My discovery occurred on an afternoon when I’d gone to play at the home of one of my classmates. This was a rare event because, in spite of my mother’s urgings, I didn’t tend to socialize much. Children my own age did not seem particularly interesting to me. I preferred to follow my mother around the house, though she didn’t encourage this. On occasion, I listened from behind a door as she spoke on the phone, or watched her as she sat on the sofa with her eyes closed, a frown of concentration on her forehead. It amazed me how still she could be, how complete in herself. I tried it sometimes. But I could keep it up for only a few minutes before I’d get pins and needles.
I’ve forgotten the girl’s name, and why in the course of the afternoon we went into her parents’ bedroom, but I do remember her telling me not to jump on her parents’ bed, they didn’t like it.
“You mean your mom sleeps here—with your dad?” I asked, surprised and faintly disgusted.
“Sure she does,” the girl replied. “You mean your mom doesn’t?”
Under her incredulous eyes, I hung my guilty head.
“You guys are weird,” she pronounced.
After that afternoon, I undertook a course of serious research. One by one, I went to the homes of the children I knew (they were not many) and, between games and snacks and TV, checked casually into their mothers’ sleeping arrangements. Finally I was forced to conclude that my family was, indeed, weird.
Armed with the statistics, I confronted my mother.
That was when I made the other discovery, the one that would nudge and gnaw and mock at me all my growing-up years.
My mother was a dream teller.
The discovery did not come to me easily. My mother disliked speaking about herself and, over the years of my childhood, had perfected many methods for deflecting my questions. This time, though, I persisted.
“Why don’t you sleep with Dad?” I kept asking. “Or at least with me, like Mallika’s mother does? Don’t you love us?”
She was quiet for so long, I was about to ask again. But then she said, “I do love you.” I could hear the reluctance in her voice, like rust, making it brittle. “I don’t sleep with you or your father because my work is to dream. I can’t do it if someone is in bed with me.”
My work is to dream.
I turned the words over and over in my mind, intrigued. I didn’t understand them, but I was in love with them already. I wanted to be able to say them to someone someday. At the same time, they frightened me. They seemed to move her out of my reach.
“What do you mean?” I asked, making my voice angry.
There was a look on her face—I would have called it despair, if I had known to do so. “I dream the dreams of other people,” she said. “So I can help them live their lives.”
I still didn’t understand, but her face was pale and tight, like a cocoon, and her hands were clenched in her lap. I didn’t have the heart to badger her further. Hadn’t she admitted to the most important thing, that she loved us? I nodded my head as though I were satisfied with her explanation.
Her smile was laced with relief. She gave me a hug. I could feel the remnants of stiffness in her shoulders.
“Why don’t you decide what you want for dinner?” she said. “You can help me cook it, if you like.”
I allowed myself to be diverted and asked for ravioli. I’d had it for the first time on that fateful afternoon in my classmate’s house. At home we rarely ate anything but Indian; that was the one way in which my mother kept her culture. She had never made ravioli before, but she looked it up in a cookbook. We spent the rest of the afternoon rolling, crimping, stuffing dough with cheese. The ravioli turned out lumpy, and the kitchen was a disaster, sauce smeared everywhere and shreds of cheese underfoot, but we were delighted with ourselves.
In the middle of boiling the ravioli my mother turned to me and said—though I hadn’t shared my classmate’s words with her—“Rakhi, remember this: being different doesn’t mean that you’re weird.” She startled me in this manner from time to time, referring to things she couldn’t possibly know. But her clairvoyance was erratic. It would create problems for us over the years, making her ignorant of events I expected her to know, secrets I longed to tell her but couldn’t bear to speak of.
For example: the reason why I left Sonny.
At dinner Father admired the creative shapes we’d made and said it was a meal at once delicious and instructive. He cleaned up the kitchen afterward, humming a Hindi song as he scrubbed the sink with Comet, his hands encased in neon yellow rubber gloves. He was the tidy one in our household, the methodical one, always kind, the one with music. My mother—secretive, stubborn, unreliable—couldn’t hold a tune to save her life. I wanted to be just like her.
Years later, after she died, my father would say, “Not true. She didn’t love me, not really. She never let me get that close. The place right at the center of her—that was reserved for her dream gods or demons, whoever they were. She never shared that with anyone. Not even you.”
And I would be forced to admit that he, too, was right.
3
She’s thinking of green. Deep-forest green, gold-gray green, green tinged with the foggy silver of dawn, edged with the brittle brown of time passing. All the colors of the eucalyptus grove she walked to earlier this morning. She’s thinking of the colors she will have to mix in order to re-create that green, colors that are not green at all. It is the closest thing she knows to magic in a world that has disappointed her over and over with its mundane workaday habits. Even its terrors are predictable ones; its disappointments mark the air with their distinctive, unmistakable odor long before they come to pass.
She takes out the big clear-glass plate that serves as her palette as she thinks this; she takes out a new, primed canvas. She feels its spackled surface; its smell is as familiar to her as Jona’s breath. She squeezes out Naples yellow and yellow ochre, cobalt and cyan and burnt sienna, a bit of Prussian blue for the shadows, and considers the unfamiliar geometry of foliage. Her thick black hair, tied back mercilessly with one of Jona’s old ribbons, threatens to escape and curl around her face. Deceptive, those baby curls. Along with the ridged planes of her cheekbones, her high, unlined forehead (which is shiny right now with concentration), and the small mole in the exact center of her lower lip, they charm strangers into believing that she is innocent and high-spirited and optimistic, and that this is so because nothing bad has ever happened to her. If they looked into her eyes, wide, with a depth in them that is almost purple (like night, like a new bruise, like the aparajita flower that her mother has never described to her), they would see that this is only partly true. But few people care to do that—and of these even fewer know how to go about it. Rakhi is not unhappy about this. As she told Belle once, she prefers to remain misunderstood.
The eucalyptus grove was wet when she got there this morning, a fact that surprised her. It hadn’t rained near her house, though it was misty the way it usually is in Berkeley. But in the grove there were puddles of water. She had to step around them to keep her shoes dry. And then another surprise: there was a man in the eucalyptus grove. A rare occurrence, so early on a weekday. He was practicing Tai Chi.
She had come to the grove because she planned to paint it, and this made her nervous because she’d never painted trees before. Until now, most of her paintings had been about India—an imagined India, an India researched from photographs, because she’d never traveled there. She’d painted temples and cityscapes and women in a marketplace and bus drivers at lunch, but never trees, not as her main focus. But last night it had struck her that she needed to do something new, something challenging. It was a thought she was already regretting.
She was annoyed when she first saw him. She had wanted the grove to herself, its energies undisturbed. But he was far enough away that after a while she did not mind. She watched his clean underwater movements and thought, This is how people were meant to use their bodies. From where she stood, it seemed to her that he had beautiful hands. He was dressed in loose-fitting white clothes, and the sun, filtering hesitantly through eucalyptus branches, lent iridescence to his black hair. She could not see his face clearly— just a hint of olive skin and high cheekbones. For a moment she wondered who he was. If he was Indian. She wanted to walk up and look into his face. There was a tingling in the soles of her feet, precursor to desire, which she’d thought she had put away after things went wrong with her marriage. She shut her eyes to control it. She was older now; she was a mother. She knew from experience that the tingling pointed the direct route to trouble, and she’d had enough trouble in her life already.
She fastens the canvas to the easel, tightens the screws to hold it steady. She loads a brush with color and makes that first pure sweep across the virgin background. This is the moment when anything is possible.
The phone rings.
Annoyed, she wonders who it could be. Belle knows not to disturb her in the morning, which is her painting time. Her mother would be busy with her clients. Her father would be at work. Besides, he calls her only when he is drunk, on weekends.
She waits impatiently through the rings for the machine to turn itself on. A voice begins to leave a message. The phone is shut in a closet at the other end of the apartment (she puts it there at painting time), so she cannot decipher the words. But she knows the voice.
Sonny.
She should have guessed it! She feels herself tensing, a tightness that starts in the backs of her calves and moves up her body into her fingertips. She grips the brush more firmly.
I refuse to stop
for him.
But the truth is that she can’t stop for anyone, not right now.
She tried to explain this to Sonny once. How at a certain moment the colors take over the eyes, the hands. How she must surrender her body to their rhythm. How, until the movement is done, nothing else matters.
She had not expected him, who was not an artist, to understand.
They were at the table, finishing dinner. He was eating and flipping through a music magazine. She can never remember the names of his magazines—except
Playboy,
over which they once fought. He took small bites of the sandesh she had made. This was when she still cooked elaborate meals—appetizers, rotis rolled out fresh, rich curries in almond sauce, traditional Indian desserts that required hours of culinary acrobatics. He was careful to brush the sweet white crumbs from his fingers between bites. It never ceased to amaze her that a man like him, so Dionysian in his other appetites, should have such dainty table manners. He didn’t say anything for so long that she thought he had not heard. He was often off in places in his head. Or perhaps he had nothing to say. But as she was taking the dishes to the sink, he murmured, “It’s like being in the middle of lovemaking, isn’t it?”
She had been silenced by the exactness of the comparison. He humbled her like that from time to time, making her see invisible things about herself, articulating what she had no words for. It was one of the things she had loved in him before the night that had spoiled everything.
As soon as she thinks the words, she knows they aren’t true. A relationship doesn’t spoil in one night, like milk. There had been hints for a while, but she had chosen not to see. She had gone around and around the millstone of her life that she was so in love with, like the blinkered bullocks she had seen in a photograph of an Indian village.
Bulls can be forgiven their blindness. She had never forgiven herself for hers. That is why her calves grow tight when Sonny calls, and there’s a pain like a stuck fishbone in her throat.
She finishes a set of strokes, drops the brush into a jar of turpentine, and picks up another. She adds colors, shapes. She thins the paint carefully with linseed oil so that the lines of objects grow fluid. When their edges bleed into each other to form unplanned-for designs, her scalp prickles with pleasure.
But the phone is ringing again, just when she needs all her concentration.
If it’s Sonny calling back, he’s going to be one sorry puppy.
But this time the voice is female. Muffled and closeted as it is, she can’t quite place it, though it is tantalizingly familiar. She registers the gritty purple anxiety of the tone. The whole world, yin and yang, is conspiring against her today. Well, this woman will have to wait, too.
She’s halfway into the first layer of the painting, which is a close-up of a tree, texture of leaves and peeling bark. Sunlight glints at its edge like an uncertain memory. A breeze shakes the chunky eucalyptus blooms in the left corner free of their pollen. She stares at the easel, trying to feel the life behind the brushstrokes. Below what she has made, there are other layers waiting. New colors to introduce. Ivory, black, vermilion, a hint of sea salt heavying the air. She touches the lower right corner tentatively. She needs something more here. Perhaps—? She hadn’t planned on it, but suddenly she decides to paint in the man with the beautiful hands.
The phone calls have done their job, though, waking the whisper voice that lives inside her skull. What if Sonny was calling about Jona, who’s staying with him this week? it asks. What if that second call was from Jona’s school? What if something terrible happened to her?
If you were a good mother,
it says with disapproval,
you’d stop right now and check.
The whisper voice calls up catastrophes behind her squeezed-shut eyes. It makes her hand shake.