Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Read online

  “But why my daughter? As you yourself pointed out, my Kanwar is no beauty.”

  Soniya gave her a sideways look and hesitated.

  Gurpreet pounced on the pause like a cat on a dithering mouse. “What?” she demanded. “What is it? He wants money? Gold? What is it?”

  “Nothing like that,” Soniya assured her. “Just that the boy is blind in one eye. In every other way he is whole and fit.”

  “How old is he?” Gurpreet asked, still not convinced. Why would a foreign-returned with no family burdens want her Kanwar’s hand in marriage? Was he so ancient that he was losing his eyesight? Was this his second marriage? Did he already possess a white wife?

  Soniya gave her an exasperated look and, snapping the fan open again, waved it vigorously. “Sister, you question too much! There is nothing wrong with him. He is thirty years old and wants a girl from a decent family who will adjust to life in a foreign country. He has lived abroad since he was sixteen and does not care about dowry and all that kind of thing. If you are not interested, tell me right now. There are lines of parents waiting for men such as this one, hanh!”

  “No, no, it is not that. You must understand, it is my duty to make sure that my daughter is going to a good man.”

  “As if I would bring any other kind to your door,” Soniya huffed.

  Gurpreet soothed her with flattering words so that she left beaming and promising to find a groom just as good for Sharan as well.

  “Did you see her gold!” Gurpreet said wistfully as soon as Soniya was safely out of earshot on the dusty path leading to her house. “And her skin. Looks so young and tight. No worries, that’s why. What with Jeeti engaged to a fine man, all her responsibilities are done.” She turned to Sharan. “A whole month younger than you, that friend of yours, and she is already engaged.”

  As if it is my fault, Sharan wanted to say. If not for Kanwar standing like a rock in her way, by now she would have been married ten times over. But seeing her mother’s brooding face she kept her thoughts to herself.

  Later that night, however, as the three women lay on mats in the moon-washed courtyard, Gurpreet allowed herself to feel a cautious excitement about Khushwant Singh, the boy from Abroad. “He sounds exactly right for our Kanwar,” she said. Sharan heard the smile in her voice. “See, there is a reason that Ooper-Wallah made us wait so long.”

  “But Amma,” Sharan said, sitting up beside her mother’s recumbent form. “He is blind in one eye! Who wants to marry a man who can see only half the world?”

  “He can turn his head, can’t he?” Kanwar asked with surprising asperity. “I don’t mind a one-eyed man, so why should you care?”

  “With a single eye you can see everything you need to.” Gurpreet’s voice was harsh. “Your father had both eyes but was blind to everything except his dreams.”

  “Is he good-looking?” Sharan asked. “Is he rich?”

  “We will have to wait and see what he looks like,” her mother replied. “Soniya said he is not rich, but he has a house, a shop, no debts and is able to look after a wife well. Once our Kanwar joins him, she can help him become rich.”

  Sharan looked down at her sister’s face, transformed by the soft light of the moon and hope into something almost pretty, and was filled with sudden envy. It would be Kanwar, after all, who would go to the country that Sharan had dreamed about ever since she could remember. But Canada, with its lavender soap and chocolate, was her fate. She was the one who longed for Abroad. She wished that this man who was causing such a flutter in the house was coming for her. Why, she thought, a single look at me and he would demand to marry me like all the other men have. An idea crept into her mind. Why not give him the choice, why not let him see both of us sisters and decide? And this time, if he chose her and if Gurpreet refused to give her hand in marriage, she would run away with the one-eyed suitor. Never mind what the village gossips would have to say about that.

  “When is he coming, Amma?” she asked.

  “Next week,” said Gurpreet. In the darkness, she peered up at Sharan’s face. Something in the girl’s voice must have alerted her, because she said sharply, “And you are not to show yourself until all the formalities are done, you understand? I don’t want this one to go away as well. Remember, if your sister does not marry, neither will you. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, Amma, I hear you,” Sharan replied meekly, lying down on the mattress. She felt her mother relax beside her.

  “I will ask Soniya to lend us her yellow silk salwar kameez,” Gurpreet said. “And maybe she will lend us some jewellery as well. Nothing much, just a chain and two bangles. We don’t want to give the boy an idea that we have plenty. Yes, I can feel it in my heart, there will be a wedding this time!”

  Yes, there will, Sharan thought, closing her eyes.

  The following week, Khushwant Singh arrived in the village to see Kanwar. While Gurpreet fussed around in the front room, anxiously arranging delicacies on plates, Sharan helped Kanwar dress. The sound of chattering and laughter erupted outdoors. Sharan ran to the window and opened the shutters.

  “Are they here?” Kanwar asked nervously.

  Sharan stuck her head out of the window and watched a small group of people approach their house. The tall young man with the long beard curling down his chest and the white turban tied in a fancy city style must be Khushwant Singh, she thought. Behind him were Soniya and a few elderly relatives.

  “What does he look like?” Kanwar begged, poking her sister’s back.

  “He’s handsome,” Sharan replied. She took in the man’s wide face and thick eyebrows. He wore black pants and a jacket like the Collector Sahib, and on his feet he had shoes. Real shoes! All the men in Sharan’s life so far, including Banarsi Das, the wealthy grocer, went about barefoot, their knobbly feet cracked and ugly and visible to all the world. He walked past the window. Sharan leaned out a bit more and giggled loudly. Khushwant Singh looked up, startled. His expression changed from surprise to pleasure. He grinned, displaying strong white teeth. Sharan still could not make out which eye was blind and was relieved that it was not obvious. She smiled back boldly, allowing him to gaze at her face for a long minute, and then ducked out of sight. She had caught him, she thought smugly, she was sure of that.

  Why did Sharan show her face at the window, even though her mother had threatened her with three kinds of beatings if she did? Even though she loved her sister deeply? Even though she knew it was wrong? Perhaps it was the scent of lavender soap haunting her nostrils. Perhaps it was that distant Why Not that had propelled her father into making one journey and likely the next one too. Why not take a chance? she had asked herself.

  After they were married, Khushwant Singh held his sixteen-year-old bride against his body, stroked her skin with a hand scored rough by hard work in the lumber mills of Duncan and Vancouver, and whispered against the delicate curve of her throat how he had fallen in love the second he saw her. He had come to Panjaur expecting a girl who was known more for her virtue and hard work than her looks. He had thought that his bad eye would prevent him from getting anyone better than that. Then he had spotted Sharan, framed in a window, and wondered if she were a figment of his imagination. A pari, an apsara, a goddess, he whispered as he thrust into her virgin body, and she muffled her screams in his shoulder. He was a man given to superlatives. Besides, he had spent all these years in Canadian lumber mills dreaming of lush beauties raised on the water and wheat of his native Punjab. Who could blame his ardour?

  When Kanwar and not Sharan had emerged from the kitchen bearing a glass of lassi, Khushwant Singh had been filled with dismay.

  “She isn’t the one I saw,” he blurted out. “Who was the girl at the window? She is the one I want to marry.”

  “That’s the younger daughter,” Soniya said before Gurpreet could comment. “A nice girl, very talented and beautiful, as you saw for yourself. Sister, where is our Sharanjeet? Why is she hiding? Gurpreet, sister, it is time to celebrate. He has liked your
daughter. He wants to marry her!” She clapped her hands and laughed, ignoring Kanwar, who stood in the corner, dressed in borrowed finery, resignation stamped on her face.

  Gurpreet was furious with Sharan and with this heartless young man who had humiliated Kanwar. Recklessly she brushed aside Soniya’s babblings.

  “No, he can’t marry Sharanjeet,” she said. “Either he marries my older daughter or nobody.”

  “You are a foolish woman,” Soniya hissed to Gurpreet in the privacy of the kitchen, where she had dragged her. “And too proud for your own good. Do you want to die the mother of two unmarried daughters?”

  Gurpreet was adamant. After the visitors had gone, she thrashed Sharan hard, without saying a word. Kanwar did not intervene to save her sister from the beating. And Sharan, dodging her mother’s hand, wondered how to contact Khushwant Singh and offer to run away with him.

  The next morning, to everyone’s astonishment, the young man sent word with Soniya. He begged Gurpreet’s forgiveness for having hurt Kanwar, but his heart couldn’t accept her as his wife. Only one woman would do.

  “He says that he wants no dowry,” Soniya reported. “He says he will pay for the wedding. I think he is a fool, but who am I to say anything?”

  Khushwant Singh also had another groom in mind for Kanwar—a widower cousin with a young son and a few acres of land in a nearby village. In fact, if Gurpreet gave him permission, he would tell his relatives to start the negotiations immediately.

  “But all this only if you give him your Sharan,” Soniya said, flapping her fan.

  Gurpreet gave up. She had no choice. Matches like this arrived only by the greatest grace of God. If it was not Kanwar’s fate to go to the country her father had tried to reach, then it must be Sharan’s.

  Two months later, Gurpreet celebrated both marriages.

  Sharan’s new husband left for Canada soon after the wedding, in 1938. World War Two broke out the following year; many Sikh men from the villages of Punjab died fighting for the English in that war, and Sharan was glad that her husband’s blind eye prevented him from joining the army. At least she would not become a widow before she had even lived with her husband. But as the war dragged on and Sharan remained in Panjaur, she began to feel as if she was indeed a widow.

  Meanwhile Kanwar moved to Dauri Kalan, her husband’s village, some distance away from Panjaur. She came home six months later for the birth of her first child, a boy named Gobind. Sharan held the tiny infant in her arms and envied her older sister all over again. She had stolen the man meant for Kanwar, but as time passed, with only letters from her absent husband to mark the passage of time, she began to wonder whether she had done the right thing after all. Was she only going to have a long-distance husband? Would she ever see anything more of him than the lengthy epistles he sent every month and that the postman read out with zest to her and later disseminated to the rest of the village? He always began by telling her how much he missed her, his Baby, his Honey, his Beloved, and assuring her that very soon she would be by his side. This would be followed by a brief report on the state of his health (which was always fine), after which Khushwant Singh would cover several sheets of paper with impassioned essays on the history of the Sikhs in North America. He seemed to be obsessed with his community, and underlined the richness of Punjabi traditions and culture. Then, in seemingly direct contradiction, he would write that she should learn English ways, should become a modern woman so that she would be able to settle into life in Canada. Sharan was confused—what exactly did he want her to be? A traditional Sikh or an English mem? And how, she wrote back, was she to learn English in a village where nobody other than the postman knew it?

  “I have arranged for you to go to Amritsar and stay with my relatives,” he replied in his next letter. There she would be tutored in the English language by a gori memsahib named Mrs. Hardy. She would also attend classes at the Golden Temple to learn how to read and write Gurbani.

  “It is important to know where you are coming from and where you are going” her husband wrote. “For this you need both languages, the language of our soul and that of the goras. This way you will be a two-edged sword.”

  Sharan was excited at the thought of leaving her mother’s house to go and live in Amritsar, Sikhism’s most holy city. This would be her first journey away from home. She was determined to become a modern woman with two tongues in her head: one to do business with the goras who ran the distant country that awaited her and the other to deal with her own people.

  Every morning for the next several years, Sharan walked through the narrow gullies of Amritsar, past the Golden Temple, to Mrs. Hardy’s home, where she sat before the elderly Englishwoman’s sky-blue gaze in a drawing room festooned in lace and learned ABCD and 1234 like a little girl. From one window she watched the gardeners struggle to tend an English garden of roses, delphinium, phlox and lilies that drooped and died under the scorching sun of Amritsar. From the other window she gazed at the dome of the Golden Temple. When she first arrived, determined if often scared and lonely, Sharan would glance out of the window before her lessons for the blessing she believed she would receive from the mere sight of that golden structure rising gracefully into the hot shine of the sky. On Saturdays and Sundays she would go to to the temple to learn a different alphabet at the free school run by the priests, to become the two-edged sword that her husband wanted her to be. Not that she minded the effort all this sudden flood of learning involved. She would tell herself that if it had not been for a husband as enlightened as hers, she might still be an illiterate farmer’s daughter, waiting stupidly for her fate to turn. But now she had the opportunity to be something better, and so, not being one to turn up her nose at chance, she applied herself with diligence to her studies.

  Twice a year, to celebrate the Baisakhi and Diwali festivals with her mother and sister, she caught the bus back to Panjaur, glad after each visit that she had managed to get away from the smallness of life there. During one of her visits, in 1940, Kanwar gave birth to her second child, a daughter named Nimmo. Sharan cuddled the warm baby and wondered whether she would ever join her husband in Canada. She decided to accompany Kanwar back to Dauri Kalan for a few months and help her with the new infant before returning to Amritsar.

  Finally the war was over, and one evening she returned to her relatives’ home from her session with Mrs. Hardy to find her immigration papers had arrived. By then she was no longer a villager from a dusty dot on the map but a city girl who knew how to read and write, who had surreptitiously broken the religious rules of god-fearing Sikhs and cut her hair a few inches to even out the ragged ends. She was ready to take her future in her own hands and shape it to her liking.

  She paid scant attention to talk of the impending independence of her nation and the division of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, even when the murmuring turned to a shouting. She had too many things to do in preparation for her departure. And then, in January 1946, waving goodbye to Gurpreet, who had made the trip to the city to help her daughter prepare for the journey, Sharan caught a bus from Amritsar to New Delhi, a train to Calcutta, and from there a ship that sailed via Hong Kong to Vancouver. While Kanwar stayed behind in a land that would soon be split into two nations, Sharan— inheritor of her father’s dream and that troublesome question Why Not—was on her way to a new life.

  Two months later, when she reached the port of Vancouver and saw the dark trees pointing at the sombre, rain-laden sky of that city, when she heard the cry of the gulls in the harbour, when she finally set foot on the damp earth, Sharanjeet Kaur felt that she had overcome space and time and won the country that had turned her father away all those years ago. Her life, she thought buoyantly, was complete. What more could she ask?

  THREE

  GUILT

  Vancouver

  1951

  Sharan—Bibi-ji, as she was now called—sat at the cashier’s desk in the dim interior of East India Foods and Groceries. She tapped out a tuneless ta
ttoo on the wooden surface in front of her with one plump, long-fingered hand. The late autumn sun warmed her gently through the sheet glass window she cleaned every morning so that she could see the world clear and undimmed by yesterday’s grease and dust. And, of course, so that the world would see her, Bibi-ji, wife of Khushwant Singh, or Pa-ji, unchallenged owner—no, proprietor; that sounded grander—of East India Foods and Groceries, 2034 Main Street. And full owner also of the apartment above the store—the one with two bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, a living-cum-dining room, and a kitchen with more pots and pans than she knew what to do with.

  Yes indeed, Bibi-ji had arrived. Her life was now enriched by all manner of luxuries that an ardent Pa-ji poured into her lap, even though he could not always afford them. Pa-ji was a great giver of presents. He loved the feeling of power that he experienced every time he entered a shop, pulled out his wallet and purchased something for his young wife. He loved spending because he could. There was a time, not so long ago, when he had to count every penny. In most people the experience of extreme poverty inspires extreme parsimony, but Pa-ji was different. He forgot the past by living it up in the present. These gifts to Bibi-ji were apart from the ones he purchased on birthdays, on anniversaries and for every festival he could find in the calendar. He insisted on being multi-denominational as far as festivals went, and celebrated them all—Baisakhi, Diwali, Eid, Hanukkah, Christmas. If there was no reason to buy a present, he discovered one. When Bing Crosby came to the Sunset Community Centre as the star attraction the year Bibi-ji arrived in Vancouver, Pa-ji decided to celebrate the twin arrivals of wife and film star by buying a gramophone player and two Bing Crosby records. The first day of winter was greeted with new toques and matching mitts for both Bibi-ji and himself. The appearance of buds on the cherry trees, the arrival of a pair of blue jays in the garden of the house behind theirs—anything was reason enough. Sometimes Pa-ji made up these occasions. “Business boomed this evening,” or “Churchill came to our shop to buy basmati rice,” or his favourite—which always drew a laugh from Bibi-ji, no matter how often it was repeated— “I was just elected the Prime Minister-ji of Canada.”