“You think wearing that turban makes you better than other people and gives you the right to judge them?” she says. “You think you know all about me? Well, you’d better leave before I contaminate you with my coolness.” She turns to me. “We need to start with the inventory. We’re already late.”
Belle has contacted a company that buys equipment from bankrupt businesses. They’ve agreed to look at our inventory and give us a price. If we agree, they’ll send their van in a couple of days to pick up everything they want. We’ll have to throw out the rest, I guess, or maybe give it to Goodwill. And then good-bye, Chai House.
Belle calls out the names of items, and I write them down. The espresso machine, the display trays, the spoons with roses embossed on the handle. I remember buying each item. My hand hurts. I realize I’m gripping the pen too tightly. My father has disappeared into the kitchen area in the back, where the stoves and ovens are, but the young man, surprisingly, is still around. When Belle climbs up to see what’s stored in the attic, he steadies the ladder for her, although she pointedly ignores him. I feel a wrench as I add the rocking chairs to the list. I can’t take them, even though I’d like to. Soon I’ll have to move to a smaller place. And begin the long search for another job. My stomach curdles as I think of it.
Several hours and we’ve barely made a dent. Who knew we had so many little things: cookie cutters, melon scoops, teapots with silk cozies to keep them warm? I’m exhausted, dusty, hungry. Belle suggests that one of us run down the street for some fast food. The young man, who’s been helping us fill boxes, offers to do it. I take out some money from my rapidly slimming purse, but he waves it away. “My treat,” he says with a grin that makes him seem younger and less forbidding.
“Absolutely not,” Belle says, chin squared in stubbornness. I can see we’re in for another long argument, but then, from the door of the cooking area, my father clears his throat.
“I could fry up a few pakoras for you,” he suggests hesitantly. “Make some cha, Indian style?”
Cha,
that Bengali word again. I remember my mother using it, though I can’t quite recall when. I’m about to refuse, but Belle says, “That would be great, Mr. Gupta. We have all this good Darjeeling tea we’ve been saving—”
“Not to mention a whole packet of chickpea flour,” the young man adds, “destined never to be used in your lifetime—”
Belle draws in her breath for a suitable rejoinder, but my father, in his new incarnation as chef-cum-peacemaker, asks the young man to carry the box into the kitchen for him. We hear murmurings, the water runs, there’s the sizzle of pakoras in hot oil.
Belle sits down in one of the rocking chairs and puts up her feet with a sigh.
“How’s the job search going?” I ask.
She grimaces. “It’s a soulless world out there, Rikki. No one wants people like us, with our enriching and impractical liberal education.”
I sit there rocking. She’s right—what am I trained to do? Maybe I could work as a maid in a hotel, or a waitress in someone else’s restaurant. I guess I could clean houses, except if folks knew what my own apartment looked like, no one would hire me.
“Hey,” Belle says suddenly. “Is that your dad singing?”
It is. He’s singing one of his Hindi songs—it must be a well-known one, because the young man joins in the chorus. They make a good duo, though my father is obviously the lead singer. Interesting how when he sings his diffidence falls from him and a rich, pure melody emerges.
“He’s good!” Belle says. “How come you didn’t inherit either of your parents’ talents?”
“Thanks,” I say. It’s the first time she’s mentioned my mother without an accompanying somberness. It’s the first time I haven’t flinched when she’s been mentioned. It’s a progress of sorts.
“That other guy—he isn’t too bad either,” I say. “I wonder what his name is.”
“Jespal.”
“So you know him from before?”
“I’ve seen him around at community events back in Turlock.
My folks talk about him all the time. Successful career. Keeps in close touch with his family. Plus a devout Sikh. What more could a girl want, as my mother is fond of saying.”
“And what do
you
say, especially now that he’s shown up at your doorstep, bearing gifts?”
“Yeah, chickpea flour and radishes.”
“Things can only improve from there! He’s obviously interested, to hang around after the tongue-lashing you gave him.”
“Even if he is, I don’t have the energy to respond. Besides, nothing could come of it. Do you see me covering my head and following him to the gurdwara every weekend? And he’d probably faint from shock if I took him to my favorite club.”
The men bring in trays of steaming dishes. Tea, pakoras, a chutney to go with the spicy balls, which, my father informs us, he has concocted out of spinach, onions and chickpea flour. (“Known as besan to the initiated,” Jespal adds, with an impudent, imprudent grin, to which Belle returns a dagger look.) It’s a novel pleasure to be waited on in our own Chai House, and by men, too.
“How much sugar in your cha?” Father asks.
Now I recall when I heard that word before. My mother had said our problem was that we hadn’t been able to make this into a real cha shop. It upsets me all over again to remember that she had thought we weren’t authentic.
“Mr. Gupta!” Belle says as she crunches into a pakora. “How did you learn to cook so well?”
My father smiles. “When I was growing up, my parents were very poor. For a while there wasn’t any money for me to go to school unless I earned it myself. So I took a job as an assistant in a snack shop. Someday when there’s time, I’ll tell you more about it.”
“This tea is excellent,” Jespal says. “Did you put in ginger? That’s how my mother makes it, too!”
I sip my tea. It’s rich and full-bodied and very sweet, with a slight kick to it that must be from the ginger. I have to admit it’s far superior to the watery version with too much cinnamon that I’d drunk in other cafés and then served in ours.
Jespal exchanges phone numbers with my father before he leaves. He glances at Belle as though he wants to ask her something, but finally he doesn’t. I watch my father pour another cup of tea for Belle, raising the pot high with a practiced hand to let the amber stream froth into her cup without spilling a drop. All the earlier weakness seems to have left his arm. He handles the cup almost tenderly, and I realize that he is enjoying this.
I’d always thought my mother was the mystery person in our household. But my chameleon father is turning out to have a few surprises in him, too.
“Girls,” he says now. “If I may call you girls—? May I suggest that you leave the inventorying for the day?”
“We don’t have the luxury, Dad,” I say, my brief moment of well-being replaced by irritation. There he goes, interfering in my life again. “We don’t have customers, and there’s no money to pay the rent. Let’s face the truth—we’ve lost the battle with the competition.”
I glance balefully at the café across the street. Someone’s standing outside, watching our store. For some reason, I can’t see him—or her—clearly. Even though it’s a sunny day, there’s a shadow over the street right in that spot. Or maybe it’s a smudge on our storefront window, which we’ve been too disheartened to clean in a while. But I don’t need to see to know. It’s the manager. Why is she standing outside instead of tending to her (or should I say
our
) milling clientele?
“I might have a suggestion or two, something to keep you from losing the store. It’s a lovely space—” He says it with such earnestness that I hold back my retort.
“We’ve gone over every possibility already,” Belle explains to him patiently. “We just don’t have the funds to survive.”
My father stares out the window. I wonder if he’s looking at the manager, and what he’s thinking. Had my mother said something to him about Java? But what could she have told him? They didn’t talk much, and they never discussed the inexplicable. He was uncomfortable with what couldn’t be verified by technology.
When he finally speaks, it isn’t anything I’m expecting.
“I have some money,” my father says. “Would you consider letting a new partner join your business?”
In the car we talk, but not about his offer. (Later I will wonder where the money came from, if it was my mother’s life insurance. But surely not, surely he couldn’t have received it so quickly.) I ask him about the journal entries.
“Is it hard for you to go through them?”
“Well, yes, it is. A lot of the time I’m struggling with the language. Some of the words—there aren’t any English terms for them. I hope I’m able to do them justice.”
“I didn’t mean that. Does it—uh—bother you to read them? Sometimes I feel like we’re trespassing, that perhaps we should just leave them the way they were, tied up, in the back of the closet—”
“You shouldn’t feel that way. Your mother was a meticulous person. You didn’t find those journals by accident. She left them for you. Maybe they’re her way of telling you what was on her mind.”
“From what I recall, she never had difficulty telling me exactly what was on her mind.”
“Those were just the surface things, the things she needed to say to run your everyday life. But the important things—the ones that live in dark closets inside us—I think everyone has trouble speaking about them.”
I didn’t expect to hear of dark inner closets from my father— but now that I give it some thought, it fits. Perhaps that’s where he disappeared to when he went on his drinking binges.
“Maybe leaving the journals behind is her way of comforting us,” my father says. “Some of the time when I’m reading them, it’s almost as though she’s right here, talking to me. Some of the things she wrote surprises me, though. She remembers events so differently. How we met, for example.” I dart a guilty glance at him, but he seems not to notice. “If it were anyone else, I’d say she’d just made that story up. But your mother—” He shakes his head, and I understand what he means. My mother was never one to make things up. Why would she? The world she lived in was more fascinating than any fantasy.
“Some of the time,” he continues, “it’s like reading a novel written by a stranger—I don’t recognize anyone, especially myself. And the parts about the caves, and her—uh, skill—why, it’s like one of those old tales I heard when growing up. Then she has those entries about clients coming to her for help. I can’t believe that all of that went on right in my house.” He sighs. “But they must have happened. At least in her mind.” He gives me an apologetic look, and I know he’s struggling with the same doubt that has plagued me.
Did she only imagine it all?
But I’m not ready to discuss my mother’s failing—if failing it was—with him. While I’m beginning to like the man I’m finding as I peel away that old label
father,
I have no doubt as to where my loyalties lie. I turn up the car radio to signal that our conversation is over, and the rest of the way we listen to Simon and Garfunkel on the oldies channel, singing about darkness my old friend.
23
They sit at the dining table late into the night, father and daughter, compiling lists, trying out ideas. Through their excitement they are dimly aware that this is a first-ever event. Before this, all their interactions took place in the presence of the mother,
through
her, as it were. She was their conductor, their buffer zone, their translator. She softened the combative edges of their words and clarified their questions, even to themselves.
I’ll take care of it,
she whispered without words.
Don’t you worry.
It was like making sounds underwater, the daughter thinks. Soft, rounded, beautiful, ineffective. Now that aquatic mother-medium is gone, taking all comfort with it, and her own words startle her, arrowing through the air with their new, harsh speed.
They have decided to transform the Chai House into an Indian snack shop, a chaer dokan, as it would be called in Calcutta. They’re going to model it after the shop the father worked in so many years ago, with a few American sanitary touches thrown in. He’ll teach Belle and her to brew tea and coffee the right way, and he’ll cook the snacks himself. He lists them on a sheet of paper: pakora, singara, sandesh, jilebi, beguni, nimki, mihidana. The daughter stares at the list in fascinated misgiving. She doesn’t recognize half the names, has tasted the others only occasionally. Can her father really transform himself into a chef extraordinaire and turn out these items from the mundaneness of flour and sugar syrup, chili, eggplants, peanut oil? Is he heroic enough to take on such a metamorphosis? But she doesn’t wish to lose this brief moment of camaraderie, this floating together on the cloud of their shared dream. So she says, instead, “Tell me about the shop where you worked.” And is plunged into her first Indian story.
I was only fourteen, he says, when my father lost his job. This was a great blow for our family, for though his job as a clerk in a government office was nothing special, it was the only income we had. Added to the problem was the fact that my father had developed a hacking cough—folks feared it was tuberculosis—and it kept him from finding a new position. He was always tired. The doctor advised us to move him to a place with cool, dry weather, Deoghar maybe, or Hazaribagh.
I remember that day in the doctor’s office, my mother, embarrassed, whispering that we couldn’t afford such an expensive move. The doctor, a young man, was sympathetic. My mother was a beautiful woman. I would soon learn that most men were sympathetic to her. He told her he’d give her the medicines for free. But my father needed more: clean air and bed rest and an ongoing, expensive diet of chicken soup and fresh fruit—things the doctor couldn’t do much about. Nor could we. We could barely afford a basic meal of watery rice and chilies. Every night for a year my mother and I went to bed hungry so my father could have more to eat. We didn’t let him know this, of course. He already felt he had failed us, and the doctor had warned us not to upset him further.