, joining a row of other important people who sat in a row behind Dr. Randhawa’s chair. Bibi-ji had refused to attend, pleading illness.

“Listening to that man going bak-bak the past two days has given me a headache,” she told Pa-ji angrily. “Now I have to go listen to him officially also? No thank you!”

Pa-ji noticed groups of young men in black turbans walking through the crowd and collecting money in tins. He thought he saw Jasbeer too, but in the confusion of the crowd he could not be certain. The boy had not spoken to Pa-ji since the morning of his announcement and was hardly seen at home except at mealtimes, when Dr. Randhawa and his acolytes returned for their meals.

Dr. Randhawa began his speech, in Punjabi, without any preliminaries. It wasn’t very different from the one he had delivered years ago to a crowd of five, with its demands for an independent Sikh state, the slide show displaying flag, coin and map, and a few archival photos of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. He didn’t go on as long this time, to Pa-ji’s surprise, and his speech was met with rapturous applause. Now he was holding his hand up for silence. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in English, although there were few women in the crowd. Then he switched to Punjabi again. “There are some witnesses here, who come straight from the torture chamber of the Hindu Raj. They will give those of you who need to be convinced the proof of what I have just said to you—we need our own country where every individual is treated with respect, where we can practice our religion in peace, where we will not be penalized for it.”

A young man sitting in the row of chairs behind him stood up and came slowly to the podium. He was only about twenty years old and had the thin, hunched look of a beaten animal about him. Dr. Randhawa introduced him, and he began to speak.

“My older brother, Lakki, wasn’t at home that night,”
he said without any introduction, as if he were already in the middle of a story started long ago. “He was rarely home, and we never mentioned him because he would be in danger if we did.

“But there were others who remembered Lakki’s existence. One night they came, the killers. My father opened the door, what else could he do? He was an old man, and the only weapon he had was a rusty scythe. Inside the house, my mother quickly unwound my long hair. She didn’t know what sort of men were at the door: these days it is difficult to tell. Sometimes it was the police, at other times it was the extremists.”

At that, Dr. Randhawa, who was contemplating his hands, looked up with a slight frown. The witness was here to support him; he did not appreciate the mention of extremists.

“There was a war, we were told. My brother was a soldier in that war. The enemy was everywhere, and people had forgotten what the war was about or whose side they were on. We could hear my father shouting something. My mother took a pair of scissors and hacked off my hair, crying bitterly at the sacrilege that her hands were obliged to commit.

“‘If the police catch you,’ she whispered, ‘they will think you are a Hindu. It is safer to be someone you are not.’ She was wearing pink glass bangles, and I can still hear the way they went chhin-chhin.

“‘Go, putthar, go quickly,’ she whispered to me. ‘Get help. Tell them … tell them … I don’t know, but bring back help. Run, run like the wind.’

“I didn’t know who I was supposed to call for help, but I did run like the wind. I raced around the village banging on doors. But everybody was too terrified of the knock on the door in the middle of the night to help. I ran to the police chowki, but there was nobody there either. When I came home, my mother and my father were dead.”

The young man paused, dry-eyed. He touched his head. No turban, no long hair. “I kept my hair like this to mourn, to remind myself of the last touch of my mother’s hand. But every moment I can feel the weight of hair on my scalp.”

An uneasy silence had descended over the crowd. Many people cried silently. Pa-ji, too, felt like weeping. Was this Dr. Randhawa right after all? Was the situation for Sikhs in India so wretched? Could yet another division of the country heal the wounds that had been caused by the first one? Pa-ji realized it was difficult, from this distance, to have a proper perspective. But he held on to the flickering idea that somewhere, between the boy’s raw story and Dr. Randhawa’s posturing, lay the truth.

T
he air was clouded with the smell of burning wood, the smoky odour that was peculiarly a part of this time of year, which reminded Nimmo that once again Diwali was around the corner and they still hadn’t purchased any firecrackers, clay diyas or even cotton wicks and oil for the diyas. Satpal had been urging her to stop this annual ritual of filling a hundred earthen lamps with oil, rolling the cotton wicks into spires and lighting them all at dusk, and to switch instead to the simplicity of a string of electric lights. But Nimmo wasn’t ready for simplicity. She liked those small earthen lamps-filling them with oil, arranging them outside and finally lighting them, so that at night it looked like a hundred
twinkling stars had fallen about her house. And she had to admit that the celebrations were more for her and Kamal than for Pappu, who was now a towering young man and no longer as excited as he had once been about festivals. Only Kamal shared her enthusiasm, helped her light up the diyas and place them all over the house. Sweet, good-natured Kamal, how happy Nimmo was that she had this last child, a daughter, to complete her happiness.

She waved to her two children from the head of the alley as they went their separate ways to school and work, and returned to her home. In the kitchen Satpal was lifting lids off the pots to see what there was to eat.

“Anda-bhujiya and parathey,” Nimmo said. She went to the refrigerator and removed three eggs and a few green chillies. Her husband loved scrambled eggs with spices and onions and hot parathey. “Can you buy some vegetables on your way back home? Don’t bring cauliflower again. We’ve have had it every single night for the past week. Everybody is sick of it.”

“Have you forgotten? I am going to Modinagar today. Have to pick up some parts. I’ll be back very late tonight.” Satpal glanced quickly at the newspaper as he ate his breakfast.

“Do you have to go? Why not Mohan Lal?”

“He has a prospective groom coming to see his daughter this evening,” Satpal said.

“How about Pappu, then? It will be good experience for him.”

“No, I have to decide what to buy after I see how much it is going to cost. And that young man has to finish
work on Sharma-ji’s car.” Satpal frowned at the thought of Pappu, who had dropped out of high school and joined the mechanic’s shop, but was rarely to be found at work. He preferred to hang around on street corners eyeing the girls. Sometimes Satpal wondered whether Jasbeer, their oldest son, might have become a scholar if they had kept him here in India. He too had not done well at school, it seemed from the letters they received from Bibi-ji, but what was that she had said in the last missive? The boy was showing a deep interest in religion, in fact he was planning to go for a year to the Damdami Taksal in Bhinder to study the scriptures? She had not commented either way on this decision, but it worried Satpal. Like most of his friends, he was God-fearing but not fanatical. Not that a good religious education would turn Jasbeer into a fanatic; but still, had they not sent him abroad so that he could become a doctor or an engineer, and was it not better for the boy to remain abroad instead of entering the violent mess that Punjab was deteriorating into?

“What time will you be back then?” Nimmo asked, stirring the eggs in the pan.

“Why? Aren’t you going to be at home?”

Nimmo shrugged. “I was thinking of taking Kamal to the market this evening to buy new clothes. I saw a pretty green salwar kameez set in Jain’s store. The last one we bought was for the Baisakhi festival in April. She is growing so fast, everything she owns looks too tight.” Nimmo thought pleasurably of spending an evening shopping with her daughter. “What is in the news today? Any
strikes or anything? I don’t want to go out if there is likely to be trouble.”

“No news, except for more deaths in Punjab. More violence, encounters with police, encounters with militants, more widows and orphans on all sides,” Satpal said bitterly. “I don’t know why the government is sitting on its hands and doing nothing.”

“You sound like your nephew Sunny, always talking about killing and war and trouble in Punjab. We live in Delhi. It is not our problem.” She handed him his plate of food and set the kettle on the stove for tea.