A Breath of Fresh Air (10 page)

Komal snickered and we both looked at each other with identical expressions of weariness. Mothers, I presumed, were the same all over the world.

“My mother used to always say that. She said that until she died,” Komal whispered to me. “She said it to Sandeep, too.”

We walked silently for a while and then Komal leaned over again. “And we were happy when she was alive. Now . . . things are different.”

“Sandeep is happy,” I said tightly.

Komal looked at Sandeep and Amar and frowned.

We found a nice spot to watch the effigy of Ravana burn with the flames from arrows shot by young men standing below. Torn from the pages of the great epic
Ramayana
, it was the age-old story of good versus evil. It was on the day of
Dussehra
that Lord Rama, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, had killed the demon Ravana.

Amar clapped when the first arrow hit Ravana and started a small fire. A few more arrows struck the effigy tied to a wooden pole and the flames rose high. Cheers went through the crowds and Amar was jubilant.

The parade ground was noisy and crowded. People were bumping into each other and the noise was deafening, but I heard my mother’s squeak distinctly.

Instantly I worried that something had happened to my father and I looked to him. But he seemed perfectly all right talking to Amar and pointing at the burning effigy.

“I saw him,” she said wildly, looking at me with big eyes. “He is here.”

I tried to decipher what she was saying by following her line of vision and saw a man holding the hand of a young girl, looking straight at us.

Sandeep gave me a questioning look and I shook my head in an effort to tell him everything was fine. I pretended nothing was wrong and Sandeep went back to looking at Amar’s happy face. While I tried to make out what my ex-husband’s daughter—healthy daughter—looked like.

FOURTEEN

ANJALI

I always wanted to have children.

I wanted to have a child as soon as I got married the first time. Prakash didn’t, so I went on the pill. That always made me uneasy, his nonurgency next to my urgency to conceive.

Why didn’t he want children? Children meant permanency, a rite of passage into adulthood. I would be someone’s mother forever and a mother was always an adult.

After the abysmal first summer of my marriage, I waited impatiently for Harjot to come back from college for the
Dussehra
holidays. We had kept in touch with letters for the past months and I missed her. She was the only real friend I had in Bhopal, and since things with Prakash had reverted back to how they used to be I missed her even more. I needed a shoulder to cry on, to help me sort this mess that was my marriage. I couldn’t discuss my problems with the other wives who would gossip about them. Mrs. Bela Chaudhary initially had seemed like someone who could be my friend, but she was Prakash’s friend and I was just his wife. I understood that they were close—after all, Prakash had served under her husband. Before we were married, he used to go to their house for homemade dinners. She had fed my husband when I wasn’t there and I couldn’t hold that against her.

I often saw them together. It all seemed like a coincidence, for the first few weeks at least. They would be talking at the Saturday evening
Tambola
party, and I would see them together at the Open Air Theater
samosa
stand. Prakash would go to get
samosas
during the movie’s interval, and he’d leave the
samosas
with me and disappear for the rest of the movie.

I later found out that gossip amongst the wives had reached fever pitch while I was still naïve enough not to put two and two together. I couldn’t imagine Prakash having anything to do with another woman. Middle-class men didn’t have extramarital affairs.

When I went to play cards with Mrs. Dhaliwal and some of the other wives one day, Bela Chaudhary was there. Bela was in her early thirties, but she didn’t look her age; she looked like she was as young as I was. I liked her. I couldn’t help it. She was the kind of woman I wanted to grow up to be— sophisticated, elegant, and above all a woman who held her head high.

The other wives seemed nervous seeing us together in such close proximity. They probably didn’t realize that I was stupid enough to like the woman my husband was having an affair with. Worse, they didn’t realize that I didn’t know he was having an extramarital affair.

She wasn’t very good at rummy, while I had learnt the art of playing cards in the past few months. I helped her learn the finer points of the game. I taught her how to read, from the cards thrown down by other players, what sets the other players were making and how it would affect her game. I taught her what I knew and hoped that this would be the beginning of a new friendship.

As it usually was, the topic of discussion besides the card game at hand was movies.

“Did you see the new Amitabh Bachchan movie?” Mrs. Mehrotra asked, and silence fell.

“Silsila,”
I said with a deep sigh. “It was wonderful.”

Everyone shuffled their cards around, sipped their soft drinks, and tittered uncomfortably.

“What?” I asked, perturbed.

“Nothing, dear,” Mrs. Dhaliwal said, as she dropped a card on the table. “It was a nice movie.”

“I mean seeing adultery in a Hindi film,” I continued. “I don’t know how they could make the movie. It took a lot of courage to discuss that subject.”

“I agree,” Bela said.

It was a controversial movie. At that time it was rumored that Amitabh Bachchan was having an affair with the reigning actress, Rekha. In the movie he was married to his real-life wife, Jaya Bhaduri, and having an affair with Rekha’s character. No one had dared to make a movie about adultery quite so blatantly before. The Hindi cinema still portrayed women as husband-worshipping wives and puritans. But in
Silsila
, the people were real, the circumstances were real, and the fact that the actors in the movie were facing a similar problem in real life added to its intensity.

I was playing the real-life wife in my small world, while Bela was playing Rekha. She knew that; all the women sitting around the card table knew that; I didn’t. So I talked about the movie and complained about the fact that the hero stayed with his wife when he was really in love with the other woman.

“So you think a man shouldn’t stick to his marriage if he is in love with another woman?” Mrs. Sen asked.

“Absolutely,” I said with conviction. “Marriage is sacred, of course, but if he is cheating on his wife, I think it would be better if he left her and married the woman he is really in love with.”

I didn’t know then that I actually meant what I said. I wasn’t just stringing words together for effect; I truly believed in the sanctity of marriage and I did not want a husband who cheated on me.

Harjot came back to Bhopal for the holidays and didn’t leave for a long time.

It was a mild October afternoon and, since it was the last day of the month, the kids had a half-day at school. Harjot was at my house telling me about the latest news from her college.

“But things are getting so difficult for us,” she complained.

Harjot was a Sikh and after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered army troops to attack the Golden Temple in July, the Hindu-Sikh rift had expanded.

“But here, we are all the same,” I consoled her.

In the army all religions were accepted. All holy days from Christmas to
Diwali
to
Id
to
Guru Nanak Jayanti
were celebrated. From what I had seen, no one noticed if you were Hindu or Muslim or Sikh or Christian. I had been shocked at how open-minded everyone was. In Hyderabad it was different. Not only did it matter what religion you belonged to, your caste was just as important. Being a Brahmin was better than being a Reddy and people from the same caste stuck together. I didn’t have too many friends who were from the backward class. We mingled with our own people, but in the army I didn’t even know what caste anyone belonged to.

Harjot and I were listening to Hindi songs on the radio, humming along with the singers and pointing out some of the bizarre lyrics, when we heard the bad news. One of our favorite songs from an old black-and-white movie was playing when a harsh voice cut off the song with a special announcement. Harjot and I groaned at the interruption.

When the harsh voice continued with the special news bulletin, Harjot and I knew she wasn’t going back to college for a while.

We switched on the television immediately. There was only one channel and we devoured the news, staring at the television screen, afraid that if we looked away we would miss something. The downcast news anchor gave the nation the devastating news. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was dead.

She had been assassinated by her Sikh guards. The guards she had been asked to fire by her colleagues in the Congress-I party just a few days prior. She had refused to fire the guards and had also refused to wear a bulletproof vest. She had said she trusted her guards and wouldn’t insult their loyalty.

Harjot put her hand against her mouth in shock.

Tears pricked my eyes. This woman had been a constant in our lives and now she was gone. The great woman was no more. I kept waiting to hear more, for the news anchor to come back and tell us that it had all been a mistake and that Indira Gandhi was alive. I couldn’t imagine the Independence Day parade without her, I couldn’t imagine watching the news without her. She was a politician, no one I knew personally, yet she belonged to me as she did to everyone else I knew who was a Congress-I supporter.

“I am so happy,” Harjot said, tears streaming down her face.

Shell-shocked, I looked at Harjot. Her words exploded in my mourning heart. How could she be happy?

“What?” I barely managed to say.

“I really am, Anjali. She made Punjab a battlefield.”

“How can you say that?” I cried out. “She is . . . dead.”

“And that makes all her mistakes right?”

I couldn’t believe Harjot could think that Indira Gandhi’s death was a good thing. “She was killed by Sikhs. Is that why you are happy?”

Harjot was the only friend I had had for months and I was arguing with her over a dead person neither of us knew much about. “Yes, actually it is.”

“Really?” I asked, ignoring the fact that besides her I had no friends in Bhopal. “How can you be so unpatriotic? She was our leader.”

“She was your leader, not ours. To the Sikhs she was just another Hindu tyrant,” Harjot said, before she stormed out of the house leaving the door wide open. I slammed the front door shut.

The little bitch! I decided never to speak with Harjot again. She was a Sikh; what did she know about loving India? All Sikhs wanted their own country, wanting to break away from India anyway—traitors, all of them.

When Prakash came home, I burst into tears, partly out of anger and partly out of grief. I told him what Harjot had said.

“Colonel Dhaliwal has been saying things like that for a long time,” Prakash said, and wiped my tears with his fingers in an effort to soothe me. “They are probably throwing a party.”

“But he is an army officer,” I protested, moving away from Prakash as anger took over again. I wiped away the remaining tears on my face and said sarcastically, “And I thought everyone in the army was green.”

Prakash made a sound in disgust. “One would think so. But these Sardars are just . . . they killed Indira Gandhi. Heads are going to roll because of this.”

Prakash was right. The riots began almost instantly. It was a massacre. The Hindus were outraged at the killing of Indira Gandhi and started slaughtering Sikhs wherever they could find them. News of Hindu mobs burning down Sikh homes with the people in them became rampant. News about Hindu mobs running around with swords beheading Sikhs became an everyday affair. The riots were worse in big cities, like Delhi and Bombay, with some of the anger and rage spilling into nearby states like Haryana, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh. Bhopal, nestled in the center in Madhya Pradesh, didn’t see much of the bloodshed because the population of Bhopal was largely Hindus and Muslims. But the cloud of despair and uneasiness encompassed the entire country and I mourned along with everyone else the needless death of Indira Gandhi as well as the brutal deaths of the Sikhs. I couldn’t blame an entire religion because of what a few of their members had done.

However, my broad-mindedness did not include speaking with Harjot. I heard from Mrs. Sen that no one was speaking with Mrs. Dhaliwal either. Apparently Colonel Dhaliwal had thrown a party for other Sikh officers the day after the assassination. I was disgusted.

I vowed never to speak with Harjot again.

But I couldn’t keep that promise to myself. And I was thankful that I couldn’t.

Three weeks after Indira Gandhi died, the riots and the bloodshed hit very close to home. Bad news always travels fast and when I heard from Prakash what had happened, I had to see Harjot and be there for her.

Colonel Dhaliwal’s relatives were trying to get away from Delhi. They wanted to come to Bhopal, where they could be safe from the riots. They managed to come halfway, but didn’t succeed in reaching Bhopal—at least, not all of them.

Colonel Dhaliwal’s four brothers, their wives and their five children, had been traveling together by train. All of a sudden, the train had been stopped. All the Sikh men were ordered out and butchered to death by Hindus right in front of the eyes of their wives and children. It was rumored that the Hindus were also raping Sikh women, and everyone in the EME Center agreed the same fate had befallen Colonel Dhaliwal’s female relatives.

The door to Harjot’s house was open. Everywhere I looked inside the three-bedroom army flat, women were dressed in white for mourning. A young woman held on to a young boy, her body wracked with sobs. The boy stood perplexed in his mother’s embrace, looking around the room with astonished eyes. He didn’t seem to understand why his mother was crying or where his father had gone.

Harjot was in a white
salwar kameez
, sitting on a straw mat in the living room surrounded by women in white. Her eyes were red as if she had been crying for a very long time. She didn’t say anything when she saw me, she just walked toward me and hugged me tight.

I stayed with her for the rest of the day. I helped in any way I could. I cooked and cleaned and made sure everyone ate. There were several people in the house. The newly widowed wives, the five young children, and Harjot’s parents and brother—all seemed incapable of carrying out the everyday tasks. The extent of their sorrow was beyond measure and there were no sympathizers except for a few other Sikh families. I was the only Hindu in the EME Center who had bothered to visit them after finding out what had happened.

When I got home in the evening Prakash was already there. When I told him where I was he got angry.

“They celebrated when she died. They deserve this,” he thundered.

“No one deserves this, Prakash. How can you say that?” I said. “I may have to spend the night there, just to help out.”

“You are not stepping out of this house,” he ordered.

And for the first time in my dismal, half-assed marriage I didn’t obey him. Harjot was my friend and I was not going to let Prakash’s prejudices come in the way as mine had.

“Yes, I am,” I said softly. “And the door had better be open when I get back.”

“How dare you?”

“How dare
you
?” I turned on him. “All her uncles were murdered, and instead of showing sympathy, you want me to turn away. What kind of a person are you?”

“I love my country.”

“You just don’t like the people who live in it. You can’t just like the Hindus and not like the Sikhs. They are all Indians,” I yelled. “And don’t ever tell me what I can or cannot do. I don’t stop you from doing anything, so you can show me the same courtesy.”

I was shaking uncontrollably when I walked out the door. I didn’t even know I had it in me. Prakash seemed to be just as shocked at my behavior as I was. He continued to try and stop me from seeing Harjot but I was stubborn and ignored him and everything he had to say.