Under the Lemon Trees - Hardcover

Chapter One

The chance to love comes to all of us.We listen for its sound beneath our footsteps, seek it down the improbable paths that we roam. Sometimes we choose to turn away from it, or must. Or we fail to see it at all and it vanishes like a feather on air, leaving only the flicker of a shadow as it passes. By the time she married, my sister, Neelam, had surrendered herself to a fate dictated not by desire or foolish dreams but by the positions of the stars and planets. She was engaged to a man whom she had never met, whom she knew merely by the fuzzy image in a photograph, but whose destiny was clearly aligned with hers. Over cups of scalding tea, my mother watched Charan Kaur as she pored over the creased pages of her astrological charts, settling on the twenty-first of February that year, 1976, as an auspicious day for her daughter's wedding. Thus were Neelam's shame and misfortune to be swept away, forgotten altogether if memory were charitable.

The same Charan Kaur had arranged the match. My mother had developed an unfaltering faith in the woman to whom she had turned to ensure her third child would be a boy. This action troubled me when I learned of it: Had Charan Kaur merely consulted her charts, or was she present in some magical way the fated night my mother and father had, no doubt, so joyously made love, believing a son would soon bless our family? The cherished birth of my younger brother, Prem, nearly a year later only affirmed my mother's instincts. Charan Kaur had become in the interim a much-sought-after matchmaker. Those who took interest in such matters could tell you of her successes: She managed to join the feuding Gill and Thiara families, joining Oak Grove's most eligible Indian bachelor with the starchy, morose eldest daughter of the Thiaras, thereby doubling the land holdings of each. Convinced of the woman's unique and supple talents, my mother eagerly enlisted her to find a suitable boy for her troubled daughter.

My mother, after all, was not one to leave things to chance. In her own way, she was a generous woman, with a blind faith in most things working out in the end. Over the dusty-blue damask sofa in our living room hung portraits of Guru Nanak, Jesus, and John Kennedy, as if she were hedging her bets. Nothing in life is a coincidence, she'd always told us as a preface to some exemplary tale. A favorite of hers: "There was my Uncle Dev, who once took the wrong train from Jalandhar to New Delhi and wound up in a small village in the highlands. At a lunch stand, he encountered a former colleague from the postal ser vice who had retired there with his two daughters. At dinner at this man's home that very evening, Uncle Dev was particularly taken with the eldest daughter, Seema, a ravishing beauty ever so reluctant to marry, though she was nearing twenty years of age. That night, Uncle Dev, unable to sleep because of his thoughts of desire, roamed the dark village streets, when a holy man dressed in mere rags approached him. This holy man looked deep into Uncle's fevered eyes and instructed him to drink at dawn from the spring at the hill beyond to purify himself against such injurious thoughts. Uncle Dev did so the following morning, but then collapsed, exhausted, against a rock nearby. Along came Seema, the lovely daughter, her slender arms embracing a ceramic pot to collect drinking water. She revived him, and soon they were married and produced seven excellent children. Coincidence that he took the wrong train?" my mother would ask, her hands clasped triumphantly. "Impossible!"

We lived on Fremont Road in a three-bedroom house on the outskirts of the small northern California town of Oak Grove. Surrounding the town in every direction, orchards had supplanted a fertile landscape once lush with grasses and dotted with sprawling oaks. The broad domes of Sikh temples competed in the skyline with the lean spires of Christian churches. Since the immigration laws had changed, the town pulsed to the exotic beat of tablas and the sound tracks of the most recent Indian films to hit American shores. The all-white city council members learned to publish their campaign literature in Punjabi, as though each tumultuous decision made at City Hall had some great bearing on our tight little universe. My uncle Avtar, my father's older brother and the first in my family to settle in America, had taken advantage of cheap land prices following World War II to begin securing his holdings. He'd offered my father, Mohinder Singh Rai, a small share of it when he emigrated from India in 1957, seeing that my mother was already expecting her first child.

A young woman scarcely had time to weave the fragile fabric of her dreams in our town. All too soon the hazy faces and soft mouths of imagined lovers were replaced by hard, real ones. Neelam married Davinder Mahal when she was eighteen; I was fifteen then. It was a hasty affair that left all involved a bit breathless and stunned as she exited the front door carrying the last of her bags. In the days following the wedding, my mother roamed the house with a light, buoyant step, as one who is certain of victory.

I hurried off the school bus into a full, slanted wind one fall afternoon, months after Neelam's wedding, the sycamore leaves tossing around me like many brown hands. I was attending Oak Grove High School, and afternoons, I would return home to a living room where my mother, sister, and aunts sat like fleshy fixtures drinking tea. Inside the house, the air felt stiff and dry. Aunt Teji, my uncle Avtar's wife and the eldest among us, greeted me when I entered the living room and tapped the sofa seat next to her lightly with an open hand before pushing her smudged glasses back on her nose. I settled back beside her, taking in the sandalwood scent of her wool shawl. My mother's attention was focused on her sister, my aunt Manjit, who perched at the edge of her chair in her erect and ever-alert way.

"If it worked once, why shouldn't it again?" my mother said, casually flicking crumbs from her kameez. Her voice had a slightly ragged edge to it, and I recognized that, with my presence, the conversation had shifted into what I called "code talk" —matters urgent and unavoidable that required immediate discussion. For I had learned that the women who surrounded me did far more than drink tea on these balmy afternoons; they gave shape to fortune and destiny. I looked from face to face for clues. Neelam turned toward the wall in one long sweep of her lashes and a streak of crimson rose along the side of her neck.

"There's an ointment that can be rubbed into the feet each night. Santi was telling me," Aunt Manjit said. She had a closet shelf stuffed with ointments and ingredients for salves —tattered paper bags filled with old walnut husks, dried pomegranate skins and ajuwan seeds — the woody scent mixing with that of shoe leather from the scuffed collection of boots and sneakers piled on the floor. She was my mother's younger sister and they were perhaps as different from each other as Neelam and I. Only twenty-eight, her body hadn't softened and spread after three children, but had sharpened into the pointed, bony angles of her chin, shoulders, and hips, a body turning in on itself.

"I think the young bride and groom can handle these matters on their own." Aunt Teji shifted her soft, pliant weight on the sofa and playfully slapped Neelam's thigh. Neelam, who had thus far displayed no emotion other than visible agony, stirred and languidly peeled herself from the sofa back, sitting upright.

My brother, Prem, burst into the room with a basketball hooked under one arm and, without any greeting, plunged a dusty hand into the platter of pakoras.

"As many as you like, son," my mother said. "Here, take some for Deepa, too." She handed him the entire platter. Deepa was Aunt Teji's son. The two boys...