Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Page 9

  “No. Vancouver.”

  The driver was silent for a few moments and then turned around to look at Leela without diminishing his speed. “May I ask you a favour, madam?”

  “Keep your eyes on the road, ji!” Vimala exclaimed.

  “Small favour,” the Sikh said. The car had not swerved off its straight path.

  “What is it? Tell me and I will see,” Leela said reluctantly.

  “It is nothing much. My wife has an aunt, her dead mother’s sister, somewhere in Canada. My wife does not remember much about her, she was very young during Partition. Only that her name was Sharan, and that she was married to a gentleman from Vancouver. If you meet someone by that name, please, will you give her our address and tell her to write?”

  Leela laughed. “There are millions of people in that country. You think I will be able to find your wife’s aunt? When I myself know nobody there?”

  “Anything is possible in this world, memsahib,” said the Sikh. “Without that hope, how can we live? I do this airport route occasionally, and every time I take somebody who is going to Canada or Britain—there are a lot of Sikhs there also, you know—I tell them about my wife’s aunt. If Guru-ji wills it, we will find her one day! The world is not such a big place. It is a possibility, is it not?”

  “Yes, baba, everything is possible,” Leela agreed, thinking of the coincidences that had propelled her own life forward to this point.

  “So madam, will you take my address with you, just in case?” The driver swung into the airport and joined the long line of taxis inching forward into a general chaos of people, baggage and exhaust-belching vehicles.

  “All right,” Leela relented. “I will take it with me.”

  After the driver had loaded the bags into a cart that Vimala had managed to commandeer, Leela wrote down the man’s wife’s name and address on a piece of paper.

  Nirmaljeet Kaur, daughter of Kanwar Kaur (sister of Sharan), Dauri Kalan village.

  What was the harm, Leela thought as she scribbled, what was the harm in keeping someone’s hope alive? For a moment the anxiety, the annoyance with Balu for having ripped them all away from their home soil, the fear and sadness, all of it lifted. Leela wasn’t sure why this Sikh taxi driver’s request should so lighten her own mood but it did, and when she waved goodbye to Balu’s cousin and to India, it was without too much pain. She would be back soon, she thought, and then everything would be all right.

  “I will go and come,” she said, hugging Vimala.

  “Don’t forget to write to me as you promised,” Vimala insisted, holding her tight.

  “And you too. Every bit of news from here, you understand?”

  She waved once more, and then she and the children were inside the warm airport.

  In the airplane, Arjun covered himself with his blanket and went to sleep. Leela turned to Preethi, who had cornered the window seat and was poring over the book Vimala had given her.

  “Amma,” she said, leaning against her mother’s shoulder, “what does node mean?”

  “It means where two or three things cross,” said Leela. She examined the book curiously. “What are you reading?”

  “About Indra’s Net,” Preethi said. “Do you know this story, Amma?”

  “No, I don’t.” Leela stroked the child’s soft hair. “Why don’t you read it to me, very softly, so we don’t disturb anyone, hanh?”

  “Indra the god of heaven flung a net over the world,” read Preethi, with Leela helping her along when she stumbled over the more complex words. “Its shining strands criss-crossed the world from end to end. At each node of this net there hung a gem, so arranged that if you looked at one you saw all the others reflected in it. As each gem reflected every other one, so was every human affected by the miseries and joys of every other human, every other living thing on the planet. When one gem was touched, hundreds of others shimmered or danced in response, and a tear in the net made the whole world tremble.”

  Preethi stopped reading and looked out the window. Far below, from out of the pitch darkness, a long string of brilliant lights stretched like gems into infinity. The plane was crossing the India-Pakistan border, which was lit up in vigilance, echoing the line that had been drawn on maps in London and Delhi little more than two decades ago to mark the beginning and end of a pair of young nations at war with each other from birth.

  “Amma, look, look!” she whispered excitedly. “It’s Indra’s Net!”

  Leela leaned across her daughter to peer out the window. She gazed down at the brilliance scattered across the darkness, imagined the mountains, valleys and plains cut by that rope of light. Perhaps, she thought drowsily, reluctant to dampen her daughter’s excitement by telling her the truth, perhaps it was indeed Indra’s Net. And their movement, their migration from one world to another, had set it in motion, causing a series of tremors. How it would all end, she did not know.

  SEVEN

  INDRA’S NET

  Vancouver

  1967

  “This,” Balu said proudly, waving his arm out the car window as they drove away from the airport, as if he had created it himself, “this is Vancouver.” He waited expectantly for his family’s reaction to the sweet mid-afternoon air, the sun-drenched expanse of land leading, on one side of the road, to a low range of mountains still hazy with cloud cover, and on the other to grassy fields. “Well? Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “Actually, it smells just like Cubbon Park after the rains,” Leela declared.

  “But nice, hanh? It smells nice?”

  “I don’t know,” Leela said. She would not allow herself to be beguiled. She was feeling the oddest mix of emotions, agitation and anger, for no particular reason. Disappointment, yes, that’s what it was. She was disappointed that Vancouver was not something she could readily and immediately hate. And it did not smell like Cubbon Park at all. It was different—a wonderful, clean smell of tree resins and new rain. Leela had to admit it, she liked the smell.

  They passed a wide green field and she said, “See, like our own paddy.” She spotted a low arc of mountains beyond the field. “Just like our Western Ghats, only smaller,” she remarked.

  “Leela, those are the North Shore mountains,” Balu said, getting a bit wound up now. “They look nothing like the Western Ghats.” He braked ferociously several car lengths behind another vehicle.

  “I don’t know about North Shore and all.” She sounded childish and obstinate, even to herself, but couldn’t help it. “Those are the Ghats.” And the river that glinted down there through the trees, that was the Cauvery.

  Balu clutched the steering wheel, deflated and angry. A silence fell over the family, and the car moved along the roads in spurts and starts, for Balu was an uncertain, nervous driver. A cyclist narrowly missed climbing the pavement as a result of Balu’s manoeuvres and stopped to give him a dirty look. A bald man wearing glasses leaned out of a red car that roared alongside theirs after almost rear-ending them, thanks to Balu’s abrupt braking, and, sticking his middle finger up in the air, yelled, “Fucking Chinese drivers! Go back where you came from!”

  “What did he say?” Leela asked, startled out of her silence.

  “He called us fucking Chinese drivers,” Preethi announced happily.

  “What cheek! And you, Preethi, don’t use that word again,” Leela said, annoyed equally with Balu for inspiring such wrath among so many because of his driving and with the rudeness of the people shouting at them. “Do we look Chinese? He is blind, that lout!” She was particularly offended by the Chinese reference. “Because of them poor Jawaharlal had a heart attack!” she muttered.

  “What?” Balu was bewildered. “Who?”

  “Our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Killed by the treachery of the Chinese.”

  “Leela, honestly, for a clever woman you say such rubbishy things sometimes. Nehru died of a heart attack, period!”

  Leela fell silent again. It wasn’t rubbish, she thought mulishly. She had admired Ne
hru just as much as she now admired his daughter, Indira Gandhi, the current prime minister of India. And the Chinese had broken his heart when they invaded India in 1962.

  With a final slam of brakes, Balu brought the car to a halt outside a small house. It was white with a blue roof and reminded Leela of the cottages pictured in the English books she used to read to the children. It didn’t look very different from the houses on either side: four windows downstairs and four upstairs, and a small lawn on either side of the walk leading up to the front door. It wasn’t as big as their home in Bangalore had been. She climbed out and breathed in the clear air.

  “Well?” Balu asked, coming up to stand beside her.

  “Hoonh, it is not bad,” she said, unwilling to give too much away. It still rankled that Balu had decided to drag her all the way here without even a proper discussion of the matter.

  Balu opened the front door with a flourish and bowed low, pretending to sweep an imaginary hat off his head. “So glad it meets with your approval!” he said.

  Leela smiled and shook her head. At least they had all reached this place in one piece. At least their luggage hadn’t been misplaced or lost. She composed a letter to her mother-in-law and Vimala. Vancouver is not a bad place. It looks a lot like our Bangalore with many large trees and clean roads. It is naturally not as big as Delhi and there are very few people. The house is very nice also. She would never write anything but positive words in her letters. It wouldn’t do to let people know that she was in any way dissatisfied.

  Preethi ducked past her, ready to charge inside so that she could claim the nicest room, but Leela seized her arm and pulled her back. “Right foot first,” she commanded. “Otherwise we will have bad luck.”

  “Even in Vancouver?” Preethi asked.

  “Even here,” Leela said. She carefully put her right foot forward and crossed the threshold into the house, her family close behind. “And don’t stop in the doorway,” she called over her shoulder. “Remember, it’s an in-between space. Neither here nor there. It is dangerous.”

  Doorways between inside and out, sea foam that was neither wet nor dry, dusk, dawn, these were all zones of dis-ease, where wicked spirits lurked waiting to carry you away into sorrow, madness, ill health, death.

  Her nose wrinkled slightly at the smell of cleaning fluid and floor polish. She would have to light some incense sticks as soon as possible; that way it would smell more like Home. She would hang up her pictures, she would set up her gods. She would cut this New World into the shape she wished it to be, pull at the edges that didn’t match the pattern of her memories and rename it. She would redraw maps and mythologies like the settlers who came before her, those men and women from Europe who had taken a land already scored by earlier populations and marked it with their own symbols and meanings, owned it with their namings and words. Like them, she would make this corner of the world her own until it was time to return home.

  Her grey eyes ranged around the drawing-cum-dining area, which, she realized, was stuffed with furniture. There were four bookshelves and two huge sofas—one the colour of mud with orange roses all over it, the other blue with white checks. Accompanying these large pieces were three coffee tables—one with a vase of fresh tulips—and a television on a stand.

  “Bibi-ji, our landlady, sent these flowers to say welcome to all of you,” Balu said. “From her own garden.”

  “And all this furniture?” The dining area was even more crowded—with a table that had a wad of newspaper stuffed under one of its legs, and five mismatched chairs, a towering glass-fronted showcase which was empty except for a few books on the bottom shelf, a pot stand with a ragged-looking fern and another small table that didn’t seem to have any particular reason for being there.

  “My friend Dr. Majumdar gave some of it, and the rest came with the house.”

  “Why can’t we buy our own furniture?” Leela wanted to know.

  “Do you know how expensive it will be to get new? And if someone is giving us something for free, why spend money?” Balu replied.

  Leela was silent. What had happened to Balu? Where was his pride? Had they become a charity case? Did he not mind that people were giving him things because they thought he couldn’t afford them himself, just like she used to give away their old clothes to the servants in Bangalore?

  When the Bhats had finished unloading the car, Leela shut the dark blue door behind them. Preethi went down a flight of stairs and discovered the basement. She came running back up. “There is another house downstairs!” she exclaimed breathlessly.

  Leela was pleased. This house wasn’t so bad after all—it had a ground floor, a first floor and an underground floor. She composed more of the letter that she would write tomorrow to her mother-in-law and to Vimala. We have a three-storey house which is a relief because it is good for each of the children to have a floor to themselves.

  She busied herself in the kitchen, setting up her gods in the space that Balu had arranged for them, allowing a pan of milk to boil over in a ritual meant to ensure that there would be no dearth of food in this household, and that luck, happiness and good health would overflow like the milk frothing over the stove. A few incense sticks and a small prayer to ask the gods to make true all that the boiling milk symbolized, and the formality of entering a new home was done. Leela climbed the stairs to the first floor to begin unpacking.

  From the window in the landing she could see the road outside their new home, straight and long, running in both directions past houses that seemed to be about the same size as hers, except for a large white one at the end of the road. A fine drizzle had started and the grey sky poured over the city, dripped down the roof and veiled the tops of a tall fir tree in the front yard so that it loomed like a long-robed old wizard.

  How far away were the shops she had noticed while driving home from the airport, she wondered? She climbed the remaining stairs and entered the bedroom claimed by the children. Preethi was stuffing her things haphazardly into a white dresser while Arjun was lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Leela wandered over to the window that overlooked the backyard. In the time that it had taken her to get to this window, the rain had halted and the sun shimmered like a dream behind a haze of cloud. A twisted old tree bearing acid-green leaves grew in the far corner of the backyard, and on the lawn an exotic black bird with a white streak down its chest pulled a worm out of the earth. There was a profusion of flowers in one bed, a circle of rose bushes in the centre and a low hedge separating their property from the neighbours on either side. The yard to the right had a swing hanging from a large tree and a child’s bicycle lying on its side. The lawn was worn in patches, showing bare earth. The yard to the left of hers, though, was as beautifully maintained as her own. From where she stood, Leela could see a wedge of her neighbour’s lawn; purple and yellow flowers lined it like embroidery. A woman with white hair kneeled in the grass at the edge of the flower bed, digging into the rich black soil. Beyond her, in another yard, Leela spotted a line of clothes, swelling with wind for a few moments before flattening out breathless. The ordinariness of the scene, so like that in her own yard in Bangalore, reassured her.

  Then Balu entered the room and said, “Okay Leela, I have to go. I will be back around six or seven o’clock.”

  “Go? Where are you going?” Leela was hurt. “Can’t you take today off?”

  “I can’t miss my class. I am not permanent at the college yet. If I cut work they might not get a very good impression of me, no? But tomorrow—Saturday—I am not teaching, so we can go out together and see Vancouver if you want. Maybe have lunch at The Delhi Junction. You’ll meet my friends there.”

  She followed him down the stairs and to the front door, watching as he backed out of the driveway, waved and drove off. Beside the door was a thick new telephone directory. She bent down to pick it up. Just as she was turning to go in, she caught sight of the white-haired woman from next door whom she had seen earlier tending her flowers in the backyard
. The woman raised a hand in greeting and smiled. Leela returned the smile, vaguely surprised by the friendly gesture. She had heard that white people were very private and kept to themselves, that they did not make friends easily. She must have been misinformed. Or perhaps this woman was an exception. She wondered whether she should go over to the fence and introduce herself. But what would she say? I am Leela Bhat, of the famous family of Kunjoor Bhats? Would it mean anything here?

  She went back into the house carrying the directory and set it down on the kitchen counter. It was so big—were there really so many people in this city? She had seen hardly anybody on their drive from the airport.

  She opened the book at random pages. How strange it was to have a telephone directory that possessed not even one name she knew. How lonely it made her feel! She checked the Bs to see if Bhat was listed and was idiotically gratified to see their name. She held the phone book as if it were a gift. Then, setting it down again, she leafed through it to see if she could find another name she recognized. And there it was, even though she had not met him yet— Alok Majumdar—Balu’s friend, the one who had given them the dining table that had to be kept steady with a wad of newspaper folded into a small square. She left the directory on the counter and opened another suitcase. It contained more clothes and a couple of photo albums, which she took to the living room. She placed them on one of the coffee tables wondering drily who had donated that particular piece of furniture to the Bhat charity.

  She continued unpacking steadily for the next few hours, exhausted from her journey but too keyed up to sleep. She was busy emptying packets of spices into bottles when the doorbell rang. Leela paused, startled. Could Balu have returned already? What time was it? She went to the door and peered through the spyhole. A tall woman stood there with her finger on the doorbell. Beside her was a smaller, youngish man in a black suit carrying several bags in his hands.

  Leela slipped the safety latch into position and opened the door a crack. “Yes?” she said suspiciously. “What do you want?”