Home To India (3 page)

I thought it might be possible to say something about the garden, but now that it was June, dry, yellow grass struggled through the hard, packed clay, and the supports which must have been put up for long-departed sweet peas sagged in the wind that was already starting up.

Sweat from the previous night's lovemaking had dried and caked on my skin. My hair was sticky. It would be too much for Carol to hear about. Better to get back to details that would reassure her that all was well. Now she was in Michigan, and the early summer would be making its gentle appearance. It was easy to picture Carol taking a job translating Dante, or helping somebody else translate him. I could see her, earnest and nearsighted, slogging through the library stacks armed with three-by-fives, chasing down references and compiling a bibliography, while her boss had all the fun and got all the credit. In the midst of this, Carol would probably like to hear about the postman, the
New Yorker
, the gander, even. She liked comfortable, everyday, recognizable things.

I'm certain Carol would have found far too unusual the item of furniture I was sitting on as I wrote, had made love on a good deal of the previous night, and had sent Tej off from before dawn, in order to spare the rest of the family—Mataji and Pitaji, the girls, and Hari, Dilraj Kaur, and little Nikku, the cousins from Amritsar, neighbors on adjacent rooftops—the sight of us in bed together. Sleeping out of doors in summer was a way to keep tolerably cool, but it lacked privacy. The charpoy itself, a cot fashioned out of a bamboo frame mounted on wooden legs and strung with rope, sagged in the middle, so that whatever else was on it toppled into my space as I wrote.

Best not to burden Carol with the charpoy, but I could have written a treatise about its uses. As the setting for even the most extravagant of amorous encounters, for example, the charpoy provides the logical place for babies to be conceived, and later birthed, on. The sick and the elderly die on it and are carried, bound to it, to their funeral pyres. Tipped upright and leaned against a wall, it creates acceptable shade on a summer's day. Set it on its side, and you can drape wet clothes over it to dry. And of course you can simply sleep on it, with a thick woven dhurrie thrown over the ropes, and sheets on top of that. The foot end, where the ropes can be tightened from time to time, has gaps where your heels get entangled if you thrash around too much. Otherwise, it is serviceable and good, and lightweight for easy moving indoors out of dust storms or rain on summer nights. In winter, I was told, it makes a sofa to settle down on while one sits wrapped in a quilt. But how was I to get into all this with Carol? Carol would have fretted over the rough ropes, imagined my spine getting permanently curved from the sag, sent yet another letter urging me to say if I was all right and asking when I was coming back. All letters from the States were variations on this same theme.

“I don't know!” I heard myself say aloud. “I don't know!” I looked around to see if anyone had heard me. Veera Bai, the Harijan woman who swept our yard every day, looked up from her work briefly and then went back to her sweeping. Mataji had already bathed and washed her hair. The curly grey strands amongst the black were highlighted by the sun. Her bedding was folded for the day, and she was sitting on one end of her charpoy on the roof reading her prayer book and reciting her morning prayers from the
Japji Sahib
while the maidservant Ram Piari stood over her, rubbing and pounding and slapping the thick, dark, orange-colored mustard oil into Mataji's scalp. The cot drooped with her weight. She didn't look up. Nor did the girls—Tej's sisters Goodi and Rano, sitting on low stools beside her. The two were crouched over some embroidery they had started together the evening before and were bent upon finishing before another sun went down. It was a bright length of muslin, a dupatta that when worn over their heads or draped over their shoulders would catch dozens of sunbeams in the tiny round mirrors they were stitching into it. Hari was bathing. I could hear him singing and splashing water from the pump at the back of the house.

Pitaji, Major Sant Singh Sandhu (Retd.), would be off on his rounds of the farm. It's what he did every morning, if he didn't go hunting with the cousins from Amritsar, three young men of indeterminate age who all looked alike. Middays he escaped to town on farm business. These trips often turned into social forays as he searched out friends to talk to. Life in the army had made him gregarious to the extent that Majra company fell short of his taste for talk. In the evening Pitaji made another round of the fields before dinner. Sometimes he would send for me to listen to him talk about world affairs, Indian politics, or the price of sugarcane. Today Tej had gone at dawn with the Amritsar cousins to oversee the loading of the last, drying stalks of sugarcane for market. Now that the juice that plumped up the weight (and the price) had largely dried up, it was hardly worth the effort and cost of hauling it off. Still, Pitaji had decided it must be done, and Tej was probably already waiting for the tractor driver to bring the trailer around and mad with impatience to finish the job so he could return to me. To his sitar. To his music, for the rest of the day.

I contemplated for a moment the surroundings. The compound of our house was closed off from the rest of the village by a mud wall two feet thick and seven feet high. In the six weeks I had been here, I had scarcely gone outside it. The photographs I had envisaged taking still lay curled up in the Rollei as unexposed film. Women of a landlord's household do not have the freedom of the village, and especially not for taking photographs. It would create excitement of the wrong kind; it would invite criticism from all sorts of people. I had, then, to rely on my imagination for the pictures I might have taken. From the roof where Mataji sat, there could be seen—and photographed through the widest of wide angle lenses—the whole expanse of fields, and in their midst, the mud houses clustered together. The horizon would be as flat as a table top and the sun a pale orange mask of a face behind a veil of dusty beige. The blindfolded camel was walking around in circles, powering the Persian wheel well outside our gate. I could hear the creak of the wheel and the slosh of the water from where I sat. And the circles would expand to include the whole village, those dwellings that rose up like natural extensions of the earth from which they were fashioned, the fields, and even the towns I had never seen, but felt must be there, endless copies of Ladopur as far as the imagination could take me. I had been told that in the monsoon season one could actually see the foothills of the Himalayas to the north. Now they had to be wondered about.

Inside our compound a series of rooms with thick mud walls leaned along the north side, shaded by a tamarind tree under which the vicious Moti had sat furious and chained since dawn. He had nothing to do but await his release at sundown, while Jim and Lal roamed the yard free, sniffing the morning air, marking their territories, and frightening the butterflies. Ram Piari had finished Mataji's massage now and was rolling up the beddings from the charpoys and stowing them inside the house for the day. Gian, a youth conscripted from the village for odd jobs around the house, was stacking the rope cots against the outside of the storeroom wall. Something he whispered to Ram Piari as they went through their routine caused her to flash him a fierce look. As soon as he had turned his back, she pulled her dupatta more tightly over her head to hide a smile.

And
she
was already in the kitchen, up before everyone else, overseeing the work of Udmi Ram and Chotu and Ram Piari, keys jangling from her kameez pocket and her bare feet slapping the packed earth of the kitchen floor as she strode back and forth. She would have bathed, washed her hair, said her prayers, and seen to the servants' getting up and starting the wood-burning
chulas
. The kitchen would be all smoke and boiling water, steaming buffalo milk and tea things taken out. Six-year-old Nikku would be sitting on a low stool, drinking sweetened cow's milk from a big brass tumbler. I could hear the striking of brass utensils, one against the other. Soon it would be the groan and squeak of the wooden beater in the earthenware butter churn.
She
was seeing that everything got done. But how did she manage to shout without raising her voice?

Mataji was joining her now for the first of the day's series of ongoing conversations. The kitchen was the favored locale. It might have been that it offered the two women an excuse to sit together without seeming to waste time. No one could accuse them of idleness if they cut and peeled, stirred and ladled while they talked. I often caught bits about the flamboyant life of Mataji's younger brother, Uncle Gurnam Singh. It was obvious Mataji didn't approve of what he was doing with his life and to his family. There was something about another woman.

The kitchen, indeed the whole household, was a scene that would have done just as well without me in it; nor had it taken me long to arrive at this. Now, after all these weeks, I had almost got used to it. But not quite. Sometimes I wanted to stand up on the flattopped roof and shout to the village at large: “Hey! Look at me! I'm Helen! I can recite the Lord's Prayer in Gothic, tell you the difference between an Italian and Shakespearean sonnet. I can give a recitation of Goethe's lyrics from the Weimar period. I can take pictures and develop and print them myself. I saw the world premières of
Gone With the Wind
and
Citizen Kane
; the sneak preview of
Casablanca
before it was released. Humphrey Bogart was in the audience! I can tell you who starred in the original version of
A Star is Born
and who Bette Davis' costar was in
All This and Heaven Too
. I can conjugate verbs in five Old High German dialects and recite the first twenty-five lines of Virgil's
Aeneid
!”

But I had no audience, and besides, knowing all this was about as practical in the present circumstances as being able to write all the four Gospels on a grain of rice.

There were clearly other skills to be cultivated here. So far I hadn't shone at any of them. Trying to light the wood stove had ended in blackened fingers and tears in my eyes from the smoke and frustration. Rolling out chapattis had provided a hilarious time for all as the wet, sticky dough slipped and slid beneath my rolling pin, producing a polygon of varied thickness, instead of the neat, perfect circle aimed at. Attempts at crochet had resulted in tight little masses of sweat-stained cotton thread with no shape, and holes everywhere.

She
had always been there to smilingly take the offending rolling pin or crochet hook or metal tube blower for igniting the fire out of my awkward hands to finish the job perfectly herself.

“Marvelous,” I thought, “how I have managed to keep Dilraj Kaur out of my letters back to the States all these weeks and out of my conversations before leaving. But I have. She is my secret from all those at home. An obsession here and now. A raging preoccupation.”

An angry crow flew in from nowhere and began hopping sideways toward the glass of half-consumed buttermilk on the stand by my charpoy. His uniform of navy blue and grey feathers gave him a military look as his brisk, greedy eyes scanned the glass. I gulped down the last bit to spite him, picked up the unfinished letter to Carol, then set it down again. It was getting too hot to write. Thought, like something physical, melted away at high temperatures. I would finish the letter later, in the evening when it grew cooler.

“No,” I said to myself, getting up to find a place in the kitchen scene. “it's too out of the ordinary. I couldn't tell Carol I have a co-wife, or will have one, as soon as Tej and I are married.”

3

How had it happened? How had it come about that, of all the women I had ever known, I was the only one with a cowife? It was like having some rare disease or a special talent, one that was interesting but not exploitable. It wasn't something I wanted to share with Carol. Besides, a whole lifetime's worth of will had been used up just getting to Majra, so that even a simple matter like finishing the letter to her that I had begun in the morning became a major undertaking. Now that it was evening, it should have been easy enough to take care of. But it meant sitting inside our clay oven of a room, writing by kerosene lamp, and missing the best part of the twenty-four hours out-of-doors.

Gian would already have set out the charpoys for the night. The tractor driver and the cousins from Amritsar would be getting instructions from Pitaji about what needed to be done in the fields the next day. Hari would be arguing forcefully for a bigger share of the profits, complaining, as he often did, that he was being overlooked in favor of “others” (meaning Tej) because he was the younger son. Chotu would be bringing tea for the unexpected guests from Ladopur, the Tehsildar, a petty official, who owned a horse-drawn carriage, and his powdered wife. With a rattle of plates and spoons, Chotu would set the brass tray, too big for him to carry comfortably, and polished to a high luster with ash from the fireplace, heavily down on a marble-topped table in the yard. Mataji and the Tehsildarni, their faces carefully concealed from each others' husbands, would be sharing information independently gathered on the scandals that had rocked that small town of shopkeepers and temple priests the past week: what elopements had taken place, which police official transferred for taking bribes, what the Christian Mission miss-sahibs had been up to. The sight of nurse-evangelist Ina Mae Scott, straight and stoical at the wheel of her jeep, with the cook sitting at the back as she drove out to faraway villages every morning, never failed to arouse the curiosity and awe of the citizens of Ladopur.

Dilraj Kaur would be seeing to dinner that wouldn't appear until just before bedtime, and Goodi and Rano would have put away their completed embroidery piece at last. Freshly bathed, hair oiled and braided, they would be silent but keen partakers of the gossip. Discreet drops of
ittar
, dabbed behind their ears, would have rendered them as fragrant as the jasmine blossoms that were releasing their sweetness on the summer night. The girls were not twins, but only looked as if they were, even though at eighteen Rano was three years older than Goodi and an inch taller. It was because they did everything together, dressed similarly, and chaperoned one another everywhere, like nuns. From the roof, where Tej sat exploring an early evening raga on the sitar, came the plaintive sounds of his improvisations. They suggested some nostalgic remembrances, some whispered longings, some half-uttered vows.