Free Home To India by Jacquelin Singh Page B

nastiness, I suppose.”
    â€œWhy don’t you lay off her?” he said, getting really impatient now. “She’s an unfortunate woman. Her husband is dead …”
    â€œHer first husband,” I corrected him.
    â€œHer only husband,” he said pointedly. “What I am trying to ask you is, who would want to trade places with her? With only that little son to love her? When Hardev Bhaji died, her whole life was over. She broke her bangles, tore her hair, threw away all her fine clothes.” Whenever Tej, or anyone else in the family got on this subject, their language took on the flavor of myth in the retelling. “She even wanted to die on his funeral pyre,” he went on. “We men had to hold her back from making the supreme sacrifice …”
    â€œThat doesn’t give her a license to make my life miserable,” I broke in. I had heard the story too many times now. It had become family folklore, this grief of Dilraj Kaur’s and her desperate acting out of it.
    â€œLet’s drop it,” Tej said. It was more of a warning than a suggestion.
    I knew he hated to come to grips with things. He hated defining relationships, pinning things down, drawing lines, receiving ultimatums, looking at circumstances from an either-or perspective. He hated me for insisting on it now. His way out was to turn to the sitar, or to go see the musicians in the gurdwara. I wasn’t going to let this conversation go the way of all the others if I could help it. “Well, she appears to have your sympathy, anyway,” I said. “You’re always leaping to her defense like some …”
    He was on his feet, standing over me. “What is that supposed to mean?” he demanded.
    â€œNo more than what I said.”
    â€œThat’s already too much,” he shouted.
    â€œAfter all, she did have you to herself when you got back, those seven months before I arrived,” I couldn’t help saying.
    â€œWhat?” he exclaimed, seizing me by the shoulders and looking at me hard. “Say that again, and I’ll …”
    I will never know what threat he was about to make because just then a deep rumbling from far away came bursting in upon us, and his words were lost in it. We both stopped and listened. It was followed by yet another deep rumble and a rushing sound unlike anything I had ever heard before. In an instant, the sky closed down and turned the sun off. The rushing sound soon became a roar, the wooden shutters began to rattle, and the door to shake on its iron hinges. We ran to the window to look out, and as we unbolted the shutter, it was ripped out of our hands before we could stop it and went banging rhythmically on its hinges against the outside wall. The sky was a roiling mass of low, black clouds amidst a garish yellow glare now, and lightning stabbed the ground in repeated thrusts. The smell of sulphur and the continuous blasts of thunder fueled our excitement and exhilaration as we fought our way to the roof, our clothes whipping about us and dust forcing its way under our eyelids and between our teeth. Palm trees in the distance were bent double, snapped back, and hurled forward again. Branches were torn off the sheesham trees in our yard. Pitaji was in Abdullapur for the day, and the girls, who had gone to visit a friend in the village, returned laughing and running against the wind in a wild, spontaneous celebration. On the distant horizon to the east we could see it advancing—a moving sheet of water. The earth sent up its pungent female fragrance as it received the first hesitant drops of rain. And then the sky opened up to pour out the monsoon.
    Bucketsful! The whole village heaved to life as if it had been a corpse miraculously revived. From the courtyard below, Rano shouted something to us about tea and some sweet, fried pancakes made of semolina and syrup that she and Goodi were preparing.
    â€œWe’ll be down in a