Still reeling from Baba Nanak’s death, Aziza is hurled into a tempest by Buddha’s words. Unable to stay still, she dashes out of her hut without wearing her burqa, with the aged Motia at her heels. It is midafternoon on a cool winter day. Motia splays out in the sun, too weary to follow her mistress. Aziza walks without intention or awareness toward the village, then abruptly turns around and follows the footpath to the forest on the opposite side. Realizing she has walked too far from her hut, she turns around, returns to the hut, and wanders aimlessly in circles around it. She feels herself tumbling helplessly, without direction, in a flood of emotions and thoughts.
“Aziza, Aziza, calm down!” she berates herself. “Go play your rabab!” But the thought does not attract her in the least. She sits on the sill of the door, puts her head on her knees and cries:
“Help me, Ar Rashid!”149
As she lifts her head, some weeds in the front vegetable garden catch her attention. She gets up, fetches her trowel, and digs them out. Soon she sees others, and begins to pull them out, one by one, till the storm ebbs, only to come back full force periodically. Feelings she did not know she had, though she had felt them in her unconscious and in her dreams, make her stop and acknowledge them.
“Aziza, what are you thinking, what are you feeling?” She speaks aloud to herself. “You will get sucked into a whirlpool in seeking the kind of love a moth seeks but rarely finds, only to burn itself to death. You will love him so much you’ll become his servant and his slave; you are in danger of making him your god and worshipping him. This unbound love can only be given to the Unbound One. You will have babies and forget all about your real lover: your rabab, music, the One with Many Names who fits your soul so snugly. Never, Aziza, never make that mistake. Remember Bharatrihari, child.”
She surprises herself by addressing herself as “child,” and realizes she is speaking to herself in Fatima’s voice. Feeling her grandmother’s invisible nearness, she grows calmer, as if a strong hand has reached out and plucked her out of darkness.
“Buddha is a thinking sort of person. ‘I have been thinking,’ he said! Not ‘I have been feeling.’ ‘There is a solution to your isolation.’ Solution! It is a mental decision on his part, a sort of business arrangement to help out a childhood friend, an act of compassion, not passion. His passion flows only and forever into Akaal Purukh. He will never fulfill your female longings. No man can fulfill them, Aziza, no one! He will only arouse your hungers. You will become a clinging vine: ‘Why don’t you ever spend time with me, love me, as I need to be loved? Why are you away so often? Why do you spend so much time at the dera? What about me?’ You will be disappointed in him as a lover, or a husband, and become a bitch and a nag, hit him over the head with a rolling pin or chase him around the courtyard, broom in hand!”
The image makes her laugh and cry out loud. Memories lurking in obscure recesses of her mind unfurl one by one as she tends the roses, snipping off the dead heads. She recalls the stories Buddha had told her about Mata Sulakhni with Baba Nanak; her grandfather’s abandonment of her grandmother for decades; her parents’ relationship, or rather, non-relationship. She is not encouraged by any of the marriage models in her mind.
The flood of confusion, somewhat quelled by her digressively relevant recollections, is back in full.
How much work it takes to keep a relationship half-alive, Aziza thinks, fetching saplings from a shady spot behind the hut, and planting them in a prepared bed. Who knows, Buddha might get it into his head to travel like Baba and leave me, pregnant. His mother will tyrannize me, like Mata Sulakhni tyrannized Dhanvanti. All mothers-in-law want their daughters-in-law to be sweet and obedient. Do this, do that, and keep your mouth shut! And when Buddha returns, the children will not know him and fight with him constantly! How badly Abba got along with Daadu, and Sri Chand and Lakhmi Das with Baba!
“No,” she says aloud, standing up.
Who knows, Buddha may tyrannize me, too, she thinks, pulling up male bhang plants by their roots. “Unfertilized females are strongest,” she hears her grandmother, who had grown bhang for her grandfather, say. He will tell me like he told Daadu that eating and smoking bhang is a dirty habit. Or I’ll have to lie to him about eating my halwa.
She works some more, removing dead leaves, staking plants that need support, digging the hard soil around the roots till it becomes loose and soft. She fetches manure and spreads it on the earth around the roots.
“When he comes again I will say no.” The decision brings another tempest. She does not understand why, so she stops, trowel in hand, to examine her feelings and the thoughts accompanying them: regret, jealousy, and sorrow.
How easily he will forget me! He will marry someone else and make babies with her. She will be just a woman to him, to love occasionally and leave to her tasks, like Abba leaves Ami. Abba doesn’t even come home many nights, and she is not to ask him where he goes. Buddha will spend all his time at the new dera in Khadur, listening to kathaa150 and kirtan, engrossed in the affairs of the institution the Sikhs are becoming.
But oh, how will you hear his wonderful stories? she asks herself, despairing. She takes a decision, but the decision does not hold and she totters to the other side of the scale, back and forth, back and forth between yes and no, enumerating benefits and disadvantages of each.
I won’t have to wear my burqa. But then I have become used to it. No, I like it, love it, even. It gives me anonymity. It is my fortress, my cocoon.
Working outdoors ebbs her conflict somewhat, but the tide returns and robs her of her peace, putting her in the meat grinder of conflict: Stop it, stop it, stop it, Aziza, she screams, stamping her feet on the ground. It is your ego that is grinding you down, child, deluding you into thinking you have a choice to make. You cannot make it. Turn to the Goddess of the Crossroads instead. Become a Gurmukh, child, and you will be taken in a boat that glides on calm waters to your predesigned Destiny in which all is forever well if you set your compass to the Great One. S/he will give you the power and skill to navigate yourself to your one and only desire: to be, to live always in accord and harmony with the Cosmic Will. This is the first and last lesson that Baba has taught us. Whatever happens will be for the highest good. Go meditate, child, and surrender, surrender, surrender.
Aziza stands still for a while and then goes indoors.
She sits cross-legged on a daree: I have come to You, All Knowing. I give myself to You, Al Alim,151 Al Haadi,152 in trust that You will guide me into the right decision.
Almost instantly Aziza falls into the eye of the storm, into blessed, blessed calm. She sits thus for a while, and when she opens her eyes her gaze falls on one of the looms. It is one of the unfinished ones that Fatima had bequeathed her. Two warp threads of browns, the color of earth and the many shades of natural wool, alternate with hints of madder red, burnt sienna, pale yellow, and ocher in the weft. She recalls how her grandmother had made the browns from the bark of horse chestnuts and the soot of burnt, resinous wood. She touches it. Motes of dust arise and dance in a beam of light streaming through the speaking hole on the west of the hut.
Aziza’s heart leaps as she wonders if this is a sign for her to go ahead and accept Buddha’s proposal. Or, her mind whispers, as she looks at the loom, a sign to stay in her solitude?
The question put her once more in the mouth of conflict, but almost immediately she remembers to surrender and sit still in the center of it. Trusting that she will be led to the right decision, she turns with an empty mind to the loom, and begins to weave in silence.
149. The Guide: one of the many names for God in Islam.
150. Spiritual talks.
151. The All Knowing.
152. The Guide.