“Nor did her mother,” says Karan. “She didn’t want us to stay married after the two years unless I cut my hair and no longer tied a turban.”
“Makes sense. Grandma’s practical.”
“No, it doesn’t make sense. No one should ask that.”
Uma taps her cigarette on the edge of the table; ash falls on tile. “Yeah, I guess. I don’t know her very well — she got remarried and moved to Chicago after Grandpa died. Ma said Grandma had to be someone’s wife or she didn’t believe she was alive. She’d call Grandma every Sunday morning and hand me the phone, and Grandma would tell me how I should try giving Ma cod liver oil pills or green tea. But she never showed up to see us for more than a day.”
She blows a smoke ring. “What about your ma? How did she take it?”
“Not well. Only son marrying a gora woman — I mean someone non-Indian. It was uncommon in the early eighties. But she put a good face on it, sent jewellery for the wedding.”
“Wow. So who got the jewellery, you or Ma?”
“Rita.”
“Hmmm. She must have sold it when we were having budget troubles.” Uma leans forward. “So you both stuck it out two years. Was it worth it, you think?”
Karan strokes his moustache. The answer Uma expects plays through his mind like the drone of a repetitive raag. He should be so grateful to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave. But there were bad times, better times, okay times, good times. Any immigrant would say that.
Some very bad times after 9/11.
”Dr Singh, tell us: why did you travel to Pakistan in 1997?”
“A bus service had opened up between India and Pakistan. My mother was dying and I knew she wanted a picture of the house in Multan where she was born.”
“You want us to believe you went to Pakistan to take a photo? Which other cities did you visit? Who did you meet? Were you ever in Afghanistan?”
His alien registration card said he was a permanent resident on Day One. But they took till Day Five of harassment and solitary to let him go.
No apology.
This happened in God Blessed America. It happened to him.
And for the five days and nights he sat alone in a cell in Sacramento, no one asked where Dr. Karanbir Singh was. Adela is illegal — she wasn’t going to call anyone, even if she had known whom to call. Nadir thought he’d forgotten their squash game — in his experience, “interviews” only happened to Muslims. His students waited ten minutes and left. Bradnock said later he thought Karan was sick. Karan didn’t believe him.
The dean, a supposedly well-educated man, seemed to believe that the constitution was suspended and would be for the foreseeable future. He didn’t think it could protect foreign-born people or non-citizens in a time of war. National origin, he said, that was the key.
What if they’d kept Karan longer? Who would have called an attorney, organized protests or demanded his rights? It was the only time he’d wished Rita was there. Or any wife. Or a single relative living in the USA. He has called civil rights attorneys since his release, but they’re swamped with Guantánamo cases or simply unwilling to take his.
So what should he answer? Was the marriage worth it? Is it worth it now that fear has replaced love?
“It was worth it in the beginning,” he says. A fluted space appears between him and Uma, magnifying each word, his meaning. She regards him solemnly.
“Got an ashtray?”
“No,” he says. “Smoking is against my religion.” “Against — no kidding!”
She rises. Goes to the veranda door, steps out, grinds the cigarette beneath her toe on the tiled stair and skips the stub into a flowerbed.
“You’re real religious?” she says, returning.
“Not very. My sisters say I’m a Sikh out of habit. Habits from the seventies. They tease me, say I’m more observant than many Sikhs in Delhi.”
“Delhi. In India, right?” She takes the chair beside him. “So, do I got relatives there?”
He restrains himself from correcting her English.
“Oh yes,” he says. “You have aunts, cousins.”
“Grandparents?”
He places a black and white photo before her. “First of all, here’s my grandfather. My father’s father, Dadaji — he’s ninety years old.” The photo is circa 1943, before he was jailed by the British, and Dadaji is wearing a plumed turban and kurta salwar. Karan tells Uma how Dadaji fled Pakistan in 1947, taking the last train from Gurdaspur to Delhi before the British-decreed borderline between India and Pakistan came down. How he found out a few months later that Gurdaspur ended up in India after all. But Dadaji couldn’t go back there after what he’d seen.
The patriarch’s birthday, he tells Uma, brings Karan and his cousins back to Delhi every year. He does not mention his memories — the petulant roar of the aged tiger demanding love as his due, the tribute to be paid for the treasure each of them hosts in blood and bone: his hardy seed, his memories in their genes. If she ever meets him, let her make up her own mind about him.
Uma has what he came to America for. Economic freedom, intellectual freedom. She can be anything, do everything he once wanted to do, more than can be accomplished in one lifetime. You are born here, he wants to tell her. You cannot be deported. You have light skin; you will never understand.
“And what,” he asks, changing the subject, “do you do?” and nearly adds, with your freedom?
She works at a bar near an auto plant. The customers are mostly auto workers. Good people, she says. All just trying to get by. She makes good tips. Flexible hours, so she could care for Rita. She still lives in Rita’s apartment — in Indian Village, by the way — “not your kind of Indian, ha ha.” She works out with weights, has good friends from school — Ashley, for instance.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
She hesitates, seems to weigh her answer. “Not right now.”
“Pretty girl like you?” A clumsy attempt to tease.
She looks away. Picks something off the coffee table. “What’re these?”
“Gandhi slippers.” Minni sent them last year, courtesy of some Indian traveller.
“They look like real silver.”
“They are silver.”
“Wow. What are they for?”
“For? Nothing. Just beautiful,” he says. And his reminder of one man’s ability to bring about change in a whole economy, one man’s struggle against colonialism in every soul-diminishing form.
Uma puts the slippers down.
“Ma loved the movie. I liked Ben Kingsley better in House of Sand and Fog.”
Karan is unwilling to reduce Mahatma Gandhi to the film version, though he’ll admit that harnessing religion in the cause of independence was an act of cruelty against a newborn country.
He moves the slippers to the lower level of the coffee table.
Another picture. “My mother. A widow. But she managed to raise three of us. Me, my two sisters.”
It’s safe to say his mother would have loved to meet Uma, since it’s an untestable hypothesis, so he does. Uma glows at this comment; his breath catches in surprise.
“In fact, I’m sure they’d all like to meet you, get to know you. Here —”
Wedding pictures of Gagan, then Minni. His princesses in their flame-red lehngas, festooned with gold hand ornaments, hair ornaments, necklaces, bangles and nose rings. Henna curlicued all over their hands, kajal ringing their large black eyes.
“How come they aren’t wearing turbans?”
“Only Sikh men wear turbans.”
“Yeah?”
“A few Sikh women in North America wear them, but I’ve never seen a Sikh woman wearing one in India.”
“Doesn’t seem fair.”
“To the women, you mean?” Protest poises on the tip of his tongue — the only religion in which women and men are equal, etcetera etcetera —
“To the men,” says Uma, turning the page. She sighs and exclaims over more wedding pictur
es. “Bet you miss India.”
“Sometimes.”
“But you love it, right? Then why didn’t you go back?”
“Wasn’t much to go back for.” Karan had escaped it all once the Emergency was lifted. Escaped two thousand rupees per annum with scooter allowance, dearness allowance and government housing in seven-storey tenements, escaped the years necessary between application and receipt of a telephone, escaped the corruption, the pidgining of English as it mixed with Hindi, replaced them all with different cares. But … “You have to leave to learn how much you love people. I missed my mother, and I do miss my sisters.”
He tells her about his cousins, aunts and uncles all over the world. “We’re a globalized family,” he says and laughs.
She laughs, a little uncertainly.
“Where’s your pa?”
He shows her a picture. “My father — your grandfather — died when I was seventeen.” He doesn’t add that he was seventeen when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s thugs dropped off his father’s blood-spattered, turbanless body. Seventeen when he lit his father’s funeral pyre, travelled to Hardwar by train with his father’s ashes resting on his knees. Someone said his father had written articles critical of Mrs. Gandhi’s sterilization programs. In later years he had studied the correlation between WHO’s population targets and the PM’s quotas, but that data was no comfort. Oh, the slow torment of learning to live without Papa, the need to invent a gilded version with wings. Even with loving uncles who had pooled their resources to send him to school in the US.
“Speaking of fathers, what did Rita say about me?”
Uma rises, moves to the screen wall, and looks into the foliage. She turns back to him after a moment.
“Ma said you were smart, tall, thin — she wanted me to be thin.” Palms on hips, Uma rolls her eyes. “Never showed me a single picture, hated cameras. Any time I got bad grades in school it was your fault. When I was real small, I used to ask if we could go live with you, but she said she didn’t want a husband, just me.”
“Yes, Rita was like that only.”
“Always thought she was joking around about that — but now I think maybe she did mean it and I just didn’t want to believe her. Said you had moved back to India when I was a few years old and she didn’t know where. I used to bring it up every once in a while but never heard any different till last year.”
Rita! A sardonic laugh escapes him. “Moved back to India. Either Rita didn’t know me very well or she didn’t want you to try to find me.”
Even now, when he goes back, more than twenty years fall away on landing, as if the North American continent hid itself in a pre-Columbus fog, as if five thousand years of touching the feet of elders suddenly evaporated his years of cultivating a firm European handshake. Even his American accent melts in Delhi, replaced by the silent head-wobble yes, and the Arey-yar! Rushdiestyle speech rhythm of the Delhi University lad he once was. But live there again?
Maybe he no longer knows how.
“Or she didn’t understand the news from India in the eighties.”
Since 1984, when politicians gave tacit permission for riots and thousands of Sikhs were killed in Delhi, he can’t imagine living in India. After the riots Karan turned into one of those swaggering Non-Resident Indians, an ugly NRI, making every member of his family aware of the favour he bestowed by his presence each year in a country he now abhorred. Oye! Such a bastard he was then!
Then came Montreal. He actually felt safer wearing his turban in Montreal than in India. It calmed him down. Allowed him to explore the economic rationale underlying the pogroms.
He can’t describe these things. Context, nuances, qualifications, time frames. He has one weekend. One weekend in which to counter all that Rita must have filled Uma’s mind with in twenty-three years. Or one weekend in which to fill in a whole lot of blanks.
“So what happened last year to make Rita break her silence?”
“We were watching TV,” says Uma. “May or June? The news came on after Cheers! and Ma saw this skinny old guy and she sat up in bed. That’s a Sikh, she said. And I’m like, What is? He is! she says. See his turban? Like your pa, she says. First time I ever heard you wore a turban. See his beard? That’s like your pa. So we kept watching as this guy was getting sworn in as Prime Minister of India.”
“Manmohan Singh.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Any relation?”
“No, all Sikhs are Singhs.”
“Oh. Anyway, after that she convinced herself I needed to look you up. But not till she was gone. She’d decided she was going, and when. Couldn’t get her off of it, so I promised.”
“Well,” Karan says with a smile, “I’m glad you keep your promises.”
Uma thinks a Leinenkugel would taste much better than the orange juice right about now. But her dad is saying the only beer he has is Kingfisher. She’s not in the mood to try it.
So many books in one room, and it’s not even a library. Ma kept five or six for show in the living room. Karan’s are spread face down all over. One is marked up, highlighted, indexed and footnoted in tiny precise writing: The Trial. Tom Cruise could play the guy on the back cover, Joseph K. Maybe Sean Penn — no, he’s too old.
It’s going to be fine. Uma can just flow into Karan’s life. She’ll start from babyhood. Tell him how she won a swimming trophy at twelve, was captain of the Lush League softball team last year, and how she’s been to Windsor, Canada, and seen their cute coloured money. He’ll place his hand on her shoulder. She’ll tell him how she hoped he’d walk in one day and rescue Ma and her, and Ma would get better and all of them would live … oh, sure.
Right now if she were dreaming there would be a dad who’d say what Ma did: Kid, you done good. You couldn’t have done more than you did. Can’t he say that just once?
But she doesn’t know this guy. No clue where he’s coming from.
So what? He’s still her dad. She has a dad.
Part of her is trying very hard not to get mad. Why did he not know? Wasn’t there some kind of father’s intuition? How come he didn’t figure out Ma was pregnant? Why didn’t he call Rita at least once if he was still in the States or Canada? Ashley’s parents are divorced but her pa calls her ma sometimes. And he always calls Ashley for her birthday.
That’s because he knows when Ashley was born — he was there when Ashley was born.
Pretty mean of Ma, telling her Karan had gone back to India and she didn’t know where he was. One time, when Uma asked too many questions, Ma hinted she didn’t contact Karan when she found out she was pregnant because she thought he might kidnap Uma and take her back to India with him. And that night Ma rented the movie Not Without My Daughter. Uma got the message.
Karan has pulled out photos. In colour. How come she’d expected them to be black and white, or even sepia? Maybe cause the eighties are in the last century. All of Ma in colour, taking up most of the shot. Karan smiling over her shoulder, like he’s hiding behind her. They don’t look like enemies. But they don’t look in love, either. He put in his two years and then split. Kinda like going in the army. Well, Ma was great most of the time, but often so pig-headed German that you had to find a lot of love to put up with her the rest of the time.
Maybe Ma put in her two years and was ready to split too?
Was it worth it? She really needs to know.
Karan hesitates a long time before answering, “In the beginning.”
He could mean it was worth it only while he and Ma were married, or that he thought it was worth it for a few years and now he’s not sure. She tries to read his face.
It’s harder to read a brown face. Especially one you don’t know.
It was worth it while he and Ma were married. She’s sure of it.
She needs another smoke, but he says it’s against his religion. That’s gotta be bullshit — she’s never heard of a religion that forbids smoking. But then he’s born into a religion that says no cutting your hair. Even women? What do Sikh w
omen do about underarm hair? Do they shave their legs? Can’t ask a guy something like that. It’ll be on the net somewhere. But even if your religion does forbid smoking, can’t you have an ashtray for guests? Can’t you just do it anyway — like Catholic girls do the Pill?
He’s off lecturing again, telling her his ancestors — and hers — once lived together in a haveli, a mansion with suites of rooms that opened onto verandas and courtyards. Generations rubbing up against one another, the young educating the old, the old receiving respect and ruling with iron authority over the young. And then.
He pauses dramatically.
And then came Partition.
“It was a vortex of violence. Every man became aware of himself as animal, every breath became a gift of Ram, Allah or Vaheguru. Some escaped on trains to places where they had family ties, marriages made as alliances were now called to account. The old haveli fell to the battering ram of Islam, and its occupants took every possible transport and fled from blood and slaughter as far and wide as they could.”
Now her relatives wander in London and Winnipeg, in Fiji and Hong Kong, in Sydney and Singapore. And some remain in India. Karan shows her wedding pictures of two “aunties” in Delhi — Aunty Gagan and Aunty Minni. Much younger than Karan. Only a few years older than her. They don’t wear turbans. Uma does look a bit like them. And she doesn’t — they’re beautiful.
“We’re a globalized family,” he says and laughs.
Uma isn’t sure what the joke is, but laughs because he does — like she does with customers sometimes.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
Does she? There was no parting screaming match last year. No tears. Will came in one evening when she was bartending and made a long loud speech about Indians draining away a call centre job that should have been his. And an immigrant who took the other one he’d applied for. Said he was ready to join the Minutemen and police the border. Uma told herself he was just tired of troubleshooting for folks who didn’t know enough to reboot their PCs.
“Not right now,” she says to Karan. Because after Will’s tirade she no longer felt anything pour in and overflow inside when he kissed her. And every time she went out with him she wondered how she’d ever loved a guy who could hate so many people, how she could have missed the clues, and if there had been any clues.