Читать книгу Jasmine - Bharati Mukherjee - Страница 13

PITAJI died the next May. He died horribly. He got off a bus in a village two hours west of us and was gored by a bull. He’d had the bus driver let him off in a country lane so he could take a shortcut through a field to a friend’s hut. The friend he’d gone to visit was another Lahori, someone he liked to play chess with. The horror was the suddenness. He used to say, lying on his charpoy in the courtyard, I can watch death coming from here. He’ll have to be a very sneaky fellow to catch me by surprise. I will die with my kurta buttoned and my glasses folded on my paper and all my prayers said. The bull attacked him from behind. He never saw it coming.

The Lahori friend consoled my mother. “Why cry? Crying is selfish. We have no husbands, no wives, no fathers, no sons. Family life and family emotions are all illusions. The Lord lends us a body, gives us an assignment, and sends us down. When we get the job done, the Lord calls us home again for the next assignment.”

I know that sounds soft. “Very, very, very Indian, Jassy”—that’s what Taylor used to say, back in Manhattan. “You don’t believe that, do you? You can’t, you’re more modern than that.”

What it means is this: Grant the notion that there’s a God. Taylor agreed. For the sake of argument, then, if He’s God, His assignments are perhaps too vast for the human mind, even your very superior one, Taylor. Go on, he said, smiling his lopsided, I’m-amused-by-all-this smile. Then, I said, let’s make a bigger leap. Perhaps Pitajis life assignment was merely to crunch one small piece of gravel as he jumped out of the bus that morning, and once he did it, perhaps God took the form of a maddened bull, or God took the form of nettles that caused a perfectly harmless bull enough pain to charge. Perhaps my father’s assignment was to be just that: my father; to die in a freakish accident before he could marry me off so that I could be free to fall in love with Prakash. What if my father’s assignment was to hasten my eloping with Prakash, hasten my getting to New York! Maybe my