English Lessons and Other Stories Read Free Page A

quarter on her charpai as usual. She was already on her corner of the kitchen floor, and she was wearing yesterday’s clothes. Her glasses lay on the floor beside her and she held one knee as she dozed. I shook her a little.
    â€œDropadi Ma — Sukhimama has taken a flight to Canada last night. There can be no wedding!”
    Her toothless smile was wide and joyous. “Come, little one. Ma will tell you a story.”

Family Ties
    Everyone says Inder is the smart one and I the steady one. I know steady means boring but it doesn’t matter; he’s my brother. He’s the thin one, and I’m the one Mummy calls Fatty. He’s the one with laughter and he always asks why. “Why?” is a question Mummy takes as a personal affront, but Inder asks it over and over. Why can’t we live in Indore with Dad? Or in Darjeeling with old Bibiji and Nana? Why can’t we play Gulli Danda with the big-eyed, bandy-legged jhuggi children? Why doesn’t Mummy allow him to sing like Rajesh Khanna in the films — winking at girls, with his right hand twirling in time to the music?
    I am ten and he is fourteen and he challenges me to play mental chess through the mosquito nets separating our beds, and I hear him whisper “check” by my fifth move. And every night he tells me stories. There is his favourite — the one about the sons of Guru Gobind Singh who were interred alive in a brick wall but who did not convert to Islam. Then there is my favourite — the one about Guru Nanak falling asleep with his feet pointing towards Mecca. I make Inder tell me how the qazis came upon him and tried to move his feet to a more respectful place, and how the Ka’aba spun till Guru Nanak awoke and suggested theytry pointing his feet at any place where God is not. Most nights, the chucka-chucka-chuck of the three-armed overhead fan lulls me to sleep and leaves him to finish his stories alone.
    When winter comes, Mummy buys a TV from Nancy and Pierre, her Canadian diplomat friends. Inder and I sit on the threadbare oriental carpet, watching clips of old Hindi films and the endless agricultural shows, huddled together with our knees propping up the warm tent of a bulbous silk razzai. I gaze enthralled at the blue-grey glow for the news while Inder imitates the pompous, stilted voices of the announcers trying so hard to sound like the BBC: “THIS is the news. Today the government announced that President Mujib Rehman has asked for the support of the Indian Army’s brave jawans in defence of the Muktibahini in Bangladesh.” Now the nightly stories have Dad attired as Guru Gobind Singh from two hundred years ago, wearing a saffron turban, wielding a huge kirpan — and leading the 61st Cavalry.
    Mummy orders Dad’s old driver, Nand Singh, to paint the upper half of the headlights of our Ambassador black, in preparation for blackouts. And Dad comes home the night we hear the first sirens wail their warning.
    Dad doesn’t wear a saffron turban or carry a big kirpan. He isn’t even as large as I remembered, and he looks a little worn. Mummy and he use a servant as their messenger when they need to talk — or me, because I can say the English name of Dad’s department in the government as he speculates about his next posting. And all the time Inder asks, “Aren’t you going to be in the war?”
    â€œNo,” Dad replies. “I lost enough in ’47.”
    It’s true, I know, because Nand Singh has told me the story of Partition. He has told me how Dad and my Dada and my Dadilocked their haveli near Rawalpindi before the Muslims came and how they fled on a death train and only twenty-one-year-old Dad arrived in the new India because Nand Singh and he used their turbans to rope themselves to the belly of the railcar and hid beneath it with a revolver as their only weapon while Dada and Dadi’s screams filled the mad swirling darkness. I know Dad is