Is this how my mother felt when she left her community of interpreters and lost her ability to dream?
After his initial slowness, my father has made great strides in translating the journals. He tells me he has fallen into a rhythm, has become accustomed to my mother’s style. I think he’s as addicted to them as I am. That he searches them with the same hunger. We’ve come to an unspoken agreement not to discuss them. I fear it will make him self-conscious, defensive, now that so many of the entries are about their life together. But sometimes I can’t help watching him with sideways surreptitiousness, trying to see him with my mother’s eyes.
I’m halfway through painting when I experience that strange prickling again on the back of my neck. Why should this be? People have been watching ever since I started the lettering. Marco strolled over to ask what I was doing, Mr. Jamison from the art store came to find out what we were going to sell now, strangers waiting at the bus stop stared, trying to guess the words before they were completed. But this is different—there’s a maliciousness to this gaze that goes through my clothes, through my skin, and into my spinal column like a needle of ice.
I look cautiously in the glass, but already I know. It’s the manager, standing outside Java, smoking a casual cigarette. She isn’t looking this way, but I can feel the intensity of her attention. There’s a heaviness in my shoulders. My arm aches with the effort of holding itself up. My hand shakes, and when I try to continue, I smudge the O beyond repair.
“How’s it going?” says my father from the door, making me jump and smear the
H
as well.
“Look what you made me do!” I say, hiding fear behind irritation. It isn’t totally true, and he knows it, but he doesn’t say anything in self-defense. He brings out a box of rags and dips them in thinner and helps me clean off the ruined letters. While I redo them, he stands beside me, arms crossed. I consider saying,
Don’t watch,
you’re making me nervous,
but then I realize something. His presence feels calming, protective—as though he’s a shield. I sense the malicious force hitting him and ricocheting away, unable to pass through. It gathers itself into a wave and hits him again, hard. I watch him carefully in the glass, but there’s no sign that he feels any of it.
“Dad,” I say, “don’t look now, but did you see that woman outside the coffee shop?”
He turns to stare. My heart hammers and I grab his arm and jerk him back. “Didn’t I just tell you not to look!” I hiss. I don’t inform him of the thought that went through my mind like a lightning flash—if his eyes met hers, she’d turn him into stone, like Medusa, or enchant him, like Circe.
Such nonsense, he would declare—and wouldn’t he be right? He dips his head conspiratorially, looking at me in the glass. Whatever it is you’re playing at, his good-humored expression says, I’m willing to play along.
“Your competitor, hunh?” he says with a grin. “But not anymore! We’re about to do something totally different, something she can’t match. You just watch, beti!” He gives my shoulders a squeeze. “I must inform you—rather immodestly—that I outdid myself with the gawja. Come in and taste some. It’ll—as you girls like to say—blow you away.”
He holds the door open. I go in. Behind me, tentacles of malice grasp for me one last time, slide off my skin. I nibble on the gawjas, which are as delicious as my father promised, and try to arrange my confusions.
This is what I end up with. It’s by no means satisfactory.
I look down in horror at the empty tray. She’s right. I can feel myself bloating up already. I’m probably breaking out in a rash, too.
“Girls! Girls!” my father says. He’s smiling proudly at this evidence of his success, never mind that his daughter feels like an overinflated blimp. “My gawjas can’t hurt you! Remember that song you used to sing over and over in your college days, driving us insane? Don’t worry, be happy.” He sings the refrain, sounding uncannily like Bobby McFerrin. “Everything’s going to go perfectly tomorrow.”
T omorrow comes sooner than I think it will. I’d expected to lie in bed, awake with worry and anticipation, but my sleep is sweet and immediate and refreshing, like a mouthful of rasogolla syrup. I wake to a cool, clear morning, a sky like white oleanders. When I step out to the car, there is a bird in the maple tree, one I haven’t seen in this part of the state before. It is large and gray, with bright orange mihidana eyes. It watches me intently, without any sign of fear. I run inside to get my father, but by the time we return, the bird is gone.
Could it be an omen? I ask.
What’s an omen? he says.
I sigh. I don’t want an argument between us today, but I know this: the universe does send us messages. The trouble is, most of us don’t know how to read them.
It’s at such times I miss my mother the most.
When we get to the store, the first thing I notice is a big banner over Java’s entrance. ANNIVERSARY SELLABRATION! it screams in multicolored glittery letters. DOOR PRIZES! FREE FOOD!
I turn to my father in outrage. “That is such a lie! They’ve only been here a few months.” But no one else seems to have noticed. Or maybe they just don’t care. In front of the entrance to Java, people are milling around like sheep. Of the manager there’s no sign. She’s at the cash register, no doubt, gloating as she rakes in money that should have rightly come to us.
Inside, Belle is slumped against the counter, too despondent to be indignant. “She’s outwitted us once again,” she whispers. “What will we do with all the supplies we bought? And those sweets you made last night, Mr. Gupta? They’ll all be wasted. All your savings gone down the drain, all your effort, just because you tried to help us.”
My father looks a bit shaken, too, but he pats her shoulder. “Cheer up, Miss B!” he says. “Didn’t one of your American heroes say, It ain’t over until it’s over?” He disappears into the back room. We can hear the banging of pots and pans, and after a moment, the sound of whistling.
Belle gives me a push. “Go in there and stop him. It’ll be terrible if he makes more of those lovely things and there’s no one to eat them.”
But when I go in there, I forget what I’ve come to say, because there in a little alcove next to the big gas burner, sits the black-and-white photo of a young woman. I think it’s my mother—but it’s an old photo, from a time before my birth, and so I’m not sure.
Where had my father hidden it all these years?
In the photo my mother, if that’s who she is, looks worriedly off to one side of the camera. I peer closely, hoping to catch a glimpse of the dream caves she wrote of in her journal, but the land around her is open and flat. What place is this? There’s no grass, no trees, only tarmac under her feet and a blurred metal-gray shape far in the background. Then it comes to me. She’s in an airfield, getting ready to board the plane that will bring her to the United States. No wonder she looks anxious. She’s about to leave everything she knows to follow a man she’s met only a few times—a decision everyone close to her thinks of as a huge mistake. Maybe she’s wondering if crossing the ocean will indeed cause her to lose her abilities, as she’s been warned. And yet there’s something else in her face—a determination, a strange joy. I realize I’m seeing something I never saw in my lifetime: my mother in love.
I close my eyes, trying to call up the face of the mother I’m familiar with. What was her habitual expression? Wry amusement at my follies? A guarded sympathy? But all I can see is the face in the photograph. Annoyed, I shake my head, trying to clear it. But the photo has taken me over. From now on, this is how I’ll be forced to picture my mother, as a stranger younger than myself, and more hopeful.
If my mother could risk so much to follow her dreams, then as her daughter can’t I take this small risk that faces me today? She had to take on her journey alone—I’m fortunate enough to have a friend and a father with me.
I don’t tell my father to stop. Instead, I watch as he mixes a huge bowl of pakora dough, adds chopped onions, spinach, an assortment of spices. How lovingly his hands gather the besan flour, pour the warm water.
“Don’t just stand there,” he tells me. “Cut up the green chilies and throw them in.” He tests the oil, starts releasing the first set of balls into its sizzle. Then the doorbell rings.
Our first customer!
“Just in time,” says my father.
I rush to the front and find Sonny entering the store. Sonny, of all people! When we were married, nothing less than a natural disaster would have forced him out of bed before noon. When we started sharing custody, he had to hire a woman to get Jona to school, because he couldn’t wake up on time.
“Oh, it’s you,” I say. “I thought it was a real customer.”
“You really shouldn’t get this excited when you see me,” he says. “It’s bad for your heart, now that you’re getting on in years.” He turns to Belle. “I thought I’d come and check things out. What’s the matter? I was sure there’d be more people here.”
Belle points glumly out the window at the SELLABRATION sign. Sonny lifts an eyebrow, which means he’s thinking. After a moment he says, “Well, I’m going to start you guys off here, then.” He orders a plate of pakoras and a box of sandesh to go, and saunters into the back room to talk to my father.
“Should we be charging him money?” Belle whispers to me. “After all, he is family, kind of.”
I hesitate, not sure about ex-husband etiquette. It
is
decent of him to come by, especially after that dinner fight, which was more my fault than his. We decide we’ll give him the pakoras for free but let him pay for the sandesh.
He comes out of the back room munching on a plateful of pakoras that my father must have handed him. “They’re good! Didn’t know Dad had these hidden talents. Want one?”
He isn’t your dad,
I tell him inside my head. He grins as though he knows exactly what I’m thinking and compliments me on the paint job. He jokes with my father about the new name, and tells him he expects to eat some real kurma next time he comes.
“Sure thing, beta,” my father says. “I’ll make a special order for you. Just give me an hour’s notice.”
He isn’t your beta,
I tell my dad inside my head.
Before he leaves, Sonny walks over to Belle. “You’re looking even prettier than usual,” he says. “What’s up? Are you in love?” When she flushes, he laughs, a delighted, infectious sound. We watch him as he walks down the street, packet of sandesh swinging from his left hand, cell phone in his right, still smiling.
“I can see why you married him,” Belle says. “He can really turn that charm on.”
“And off,” I say acidly as I watch him talk animatedly on his phone. “Probably calling his girlfriend,” I add. “It’s her turn to bask in five minutes’ worth of Sonny’s charm.”
Belle looks at me with narrowed eyes. “And why should you care if he’s calling his girlfriend? Riks, are you still—”
“I am not,” I snap. “And don’t call me Riks.” I go over to the tables and wipe them down once again, though they are spotless already.
But I have misjudged Sonny. As the day goes on, several of his friends—musicians and fellow DJs—stroll in. I haven’t seen them since I moved out. I feel awkward welcoming them into the shop, but they seem to have accepted the fact of our breakup with scarcely a blink. In their world, such things probably happen every day. Sonny must have called and asked them to show up. Several express interest in meeting the new chef, so he must have told them about my father, too. My father makes a dramatic entry from the back room, bearing aloft an emerald-green bowl of chutney, and impresses them by reciting the history of various dishes. The rice pudding, he says, is one of the oldest desserts of India, mentioned even in the Ramayan. It is what the gods sent to King Dasharath’s barren queens to make them fruitful. He points to the laddus and informs Sonny’s friends that they are made from the same recipe that Duryodhan’s cook used in the Mahabharat to lure and poison his cousin Bheem—minus the poison, of course. I give him a suspicious look, but Sonny’s friends love it. They order substantial amounts, leave large tips on the table. Jespal brings in a group of coworkers for lunch, and promises to come back after work with some more people. It’s more traffic than our shop has seen in months, but I’m not happy. We can’t run a business on the support of friends. Strangers—like the ones jostling to get into Java—is what we need.
But how to attract them?
After lunchtime the shop empties. Belle pokes around in the back room. I rearrange the plate of laddus and look out the window from time to time to check the crowd outside Java. It’s still there. We’ve made only a small dent in the laddus, and some of the other desserts are still untouched. If a significantly larger number of customers don’t show up by the end of the day, we’ll be forced to do what Belle predicted—throw it all away.