The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters

This wasn’t a good start to their journey. Mum believed that whatever happened in the morning set the tone for the rest of the day – all of her rituals were completed by the time the sun rose. If Mum were here, she wouldn’t be happy. The morning wasn’t even over and they were already down to two.

The langar hall throbbed with the same noise and energy of a Delhi street, but the scene was surprisingly organized. People sat on the floor in rows and ate with their hands from metal trays. Servers roamed up and down the lines, refilling plates with rotis and ladlefuls of dal. ‘Of course you already know that in the Sikh religion, we believe in serving food to anybody who comes to the temple, regardless of their creed, gender or income,’ Mum had written in her letter, after explaining the significance of this temple. ‘They don’t have to worship here. They don’t have to offer any services, or money. This is a very good system, and one that helped our family after your father died.’

Shirina was aware of the temple’s welfare from the meals that Mum used to bring home from the morning service, usually at times when the cupboards were bare. ‘We’re still okay,’ Mum would say, looking at a full plate before her. Her tone was never convincing enough. Shirina would look at the plate and see the thinness of the roti, the watery dal, and sense that there was only so much charity they could ask for.

Shirina and Rajni entered a wide back kitchen, which bustled with activity. Along one wall, enormous steel pots were being stirred slowly by young turbaned men with ladles the size and shape of oars. In the corner, a cluster of older women kneaded balls of dough. The serving line was being set up and there were young children pushing for a chance to put out the plates.

Rajni wandered off to the vegetable counter and, with a few quick nods and smiles with the other women there, she was handed a knife, a chopping board and a tubful of carrots. Shirina considered her options more carefully. There was a counter dedicated to roti-making but those women were experts – just look at how they were flattening the dough into such perfect circles with the flick of their wrists. They were deep in conversation as well; Shirina would be intruding. She almost turned a full circle considering her options before she felt somebody gripping her by the shoulders. She turned around to see a small elderly woman standing before her.

‘Looking for something to do? Can you take my place kneading dough for a while? Young thing like you would do a faster job than these.’ The woman held up her hands and showed Shirina her curled arthritic fingers. Shirina felt a pang of sadness, remembering the way Mum clutched the edges of her letter, her voice shaking slightly as she read it to them. Grief came to her like a series of aftershocks – every time she thought she had moved on, something new reminded her of Mum.

Shirina thought some introductions might be needed but as soon as they saw her approaching, the women shifted and a space opened up for her. She drove the heel of her palm into the dough and then ran her knuckles over it and repeated this motion until the dough was soft and smooth. Then she started a fresh batch, combining the water and flour in a steel bowl. The fingers on one hand became sticky, so she switched to the other. Around her, pots crashed and voices shot into the air. The other women’s chatter blended with the commotion. It was enough distraction, she thought at first, but as her motions quickly settled into a routine, the spaces between the noises began to open wide.

It had been quiet like this in the moment Shirina’s mother-in-law opened the door to find her resting her head against the taxi driver’s chest. Mother had stood stiffly in the doorway, arms crossed over her chest as the driver apologetically explained that he was just making sure she got home safely. ‘Thank you,’ she said to the driver, before pulling Shirina into the house and shutting the door. ‘Get upstairs,’ she ordered.

The morning after, her skull still throbbing from the wine, she had joined Sehaj and his mother at the breakfast table. Sehaj gave her a terse smile and Mother didn’t even look at her. Shirina sat still, unsure of what to do. In her family, disagreements were shouted out until voices went hoarse. Here, nobody said anything. So this was what Sehaj meant when he said that his family rarely fought. Shirina opened her mouth to say how sorry she was but nothing came out. She realized how scared she was of doing the wrong thing again. When Mother did finally speak, it was to announce that she was going back to bed. The silent treatment lasted all weekend until Mother announced she had a doctor’s appointment the following Friday afternoon. ‘You will drive me there,’ she said, and Shirina was so grateful that Mother was speaking to her again, that she cancelled a meeting and took half a day off work. She wanted to make sure she was on time to pick Mother up and bring her home as well.

In the folded printout from a website about Sikhism that Rajni had read last night, there was a quote about the simplicity of service leading to meditative thoughts. She was supposed to feel a sense of oneness with others and herself, so that her mind was free to focus on the present.

The work was certainly simple. Rajni chopped carrots into a pile until it threatened to topple over the edges of the board. Then she swept it into a big bowl and carried it to the station where a vegetarian curry was bubbling in a pot the size of a small bathtub.

She’d repeated this process a dozen times but the pinch in her shoulder interrupted any meditative thoughts. Then there was the pulsing pain just behind her eyes, now a constant presence. She had been unable to sleep last night from a combination of jet leg and flashes of acute anxiety about becoming a grandmother at forty-three. She cast a look at the gathering of older women kneading dough next to Shirina. They were grandmothers – dupattas tucked behind ears, backs stooped towards their work. She straightened her own posture and checked the time. Kabir would be fast asleep on his stomach with one leg thrown over the empty side of the bed.

The steam from the row of pots made beads of sweat prickle on Rajni’s forehead. How many hours of service did one need to contribute in order to feel closer to God? It had only been about an hour and she already needed a break. She nodded to the women she was working with and as she moved towards the door she glanced over her shoulder at Shirina, quietly kneading dough, and Jezmeen, who had eventually returned and was elbow-deep in soap suds at the industrial sink.

Stepping out of the kitchen, Rajni expected to feel an instant release, but the langar hall was packed now. She pushed through the crowds, carefully tiptoeing past cups of tea that lined a narrow serving aisle. The fresh air and the sight of an unbroken blue sky above, when she finally descended the stairs, was gratifying. The grounds outside were a welcoming open space, with patterned tiled floors and long stretches of maroon carpet creating paths for worshippers between the low-domed buildings. Rajni walked up to the sarovar, a large pool at the temple’s entrance. The water rippled from the movements of bathing worshippers, breaking Rajni’s reflection. She pulled her short hair back and even through the movement of the water, she could see how much she looked like Mum these days – the sharp chin and dark eyebrows. Even when she smiled, she appeared stern and disapproving, or so her students said.

At the edge of the pool, a woman lowered her feet into the water, a small wave sweeping up to darken the border of her salwar. An elderly man wearing only a dhoti around his waist stood in the centre of the pool, bending his knees to reach down and scoop the water in his hands and pour it over his head. As it cascaded down his neck and shoulders, he tipped his head up to the sky and smiled beatifically. Plump orange fish cut their paths through the water, their tails flickering like faulty bulbs. With unexpected grace, the man folded at his hips to gather more water. Then he brought his cupped hands to his lips and drank.

Rajni flinched. She didn’t mean to, it was an involuntary response to the man ingesting water that others were bathing in. Pissing in as well – surely the peaceful grin spreading on that child’s face was not from a spiritual release?

The bathing was unnecessary, although Mum had told and re-told Rajni the story of her name and its roots in holy waters many times. Bibi Rajni, a woman married off to a leper, had remained devoted to her husband, carting him around in a wheelbarrow. One afternoon, he went to take a bath in the sarovar outside the Golden Temple in Amritsar and miraculously, his leprosy was cured. ‘Remember your namesake,’ was Mum’s favourite character-building advice. The result was a childhood spent making tenuous allegorical connections (maybe being Asian was like having a terrible disease and she had to wash in the local pool so the girls on the bus didn’t declare her street Paki Zone?).

Rajni and her sisters were expected to bathe in holy water once they got to the Golden Temple. It was one of those pilgrimage duties that Mum had stipulated, preceding a quote about bathing in God’s immortal nectar that did not further clarify the difference between nectar and water, nor the figurative nature of this instruction. The power of metaphor was largely lost on Mum anyway. She had wanted physical proof of the presence of God when her symptoms first appeared, as if she could already sense the dire diagnosis. Wanting to help, Rajni had printed glossy pictures of all ten Gurus and pasted them around the house, which became a shrine of its own. Kirtan songs floated through the hallways, choral and sorrowful. Incense and birdseed and fruit platter offerings became commonplace. It was all too reminiscent of the days after Dad died, when superstitions and rituals became Mum’s insurance policy against further misfortune.

In the hospital as well, everything was done in the spirit of making Mum more comfortable when they knew that a painful end was upon her. Do whatever she wants had been Rajni’s mantra since returning from her last trip to India, and now it was even more pertinent because denying Mum any hope was akin to torture. Rajni even began feeling guilty for resisting Mum years back, when she tried to prescribe religious rituals and herbal remedies for her fertility problems. ‘I’m telling you, it worked for me. After eleven years of thinking I couldn’t have any more children, out came Jezmeen and then Shirina three years after her,’ Mum insisted. Unable to deter Mum, Rajni finally resorted to the humiliating revelation that she and Kabir had stopped trying – stopped having sex altogether, in fact. The last thing Mum said on the matter was: ‘Well, at least you’ve got a son. At least you don’t have to worry like I did, with three daughters.’

At least that.

Rajni looked down at the water and took a small step towards it. Her feet were still bare and as they made contact with the small puddles that other pilgrims had left on their way out, she felt some relief. The water was cool and it protected her soles from the sunbaked tiles. She took another step, and then another. Now her toes were touching the murky water. The ghostly bodies of fish curved and shot off. The man who had drunk the water was now taking slow strides across the length of the pool, his knees lifting high like a soldier. Rajni remained on the edges for a long time, the heat prompting her to inch closer and closer until her entire feet were submerged. She closed her eyes. Spots of light darted across the darkness and then eventually, they faded. The din of traffic – those angry, insistent horns – could be heard in the distance. A child’s high-pitched squeal rang out, shattering Rajni’s inner calm before she even began to summon it. She sighed and opened her eyes.

She didn’t want to be here. Especially not now, with everything happening at home, but also not ever. India did not suit her and not least because of the memories it evoked – physically, her body rebelled against the country: an itch from the soot-filled air was beginning in her throat, the bumpy car rides made her stomach turn and a bout of indigestion was inevitable, no matter how staunchly she abstained from potentially contaminated food. Jezmeen and Shirina didn’t understand Rajni’s aversion to India because by the time they came of age, a wave of multicultural pride was sweeping over England and all of a sudden, it was trendy to have an ethnic background. While Rajni had waited by the radio with her finger poised over the deck to record her favourite Top of the Pops song, Jezmeen’s speakers played Hindi song remixes. At fifteen, Rajni had spent Saturday afternoons dancing frantically at those nightclubs which opened in the daytime for Asian kids whose parents wouldn’t let them out at night, while Shirina’s twenty-fifth year saw her gladly uploading her picture onto a Sikh matrimonial website. Rajni had done her best to pave the way for her little sisters to be more English, and instead they went ahead and embraced their culture, proving Mum’s point that Rajni had no business having an identity crisis in the first place.

There were other reasons behind Rajni’s complicated history with this country, reasons she could not explain to Jezmeen and Shirina. When they were planning this trip, Jezmeen had wondered aloud at why they never visited India when they were growing up. ‘Mum couldn’t afford it,’ Rajni reminded her. ‘Single mother with three kids? There was no way she could make that trip.’ The steep price of a holiday had always been a convenient excuse, and it stopped her sisters from asking any other questions. I can never go back there, Mum had cried one afternoon when Rajni was sixteen, and despite knowing better, she couldn’t help feeling that this was her fault. She still felt responsible for Mum’s banishment from her family.

In the rippled water, Rajni’s reflection was distorted. Her chin multiplied and overlapped, and her cheeks sagged. She withdrew her feet from the water. The sight of her pruned toes filled her with sorrow as she remembered Mum’s bare feet poking out from under her blanket at the hospital. Her slow and laboured breaths were painful to listen to. ‘Why isn’t she wearing any socks?’ Rajni had demanded of the nurses, who scurried around the foot of the bed, eventually finding Mum’s socks. Rajni dismissed them from the room and she rolled the socks onto Mum’s feet herself. Her skin was ice cold to the touch, and Rajni had massaged her feet gently, hoping to ease those hard, heaving breaths. She had pressed her hands into Mum’s bony heels and high arches until her own shoulders ached. She had waited for something divine to come from all this effort, all this wishing, but it didn’t.

Chapter Four

Purity of heart, soul and mind are all important for achieving spiritual healing. You should not be intoxicated at any point during this journey. Please try to refrain from drinking alcohol while in India. Please also dress modestly and be respectful to the culture. I happen to know of a very good tailor in Karol Bagh market – Madhuri Fashions – if you want something stylish but also suitable for this journey.

That part of Mum’s letter was definitely aimed at Jezmeen. She noted the word ‘try’ and congratulated herself for not drinking until she was back in her hotel room after their morning of service in the temple. Jezmeen opened the fridge door and surveyed the mini-bar. This tiny bottle of Grey Goose fit in her palm, so she was only sinning a little bit. She twisted off the cap, opened her mouth and tipped the contents down her gullet. The current crisis definitely warranted morning boozing.

Don’t Google yourself. The voice in her head was Cameron’s – he had just sent her an email, urgently asking her to call him. ‘Too late,’ she had replied after the incident with the teenage boys earlier. ‘I already saw it.’ She was screwed. The video had gone viral, and she had been identified. The internet was screaming with laughter over the irony of Jezmeen Shergill – the host of a television show which poked fun at people being caught doing embarrassing things on video – being caught doing something so embarrassing on video.

Cameron had warned Jezmeen that things would happen rapidly, but she could not have anticipated this. In the few hours since it had caught fire, there were mentions of her name on blogs, trolling comments, a particularly nasty thread on the National Geographic nature preservation forum and of course, there was the video. The first thing that came up when you searched for her name used to be TELEVISION HOST (to distinguish her from a paediatric dentist named Jezmeen Shergill in Birmingham). Now it was: TELEVISION HOST JEZMEEN SHERGILL BRUTALLY MURDERS ENDANGERED ANIMAL.

Needless to say, Jezmeen had compulsively typed her name into Google every few minutes today, while she was supposed to be doing seva. She was aware of Rajni watching and disapproving as she tapped away on her phone. Now she sat in the hotel, watching her notoriety multiply in the search result count. Another email from Cameron popped up: SERIOUSLY. DON’T GOOGLE YOURSELF. Easy for him to warn her against it; she’d searched for his name once and found only three hits. One, his earnest and suited LinkedIn picture from at least a decade ago (he had hair then), gave the impression that his early career was in real estate or insurance brokering.

‘Oh God,’ Jezmeen uttered aloud into the empty room. Her Wikipedia page – previously only consisting of a short paragraph outlining her modest career achievements – had been updated. The most objective account of Jezmeen’s incident was headed ‘Arowana Fish Controversy’.

On July 7th, 2018, Shergill was dining in Feng Shui restaurant in South London when she became involved in an altercation with her dining partner.

Feng Shui, which boasts a ten-foot aquarium, hosts its own rare Albino Arowana fish (valued at £35,000). The fish is known to be very sensitive to conflict and is prone to hurting itself when it is provoked or aggravated. The argument between Shergill and her partner took place near the aquarium, despite numerous attempts from the restaurant owners to ask them to respect the fish and move the argument outside. Onlookers reported that after the restaurant owner tried to steer Shergill away from the aquarium, she slammed her hand against the glass, causing the fish great distress. It leaped out of the water and onto the floor, where Shergill kicked it repeatedly.

This was the most objective version of events? It was lacking in some key details. For starters, the ‘dining partner’ had been Jezmeen’s boyfriend, Mark. Jezmeen had mistakenly thought that reservations at Feng Shui meant a proposal. She hadn’t allowed herself to consider the possibility that he might be breaking up with her. ‘You just don’t seem very happy with yourself,’ he’d said.

‘But my mum just died. I’m dealing with a lot,’ Jezmeen protested. It was an understatement, because Jezmeen couldn’t put in words how she felt about Mum’s death. The thought of death in general had always made Jezmeen desperately want to rewind time, even when she was little. After Dad died, she found it comforting to pretend he was just in hiding for a while, until Mum told her to knock it off. Mum’s death was still unreal to her. She was too old for fantasies of Mum’s absence being temporary, which was where alcohol certainly helped.

Mark shook his head. ‘It’s been like this for a long time,’ he said sadly, glancing pointedly at the bottle of wine, which had inched towards Jezmeen’s side of the table.

And did the restaurant owner really attempt to ‘steer’ Jezmeen away? Try, ‘grabbed her by the shoulders, leaving her no choice but to flail in self-defence, accidentally knocking on the aquarium.’ Also, she did not think that the restaurant owner was serious when he told her that the fish – a bloated, miserable old thing – was ‘emotionally vulnerable’. Those had been his words. It was only after the whole incident blew up that Jezmeen learned about the endangered Arowana fish and indeed its sensitive nature. Part of the reason there was so much interest in the incident was because although Arowanas were rumoured to be capable of putting themselves out of misery by flipping out of their tanks, nobody had actually captured it on video before. When Jezmeen and the restaurant owner started arguing, onlookers began filming, thinking they were just witnessing an entertaining tantrum. Now the death of the fish was taking on a life of its own.

Jezmeen sank back into the bed. She could feel the vodka working now – she had hardly eaten anything all day. After finding out that her video had gone viral, she had to return to the langar hall and wash old breakfast plates, which ruined what little appetite she had. Across the room, the dresser mirror presented an unflattering reflection, but not an unfamiliar one. If she clicked on Images, there’d be a few good headshots but even more stills from the videos: her brief and modest celebrity would turn into infamy now. She hadn’t been on television long enough to have a solid reputation to fall back on – she was an up-and-coming entertainment figure once, and Fish Slayer forevermore.

Jezmeen scrolled to the bottom of the Wikipedia page where her few acting roles were listed. Before she landed the DisasterTube hosting role, she had been a waitress on EastEnders – recurring for three episodes – and a receptionist in a television movie based on a real-life scandal in a London investment bank. Several other roles hadn’t made it to this résumé, though, and for the sake of beefing up her filmography, Jezmeen considered adding them. She had been a non-speaking extra in a few things, and what about that black-and-white student film she helped to direct ages ago? Then again, Jezmeen was grateful that some roles never made it to her page, like the short film for an amusement park in Taiwan, which people watched before getting on a rather racist Arabian Nights-themed ride. Never again, Jezmeen had vowed, after prancing around in that belly-dancer outfit and imploring roller-coaster riders to save her from her impending marriage to a cruel, moustached king. Then there were the countless runners-up, speaking parts that would have set her up for more opportunities, if she’d got them. ‘Second in line to be considered for Barista #2 in a romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant.’ ‘Was told voice too husky to narrate commercial for major adult nappy brand.’ (Initially, Jezmeen thought the director was complimenting her when he said, ‘“Ultra-absorbent” doesn’t usually sound so suggestive.’) Nobody looking at this page would know how Jezmeen Shergill almost became famous before killing that fish and clearly deserved another chance.

Jezmeen needed a distraction from reading about herself on the internet, or there was a risk of polishing off all of the mini-bar’s offerings before dinner time. She glanced at her open suitcase. In her haste to catch her flight from London at the last minute, she had thrown together a lot of clothes that really weren’t suitable for Delhi – the only appropriate bits were that long, mothball-scented cotton top she’d worn today, bought by Mum from a market in West London years ago, and her one pair of jeans which didn’t have fashionable rips in them. Please dress modestly. Mum had found a way to lecture her about her skimpy clothing from beyond the grave. That was why Jezmeen bristled when Rajni told her off for revealing too much skin yesterday – it was enough to hear it from Mum’s letter. Even though Jezmeen didn’t want to admit that her mother and sister were right, she really needed a more modest wardrobe than tank tops and cut-off denim shorts for this trip.

Jezmeen picked up the phone and dialled Rajni’s room number according to the instructions. The response was a siren-like dial tone. She pressed 0 for the operator.

‘Hi, how do I call another room?’ she asked when the receptionist picked up.

‘You dial their room number,’ she said in a tone that suggested Jezmeen was very thick.

‘I tried that … Never mind. Thanks,’ she said. After hanging up, she tried Shirina and by some miracle, got connected.