Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (16 page)

F
our o’clock in the morning, and already the busy alley was wide awake and humming with life. From the kitchen of her two-room home in the centre of the alley, Nimmo could hear the milkman arguing with Asha, the tailor’s wife next door. Nothing unusual about that, she thought, smiling to herself as she moved around softly, boiling some milk in a pan. Asha needed to disagree with the whole world about this, that or the other. She carried on a running battle with each of her neighbours. Last month it was a dispute with Nimmo over the branches of a neem tree that had roots in her compound while most of its branches leaned into Nimmo’s.

“What can I do if the tree insists on growing this way, Asha?” Nimmo had asked, half amused by the woman’s indignation. “And anyway, I don’t take the leaves, so why make such a fuss?”

“You
don’t, but those boys of yours are always pulling down branches, climbing up the tree, making a mess. I am telling you for the last time, sister, this is
my
tree!”

So what if two small boys pulled a few leaves and branches down? It wasn’t as if they were killing that wretched tree, Nimmo thought. “In that case,
sister,”
she said, “since it bothers you so much, I’m going to cut down every branch of the tree that is on my side of the wall. Then there will be nothing to fight about.”

“That will kill it!” Asha protested. “You can’t kill my tree.”

“But it is interfering with the air on my side of the wall,” replied Nimmo. She had no intention of acting out her threat, but Asha could do with a scare.

After that exchange, Asha had simmered down and started a war with her neighbour on the other side. All of them lived too close to each other, Nimmo thought.

A new sound joined Asha’s high-pitched diatribe as Nimmo’s other neighbour, Kaushalya, emerged to feed her hens and collect their eggs. The clucking and squabbling of the hens reminded Nimmo that she was out of eggs and would have to buy some later in the day.

A child howled somewhere; vehicles screamed, rattled, honked their way down the narrow gully. Above all this noise a bird sang deliriously, as if determined to drown it out. Perhaps it was the fabled nightbird, so sweet and unearthly was its singing. Nimmo had a vague memory of
her mother telling her stories about this bird, whose song was a portent of ill luck. Or was it death? She shook her head to remove the darkness and started to prepare the day’s meals.

Her ears caught the sound of her husband’s car drawing up on the road outside, the soft thump of the door and the slap of slippers coming towards the house. She opened the door before Satpal could knock. Nimmo didn’t want to wake their boys, asleep in the inner room, for another hour at least. She wanted a small wedge of time alone with Satpal before he dropped into bed. When he woke at eight, he would leave again for his day job at the mechanic’s shop that he owned with his partner, Mohan Lal. By the time Satpal came home in the evening, Nimmo would be busy with dinner and the children, and then it would be time for his taxi shift again. If not for the single hour they had alone together at this time every day, they might be strangers living in the same house.

“Did you have a good evening?” she asked after he had washed his face and joined her in the kitchen.

“The usual.” His voice was tired. As he settled down on the floor, she put a glass of hot milk in front of him. “I don’t know whether it is worth going on with this taxi business. There is too much competition, and petrol costs are going higher and higher. Maybe I should sell the car and put all the money in our shop. But then we might have to take out another loan on this house to get by. What do you think?”

Nimmo was silent. She did not like rushing into things. Neither was she particularly happy about mortgaging
their house for a second time in three years. What if they were unable to meet their debts? “I don’t know,” she said finally. “Why can’t Mohan Lal find some money to put in this time? He is your partner in the shop, after all.”

“He doesn’t own his house, Nimmo. You know that,” Satpal replied. “So a mortgage is out of the question for him. He has taken two loans from his father-in-law, and they are not exactly rich people themselves. Selling my taxi to repay the loan I took to buy it and remortgaging our house are the only options.”

“Maybe you should talk to a few people? Elders at the temple, perhaps?” Nimmo suggested.

Satpal did not say anything, focusing instead on dipping a slice of bread into the tumbler of warm, sweet milk. He slowly ate the soft slice of bread. “We need the money urgently.” He looked up at her, and Nimmo saw the lines of worry creasing his forehead.

“How urgently?” she asked, fear knocking at her ribs.

Satpal shrugged, then saw her worry and smiled at her. “We can think about that later. I am too tired now. You tell me, how was your day? Were the boys good? That little one is turning out to be a real devil, isn’t he?” There was a tinge of pride in Satpal’s voice. “Now that he is in school you will have some time for yourself. Maybe you can do some tailoring work and bring in extra money, hanh?”

“It might not be possible for another three to four years,” Nimmo said. She paused. Her news was good, but she knew it would cause anxiety too. “You are going to be a father again.”

Satpal stopped fishing bits of soggy bread out of the
milk and looked at her. “Again? Another one? In how many months?”

“Seven, I think. I will go to the doctor today.”

“Another one,” repeated Satpal.

“How will we manage?” Nimmo asked.

Satpal touched her face gently. “Don’t worry, I will think of a way,” he said.

But it seemed to Nimmo that the worry lines on his forehead had deepened. Was this the moment to tell him her other news?

“Something else, ji,” she said. “There was a letter …”

“From whom?” Satpal was surprised. They rarely received letters, not even from his older sisters in Chandigarh and Amritsar. “From my sisters? Not bad news, I hope. Are they well?”

“No, it isn’t from them. It’s from a woman in Canada who says she might be my aunt.”

She rose to her feet and, reaching up to a shelf high on the wall, removed a thick envelope from behind a picture of Guru Nanak. She kept her important papers behind this brightly coloured lithograph of the founder of Sikhism in the belief that no one who looked into his eyes would steal the papers.

Satpal weighed the envelope speculatively in his hands. “When did this arrive?”

“A week ago,” Nimmo admitted. “I wanted to think about it before I showed it to you.”

“How …” Satpal began, and then broke into a delighted grin. “Was it me? Was it one of those people I took to the airport?”

Nimmo, pleased to see the boyish delight on his careworn face, smiled and nodded.

“Who? The sardar who was going to Toronto? I knew it. I felt it when I gave it to him!” Satpal slapped his thigh and laughed again.

“No, it was not a sardar,” Nimmo said. “It was a woman going to Vancouver. She gave this Bibi-ji our address,” Nimmo said. “But I am not sure whether I should reply. Suppose she is not my aunt?”

“And suppose she is? Does she mention your parents?”

“Yes, she does. She writes pages describing my mother. But I don’t remember anything about her—or about my family, for that matter,” Nimmo pointed out.

“What about that postcard you showed me? That is proof, is it not? It has the name of your parents, doesn’t it?” Satpal’s voice rose with excitement.

Nimmo was silent. She had never told him that the postcard might not be hers, that she might have picked it up on her journey to India during Partition, twenty years ago. When she had showed it to him a few weeks after their marriage, after he had asked if she remembered anything of her family, she had produced the postcard, hoping that he would not ask any more questions. She hated any attempt to dig up the past. Unfortunately he had taken it upon himself to try to find her family, believing—or hoping—it would lift the sorrow that hung over her like a veil.

“Well? Those are your parents’ names on that postcard, yes?” Satpal asked, lifting her face by the chin and peering into her secretive eyes.

“Yes,” sighed Nimmo. “Yes they are.”

“Then why don’t you write to this Bibi-ji? What is the harm? Even if nothing comes of it, so what? You have me now, you don’t need aunts!” With a rough palm he stroked her cheek, lingering on her warm throat. “Now, come to bed,” he urged softly.

She caught his hand and held it hard against her body for a moment, tempted to follow him to where she had spread their mats. Then a whimper emerged from the inner room and she moved away reluctantly. “Not now. The boys will be waking up soon,” she said.

As if on cue, the younger child, Pappu, drifted out sleepily, rubbing his eyes. He headed for his father’s lap, and Satpal sighed. “Okay, not now. Wake me up at seven.”

A wave of morning sickness caught Nimmo by surprise and she rushed into the small bathroom, pulling the door shut behind her.

She stood at the sink catching her breath and trying to ignore the scuffle of feet and whispers outside the door. The older boy, Jasbeer, was awake as well. She heard the rumble of Satpal’s voice. “Your mother will be out in a moment, putthar. Leave her be.”

A moment later Nimmo heard Jasbeer’s heavy nasal breathing at the door of the bathroom. She smiled. “Mummy, I
need to
go!” the seven-year-old moaned.

And now Pappu’s voice, slightly distorted by the wood. “I need to go too
,
Mummy.”

Nimmo imagined the two small warm bodies on the other side of the door. The older boy standing straight, his legs apart, head flung back in a childish imitation of his father; the younger one, still a baby at five years
of age, pressing his mouth against the door. She was responsible for these two young lives, she thought, savouring a last small moment of quiet inside the bathroom before emerging to receive her world. And now she was going to add another creature to her list of responsibilities. Would she be able to bear the weight of their needs? Would she be able to ensure that nothing bad ever happened to them?

A banging of small fists. “Mummy, hurry, hurry, hurry! I need to go!”

“No, me first, I woke up first, Mummeee!” came Pappu’s childish treble.

Nimmo rinsed the sourness out of her mouth and came out. “Okay, okay, one at a time now. Let Pappu go first, putthar.” She gently restrained her older boy from shoving his way in. “And you hurry up, okay?” she admonished the little one.

Jasbeer moved away sulkily. “He did that on purpose, just because I wanted to go. I hate him.”

Nimmo caught him and pulled him to her. “Don’t say things like that about your brother.” She stroked his hair away from his forehead, gathering the long strands into her hand, marvelling at their softness. The caressing motion removed the sting from her rebuke. “He is a baby.” She kissed his cheek and worried about the darkness she sensed in his thin body. Had she passed it on to him with the milk she had fed him when he was an infant?

But Jasbeer slipped out of her arms, his eyes full of resentment. “You are always on his side.”

By nine o’clock Nimmo was alone. The children had left for school with Pappu clasping Jasbeer’s hand tightly, and Satpal had gone to his shop. Nimmo hoped that Jasbeer would remember her stern instructions not to let go of his brother, to stay on the pavement and avoid talking to strangers. She thought about Bibi-ji’s letter, resisting the temptation to reread it before she had finished the housework. She moved about quietly, washing the dishes, putting them away, soaking the dirty clothes, sweeping and swabbing the floors. She was rigorous about cleanliness and scrubbed the small house every day, her strong body revelling in the work. The noise in the neighbourhood had also subsided, except for the dull roar of traffic from the nearby highway. Nimmo worked steadily, loving the silence that would be hers until the children returned from school. By eleven o’clock she was done. The house was so neat it looked as if she were the only person living in it. The clothes flapped on the clothesline in the tiny front yard, and the afternoon meal was ready for her sons.