Jasmine (8 page)

In good weather we could ride deep into the countryside on his scooter. Beggars with broken bodies shoved alms bowls at suited men in automobiles. Shacks sprouted like toadstools around high-rise office buildings. Camels loped past satellite dishes. Centuries coalesced as we picnicked.

“I feel lucky,” I often whispered as I rode pillion. Prakash had a secondhand Bajaj scooter which he’d fixed up himself. I
was
lucky. Vimla’s avaricious husband-to-be with the perfect horoscope was demanding a red Maruti car from Potatoes-babu.

“Foolish woman.” Prakash laughed. “Someday I’ll be able to make you genuinely happy.”

One late Sunday night—he’d been cramming for the exams in bed and I’d started out the night helping by massaging his neck and shoulders and then, I guess, fallen asleep—he shook me awake roughly.

“You’re ill?” I gasped, scrambling to a sitting position
inside our mosquito net. Prakash looked awful. I hadn’t seen him that confused or gloomy. “You
are
ill!”

“Yes,” he said. He dropped his head heavily on the pillow. “Yes, I’m ill.” He tapped his heart. “Ill here.”

He untucked the mosquito net and pushed himself off the bed. I heard the buzz of greedy bugs. He went out to the porch for boiled water. He gulped two aspirin, and brought two more back for me.

“Jasmine, what do you think of America?”

I didn’t know what to think of America. I’d read only
Shane,
and seen only one movie. It was too big a country, too complicated a question. I said, “If you’re there, I’ll manage. When you’re at work in America, I’ll stay inside.”

He let out one of his long, exasperated sighs.

“What should I have said?”

“Listen to me, Jasmine. I want for us to go away and have a real life. I’ve had it up to here with backward, corrupt, mediocre fools.”

Mr. Jagtiani must have asked him to cook the books again. “All right,” I said, “if you want me to have a real life, I want it, too.”

“Arré, maybe I shouldn’t have asked.
You
have to want to go away, too.
You
have to want to have a real life.”

“What is this real life? I have a real life.”

But his head slackened onto my pillow. For the rest of the night, I faked sleep.

* * *

A week later Prakash came home drunk. I’d seen my brothers drunk, but never Prakash. My brothers were rowdy drunks, Prakash was melancholy. He laid his textbooks out in a row on the bed. I hated what the job at Mr. Jagtiani’s was doing to him.

“Let me get you Andrews Liver Salt,” I said.

“You think everything can be fixed with Andrews Liver Salt.”

“Don’t work for that man anymore,” I begged. “You’re an engineer, not a lackey.” Impulsively I showed him the empty tin of biscuits in which I hoarded my savings from the detergent route. Parminder could be talked into giving me my own route, a longer one.

“You secretive little monkey!” he shouted.

I panicked. For all his talk of us being equal, was he possessive about my working? I remembered how on Sundays when the Bajaj chugged us along pedestrian-packed streets, he imagined strange lewd hands grabbing at me and pinching. We’d been married under a year. My mother always warned me that a husband has layers, like an onion, and you’ll still find things to surprise you, usually bad things—since men show off their good side very early—years and years after you marry. Maybe he was possessive and jealous and even a secret drunk, reeling around the bedroom trying not to spill a glass of antacid, and I was stuck with him.

“Oh, that bloodsucker again?” I asked.

“No, that bloodsucking Sindhi has nothing to do with what I’m feeling.” Then, like a magician groping in a top
hat for a new trick—Masterji had once taken our whole class to the Gandhi Auditorium in the bazaar to see Marvelous Mahendra, the Maharaja of Magic, and we had loved Marvelous Mahendra more than we had the American movie
Seven Village Girls Find Seven Boys to Marry
—he whipped an aerogram out of his trouser pocket and flicked me with it.

How velvety the paper felt on my forearm and wrist! Our aerograms were rough and fibrous, you had to gouge your sentences into the paper.
CELEBRATE AMERICA
, the American postal services commanded.
TRAVEL
…
THE PERFECT FREEDOM
. “Read,” he said. “I should be sending, not receiving, letters from Kissena Boulevard, Flushing, Queens.”

The letter was from a Professor Devinder Vadhera. I knew that Professor Vadhera had taught Prakash his first year in the technical college, and that he’d lent Prakash money for books, college fees, examination fees, tiffin, bus fare, everything, out of his own less-than-nothing instructor-level salary, so Prakash could stay in school.

“Without this man, I’d be like your brothers. I’d be just tinkering and tampering.”

Devinder Vadhera’s letter was in English. I handed it back to my husband. “You read it to me,” I said.

“What’s the matter? You’ve forgotten all the English Masterji dinned into you? You’ve become like the others, my little flower?” There was a slurred, nasty edge to his voice, nothing playful, and his eyes were red. “Caring only about pregnancies?”

It was unfair. I had no books, no magazines, I reminded him.

“Then study the technical textbooks and manuals I bring home every night!”

He read me only the part he wanted me to hear.

Day by day our Jullundhar graduates are rushing to this country and minting lakhs and lakhs of rupees. They stay in nice houses with 24-hour electricity and no load shedding. They have running hot and cold water. They and their wives also are liking to work. They enjoy all manner of comforts and amenities. I see the onrush of the dunderheads from our college. When will I see my truly best student blooming in the healthy soil of this country?

Professor Vadhera, still the benefactor, went on to list two technical institutes (both with “International” in the name and both in Florida) which, for a fee, made it easy for international students to get their visas and which also negotiated a very generous exchange of Jullundhar college credits.

“You heard that,” Prakash said, after he’d finished reading. “I was his best student. The rest were dunderheads. Dunderheads! You see how the mediocre are smart enough to get away? Only we, the best ones, let ourselves be hemmed in by bloodsuckers and dunderheads.”

“We’ll go to America,” I said, helping him out of his clothes and into bed. I laid a dampened washcloth over his eyes and forehead and sprinkled cologne on it. He smelled of beer. Like my brothers. My brothers were good men, but
they weren’t imaginative and they weren’t ambitious. All they had were nearly harmless consolatory vices. They would never get away to the emirates, and they knew it. They drank and gambled to forget they once upon a time had wanted to. My husband was obsessed with passing exams, doing better, making something more of his life than fate intended.

I heard melancholy snores. I thought of the old man under the banyan tree. If we could just get away from India, then all fates would be canceled. We’d start with new fates, new stars. We could say or be anything we wanted. We’d be on the other side of the earth, out of God’s sight.

One day back in Hasnapur, my mother told me, when the children were gathered under the banyan in the schoolyard, a scooter started sputtering and backfiring very close to Masterji’s desk on the raised dais he called his stage. He tolerated the interference as long as he could, then stopped the class and walked over to the boys, who were just sitting on the scooter, firing up the engine and letting it throb. He got about ten feet from them, and then spun around and started running back toward the class. The boys gave chase and caught him without much effort. In front of the students they first knocked his turban off. They called him insulting names. He started crying and holding his beard and his exposed white hair in his hands. “I am a good Sikh, a pious Sikh,” he cried. “Why are you doing this?
We are peaceful people.” They pulled out the ceremonial comb, and his life-long hair fell over his shoulders, down his back. The boys were laughing, and the students didn’t know what to do. While one boy barbered the teacher, chopping at the hair in great clumps, another held a machine gun over the children.

After they freed his rolled-up beard and chopped it off, they spun him around until he staggered and fell. Then they shot him, emptying over thirty bullets in him, according to the police inspector.

13

T
HE
next afternoon, instead of helping the Ladies’ Group with their weekly raffle, I lay across the bed and flipped through the thinnest of Prakash’s manuals. He had books, papers, manuals, charts, stacked in neat rows on the bed as well as under it; we slept across the width of the mattress so we wouldn’t knock down the Prakash Vijh Technical Library. The diploma exams—preparing for them, passing them with first-class honors—obsessed him.

The manual was for a VCR that Mr. Jagtiani had smuggled back from Dubai and that he had wrecked trying to hook up by himself. Prakash was having to work on it at home so that Mrs. Jagtiani, whom we’d never met, could record a popular religious show that weekend. Prakash
hated bringing a conspicuous electronic item like a VCR home because burglars were likely to be tempted. There were no secrets in our building. People kept their windows open and their televisions and stereos blaring. What was the point of owning high-status goods if nobody knew you owned them? Punjabis were so rich! We hadn’t seen it all happening in the village, but in the towns, every little flat had a television set, and everyone had a close relative in Canada or the United States bringing back the latest gadgets.

That’s what excited Prakash about electronics. It was a frontier, especially in India, and no one was staying back to service the goods that were flooding in. A good repairman would eventually make a fortune, even in Jullundhar. And an inventive one could devise electronics using native skill and native resources and designed for native conditions. He was basically an old-fashioned Indian patriot, with a lot of Gandhi and a lot of Nehru in him.

Lately, the burglaries had gotten out of hand. Clock radios, Cuisinarts, sewing machines disappeared every day. Some people said the Khalsa Lions—the Lions in Jullundhar were older and bolder than the ones in the village—were behind the break-ins. The rumor was that the Lions didn’t just pass the goods on to a fence. They were converting them into homemade bombs to blow up shops and buses. Having the VCR in the house, Prakash complained, was begging for burglars.

* * *

I read his grumbling as self-hate. He hated himself for wasting his precious cramming time on freebies for Bloodsucker Jagtiani. At least the manual would help me scour the rust off my English. I started reading. By the time I finished, it was dark, it was time to bathe and change into a fresh kameez and light the butane and fry up pakoras.

Prakash said, “So your mind hasn’t deteriorated after all. I’ve got you hooked, have I?”

That evening was a turning point in our marriage. He had read aloud from the manual as he worked. “Here,” he said, “your hands are smaller. Lift this.” He gave me a pair of delicate pliers and guided them through a maze of tiny lines and wires. In bed he said, “I like having you near me when I work. We’ll have to open our own store someday.”

“Bigger than Jagtiani and Son.” I laughed.

“Vijh & Wife,” my husband said from deep inside my embrace. “Maybe even Vijh & Vijh.”

These were happy times for us. Prakash brought home ruined toasters, alarm clocks, calculators, electric fans, and I learned to probe and heal. We lived for our fantasy. Vijh & Wife!

Vijh & Vijh. Vijh & Sons.

But these were unhappy times for the city. Radios burst into flames on store shelves. Cars blew up on the street. The scared swapped tips: the Lions don’t always wear beards and turbans—just the steel bracelet. They can look
like you and me. We started looking first at the wrist, before getting closer.

Then came confusing times. One day in April, Prakash said, very casually, “Well, it came through. You’re looking at a bona-fide student-to-be of the Florida International Institute of Technology.” He pulled a manila folder out of his briefcase but didn’t hand it to me. “Tam-pah,” he said. It sounded like a Punjabi village name, the way he pronounced it. Even now I think of it that way. Tampah.

He showed me the brochure.
Admission obtained, future guaranteed
. Two young Indian or Pakistani men and two Chinese or Japanese women on the cover were standing under palm trees, smiling in their white shirts. Everyone on the cover and in the pictures inside was Indian or Chinese, with a couple of Africans. It didn’t look anything like the America I’d read about. “You don’t have to worry about me—it says ‘Indian food readily available.’ The Admissions Director is from the south. Ramaswamy.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you’d applied?”

“I didn’t tell you in case I failed. I don’t share losses, only winnings.”

“What rubbish is that?”

“Always in such a hurry, Jasmine. You have a whole lifetime to share my losses. The husband must protect the wife whenever he can. Where is it written that a sixteen-year-old girl can share a man’s losses? Such a man should be put in jail.”

“But I will be seventeen soon. When do we leave?”

“You might be eighteen before this visa comes through. You think going to America is as easy as going to Bombay or Delhi?”

Then he told me about American visas, how he’d have to prove to suspicious Embassy officials that I was legally married to him and that he had enough dollars to support me, and of course the foreign exchange was tricky because the arrangements with Devinder Vadhera would have to be hush-hush, illegal, sleazy, unfortunately necessary, just like the black-money bookkeeping for Mr. Jagtiani. He’d also have to lie about my age. I’d have to be eighteen, at least, maybe nineteen, since they’d assume we were lying. Give them a year or two so they could take it away.

“I can’t live without you,” I said. I realized the moment I said it how true it had become. My life before Prakash, the girl I had been, the village, were like a dream from another life.