Next week you will be tested on body parts, with special emphasis on appearances of the ear, the foot, the shoulder, the brow and the breast. Be prepared.
12
Rakhi
Armed with my sketchbook, I make my way to the eucalyptus grove. A few fingers of rain brush my face when I look up from under the hood of my poncho, but mostly it’s clearing up. A wash of light blue, so typical of our Bay Area, appears here and there. I love that blue. Not that I know any other sky. Though I’ve wanted to travel all my life, each time I planned a trip, some obstacle would trip me up. Mostly I would get sick. Once someone snatched my purse with my newly issued passport in it as I was getting on a bus. Another time, walking down a perfectly ordinary San Francisco street, I stepped into a pothole that I hadn’t realized was there and broke my ankle. This happened the day before Sonny and I were supposed to leave for Brazil to attend a music festival. I was disappointed—I’d been daydreaming about Rio for months—but Sonny was downright angry. His theory was that I subconsciously made these “accidents” happen because deep down I was terrified of trying something new. We had a huge fight over that one, but maybe he was right. Because soon there would be other new things he’d want me to try that I would shrink from. I’d claim moral outrage, but maybe it was only fear that made me refuse.
He went by himself to Rio and had a great time, and the next time he had to go out of town to attend a DJ convention, he didn’t ask me to accompany him. I didn’t say anything. I was afraid of revealing how hurt I was. But the jagged edge of that silence caught at our marriage and caused it to unravel a bit further.
Once I asked my mother what she thought of my accidents.
She said, “And what is an accident?”
My mother likes making statements like that. She does it well. In spite of myself, I’m impressed by them.
Then she started telling me the story of Shangri-La.
“I know about it, Mom. We saw the movie together, remember?”
It didn’t stop her from repeating the entire plot—the stranger who comes to the magic valley in the Himalayas, the beautiful young woman who, in leaving it, loses her youth and her life.
I waited for the moral, but she had started chopping mustard greens. “I’m going to make saag,” she said. “If you want some, I’ll put in an extra bunch.”
“Mom! Why did you tell me that story?”
She gave me a surprised look, as though it were obvious. “Sometimes we, too, live in Shangri-Las,” she said finally, “but like the woman in the movie, we don’t realize how special they are, or what they’re protecting us from. We’re too busy hankering after what we don’t know.”
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
My mother washed the saag and dropped it into boiling water. She waited until it turned bright green. Then she said, “Maybe someone’s telling you to stay right where you are.”
“That’s so completely superstitious,” I said, feeling angry and scared and unaccountably claustrophobic. “Are you telling me I shouldn’t leave California? How can you believe something so illogical?”
She smiled a little. She rarely took offense at what I said (a fact that frustrated me through my teenage years). “Firstly, I didn’t mention California, did I? Secondly, logical things require no belief—they’re there for everyone to see,” she said. She put on the kettle and went to the pantry to get a packet of the Brooke Bond tea, wrapped in its thick silver foil, which she favored. It was one of the few habits she’d carried over from India. Just as I was resigning myself to the fact that our conversation was over, I heard her add, “But this one I don’t need to believe. This one I know.”
I longed to ask her what she meant by that, but she must have regretted letting even that small crack appear in the wall behind which she hid herself. She kept me busy fielding questions about Jona’s activities until it was time for me to leave.
In the eucalyptus grove, I take in a deep lungful of damp air. I pick up a sloughed-off piece of bark, crumble it and hold it up to my nose. I love the smell of rain, of straggly growing things. “ ‘O let them be left, wildness and wet,’ ” I quote to Belle on seriously rainy days.
“Yeah,” she says. “And fungus and mildew and wood rot.” Some people have no romance in them.
When I got to college, I borrowed, from the South Asian library, a tape with songs about the Bengal monsoons: how the skies grow into the color of polished steel, how the clouds advance like black armies, or spill across the horizon like the unwound hair of beautiful maidens. I loved that tape, even though I could understand only about half the words. (Fortunately, it came with a pamphlet that provided translation.) I listened to the songs over and over, until Belle threatened to inflict violence on me. For months afterward, I found myself daydreaming about the storm-whipped palm trees, the red-breasted bulbuls taking shelter among the hanging roots of the banyan. The lightning was silver combs decorating the rain maidens’ hair. The rain was warm, like human tears. One of the singers had compared her heart to a dancing peacock. Was there some truth to that, or was it merely a poetic trope? Confronted by a direct question, my mother grudgingly admitted that there were peacocks, and that from time to time they did dance. My father informed me, with gruesome glee, that Calcutta flooded with every big rain, and decades-old muck (and worse) came up out of the sewers, and people died of cholera. But I was not fooled. They were hiding things from me, beautiful, mysterious, important things, as they always had. But why? Belle had told me that her parents—and the parents of the other desis she knew—loved to go on and on about India, which in their opinion was as close to paradise as you could get.
What cruel karma had placed me in the care of the only two Indians who never mentioned their homeland if they could help it?
“When I was little and didn’t know any better,” Belle told me once, “my parents would give me an extra two dollars per week to go to the language class at the gurdwara.”
I sighed. “I’d have been happy to give up my allowance for a chance to learn more Bengali—”
“You need help,” Belle said. “You are one sick person.”
A couple of times when I was in college, I tried to plan a trip to India. But it never worked out. The fellowship I applied for didn’t come through. The group I was going to travel with decided to go to Peru instead. My parents didn’t say anything, but it was clear they disapproved. Perhaps it was their silence that frightened me into giving up. Or perhaps the fear came from someplace inside me, as Sonny would later claim.
I no longer yearn for travel in the same way. Jona’s birth anchored me; the breakup of my marriage made a hole in my hull, imperfectly patched. I am moored to the Chai House by hope and responsibility and, increasingly, anxiety. Still, I think that before I die I would like to go to India—if only to lay to rest the ghosts that dance in my head like will-o’-the-wisps over a rippling sea.
I tromp through mud into the interior of the grove. Away from the trails to where the trees grow thickest, where the air is so wet you can almost see it, where I can pretend I’m in a real forest. It’s easier on a day like this when the grove is drenched and deserted. I sit on a fallen trunk and close my eyes in order to pretend better. This is my other fantasy, to live alone in the wilderness. (Belle says it’s the same fantasy because India is a jungle.)
When I open my eyes, he’s there.
No. Let me rephrase that. I don’t want it to sound like cheap magic, or a foolish fancy. He was there already—I just hadn’t noticed him. Over on one side, in a hollow, his back toward me, practicing. He’s been at it for a while—even from a distance I can tell his clothes are wet. Here’s a rain lover of an even greater magnitude than myself. Emboldened by our common passion, I’m tempted to approach him. But I don’t. There’s an aloneness to him, an absorption in the moment that I don’t want to disturb. Instead, I sketch his movements, which remind me of the flights of egrets. But I’m having problems. Sketch after sketch turns out wrong, wooden, spiritless. Why is this happening? It’s not as though I haven’t sketched people before—I did a whole series of Bharatnatyam dancers once, in charcoal, and they were good! Frustrated, I tear the sketches into pieces and look up, but he’s— and this time it’s really that way, sudden, soundless—gone.
He’s left something behind in the grove, though—an energy of some kind. I see an orchestra of movements in the emptiness, the shape of his body carved into the space between the tree trunks. Presence and absence, they form a flickering pattern. I stare at them a long time. It begins to rain again. The cold numbs my fingers, which lie still in my lap, drawing nothing. But the seed of an idea is beginning to form. A perhaps.
We ’re sitting at a bright orange table inside Java, Belle, my mother and myself, waiting for our order to be served. I glance around furtively, feeling like an undercover agent. “We have to venture into the enemy’s terrain,” my mother had said, “if we are to discover their secret.” So far the secret, if there’s one, seems to be in their newness. Everything in the café seems as though it were manufactured just a few hours ago. A synthetic brilliance shimmers over it all, unreal like a mirage: the yellow and orange countertops, the sharp-cornered steel napkin holders on each table, the espresso machines hissing like monsters from some futuristic world. The light from the overhead fixtures (which are shaped like flying saucers) has a hard, alien cast to it. I imagine it burning geometric patches into my skin.
Belle wrinkles her nose in distaste as she leans close. “I can’t understand how people can actually prefer this place to the Chai House,” she whispers.
Her words startle me. For a moment, I’m disoriented, as though awakened from a trance.
“The Chai House?” I repeat, stupidly. I know what she’s talking about, of course. Our store, which is going out of business even as we sit here reconnoitering. But for some reason I’m having trouble visualizing it. There’s something about this place I’m sitting in that makes it hard to imagine other places—as though nothing else existed. For a moment panic trails its icy fingers along my spine. I close my eyes and concentrate. The Chai House
does
exist, I insist to myself. But my mind is like a sodden paper, its newsprint of memories run together. Finally, shakily, I pull up an image: a maple rocking chair in an alcove, its rich, polished wood gleaming in the light of the old, goosenecked floor lamp I rescued from a garage sale. From the thankful solidity of these objects come others, until I’ve re-created my teahouse sufficiently to let out a breath of relief.
“Can you?” Belle is asking. When I give her a blank look, she repeats impatiently, “Can you understand why anyone would come to this place rather than to our store? They must have about as much taste as a box of instant mashed potatoes.”
I look around to see who these mashed-potato people are. There are quite a few customers in the café, though it’s not as crowded as I’d expected it to be. I’d been afraid that I might run into some of our old regulars, the pained awkwardness that would ensue. But I don’t know any of these folks. Where did they come from? They look ordinary enough, though, as they sip their coffees and munch their muffins while shuffling newspapers. No zombies here as far as I can see, lured in by the machinations of evil beings from another planet.
Suddenly I
can
understand why these people—and many others like them—might prefer Java to Chai House. Java demands nothing from them except their money. It allows them to remain unknown. No conversation, no contact, nothing to look at or discuss, nothing of themselves exchanged or exhaled. And yet they have community, too, as much of it as they want: the comfortable company of a roomful of nameless, faceless folks just like themselves, happy to be left alone, to gaze into the middle distance, to notice no one. For a moment, I become one with them, feeling my muscles relaxing into the slouch of anonymity.
While we, with our homemade cookies and custom-ordered coffees, our hand-finished furniture and silk puppets, our bulletin board chronicling our customers’ lives—we’ve insisted that the Chai House be noticed. That our customers allow us into their lives just as we’ve invited them into ours. That our shop stay with them even after they leave it. We’ve believed that places shouldn’t become clones of other places. We’ve believed that it’s important for people to have a venue to enjoy intelligent conversation and a well-brewed cup of tea. Have we built our entire business on an illusion? Have we wasted our time in creating a refuge when all people want is a stop-’n’-go?
But I’ll have to deal with these perplexities another time, because here comes our order, carried to our table by the manager herself. This is the first time I’ve seen her up close, and I can’t help staring. She’s gorgeous, from her seal-sleek blond hair to her perfectly manicured nails. As she walks to our table, she looks like a movie star playing the part of a coffee-shop manager. Even her smile is just the right mix of charm and efficiency.
“Ladies,” she says. “Here’s your tea with lemon”—my mother inclines her head—“your espresso”—Belle raises a finger—“and this latte must be for you!” She sets the cup down in front of me and looks at us appraisingly. “Your first time here, right? I can always tell!” She raises her voice. “Zelda, bring over a plate of our complimentary new-customer cookies.” Then she narrows her sapphire-blue eyes at me. “Aren’t you the woman who owns the tea shop across the street? I’ve seen you standing at your window.” The smile appears on her face again, sharp as crystal. “Checking out the competition, huh?”