The Hindi-Bindi Club Read online

  Do you know the American expression “S.O.L.”? In case you don’t, I will tell you. It means: Shit Out of Luck.

  These are my fears. Will they keep me from going to Lahore? I don’t know. But if perchance I go, I won’t allow my family to accompany me.

  Through Yash Deshpande’s contacts in the medical community, I hook up with a young Punjabi Lahori couple named Farani. The husband Yousef is a surgeon. The wife Saira is a hematologist.

  I want to invite them to dinner, but I’m torn between my desire to meet Lahoris and my wariness of associating with them. I know my American history. I know about the infamous McCarthy trials where people were arrested, scapegoated, their lives ruined because of suspicion of communist relations. In the 1950s, it was the Red Scare. Today, it’s the Green Scare. (Green is the color of Islam.)

  It is said history repeats, and I witnessed the ruin of a civilization so advanced no one expected its annihilation. Not even Mohammad Ali Jinnah, founding father of Pakistan. In his inaugural speech as Pakistan’s first governor-general, Jinnah said, “You will find that in the course of time, Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.”

  So much for that prediction.

  Once you’ve seen a sophisticated civilization crumble, you know no nation is invincible from self-destruction. Just as her people have the power to make a nation great, they also have the power to destroy all that is great. Where nation-building takes generations, evisceration requires only a minuscule fraction of this time. After the holocaust of Partition, I recall everyone saying in shell shock, it happened so fast….

  The other day, I saw a bumper sticker that read: “I pray to God to protect me from His followers.” With this prayer, I bite the bullet and invite the Faranis—Yousef, Saira, and their five-year-old son Aamir—to dinner at our house.

  When I hear their car pull into the driveway, I lift a slat in the blinds with the tip of my fingernail. Squinting through the crack, I watch them get out. Aamir has sneakers like Jack’s with lights that flash with each step. Yousef is clean-shaven. Saira wears a salwar-kameez but doesn’t cover her head. Like Kiran, they look too young to be doctors.

  The doorbell rings. I don’t wait for Sandeep but dash for the door, getting there before him. I stop with my hand on the knob, try to catch my breath. Can’t. My heartbeat drums in my ears. Boom-boom. Boom-boom. Boom-boom.

  My husband bellows my name from upstairs. (We have the fanciest intercom system, but does anyone ever use it? No.) “Did I hear the doorbell?”

  “Yes! They’re here!”

  “What?”

  “Come down!” I turn the knob, swing open the door. “As sal—” The words as salaam alaikum dry on my lips.

  There they stand. Papa Bear. Mama Bear. And Baby Bear. With three pairs of hands clasped in namaskar.

  They beat me to it.

  “Namaste, Auntie-ji,” they say. Even Baby Bear in his squeaky, innocent-little-boy voice.

  I, too, put my hands together at my heart. “Namaste.”

  Before I register what he’s doing, Yousef bends and touches one hand to my feet then his heart, a sign of respect to elders.

  A wave of emotion rises inside me. My throat closes, and my eyes sting. As I touch his head, blessing him, the wave crashes. A sob rips free of my chest, and I burst into noisy tears like a maudlin Bollywood heroine.

  Sandeep rushes to my rescue with a joke about emotional Punjabis, the true test of a Punjabi, making everyone laugh, including me. We speak in Punjabi. Such an intimate language, our mother tongue, spoken only by our community. Before long, we’re swapping life stories. Pakistani-born Yousef and Saira inherited their stories of Partition….

  Their families, not related, emigrated from the Indian side. Before Partition, Yousef ’s family owned mango orchards. They were wealthy, but Partition sliced through class hierarchies, leveling the field. Whatever you had, whether a mud hut or a mansion, you lost it, abandoning anything you couldn’t carry. Like everyone else in the overflowing refugee camps, they crossed the border into Pakistan with next to nothing, struggled to reestablish themselves in a new land, a society that wasn’t always welcoming of muhajirs, refugees. Locals threatened them into selling the parcel of land allotted to them by the Pakistani government in compensation for their relinquished mango groves. They missed the people, the places, the way of life they left behind. Bit by bit, things improved; still, it often feels like “two steps forward, one step back” with the country’s problems.

  It’s been my experience that in social settings, Americans generally avoid talking about religion and politics, and Indians talk of little else. Conversely, Indians avoid public sex-talk, and Americans talk of little else! I find the Faranis are like us in this regard, too.

  “We are an Islamic nation,” Yousef says, “but there’s great debate amongst our people as to what is and what is not Islamic.”

  “There’s great debate in America,” Sandeep points out, “as to what is and what is not constitutional.”

  Yousef and Saira grew up loving Pakistan but wishing they could see India (“We’ve always wanted to see the Taj Mahal…”), the way I grew up loving India but wishing I could see Lahore (“Are the Shalimar Gardens still as beautiful as I remember?”).

  Neither of our families went back after they left. Besides emotional issues, visas between India and Pakistan are difficult to procure in good times, impossible in bad. Likewise, cross-border travel.

  “Ironically, now that we’re U.S. citizens, we can easily visit our ancestral lands,” Saira says.

  It’s not right, we agree. Peace-loving, nonviolent citizens of India and Pakistan should have access to their shared culture, heritage, and loved ones across the border.

  But how to tell a peace-loving, nonviolent person from one who is not?

  That is the problem.

  “My nanaji says it’s a conspiracy,” Yousef says, “by power-hungry leaders who use fear tactics, propaganda, and the almighty ‘patriotic card’ to serve their own interests, feed their greedy addictions. It’s to their advantage to keep ordinary Pakistanis and Indians apart, to fuel mistrust and hatred, because if we got together, one-on-one, we’d catch on to their scam, see the truth behind their lies—that the average person is not so threatening, not the enemy, that we are most capable of loving thy neighbor. Then what would happen to their power base? Poof. Gone. This is my nanaji’s theory.”

  “Are they power-hungry or passion-starved?” I ask. “Don’t we Punjabis know best the human need for passion? Like air, it cannot be denied. A person must feel passion for something, if not someone, in order to live. A goal. A cause. Conveniently, ‘serving God’ and ‘serving country’ carry universal honor. Even more, ‘defending God’ and ‘defending country.’ Tap into those, and voilà, you transform into a Pied Piper. Play those magical tunes on your flute, and watch how the hypnotized masses follow anywhere you lead.”

  “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” Yousef quotes Karl Marx.

  “Exactly,” I say. “So in these impoverished, repressed societies, some leader comes along and offers passion-starved people a reason to live, a reason to die. Reason to get fired up, to partake in an orgy of righteousness. A gift of passion, wrapped up in the validation of serving God and country, tied with a pretty bow of honor.”

  “Not only in impoverished, repressed societies,” Sandeep says. “Manipulating people’s passions is universal.”

  “But Auntie-ji’s right,” Saira says, “in that it all gets back to the human need for passion. In the absence of healthy choices, humans will choose unhealthy ones.”

  “What is violence,” I say, “but the dark side of passion?”

  When I go to check on dinner, Saira rises and follows me. We take our conversation into the kitchen.

  “Is it foolish to hope for a mutually acceptable solution for I
ndia and Pakistan?” I ask. “Does such a thing even exist?”

  “It might,” Saira says, “if the desi diaspora joined hands. We have the numbers, the power, to affect change. And outside the wire, we women can leverage our strengths more effectively. We are the nurturers, the experts at human relationships and community-building. We are the ones who break up children’s fights and teach them to play nicely, to respect one another. We, mothers and daughters, can be the greatest of healers….”

  Here is another idealist, I think. But unlike my daughter, Saira knows what she’s talking about. She’s lived it, not just read about it in books, or watched it on CNN’s Headline News. From her experience alone, I cannot discount her as a Pollyanna.

  “If anyone can reach out across divides and rebuild burned bridges, women can,” Saira says. “But first, we have to stop undermining each other. We’re quick to blame men for all our troubles, overlooking our own culpability. We, too, must observe human rights, starting in our own homes, our own families, in how we treat each other, and our daughters versus our sons. That’s not to say men don’t need more accountability. They do. A lot more. In fact, if it was up to me, if I had to pick one gender to quarantine in purdah for the greater good, it would be the male, not the female. It’s males who have a harder time curbing base urges with the opposite sex, provoked or not. Therefore, to best reduce moral corruption and promote social harmony, we should put the males on short leashes, restrict their movements, hai na?”

  “Ha! Saira for President!” I tie my apron around my waist. “What a platform. Can you imagine? Move over, Benazir Bhutto.” A controversial political figure, twice democratically elected Benazir Bhutto was Pakistan’s first and only—to date—female prime minister. When she took office in 1988, at thirty-five years old, she was the youngest person and first woman to head an Islamic government in modern times.

  Saira goes on, “I remember once, I told my mother it wasn’t Eve’s fault Adam lacked self-control and succumbed to temptation. Was God’s solution to veil all the apples, to camouflage their appeal? No. If God intended to remove temptation, to prevent Adam from seeing things he might desire, why not poke out Adam’s eyes, blindfold, or otherwise take away Adam’s sight? Instead, a loving God, just and merciful, banished Adam from Paradise to a world of temptations, so Adam could learn to act properly in the face of temptations. That would include infinite apple orchards with buck-naked Eves in plain sight, hai na?”

  I laugh. “Oh, beta. You must have given your poor mother many gray hairs.”

  “Oh, no.” Saira grins and tucks her hair behind her ear. “Ammiji was quite proud. She is ten times the feminist I am. Some of my friends here are surprised when I say that. They think ‘Muslim feminist’ is an oxymoron, but it’s not at all. My mother raised all of us—three sons and two daughters—to read the holy Koran ourselves, so we understood the rights of gender equality, among other things, in Islam. She’s always insisted if more people could actually read for themselves the teachings in the Koran, they wouldn’t be so easily misled by interpretations, distortions, and misrepresentations of others.”

  “She sounds like a very wise woman.”

  “She’s a Sufi.”

  “Ah.” I nod. “That says it all.”

  Sufis are mystics. Often controversial, often corrupted by man, Sufism is rejected by some as a legitimate form of Islam. Others maintain it’s Islam’s purest essence. Sufis believe God exists in all, and all exist in God.

  “You’ve read Sufi literature?” Saira asks.

  “Of course.” Whatever you think about Sufism, no one can deny it has inspired a treasure chest of literature and music. Sufis believe human love—including consensual physical love—awakens the heart to spiritual love, bringing one closer to God. I’ve never known anyone whose heart couldn’t be stirred by the beauty of Sufi poetry, including me. “I adored Waris Shah and Bulleh Shah.”

  “The classics.”

  “And you?”

  “I favor the modern poets.”

  “Does anyone still write in Punjabi these days?” I ask.

  “Punjabi and Urdu both,” Saira says. “Soon they’ll be writing in English.”

  “God, I hope not.” I grimace. “Even the very best English translations are watered-down versions of the original language.”

  “I know it. Punjabi has wings to soar to places English can’t even imagine with its lead feet shackled to the ground.”

  We laugh.

  It’s been so long since I had a spirited discussion about Punjabi poetry and literature. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed it. I find myself wishing I could talk to Preity like this. And wishing Saira could join our book group—she would make a wonderful addition.

  When it’s time to eat, I take out the good silver plates, bowls, and cups. “I hope this is okay,” I say, unveiling my murgh Mughalai (Mughalai chicken). Growing up, we had this dish on special occasions, as chicken was the most expensive meat. I like to make mine with lots of toasted almond slivers and plump golden raisins. “I was too intimidated to attempt biryani with such connoisseurs.”

  “Nonsense, Auntie-ji,” Saira says. “Everyone knows Punjabi mothers make the best biryani. But murgh Mughalai is a favorite, and it’s been ages since we’ve had it. What a treat!”

  “Will Aamir eat what we’re eating?” I ask. “Otherwise, I can toss a cheeseburger on the grill if he’d prefer.”

  “Shhhh, Auntie-ji.” Saira places a finger over her lips. “As long as he doesn’t hear B-U-R-G-E-R, he’ll eat whatever we eat without complaint.”

  I chuckle. “Just like my grandchildren.”

  “Your family eats beef?” she asks.

  “Here, yes. In India, no.”

  Dinner’s a hit, and I bask in everyone’s lavish compliments, though I pretend to be modest, not easy, ha ha. I’m pleased to see little Aamir eat with gusto, trying each dish. How lucky he isn’t a fussy one! Preity and Tarun were the worst. Here I slaved to prepare meals fit for kings and queens, and my kids whined for macaroni and cheese…. Not even home made with real cheese, but the kind that comes in a cheap cardboard box with a packet of bright yellow powder!

  “We’re going to Lahore for Basant,” Yousef says, accepting my offer of second helpings. “Aamir starts first grade in fall, so we won’t be able to go at this time of year anymore.”

  Sandeep nods. “We had the same problem with our kids. We didn’t want to pull them out of school in winter, but we didn’t want to go to India in summer during the monsoon, either.”

  “It’s a dilemma,” Yousef says.

  “We just hope Aamir’s old enough to remember this trip,” Saira says. “We want him to have memories of Basant.”

  I smile. “I do…”

  Yousef and Saira exchange glances. “Uncle-ji, Auntie-ji?” Yousef asks. “Would you like to come with us?”

  He can’t mean…

  “Where?” I ask cautiously.

  “To Lahore. For Basant.”

  My heart skips a beat. Starts thudding triple-time.

  “Our family’s in Defence,” Yousef says, “but we have plenty of friends in Krishanagar.”

  Saira nods. “They can help find your old mohalla. Someone there must know someone who knows someone who can tell you about your friend.”

  It’s obvious they discussed this subject before now.

  I look at Sandeep. He nods, but still, I hesitate. It’s what I want, but I’m afraid. It’s so much, so fast. I didn’t expect this. I’d hoped to spend a nice, cordial evening with the Faranis. I hoped to like them. But never did I think I would—that I could!—like them this much. Never did I expect such rapport. Never did I expect Mussalmans—Pakistanis—to feel like family. But that’s exactly how Yousef, Saira, and Aamir feel. Like long-lost family.

  “Have you ever had problems?” I ask. “With Immigration…”

  “No,” Saira says.

  “Never,” Yousef says at the same time.

  “Just think about it
, won’t you, Auntie-ji?” Saira smiles.

  “If not this time, then another,” Yousef says. “Though we won’t be able to make it for Basant again for a long time.”

  Lahore for Basant…

  Lahore for BASANT…

  LAHORE!

  “Our families, especially our remaining grandparents, would love to meet you,” Saira says, and I must press my lips together to stop their quivering.

  My emotions, long suppressed, ooze like pus from an infected wound.

  There is a Hindi word, jaan. It means life force. When a person dies, we say his jaan has left his body. We may call our loved one meri jaan. Many times, when I heard refugees weep for Lahore, they said, Lahore, meri jaan.

  “They’re getting old, and it would be good…” She doesn’t have to finish. I know what she means.

  Partition survivors are dying off. Soon, we’ll be extinct. The time for closure is now. Now or never.

  There are Indians who would call Sandeep and me trai-tors. There are Pakistanis who would call the Faranis the same. Yet other calls are echoing ever louder in my conscience. Calls of children who don’t see boundaries until adults teach them, and still, they resist.

  When we take a wrong turn, we need to correct our course.

  If anyone can rebuild burned bridges, women can.

  Is it possible? In this age of Kali Yuga, when the world’s religions are increasingly blind beliefs, ripe for man’s misuse as instruments of dominance, persecution, and division…Do I dare to hope?

  * * *

  FROM:

  “Saroj Chawla”

 

  TO:

  Meenal Deshpande

  SENT:

  January 18, 20XX 10:55 PM

  SUBJECT:

  RE: What’s wrong?

  Meenal,

  It was SO good to hear your voice, and clear the air! Thank you for forgiving me. I don’t deserve such a good friend as you. I swear it was never YOU, it was bad memories I couldn’t deal with. Partition happened so long ago, when I was so young, I thought I was over it. Now I realize if I’m to have any chance of getting over it, I need to break my silence.