Jasmine. Bharati Mukherjee
said I wrote the best English compositions, and they had me translate instruction manuals and write school or job applications.
From his charpoy in the courtyard, Pitaji protested in soft grunts. “That Masterji fellow thinks you are a lotus blooming in cow dung?” or “Get firewood! Boil tea! Feed the chickens!” Mataji and I humored him because the mustached doctor had told us he had hypertension. I stayed in school.
The work at home didn’t slow me down. I liked doing chores. At dawn I pushed our Mazbi maidservant aside and boiled the milk myself—four times—because the maid had no clue to cleanliness and pasteurization. Just before dusk, the best hour for marketing, since vegetable vendors discounted what they hadn’t sold and what they couldn’t keep overnight, I’d go with neighborhood women and get my mother the best bargains. The women liked having me with them because I could add fast in my head, and because I always caught the lime and chillies vendor when he cheated them. In return, the crabbiest of the women taught me how to haggle prices down. She was a widow, and for herself she bought only half kilos of potatoes and onions (as a widow she should not have eaten onions); I knew even then I was witnessing permissible rebellion.
Dida, Pitaji’s mother, was the only one in the family to make a fuss about my staying on in school, but she spent most months of the year in an ashram in the holy city of Hardwar and didn’t torment us with visits too often. Her line was “You’re going to have to wear out your sandals getting rid of this one.” She spoke only to Pitaji. Sometimes she changed to “Some women think they own the world because their husbands are too lazy to beat them,” but Mataji just went about her cooking with her mouth zipped and her veiled head down.
The crisis came when Dida announced that she, through a pious and ailing woman living in the same ashram, had finally located a passable groom willing to take me off their hands. I wasn’t quite thirteen then. The woman’s sister (Dida thought the sister lived in Ludhiana, but she would check it out) had a neighbor who owned almost two hundred acres of well-irrigated ground. The farmer was known to have four sons, one of whom was a widower with three children and needed a new wife to look after them.
Mataji and Dida could have been Sivaji and Aurangzeb out of Masterji’s book on Indian history. Their battle was fierce and wordless. The neighborhood sided with Dida on this one. The widower’s father was a rich man, and Mataji was a bitter woman with a mangled mind to hold up my chance at a comfortable life. Who did I think I was to turn down a once-in-a-lifetime bridegroom?
Masterji must have heard that he was likely to lose me to the Ludhiana widower. He biked all the way to our adobe compound one Sunday morning, his white beard rolled spiffily tight and his long hair tucked under a crisp chartreuse turban, to confront my father, the Lahori Hindu gentleman. He was even carrying a kirpan, which meant that for him this was a special occasion. Masterji was a Sikh. All Sikh men in our village, even the low-caste converted Mazbis, and quite a few of the older men, kept their hair and beards, but very few went around with their ceremonial daggers strapped to their chests all day long.
In school we Hindu girls had thought of Masterji as a religious man, a pious Sikh, but very noncommunal, until pamphlets accusing him of being a bad Sikh—of smoking, for instance—started showing up in classrooms. At the time we assumed the posters were a prank. There was a new Sikh boys’ gang, the Khalsa Lions, who liked action. Khalsa means pure. As Lions of Purity, the gang dressed in white shirts and pajamas and indigo turbans, and all of them toted heavy kirpans on bandoliers. They had money to zigzag through the bazaar on scooters, but since they were, like Arvind-prar and Hari-prar, farmers’ sons, we assumed the money for scooters came from smuggling liquor and guns in and out of Pakistan. In villages close enough to the border, smuggling was not an unacceptable profession.
When Masterji unstraddled his bike, we noticed the damp red stain on the back of his turban. Tomato seeds still stuck to the stain. The Khalsa Lions had taken to hurling fruit and stones from their scooters.
The maidservant dragged the only chair we had—an old wooden one missing a slat—to where Pitaji and Dida were arguing, and went off to boil sweet milky tea for the men. Mataji and I stayed inside, out of sight, within hearing range.
We heard Pitaji say, “Hooligans! Now they’re throwing sticks and stones; next month they’ll throw bombs!”
“Good,” Mataji whispered. “They’re speaking in English. Dida will be less of a problem.”
Masterji had his game plan. “It isn’t like Lahore, is it? Lahore was Rome. But as we know from the great historian Mr. Gibbon, where there is a rising there is also a falling. Hooligans who soar must also come down.”
My father, softened by the analogy, sighed. “We should have had our Nero to fiddle while we burned.” Masterji was also Lahori, where even the Sikhs, according to my father, were men of culture. Then he short-cut the preliminaries. “Masterji, you are here to tell me that there is a lotus blooming in the middle of all this filth, no?”
In Hasnapur the metaphorical and the literal converge. On the far side of the courtyard, by the buffalo enclosure, the maidservants pretty little girl was scooping up fresh dung, kneading it thick with straw chips, and patting them into cakes the size of her palms. She would slap the cakes down on the adobe walls of our kitchen enclosure and leave them to dry into fuel.
Masterji kept his eyes on the little girl working the buffalo dung. “An educator’s duty, sir, is not to burn the flower with the dung.”
“In this country”—Pitaji laughed—“we are having too many humans and not enough buffaloes.”
“Yes, yes,” Masterji agreed, too quickly, “in hot-weather countries Mother Nature is too fecund. That is why it is important that modern ladies go for secondary-school education and find themselves positions. They are not shackling themselves to wifehood and maternity first chance. Surely you know, sir, that in our modern society many bright ladies are finding positions?”
“Positions?” Pitaji demanded. “What do you mean, precisely? A lady working for strange men? Money changing hands?”
Pitaji’s face caricatured outrage. I thought for a minute that a tea stain would darken Masterji’s chartreuse turban.
“I am a reasonable man,” Pitaji said. “We are modern people. We let the girl decide.” Then he called to me to come. I ran. He held both my hands. “Masterji wants you to go to more school.” He loosened his grip, giving me the chance to break away. I stayed. He went on: “Masterji is wanting you to work in a bank. You can be steno. You have my blessing. He is wanting you to learn more English and also shorthand. You are wanting position of steno in the State Bank?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to be a steno. I don’t want to be a teller, either.”
My father looked stunned. He coddled my rough, scratched hands. He turned to Masterji, an ecstatic man. “You have heard it straight from the filly’s mouth, as it were, isn’t it? The girl refuses further education. The thing is that bright ladies are bearing bright sons, that is nature’s design.”
I didn’t pull my hands out of Pitaji’s palms as I said, “I want to be a doctor and set up my own clinic in a big town.” Like the mustached doctor in the bazaar clinic, I wanted to scrape off cataracts, fit plastic legs on stumps, work miracles.
My father gasped. “The girl is mad! I’ll write in the back of the dictionary: The girl is mad!”
Dida caught on for the first time. She said in Punjabi, “Blame the mother. Insanity has to come from somewhere. It’s the mother who is mad.”
All that day and deep into the night, we heard their chorus. “The girl is mad. Her mother is mad. The whole country is mad. Kali Yuga has already come.”
And deeper into that night I heard the thwock of blows.
But in the morning Mataji said, “They’ve come around. Just make sure you ace your exams.” She smiled. She smiled so wide that the fresh split in her upper lip opened up and started bleeding again. When I said to Wylie once that my mother loved me so much she