In my sorrow and guilt I thought to run away, believing that my going would restore peace, but my aunt guessed my mind and begged me to stay until the council came to a decision. I assented, for she was my first teacher, and this much I owed her. But later I wondered if it would have been better to have refused.
The meeting of the council (I thought of it as a trial) took days—or was it perhaps weeks? I attended some sessions; others were closed to me. At times I was asked to speak, at others ordered to remain silent while arguments were made for and against me. But perhaps it all took place in one afternoon, for time moves differently in the caves, and when I left to join my husband-to-be, less than a week had passed since we first met beside the roses.
I was sent to wait in my room while the council deliberated, and when I was brought back to the assembly hall, only the chief elder and my aunt were present. They told me I had three choices. The first was to remain in the caves with the elders for the rest of my life, and be a teacher. In doing so I would not suffer. This very night, with my permission, the elder would dream-walk into my memory and remove the man’s image from there, so that when I awoke I would no longer remember him. This was the safest and happiest of the three choices, they told me, for it was clear that I had a wayward mind and the outside world would present me with temptations too strong to withstand.
My second choice was to give up my talent and live out my life as that most ordinary of women, a wife. Again, the elder would adjust my memory so that I forgot the caves and all I’d learned there. I would go to my husband blank as new paper for him to write on, and he would be happy, for (they said) it is the wish of all men to construct without interference the story of their wives’ lives. This, too, was a safe choice, if not a happy one.
The third choice, of which they informed me reluctantly, and only when I rejected the first two, was this: I would be allowed to keep my powers, the lesser ones, so that I might help others in the world. In return, though I could live with a man if I chose to, I had to promise not to marry him. In the eye of the Great Power, then, my spiritual essence would not be joined to his. The door for my return to the sisterhood would thus not be closed completely in case I saw (as they hoped) the folly of my choice and wished to come back. But this was a dangerous choice, for it might go wrong in numerous ways.
It was this third I chose, though not with good grace, for it hobbled me with its many conditions. After, when my aunt tried to give me cautionary counsel, I turned from her angrily. Nothing would go wrong, I insisted.
I did not know that my choice would suspend me for the rest of my days between a world of inexplicable forces and the love of a man who insisted that such a world did not exist.
T he night before I left for Calcutta, my aunt brought me a gift. It was a small cloth pouch the size of a fist. When I opened the drawstring, there was another bag within, and then another. I reached in and took out a pinch of the reddish powder that lay there. For a moment, I was confused. Was it sindur? I wondered. A gesture of conciliation from my aunt, a wish for my happiness in married life? But when I touched it with the tip of my tongue I realized it was not the powder brides wear on their foreheads. No. My aunt had given me a handful of earth.
It is from the walkway in front of the caves, she told me, ground that centuries of dream tellers have stepped on. You’ll need it where you’re going.
I did not ask her what she meant. I was angry with her still, and disappointed at what she’d chosen to give me at my going-away. It was not until later, when I found myself in California with all the dreaming gone from me, that I realized the importance of the gift.
In the beginning I was not worried. I needed time to settle, I told myself. I needed to get used to my new life. There was much in it that I found novel and charming: how to manage a household, how to please a husband. (It was important for me to please him because I’d displeased him deeply by insisting on a legal ceremony instead of a temple wedding. He complained that this made him feel we weren’t really married.) There were dishes to try out, rooms to decorate. His lips tracing the lines of my collarbones at night. My hands feeling the corrugations of his spine, the smoothness of his thighs. But there came a day when these could not hold my attention, and when I looked in the mirror to apply sindur to my forehead, my face looked transparent, like a glass oval that was emptying out.
Dreams would not come to me in California because it was too new a place. Its people had settled there only a few hundred years ago, and neither its air nor its earth, the elements from which we most draw sustenance, was weighted yet with dreams. Yes, there had been older inhabitants, but they had been driven from the land, and in going had taken with them, along with their hopes, their ways of dreaming. They had left only tears behind, and curses that smudged the air.
At first I didn’t know what to do with the earth in the pouch. I sprinkled a little in my garden, but though it made my dahlias and gardenias bloom, it did not help me dream. I mixed a pinch of it into my rice and lentils, but beyond giving me cramps, it did nothing. Finally I placed the pouch under my pillow.
That night my sleep was filled with the colors and scents of home—things I had never missed while there. I awoke with a sore heart. But the dreams I needed, dreams that went beyond my own small life—I could sense their presence, but they wouldn’t come to me. My husband awoke with a headache, and a complaint that his sleep had been filled with terrible images, blood and rubble and dying animals.
I knew then what I had to do. The following night, when he fell asleep, I took my pillow to the living room and lay down on the scratchy carpet. Almost before I had closed my eyes, a dream descended on me. It spoke to me in a raven’s voice, giving instructions. It told me whose dream I was dreaming, and where I must meet him the next day, and how to help him. I felt the power of the dream flow into me until my bones grew phosphorescent and my blood buzzed as though I were drunk. I awoke weeping. I knew now how much my link with the dream spirits meant. I couldn’t give it up. I wept, too, because I realized the price I would have to pay—never again to spend the night with my husband.
Spend
. For the first time I realized the weighted accurateness of the verb, for dream tellers cannot squander their nights as ordinary women do. Never to hold the warm curve of his back pressed against me as we both drifted into oblivion. Never to wake and watch him still asleep, his hair tousled as a boy’s, the corner of his mouth twitching in a smile that I could only guess at. The small intimacies of pulling the quilt cover over him on a cold night, of rubbing his shoulders when he moaned in a nightmare.
I knew he’d be angry when I told him my decision. I would make up for it, I promised myself. I would please him in bed, make his room (already I thought of it as not mine) spin with stars before I left it each night. I didn’t know it would not be enough.
When I lifted my pillow and picked up the bag of earth, it felt lighter. I opened it with shaking fingers. The dust inside had diminished. It was as though my dreaming had used up a portion of it. My heart beat jaggedly as I looked at what was left. How many nights before it was all gone? And what would I do then?
25
Rakhi
We are going to reopen the shop tomorrow, on a Wednesday. It’s not the best choice, says Belle, but it isn’t the worst either. Wednesday is the day of the week named after Budh, the planetary deity of intelligence. Thursday, Brihaspati, would have been more auspicious—he is the wisdom planet, the teacher of the gods.
“Since when did you become an astrological expert?” I ask, half amused, half amazed.
“Jespal looked it up for me.”
“Ah, Jespal!” He’s been dropping by in the evenings to help with our redecoration efforts. Now it seems that’s not all he’s been doing. “Do I detect the blush of a rose on yon dusky cheek?”
“Quit teasing. It’s important to have the planets on our side, especially when battling the dark forces. But I’m thankful it isn’t Saturday. Shani can be a very destructive agent.”
“Dark forces! Destructive agent! You look too intelligent to believe in such nonsense,” my father says.
Belle’s mouth falls open in outrage. I brace myself, but she pulls herself together. “Mr. Gupta,” she says with a patience bordering on the saintly, “you know that’s not true.”
She must be growing fond of my father to make such allowances for him. It strikes me that I am, too.
“What’s not true, that it’s nonsense or that you look intelligent?”
I hide my smile behind my hand, but Belle is not to be deflected by paltry humor. “How could you not know, living with Mrs. Gupta all these years?”
“Ah, my dear, living with Mrs. Gupta was a most amazing experience, and a wonderful one. I wouldn’t have given it up for anything in my life, but perhaps it wasn’t quite what you’ve imagined it to be.”
We both pause in our tasks—Belle polishing the countertops, I mixing red paint (the shop is to have a new name; Jespal has already scraped the old one off the storefront window). Of all his stories, this is the one we most want to hear.
My father has been telling us stories all week, while he tries out snacks and sweets on us. I’m rusty, he claims. Got to get in shape. But I suspect he just loves to feed us. I enjoy the snacks, but it’s the stories I really crave. He has told us about his early days as a student in America, about the odd jobs he held to make money— a janitor in a hospital, a slot-machine repairman in a casino. About the people he met in these places. I would never have guessed that such a consummate storyteller lay waiting all these years inside my father. He prolongs the suspense until we’re about to shake him; he makes us burst out laughing at unexpected jokes. My favorite stories are about his life in India. But so far he has not told us any stories involving my mother, though he does mention her—lovingly, ruefully—in passing.
From time to time my father sings as he cooks, mostly songs from the movies, though sometimes a haunting tune that sounds far older will wind like wood smoke through the store. They make me restless, these tunes, as though there is something inside my chest that wants to escape. There’s a feeling like pinpricks in my fingers, a need to paint—something I haven’t been able to do since my mother’s death.
When I ask, he tells me these are folk songs that field hands sing in Bengal. He picked them up during school holidays when he visited his uncle, who was the subestate manager for the royal family of Nataal. I sense a story there. No, stories tucked within the envelopes of other stories, an entire post office worth of them, filling me with giddy anticipation.
But today my father tells us this is no time for lolling around, listening to foolish tales. Tomorrow’s a big day. Flyers have been passed out via Marco and his friends, advertisements have been placed in the
East Bay Express
and
India West.
I’ve given in and let my father deploy Sonny as our publicist, and he’s been talking up our new concept at the nightclub. We must be ready, my father insists. He needs to make another batch of gawja, those crisp diamonds of fried dough crusted with sugar. He wasn’t satisfied with the consistency of the melted sugar last time. We assure him that the gawjas were delicious, but he shakes his head. Nothing less than perfection will do for our grand reopening, as he calls it. He assigns Belle the task of writing our new menu on the board. She asks if she should provide brief descriptions of the items, but he says no. No pandering to tourist types here, he adds sternly. This is a real cha shop. If people ask, you can explain. But you’ll be surprised at how much they know already—and how much they can learn on their own. Jespal, who has just come in, is set to dusting the furniture. As for me, he shoos me outside to paint. The new name has to be dry by the time we open tomorrow. I comply, a little taken aback by his bustling, managerial manner. Is there no end to the personalities hiding inside my father’s skin? Don’t rush it, he warns as he disappears into the back room.
I trace the letters, then begin to fill them in.
Kurma House.
My father is the author of this name. He likes the pun, the idea of a word hidden beneath another word, to be revealed when the wind shifts, or when the viewer narrows her eyes. I pointed out to him that kurma is a dinner dish, something we don’t plan to serve. He shrugged. We are artists, Rakhi, he said loftily. Must we be bound to literalities?
The heft of the brush in my hand, heavy with paint, feels so right. Even though this isn’t the same as composing a painting, there are resemblances. The dip of the wrist as I tap it against the edge of the can, the curve of the arm as I trace the top of the K. I hadn’t realized how much my body had missed such movements.
As I paint, my eyes stray to the inside of the store. Jespal has done a good job of cleaning the glass—it’s almost as though it doesn’t exist. He reads out items from a list my father has jotted down while Belle writes them on the board. From time to time their eyes meet and they smile shyly. Suddenly it comes to me that within the year they will marry. (Is this prophecy, intuition, or just a guess? How far can I trust it, I who am not my mother?) Watching them, I feel at once happy and lonely. It’s not the loneliness of being without a mate, but something more primal. As though I were the only being left on this side of the glass, while the rest of the world—happy, uncaring—lived out its life on the other side. They were aware of my presence, they even waved to me from time to time, as Belle was doing, but they didn’t know how it felt to be looking in, waving back, unable to cross over.