Home To India (23 page)

Seated cross-legged on the floor, she closed her eyes and began to sway slowly. Not back and forth, but in a circular motion, describing a figure eight. Each configuration was wider than the previous one and was accomplished at a faster speed. Shortly thereafter she began to moan and, before long, Veera Bai's hair uncoiled from its knot and fell in a coarse, thick rope around her shoulders.

With each completion of the ever-widening, ever-faster circle, her hair flew about more wildly until it became a swirling, whipping mass of black about her head; the moan rose to a wail. The crowd ceased to breathe. This is what they had been waiting for. When it became clear that no flesh and blood could endure more ecstasy, Veera Bai slumped forward without warning and became perfectly still. All the while, Dilraj Kaur, like everyone else there, sat rigid with anticipation.

When the girl sat upright again, she was no longer Veera Bai, but a human vessel containing the spirit of a dead person and brimful of its messages. Her pupils were rolled back. The whites were laced with red. Drugs? Delirium? Rapture? Or the sheer exquisiteness of being possessed?

“The spirit has entered her,” a woman mumbled.

“How will we know when it leaves?” a small girl beside her asked in a loud voice.

“Shsh!” an old woman sitting in front of them hissed.

From somewhere in the darkened room a voice came: “You will come to know, all right. The earthen pot on the shelf there will fall and break into pieces,” it said.

Everyone looked around, but no one could tell who had spoken. No one moved for a full minute. The sorceress sat impassive, in a trance.

Then Loverheard one of the women near me whisper, “I once saw a sorceress in another village take a lock of baby's hair that a woman had handed her. She tied it up in a scrap of red cloth and gave it back to the woman.”

“Must have been a lock of a male child's hair. To do him harm. To bring him bad luck. Death,” her companion said in an undertone.

“The woman was told to leave the baby's hair wrapped up in the same cloth at a crossroads,” the first woman whispered.

“Yes. Always at a crossroads,” said the other. “And whoever picks it up will also be cursed with bad luck.”

The sorceress continued to sit, her head thrown back, red-eyed, staring at nothing. When she finally opened her mouth to speak, the voice was not Veera Bai's nor anyone else's the Majra villagers had ever heard. They listened with their entire bodies, heads nodding, eyes intense, waiting to be called, to receive from her magic hands the charms sealed in metal lockets and strung on black threads that, tied around the loins of a male child, would ensure his survival into adulthood. There would be short mantras whispered into the ears of jealous wives, chants that would win back a wayward husband from his mistress; phials of love potions to start romances.

Dilraj Kaur signaled that she had a request. She drew closer to the sorceress and said something in a low voice. This time the spirit was heard only by Dilraj Kaur. She asked question after question, and the answers came pouring out of the mouth of the sorceress, in hoarse whispers. Dilraj Kaur's face was turned toward the door now, as she bent to hear the words from the spirit. I thought she had caught sight of me. Had recognized me. But she was only staring in the direction of the door, I decided, while concentrating on the message she had come to hear. It was almost possible for me to read the answers in Dilraj Kaur's expression. She was frowning, her eyes wild and bright with purpose. Once or twice she appeared to ask for further directions or explanations about whatever it was she was being advised to do. At length the sorceress, her bloodshot eyes still fixed on another world, held up an amulet on a black string, tied it ceremoniously in a piece of blood-red cloth, and handed it to Dilraj Kaur: literally pressed it into her palm and closed Dilraj Kaur's fingers over it.

Then everything happened at once. There was one last rough whisper from the spirit before the earthen pot on the shelf crashed to the mud floor. It was as if an alarm had gone off. Astonished cries went up from the crowd, followed by groans of disappointment. The spirit would speak no more that night. Meanwhile, Dilraj Kaur had gotten up hurriedly and made for the door of the hut. In my rush to get a head start on her, I dropped my shawl. It slipped from my head and fell around my shoulders. A small boy beside me looked up in surprise. “It's the Mem!” he cried. “The Memsahib from the big house!” His eyes danced with excitement, and a smile lit his face as he turned to get the attention of others he could share the news with. In an instant, a cluster of curious faces stared into mine, and exclamations of disbelief, shock, and amusement arose. I covered my face again as fast as I could, but not before Dilraj Kaur had shot me a startled look of recognition as she rushed past me without saying a word. Once home, I turned off the kerosene lantern and went to bed. But I couldn't sleep. I kept seeing Dilraj Kaur's bright glance as she took note of my unexpected presence at the door of Veera Bai's hut. I got up, and the full moon followed me as I paced back and forth. I went to draw the curtain and looked out of the window. Dilraj Kaur's light was on, and she was standing on the veranda outside her room. I watched her a long moment. She seemed to be beckoning to someone below. And then I saw Tej, back from the harvesting, crossing the yard. Instead of coming straight to our room on the ground floor, he climbed the stairway to her veranda, and the two of them went inside.

The act belonged to the oddness of the time, of the night itself. And I stood there, looking through the window, asking myself all the sensible reasons why Tej should go to Dilraj Kaur's room at half-past midnight. Everything about that night belonged to the irrational. It had achieved a kind of sense of its own during the past hour when time stopped meaning anything, and place was a matter of opinion.

Instead of wringing my mind dry with further conjecture, I flung the shawl over my head again, let myself out of our room, and headed for the stairs leading to the upper floor. Before I could reach the top, the light in Dilraj Kaur's room went out. The window opening onto the upstairs veranda was ajar; the door to her room closed. I stopped for a moment and grasped the banister. Their voices, disembodied and unreal, floated on the night air like smoke arising from incense through the open window. I strained to listen to those voices that were all too familiar, but now strangely new. Locked in speech. Heard in low tones, in words and phrases; the masculine and feminine sounds, Punjabi sounds, the timbres of the two complementing each other, like well-matched instruments, the utterances still unintelligible.

Meanwhile, something had happened to me. Physically. I wanted to climb the stairs the rest of the way. Yet I couldn't trust my legs to take me up to the door, my hand to fling it open, my voice to say, “What the hell are you doing here, Tej?”

Instead, I became a fanatical eavesdropper, a lurker in shadows, an onlooker with nothing to witness but the surrealistic visions inside my own head.

“You never used to call me that,” Dilraj Kaur responded to something Tej had said.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“You never used to call me Bhabiji after we were married. You called me Dilraj. Remember?”

“But you are my Bhabiji now. Again.” His voice grew faint on the last word. It was an explanation of sorts, but she chose not to be tutored.

“What's the difference now?” she asked.

“You know as well as I,” he said.

She said something I could not understand and followed it up with a low laugh. I couldn't recall ever having heard Dilraj Kaur laugh before.

“Well, it's true,” he went on from where he'd left off.

“It doesn't need to be,” she said. “I'm not the wife of your older brother anymore; I'm
your
wife.” If words could caress, hers were doing just that.

Tej mumbled something inaudible.

“How can you say that I'm not?” she asked.

Again, I could not hear what Tej replied. But she said, “Why should that make any difference?”

“It does,” he said.

Then I could hear them both move; getting up from somewhere? Coming toward the door? Walking away from it?

“Come,” I heard her say. “I have something for you. The least you can do is accept it. It will ensure your long life. Do this for me?” She lingered on the last words.

They were clearly walking away from the direction of the door now. Their voices were harder to hear, and their footsteps fainter. There was a short, unamused laugh. I recognized it as Tej's. I knew what the expression on his face would be: raised eyebrows, an ironic look in his eyes. He laughed like that when he was embarrassed by something unexpected, when he sensed something was required of him, but he didn't know what.

My frozen arms and legs and hands suddenly grew hot. Blood shot into my cheeks and raced along, filling the arteries and veins to the point of bursting. In two steps I was at the door and throwing it open.

21

Some moments in time stretch and snap like rubber bands. The door took a century to swing back on its hinges, and Tej a decade to react to my entering the room. The moonlight slashed in through the open door like a spotlight. Dilraj Kaur looked up without surprise. She took an age to take her hands away from Tej's shoulders and to release the smile that her face continued to hold captive for too long. It took her even longer to try and cover her femaleness that threatened to overflow the boundaries of the room and spill out into the night. She was all breasts and belly and thighs; loosened hair and naked eyes.

Tej floated up and away from the charpoy on which he had been sitting, his back to the door. Was he levitating or merely unsteady when he got to his feet? At the same time, Dilraj Kaur sank down on the charpoy with a leisurely, languid gesture of resignation and made a slow, token attempt to cover herself with her dupatta.

Then everything snapped. “What's going on?” I said, the sound of my own voice reverberating in my head. Tej stood looking at me; he was confused and mad and surprised all at once, and he made a move to hurry me out the door again. Dilraj Kaur sat silent and self-possessed as on a slow-moving carousel, amidst clothes, cast off and left where they fell; sheets and pillows creating a muddle on the unmade bed. She looked first at Tej and then at me, a spectator instead of a participant.

“We'll talk when you come to your senses again,” Tej said. “Right now, you're not ready to hear anything I have to say.”

“I'm as ready as I'll ever be. Besides, it's not up to you to decide when I'll be ‘ready'. It's just a way you have of getting out of answering my questions.”

Dilraj Kaur muttered something.

“This is her room,” Tej said. “Let's go where we can talk, if you want to.”

“I want to talk, all right. But it will be right here. In her presence. We need to have it out one way or the other.”

“Come with me,” he said.

“No. All three of us have got to talk this out. Now,” I said.

“You can do your talking, then,” Tej said. “Without me.” And he went out the door, slamming it behind him.

Dilraj Kaur stood up, about to say something to stop him. It was too late. There were just the two of us left, and half a language between us to communicate with. We stood staring each other down. Her grey eyes had lost all color. It gave her the look of some wild thing at night caught in the beam of a car's headlights. She pushed her hair away from her face.

“So now you talk,” she said in heavily accented English, groping for words. The sound of my own language on her lips came as a shock. “First, you tell me. What you were doing tonight? Tell me. At the hut of Veera Bai. I saw you there, covered up like a thief, sitting in the doorway.”

“Why don't you leave Tej and me alone?” I said, ignoring her question because I had no reply ready. “You've spent all the time I have been here trying to wreck things.”

“Who's wrecking?” she said. Then, lapsing into Punjabi, she went on. “You are the one who has ruined everything. Made everything rotten. Brought down the whole house, the whole family.”

After that, she started talking too fast for me to understand anything more than the fact that she hated me. I allowed her to run down like Pitaji's old manual phonograph when it needed re-cranking. When she finally exhausted her store of abuses I began again, in what I thought was a reasonable tone of voice. “I haven't done anything intentionally to hurt you. I mean, I have not wanted to hurt you. I haven't …”

“What you are saying?” she interrupted, in English again. “Everything is okay? You come here. Take my husband. Act like a memsahib. Sit around all day, getting waited on. Don't work. Not talking, even.”

“I.…”

She interrupted me again. “Why you don't leave? Why? You and that child in your belly. You are not wanted here. My husband and me, we were okay till you come. Like a concubine. Into the house itself. You take him away from the family. You take him away from me. My husband. My son's uncle.” She punctuated her words with signs and gestures that made any misunderstanding impossible.

“Look, what you're saying isn't true. I haven't taken anyone or anything away from you,” I said firmly, drawing on an argument Tej had often relied on. “Your position in the family is secure. Nikku's is secure. Nobody's threatening you. So why blame me? If Tej has not treated you properly, blame him.”

“There!” she said triumphantly. I had inadvertently proven one of her points. “That is what I mean,” she said in Punjabi again. “You don't care for him. You have no respect for him, calling him by his first name itself. Saying I should blame him, and all. When it's no fault of his. You have cast a spell on him. That's the kind of woman you are.”

“That's just nonsense,” I said. “I only want to be left in peace without all your tricks. Don't think because I've been silent I haven't noticed all the things you've done. You've tried to turn Mataji and Goodi against me. And you've worked on Rano too. All the filthy insinuations about me and Pitaji. And now
this
. You don't stop at anything, do you?” I delivered this half in Punjabi and half in English, and I had no idea how much of it she understood. She got perfectly well my gesture that indicated her current state of undress, however, and pulled her dupatta over herself in a belated show of modesty.