women do. Surely she plucked her eyebrows, though; those straight lines seemed too neat to be true, too classic to be achieved without some help. Classic. Statuelike. Greek goddess-like. She was, in fact, a reminder that Alexanderâs soldiers had done more than fight in Punjab. They had left a veritable Juno behind in the form of this twentieth century descendant. The broad brow, the straight nose, the full jaw, the grey eyes testified to that.
She lived her life within the family occupying a couple of rooms set aside for her and Nikku. I lived mine with Tej, whose attention I shared with the sitar, farm work, the overseeing of the new house for the family going up on the village outskirts, and with all the people, friends and family, who naturally gravitated into his magnetic field.
Tejâs space and mine was the mud-walled room at one end of the compound. Mataji had installed us there together from the start, in what we took to be a triumph of logic over social taboo. Tej was, after all, my only link to the new world around me. It made sense for us to be together. Our room had two small windows with heavy wooden shutters that kept out both heat and light. On the packed earthen floor was spread a Persian carpet, a possession from pre-Partition days and one of the few belongings the family had salvaged when they made the move to east Punjab in 1947. Pitaji, back from tank warfare in the North African desert, had just retired as a Major in the Indian Army, and instead of being able to settle in his home village southwest of Lahore on the Pakistan side of the border, had to start all over again in Majra, where the government had allotted him some land in compensation for the farm heâd lost in the upheaval.
The carpet, then, was a constant reminder of the past; the mud floor, present reality. And my present reality was life amongst the resettled family that was soon to become mine. Even after two months, there were the extravagant presences outside the door of our room, the watchful eyes from behind the bamboo screens in the veranda, the cautious scrutiny at close range. I was still a novelty, an exotic, potentially dangerousâand therefore beguilingâcreature from another world. In the presence of others, Tej needed to make it seem that I was not (as they may have feared) yet another disruptive force dropped down in their midst, that I was not going to make everything fall apart. He was still his own man, his own boss, their son, and not my plaything. Alone with me, he insisted on taking responsibility for the whole of India, minus its splendor, and for all its mass of people. For every fly on every item of food in the bazaars, for every peanut shell littering a train compartment, there was the look in his eyes that took personal blame for it all. It belied the take-it-or-leave-it attitude he wore like a suit of armor. I wanted to tell him that all this was not his fault. That it didnât matter anyway. But I didnât know how.
On the day of Uncle Gurnamâs arrival, then, lunch had been finished, and everyone was ready to draw curtains, bolt the doors and the wooden shutters, and settle down for another afternoon, amongst a whole summer of afternoons, without electricity.
But then there came the seldom sound of a car engine, of tires spinning in the dust of the unpaved road into Majra, and as the vehicle approached, the groan of the overloaded chassis. Rano and I climbed up the bamboo ladder to the roof to find out what was going on. Ram Piari was not far behind. Moti and Jim and Lal barked, and Gian, acting on the reasonable assumption that ours was the only house in the village likely to have a visitor who owned a car, flung the gate to our compound open in anticipation. A jeepload of men and boys, laughing and talking loudly, was rounding the bend beyond the Majra pond, passing the abandoned mosque and heading our way.
A moment later, Nikku and Goodi were beside us on the roof, while the
She lived her life within the family occupying a couple of rooms set aside for her and Nikku. I lived mine with Tej, whose attention I shared with the sitar, farm work, the overseeing of the new house for the family going up on the village outskirts, and with all the people, friends and family, who naturally gravitated into his magnetic field.
Tejâs space and mine was the mud-walled room at one end of the compound. Mataji had installed us there together from the start, in what we took to be a triumph of logic over social taboo. Tej was, after all, my only link to the new world around me. It made sense for us to be together. Our room had two small windows with heavy wooden shutters that kept out both heat and light. On the packed earthen floor was spread a Persian carpet, a possession from pre-Partition days and one of the few belongings the family had salvaged when they made the move to east Punjab in 1947. Pitaji, back from tank warfare in the North African desert, had just retired as a Major in the Indian Army, and instead of being able to settle in his home village southwest of Lahore on the Pakistan side of the border, had to start all over again in Majra, where the government had allotted him some land in compensation for the farm heâd lost in the upheaval.
The carpet, then, was a constant reminder of the past; the mud floor, present reality. And my present reality was life amongst the resettled family that was soon to become mine. Even after two months, there were the extravagant presences outside the door of our room, the watchful eyes from behind the bamboo screens in the veranda, the cautious scrutiny at close range. I was still a novelty, an exotic, potentially dangerousâand therefore beguilingâcreature from another world. In the presence of others, Tej needed to make it seem that I was not (as they may have feared) yet another disruptive force dropped down in their midst, that I was not going to make everything fall apart. He was still his own man, his own boss, their son, and not my plaything. Alone with me, he insisted on taking responsibility for the whole of India, minus its splendor, and for all its mass of people. For every fly on every item of food in the bazaars, for every peanut shell littering a train compartment, there was the look in his eyes that took personal blame for it all. It belied the take-it-or-leave-it attitude he wore like a suit of armor. I wanted to tell him that all this was not his fault. That it didnât matter anyway. But I didnât know how.
On the day of Uncle Gurnamâs arrival, then, lunch had been finished, and everyone was ready to draw curtains, bolt the doors and the wooden shutters, and settle down for another afternoon, amongst a whole summer of afternoons, without electricity.
But then there came the seldom sound of a car engine, of tires spinning in the dust of the unpaved road into Majra, and as the vehicle approached, the groan of the overloaded chassis. Rano and I climbed up the bamboo ladder to the roof to find out what was going on. Ram Piari was not far behind. Moti and Jim and Lal barked, and Gian, acting on the reasonable assumption that ours was the only house in the village likely to have a visitor who owned a car, flung the gate to our compound open in anticipation. A jeepload of men and boys, laughing and talking loudly, was rounding the bend beyond the Majra pond, passing the abandoned mosque and heading our way.
A moment later, Nikku and Goodi were beside us on the roof, while the
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