THE IMMIGRANT (7 page)

In the apartment upstairs, in a place that promised security and contentment, Sue became pregnant. She and Gary decided to do the conventional thing and get married.

Ananda was best man. He stood next to the groom in the church on Spring Garden Road, and drank in the solemnity of the occasion, the vast arrays of flowers, the pews filled with white Anglo Saxon Canadians, quiet, elegant, expectant and well-behaved. The sound of the organ filled the church, deep, moving, sonorous. It had to be the most wonderful instrument in the world.

To marry a white woman would be like marrying the country with your whole body. He wondered whether being Hindu would be a deterrent to a church wedding.

The bride appeared. She was clothed in a sheath-like gown that left her shoulders bare. A single strand of large white pearls ringed her neck, pearl drops dangled from her ears, white gauze flowed over her pulled back hair. Down the aisle she walked, drawing all eyes towards her.

The service began. Ananda’s attention wandered through its long recital, till ring, the priest indicated, and Gary turned to him. Soon the couple kissed, tenderly, lengthily, passionately. The audience sighed as the bride and groom trooped off to sign the register in the small side room.

1975. A state of Emergency is declared in India. The nation has had enough of democratic processes declares the Prime Minister, it is time for stronger medicine to cure the body politic.

Uncle and nephew are horrified at what is happening back home. Ananda writes anxious letters to his sister. Won’t she think of emigrating? He is not a citizen yet, but he is sure their uncle will sponsor Ramesh.

His sister writes scolding letters back. Ramesh is a trained bureaucrat. Unlike medicine or engineering, that is not a profession with transferable skills. Besides, the new dispensation is making use of his talents in Delhi. Western media with their obsession with democracy tended to blow things out of proportion. India did not need an opposition, India needed economic development, which a strong leadership enabled. The slogans he heard, like India was Indira, Indira was India, were coined to drive this into the heads of the masses. Ananda could come back now—the nation needed its doctors, with his foreign degree he would find that home was the land of opportunity.

What opportunity was his sister talking about? He was still in touch with his old college friends—they were all desperate to leave. Why should he go back?

Meanwhile pictures of Sanjay Gandhi appeared with great regularity in the weekly
Statesman
and
Guardian
that Dr Sharma passed on to the nephew. Dr Sharma was a great believer in news. And the news was all bad. The PM was re-writing the nation’s laws. Her party’s majority meant that she considered herself free to amend the constitution, to award her office more power and to imprison any dissenter. Parliament was harnessed to her will. States where the Congress did not have enough seats had their assemblies dissolved with President’s Rule imposed.

India had become a threatening place. A censored press, forced sterilizations, a factory that never took off, money laundering, kickbacks, torture, with more and more in jail. Each detail became a brick in the edifice of Ananda’s love for Canada, the sanctuary. He determined to become a citizen as soon as he qualified.

From time to time Alka brought up her poor lonely brother’s need for a wife. Such and such offer had come, what did he think? He always thought negatively. A wife from India meant the India Club, meant socialising with immigrants, pretending they had a bond, when really he found their conversation monotonous and boring. With a superior snigger they compared their own virtues with the shortcomings of their adopted country; look at their domestic life, the way they educated their children, their sexual morality, their marriages, their treatment of the old, etc, etc. Then they talked of Hindi films and songs. Their heads, hearts and purses were permanently and uneasily divided between two countries.

Give him Gary any day.

Alka began to get more insistent.

‘Did you think about that last proposal? I can’t keep putting off interested people.’

‘You should see the way I live—in one room as a paying guest.’

‘A wife will help you settle. Ma’s spirit will not rest in peace till you are married.’

Ananda thought mournfully of his sexual difficulties, and wondered whether the breakthrough moment would come with an arranged marriage. Certainly he could count on a willing, patient, forgiving, loving partner.

‘You have to stop being so fussy. My astrologer told me about this girl, a teacher in my old college, a year younger than you, father used to be in the IFS. She sounds just your type.’

‘How do you know what my type is?’

‘O-ho. Calm down. I will send her picture, and if you approve I will meet her.’

‘There is no need for hurry.’

‘You are thirty one, you call that hurrying?’

‘How can I decide with just a photo? What about compatibility, taste, her ability to live here?’

‘Poor boy,’ murmured Alka after a pause. ‘To think like this makes it more difficult. Marriage is a question of adjustment.’

‘You still need a canvas to paint on.’

‘So write, phone, get to know her. I am not asking you to marry a stranger. No thinking person can.’

Still, she was pulling him backwards into the arms of an Indian wife. If she could see how respected he was in his community, how immersed in Canada, she would understand his reluctance.

‘Why don’t you visit me? Get your hotshot husband to wrangle a trip abroad. Must be easy now.’

Alka spent the next five minutes of the precious phone call explaining how Ramesh was not one of those corrupt civil servants used to wrangling trips abroad. He was a loyal and humble servant of the state. He wanted India to progress, and ever since strikes were banned the economy had been improving.

Abruptly Alka rang off. Were things so bad that an ignorant middle class housewife had to sound like a propaganda machine? Was her phone being tapped?

Two weeks later, a photograph. He stared at it, a bland, black and white formal portrait of a girl gazing into the distance. It gave away nothing. Certainly not the state of her teeth.

He first kept the snapshot face down on the table, but after a few days propped it tentatively against the frame containing his parents. Suppose circumstances propelled her from the basement to the clinic?

Picture of wife sitting in the dentist’s office on top of the implement cabinet:

Patients ask, who is that lovely lady? She looks so exotic.

With quiet pride he responds, that is my wife, her name is… he opened his sister’s letter, ah yes, there it was, Nina. Her name is Nina.

Nina, what a nice name.

Both Indian and Canadian. There are few names like that.

Like Andy? Dr Andy?

Actually Andy is not my real name, my Indian name is Ananda. Means deep happiness.

Really?

My friends call me Andy, and since it is easier to say, I use it myself.

End of conversation, but was it the end of Nina? Her name had been thoughtfully provided, no need for a Westernized version.

By this time Ananda had experienced multitudinous unbearable evenings. It was a little humiliating not to be able to find a companion on his own, but he had to admit there were some things he could not do. This was a very intimate area, and his body showed him who was master every single time.

He came from a traditional background. What was wrong with thinking of a woman from home? His sister would consider the girl’s age, education, looks, adaptability and lack of encumbrances. In a way the ground would be cleared. His friends might wonder at his choice, but Westerners, thank god, were not nosy, inquisitive, prying and pushy with their insane curiosity about other people’s lives.

His uncle’s comments about Diwali now appeared in a more forceful light. If you reject it all, then who are you?

In his anxiety to establish himself he had turned his back on India and Indians. He hadn’t been home in seven years. It was time to return.

iv

Nina had not realised that being thirty would be so difficult. Actually she had expected to go on feeling young, alone and strong till she died. Then her body stepped in to make a difference to her mind.

She detected a tiny wrinkle near her eyelid.

‘I don’t see it,’ said her mother.

‘You are obsessed with wrinkles,’ said Zenobia.

This was not true. The wrinkle was the future and she was afraid. She looked carefully and found its companions around her lips, in the folds of her neck and on her forehead. She grimaced, stretched her mouth to exercise her skin, lathered on rejuvenating cream at night, but the faint lines were faithful to their nature and refused to leave.

Invisible to all except her, these indentations had tentacles that reached into her soul.

She hesitated to discuss this further with Zen. To be so concerned about ageing was weak minded and Zen herself was forty one. But she had lived, her divorce reflected there had been choices in her life. What did Nina have? Socially she was nothing. If she were in her own flat like her friend, if she possessed a little more enabling money, then she too could be brave. Anywhere else but in B-26 Jangpura Extension amidst the heat and damp, ugly walls, the concrete garden, the windows, with the peeling varnish and the grey, splintered wood beneath.

She was only human. Only human, she assured herself, as she witnessed her youth end and her courage ebb.

‘What’s this all about, Ma?’ asked Nina as the weekend approached, and the mother reached for the silver tea set, the one wrapped in an old sari towards the back of the top shelf of the Godrej almirah.

‘Somebody is coming for tea.’

‘Who?’

‘A woman, that’s who.’

‘Somebody’s relative?’

‘Might be.’

‘Whose?’

‘A boy’s sister.’

‘Sister?’

‘Both the parents are dead, so it is left to the older sister to look out for him, poor, poor boy.’

A sister, representing a suitor, followed by another bout of hope with the inevitable disappointment. Why did this have to be her fate? Always hovering on the threshold, never crossing through. She glared at her mother, the most convenient person to glare at. ‘Why are you so sorry for a stranger?’ she asked sharply.

‘One can feel for people, no?’

‘You want me to be someone’s nursemaid?’

The mother too had her feelings. What had she done to be saddled by a daughter so difficult? Any possibility on the horizon was accompanied by tension and tantrums. ‘You are very unreasonable,’ she now protested, ‘With this attitude what is the use of calling anybody over? You have to
try,
you don’t even
try.
’

‘Ma, that’s not fair. I have seen every man you wanted me to. Can I help it if it never worked out?’

In no meeting had Mr Batra managed to produce anyone she was sure would make her daughter happy. And without that certainty, she could insist on nothing.

‘We have to keep on looking. You want to remain single for the rest of your life?’

Nina looked down, and with her finger traced the fortunes of the tiny fish woven into the border of her sari. Her longing for someone to love floated about her in silence.

Mr Batra glanced at her. A one room home in a world obsessed with material goods was not a fit setting for her daughter’s sterling qualities. But the astrologer, recognising Nina’s worth, had phoned after the birthday visit. He knew a woman whose brother was in Canada; if she wished he could make enquiries, but he would need a photograph. This Mr Batra surreptitiously gave.

‘Don’t you want to know who he is?’ she asked.

‘Alright.’

‘A dentist. Settled in Canada.’

The daughter digested this information. ‘The dentist himself is coming?’

‘No, no, his sister. And you know who brought the match?’

‘Who?’

‘The astrologer. Now say you don’t trust astrologers.’

‘I don’t. I thought his questions had little to do with the stars. He must be paid to do this kind of thing.’

‘And why not? Somebody has to. I will pay him myself, one hundred rupees, plus donate another hundred at the Katyayani Mandir the day you get married.’

‘You will never be able to afford to marry me to a dentist in Canada, so you can keep your hundred rupees.’

‘We will see,’ said the mother, hopeful because, regardless of their circumstances, the sister of a boy settled in Canada had expressed an interest in meeting her daughter.

Come Saturday, Mr Batra’s anxiety reached hysterical proportions. She cleaned and cleaned, coaxing a dull shine from the old furniture, a dubious transparency from the thick glass in the windows. She soaked dals and imli, she ground the walnuts for her special barfi, she fried namak para. She rearranged the pots in the little cemented area in the front, she plucked a few puny branches and arranged them in two vases. And yet, it all looked sad and dreary, the home of people who had come down in the world.

It was just as well that Nina worked on Saturdays, such preparations made her nervous and angry. ‘We have to be taken as we are, surely that is what marriage is all about.’

And the mother retorted silently; as we
were,
people must take us as we
were.
This is not us, this is some dreadful fate that has happened because of our karma.

But she said none of this aloud, Nina despised talk of karma: the opiate of the masses, the bane of Hindu society, the smugness of resignation, the invitation to do nothing.

Sunday. Despite the hot sultry monsoon, the gods have dredged up a cloudy sky, intermittent raindrops and a cool breeze to honour the occasion.

Nina woke to the sound of a mixie; Mr Batra grinding dal for the dahi bhallas.

‘Ma, give me a break,’ she shouted from her bed, ‘do you have to start preparing so early in the morning?’

‘It won’t take a minute,’ called back the mother, not wanting to antagonise her daughter. But the bhalla paste had to be ground, the bhallas fried, then soaked in water, then soaked in dahi. The accompanying tamarind chutney also had to be made, and it was already ten.