English Lessons and Other Stories by Shauna Singh Baldwin

Author:Shauna Singh Baldwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC029000, FIC019000
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2008-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

Looking out at earth-tone people blending into earth-tone villages — some with TV antennae rising from thatch — Janet remembered how enthusiastic she’d been about this trip. She wanted to experience India with him, his India, the India he’d told her of so many times. As soon as they’d arrived at his parents’ home, Arvind had changed from pants and a jacket and tie to a white kurta-pyjama and sandals. When she’d worn a sari, thinking to please Papaji, the whole family had applauded.

Only Chaya remarked, “She walks so funny in a sari.”

It was true, of course. Arvind tried to teach her to glide a little more gracefully, but she’d reverted to pants and a T-shirt the next day.

Mumji, always so charming, had tried to persuade her to return to the unaccustomed garb or at least try a salwar kameez, murmuring, “The best clothes for heat and modesty have been tested over centuries, dear.”

Arvind had come to her defence. “Janet comes from a young country, Mumji. Women in Canada believe in learning by experience.”

She’d seen Kamal then, looking over at Chaya as though afraid this remark was inappropriate for her ears, but Chaya sat with her vacuous smile, stroking her son’s handkerchiefed topknot.

Mumji had coaxed everyone back into harmony with a teasing smile at Arvind.

“Not everything needs to be reinvented, even by engineers.” She had gone on to admire the width of Janet’s hips, venturing the ever-so-gentle reminder that it was “high time” she provided Arvind’s family with grandchildren. Mumji was right — like Arvind, Janet was four years away from forty — but…. Now Janet told herself she should expect Mumji’s gentle intrusions, and anyway, Mumji was in Delhi, probably fanning herself in the languid dark of her air-conditioned bedroom with one of her Femina magazines. Janet imagined herself telling Anyu that her daughter had poured mustard-seed oil on a wood threshold and touched the feet of her husband’s mother. Anyu, who had lived under Communists, would say, “You start bowing your head once, it gets easier and easier.”

Outside Chandigarh, Arvind stopped at a roadside Government Milk Bar, but Janet was wary of germs in the chilled bottles of sweetened spiced milk. At Kalka, he waded through a throng of indolent men in white kurta-pajamas to get her a bottle of Campa Cola to wash down the dust. She wiped the top of the bottle with a fastidious white tissue and shook her head when he offered to throw it from the car window when she was finished.

The car began to climb the Himalayas. Cooler air released them from the frenetic pulse of the plains. The scent of pine logs mixed with black diesel truck fumes as the little car screeched up winding roads that gripped the mountain “like a python’s coils,” Arvind said, laughing at her shudder.

He pointed to the precipitous drop to the valley below.

“That drop is called the khud,” he said.

“Kud.” She could not aspirate the consonant, even after five years of marriage. And anyway, she wasn’t planning to use Hindi or Punjabi in Toronto.

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