English Lessons and Other Stories
Shauna Singh Baldwin
Critical Acclaim for English Lessons and Other Stories
1996 Friends of American Writers Award
“Baldwin’s prose is precise, nuanced and sensual. She threads her stories with ravishing glints of colour that explode against the pallid landscape of Canada.” — Toronto Star
“Each of these superb short stories shuttles between the intricate threads of family, the rich sturdy fabric of ancient Indian tradition, and the somewhat more ready-to-wear culture of North America” — The Georgia Straight
“Positions and postures are finely drawn…. Every detail is for a purpose…. Always present is a lively, active, questioning spirit.” — Books in Canada
“Baldwin presents a kaleidoscope of issues: the clash of cultures, sexual, social, racial and religious chauvinism, ancient enmities, generational misunderstandings, the stressful adjustments of immigrants.” — The Chronicle Herald
“English Lessons and Other Stories chronicles the vicious circle of Indian women attempting to balance traditional roles with views and lifestyles outside their inherited gender and homeland.” — The National Post
“Singh Baldwin writes with a restrained passion which describes the friction between East and West, traditional and modern.” — The Asian Age
“A writer from an ethnic minority who writes frankly about his or her community takes enormous risks. It is to Shauna Singh Baldwin’s credit that she has been unafraid to step on a few toes… Baldwin’s prose is precise, nuanced and sensual.
She threads her stories with ravishing glints of colour that explode against the pallid landscape of Canada.” — Toronto Star
Other books by SHAUNA SINGH BALDWIN
We Are Not in Pakistan (2007)
The Tiger Claw (2004)
What the Body Remembers (1999)
A Foreign Visitor’s Survival Guide to America (Co-author, 1992)
English Lessons and Other Stories
Reader’s Guide Edition
SHAUNA SINGH BALDWIN
With an afterword by KULDIP GILL
Copyright © 1996 by Shauna Singh Baldwin.
Copyright © 2007 by Vichar.
Vichar is a division of Shauna Baldwin Associates, Inc.
www.ShaunaSinghBaldwin.com
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright).
To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.
Edited by Laurel Boone.
Cover and interior page design by Julie Scriver.
Cover image: PhotosIndia Photography, copyright Veer.
Printed in Canada on 100% PCW paper.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Baldwin, Shauna Singh, 1962-
English lessons and other stories / Shauna Singh Baldwin.
— Reader’s guide ed.
ISBN 978-0-86492-510-7
1. Women immigrants — Fiction. I. Title.
PS8553.A4493E53 2008 C813’.54 C2008-900169-9
Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the New Brunswick department of Wellness, Culture and Sport for its publishing activities.
Goose Lane Editions
Suite 330, 500 Beaverbrook Court
Fredericton, New Brunswick
CANADA E3B 5X4
www.gooselane.com
Look not at my finger,
Look where I am pointing
— author unknown
Contents
Acknowledgements
Rawalpindi 1919
Montreal 1962
Dropadi Ma
Family Ties
Gayatri
Simran
Toronto 1984
Lisa
A Pair of Ears
Nothing Must Spoil This Visit
English Lessons
The Cat Who Cried
The Insult
Jassie
Devika
Afterword
Reader’s Guide
Acknowledgements
for English Lessons Reader’s Guide Edition
This book began from Sunno! (Listen), “the East-Indian American Radio Show where you don’t have to be Indian to listen,” an audio magazine I produced and hosted for three years on WYMS in Milwaukee. My thanks to listeners who called and asked me to write more stories to be read on air. Among the many people who helped me with this book, my special thanks go to Dr. Marilyn M. Levine, Pegi Taylor, and my husband David Baldwin, for many hours of philosophical discussion about these stories.
My late grandfather, Sardar Bahadur Sarup Singh, was the oral storyteller behind “Rawalpindi 1919,” which first appeared in Rosebud magazine. My parents’ experience in Canada was inspiration for “Montreal 1962,” and I thank the editors of Hum and Fireweed, where it first appeared. For their Punjabi maxims, translated and included in these stories, I thank the real Ma Dropadi, and Atma Singh. For research assistance in India, I am indebted to Ena Singh. For research assistance and hospitality in Canada, my thanks to Satinder and Bea Singh. For their encouragement, I thank writers Anjana Appachana, Bapsi Sidhwa, Robert Olen Butler and Chris Loken. Many thanks to Madhu Kishwar and her staff at Manushi Magazine: A Journal about Women and Society in India, where “English Lessons,” “A Pair of Ears,” and “Simran” first appeared in print; to the editors of Cream City Review, who nominated “Family Ties” for a Pushcart Prize; and to Calyx, where “Jassie” was first published. After winning the 1995 Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers, “Jassie” also appeared in Books in Canada. For their faith in me, I am always grateful to the late Bibiji Sukhwant Kaur, Sardar Kishen Singh and Sardarni Raminder Sarup Singh. For her exact editing, my grateful appreciation to Laurel Boone at goose Lane Editions.
Shauna Singh Baldwin
Milwaukee
Rawalpindi 1919
Whole wheat flour and water. Not just any flour will do either, she thought. He is very particular about that. Choudhary Amir Singh would dine on simple fare, but the first chapatti must be made from the wheat of his own mills and it must come from the hands of the mother of his sons — Sardarni Sahib herself.
It seems warmer than usual, she thought, as her fingers moulded and formed the dough, knuckling into it, brown soft hands suppling it, readying it as she had made her sons ready. And for what, she thought. The elder a poet. Gentle and kind but no businessman. What would he make of the flour mill? Now the younger one, he’s more worldly. Twenty-one years old and Choudhary Sahib had found no bride worthy of him — yet.
She made a ball of the dough… patting… patting… smoothing the wet, glistening gold-flecked ball. Now dig a small ball out of the large one. Cut it apart from the whole. Now shape it, roll it between the palms. She looked at the small ball cradled in her hand. At this stage, she could still return it to the large ball and no damage would be apparent. She could knead it back and it would blend again.
But this idea, who knows where it came from. This idea that her boy could go to Vilayat, to the white people’s country, to learn from their gurus in their dark and cloudy cities — her youngest — and then return to Rawalpindi, and his people would know no difference. She shook her head. Hai toba!
It will be different in three years, she thought. Today Choudhary Amir Singh washes his hands after sh
ake-hand with an Angrez, the collector with the brown topi and the red face. But Sarup is a friendly boy and he will have Angrez boys as friends and he will learn the shake-hand instead of our no-polluting palms-together Sat Sri Akal.
A little flour on the ball now. Just a dusting. Enough to swirl the ball between her thumbs and the first two fingers of her hands. Round and round, faster and faster, flatter and flatter, larger and larger, thinner and thinner.
He would look thinner after three years. She tried to imagine him. They would expect him to tie his beard, his long dark beard, up under his chin. She would be sure he had enough turbans to last two months on the boat and three years in Inglaand. Some silk ones — oh, the brightest colours — so the Angrez would know he came from a bold Sikh clan. But he would be thinner, with no woman to cook chapattis. Sardar Baldev Singh had been to London, and he had told her he had eaten only boiled food with not a single chilli all the time. Perhaps he said it as an excuse for his appetite on his return, but she’d noticed even quite high-up Angrez were thin. It must be their food. Sarup would never become used to that.
She rolled the chapatti with a rolling pin, picked it up and deftly slapped it from one palm to the other. Then whoosh — onto the tava over the coal fire. She steadied the tava with one hand, and, with a small rag in the other hand, rotated the chapatti till it was almost cooked.
But perhaps there were other customs he would get used to. He had already, she knew, bought an English book to read, now it was agreed he would be studying in Vilayat. She had seen it and it had an Englishwoman and a man in a black English suit on the outside. They were kissing, but Sarup told her it was a classic, like the story of Roop-Basant. He said all the English stories like “Roop-Basant” are written down, and in Imperial College, there were even people whose only study was to learn those stories. This one was called Thelma, he said. It was written by a woman called Marri Corrilli. Now how could this be, that a woman would write such a fat book. But maybe she was a poor woman who could not afford to get a munshi to write down her thoughts.
She took the chapatti off the tava. Quick, snatch the tava off the fire and replace it with the chapatti. She watched as the chapatti rose into a hot-air-filled dough balloon. Just at its peak she lifted it from the fire and set it on the ground on a steel thali to cool.
It was the thali that brought it to mind. Angrez don’t use steel thalis. They use white plates. They don’t use the chapatti, breaking off a small piece to scoop up their food. They use sharp forks and long knives — straight ones, not curved like our kirpans — to keep themselves distant from their food. He will have to learn that.
And as she rose from her haunches to pick up the thali and covered her head with her chunni in preparation for entering her husband’s presence, she decided to talk with him about it. She moved to the doorway and stepped over the wooden threshold.
“Ay, Ji,” she said. She would not bring him misfortune by using his name.
Choudhary Amir Singh looked up from the divan and cushions on the floor.
“You will need to buy chairs for this house when he returns,” she said. “And we will need plates.”
Montreal 1962
In the dark at night you came close and your voice was a whisper though there is no one here to wake. “They said I could have the job if I take off my turban and cut my hair short.” You did not have to say it. I saw it in your face as you took off your new coat and galoshes. I heard their voices in my head as I looked at the small white envelopes I have left in the drawer, each full of one more day’s precious dollars — the last of your savings and my dowry. Mentally, I converted dollars to rupees and thought how many people in India each envelope could feed for a month.
This was not how they described emigrating to Canada. I still remember them saying to you, “You’re a well-qualified man. We need professional people.” And they talked about freedom and opportunity for those lucky enough to already speak English. No one said then, “You must be reborn white-skinned — and clean-shaven to show it — to survive.” Just a few months ago, they called us exotic new Canadians, new blood to build a new country.
Today I took one of my wedding saris to the neighbourhood dry-cleaner and a woman with no eyebrows held it like a dishrag as she asked me, “Is it a bed sheet?”
“No,” I said.
“Curtains?”
“No.”
I took the silk back to our basement apartment, tied my hair in a tight bun, washed the heavy folds in the metal bathtub, and hung it, gold threads glinting, on a drip-dry hanger.
When I had finished, I spread a bed sheet on the floor of the bathroom, filled my arms with the turbans you’d worn last week and knelt there surrounded by the empty soft hollows of scarlet, navy, earth brown, copper, saffron, mauve and bright parrot green. As I waited for the bathtub to fill with warm soapy water, I unravelled each turban, each precise spiral you had wound round your head, and soon the room was full of soft streams of muslin that had protected your long black hair.
I placed each turban in turn on the bubbly surface and watched them grow dark and heavy, sinking slowly, softly into the warmth. When there were no more left beside me, I leaned close and reached in, working each one in a rhythm bone-deep, as my mother and hers must have done before me, that their men might face the world proud. I drained the tub and new colours swelled — deep red, dark black mud, rust, orange, soft purple and jade green.
I filled the enamel sink with clean water and starch and lifted them as someday I will lift children. When the milky bowl had fed them, my hands massaged them free of alien red-blue water. I placed them carefully in a basin and took them out into our grey two rooms to dry.
I placed a chair by the window and climbed on it to tie the four corners of each turban length to the heavy curtain rod. Each one in turn, I drew out three yards till it was folded completely in two. I grasped it firmly at its sides and swung my hands inward. The turban furrowed before me. I arced my hands outward and it became a canopy. Again inward, again outward, hands close, hands apart, as though I was back in Delhi on a flat roof under a hot sun or perhaps near a green field of wheat stretching far to the banks of the Beas.
As the water left the turbans, I began to see the room through muslin screens. The pallid walls, the radiator you try every day to turn up hotter for me, the small windows, unnaturally high. When the turbans were lighter, I set the dining chairs with their halfmoon backs in a row in the middle of the well-worn carpet and I draped the turbans over their tops the way Gidda dancers wear their chunnis pinned tight in the centre parting of their hair. Then I sat on the carpet before them, willing them: dance for me — dance for us. The chairs stood as stiff and wooden as ignorant Canadians, though I know maple is softer than chinar.
Soon the bands of cloth regained all their colour, filling the room with sheer lightness. Their splendour arched upwards, insisting upon notice, refusing the drabness, refusing obscurity, wielding the curtain rod like the strut of a defending champion.
From the windows over my head came the sounds of a Montreal afternoon, and the sure step of purposeful feet on the sidewalk. Somewhere on a street named in English where the workers speak joual I imagined your turban making its way in the crowds, bringing you home to me.
Once again I climbed on a chair and I let your turbans loose. One by one, I held them to me, folding in their defiance, hushing their unruly indignation, gentling them into temporary submission. Finally, I faced them as they sat before me.
Then I chose my favourite, the red one you wear less and less, and I took it to the bedroom. I unfurled the gauzy scarlet on our bed and it seemed as though I’d poured a pool of the sainted blood of all the Sikh martyrs there. So I took a corner and tied it to the doorknob just as you do in the mornings instead of waking me to help you. I took the diagonal corner to the very far end of the room just as you do, and rolled the scarlet inward as best I could within the cramped four walls. I had to untie it from the doorknob again to roll the other h
alf, as I used to every day for my father, then my brother and now you. Soon the scarlet rope lay ready.
I placed it before the mirror and began to tie it as a Sardar would, one end clenched between my teeth to anchor it, arms raised to sweep it up to the forehead down to the nape of the neck, around again, this time higher. I wound it swiftly, deftly, till it jutted haughtily forward, adding four inches to my stature. Only when I had pinned the free end to the peak did I let the end clenched between my teeth fall. I took the saliva-darkened cord, pulled it back where my hair bun rested low, and tucked it up over the turban, just as you do.
In the mirror I saw my father as he must have looked as a boy, my teenage brother as I remember him, you as you face Canada, myself as I need to be.
The face beneath the jaunty turban began to smile.
I raised my hands to my turban’s roundness, eased it from my head and brought it before me, setting it down lightly before the mirror. It asked nothing now but that I be worthy of it.
And so, my love, I will not let you cut your strong rope of hair and go without a turban into this land of strangers. The knot my father tied between my chunni and your turban is still strong between us, and it shall not fail you now. My hands will tie a turban every day upon your head and work so we can keep it there. One day our children will say, “My father came to this country with very little but his turban and my mother learned to work because no one would hire him.”
Then we will have taught Canadians what it takes to wear a turban.
Dropadi Ma
The monsoon rains curtained the windows all afternoon and Dropadi Ma held me on her lap and told me long stories. I knew them all by now and followed her toothless chant with my lips. She never said I was getting too big to sit in her lap — just covered us both in her raggedy shawl, her chocolate hands over my pale ones. Sometimes she would fall silent, thinking, remembering, and in the middle of one story would tell me a small one about the days when my mother or one of her brothers had been small enough to sit in her lap and listen. And then we would return to the story chant, smoothly re-entering webs of treachery, violence and sacrifice upon sacrifice, every story set in an age of obedience where the only conflicts lay between duty and duty. Stories to keep a child from wandering too far.
