So much hatred unleashed in the world today; where will it end?
Perhaps it’s to counter that hatred that I kiss Sonny. Perhaps it’s because death brushed by us so closely, and because I’m thankful to be alive. Perhaps it’s the simple comfort of having someone hold you on a day when certainty has slipped through your fingers and shattered on the floor.
I let his fingers undo the clasp of my brassiere and cup my breasts. I let them wander over my body, and I push myself closer to him. I have to help him off with his clothes. As I touch him and feel him grow hard, I murmur his name in his ears, as though he might have forgotten who he is. When he comes, arching against me, crying out, not
Riks
but
Rakhi,
I feel I’ve reclaimed a tiny sliver of myself.
37
Days pass, seeming like weeks. Weeks pass, seeming like months. A month passes, and it seems like yesterday all over again. She wakes in the night at the smallest sound, checks the chain on the door, the window latches. She wishes for a transforming dream, but all she gets is blackness, like being buried under rubble. One day she goes to work to find that someone has painted TERRORIST in red letters over the name of their store. Paint has run down the stem of the final
T
, pooling thick and rubbery on the windowsill. It takes hours to scrub off. They do not replace the glass in the storefront window but only patch it up with duct tape. Belle says there’s no money, but they all know the real reason. It might happen again.
Sonny brings in copies of e-mails that are being circulated by Indian organizations. The notes caution them not to go anywhere alone. (There’s no risk of that, she thinks wryly. She’s too afraid to attempt an excursion.) Don’t wear your native clothes. (What native clothes? she wonders, looking down at her pants.) Put up American flags in prominent locations in homes and businesses. (But this she cannot bring herself to do.) Pray. (When she listens to the president’s military plans, she feels a need for prayer, but she doesn’t know toward which deity, American or Indian, she should aim her supplications. Who should be forgiven, and who saved.) She grows almost accustomed to suspicious glances on the street. A couple of times people cross over to the other side so they won’t have to walk near her. How is it, she wonders, that one can become, overnight, both so frightening and so vulnerable?
The attack on Kurma House International was written up in the local papers. They received a large number of letters after that. Most were from strangers who expressed sympathy and outrage. A few anonymous notes spouted invective, and one person sent a large manila envelope with a Ziploc bag filled with turds.
They reopen the store the night after Jespal gets out of the hospital. They seat him in a corner, his arm in a sling that glows very white. Rakhi joins in Belle’s jokes about how his dark glasses make him look like a celebrity in disguise, a turbaned Elvis, but her mouth is dry with fear. She finds herself flinching every time someone she doesn’t know comes up to the counter. People she’s never seen before tell her how sorry they are that she’s had such a terrible experience. They want to shake her hand. They declare that they welcome her presence in their community. She tries to be appreciative but only ends up resentful. They make her feel like a guest.
I was born here, she wants to tell them. How can you welcome me?
The musicians don’t discuss what happened, though she notes the way they crowd around Jespal in a protective knot. He can’t see too clearly with his left eye yet. The doctors are waiting to see if it’ll get better on its own, or whether they’ll have to try an invasive procedure. (Invasive, now that’s an interesting word. Her mind meanders into the many ways such a word might be used.) He still wears a turban. (Would it qualify as his native dress, or his chosen one?) For the reopening, he’s picked one the color of banana leaves. Seeing it wound around his head makes her at once proud and anxious. One of the musicians pounds his fist on the table, swearing. But Jespal shakes his head in his usual mild manner, and soon after that they begin a song.
When closing time comes, the men hang around, pretending to be busy, packing and repacking their instruments. They wait outside until the store is locked up, and stroll behind Rakhi and Belle to the parking lot, chatting casually with her father. They watch the women get in the cars and start the engines. Their solicitousness makes her want to laugh and cry. They do this each night, until she grows used to the ritual, until she finds it comforting and companionable. Some days she forgets how it began.
She invites Sonny over and cooks for him—something she’d vowed she’d never do again. But there’s a warmth to being in her small kitchen, Jona and him and herself crowded around the countertop, chopping green onions, sautéing chicken with ginger. They don’t attempt to make love after that traumatic night. (When she thinks back to how they’d clung together in bed, trying to help each other remember who they were, she’s not sure whether to be glad or mortified.) But they do sit together sometimes after Jona falls asleep. They try to stick to talk of their everyday lives, but can their everyday lives be separated any longer from the search for terrorist cells, or the president’s bluster about the axis of evil? Sonny tells her that he feels guilty about making music while so many continue to die. She tells him how her neighborhood has changed. The Pakistani women barely come out of their apartments. The Afghani men take turns rounding up the children of their community and driving them to the neighborhood school, although it is only two blocks away. Sometimes they sit wordless in front of the late-night news and watch bombs being dropped on a country halfway around the world, the elegant plumes of smoke rising above the fires.
“We don’t even know what’s really happening out there,” he says. “I feel like a pet dog being fed tidbits to keep me quiet.”
Reporters interview American soldiers, many in their teens. Some look nervous, but everyone who’s on camera declares that he or she is ready to die for America. Rakhi feels her guts twist. Their faces are so naked, so unknowing. She wonders what they’ll look like by the time they come back home.
One night she finds herself thanking Sonny for saving her life. The words come more easily than she’d thought they would, perhaps because the dead and the dying have been on her mind so much recently, so present in her living room. Or maybe it’s because she’s not Indian enough. She expects him to be embarrassed, to shrug it off with an
It was nothing.
But he must not be Indian enough, too, because he takes her hand and says he’s happy for what little he was able to do—this time at least. She recognizes the words as his apology for that long-ago night at the party, his failure to rescue her. She touches the calluses on his fingers, wondering how he got them. His fingertips are square and neat, with the nails cut short so he won’t scratch the records. She is surprised at how distant the party seems, how dwarfed by newer, larger calamities. But as these new calamities recede, will that night regain its dark power over her? Sonny’s fingers smell faintly of wild thyme. But when he asks if he should stay the night, she shakes her head. She doesn’t want to extend a facile forgiveness only to take it back later. He asks her again to come to the club to hear him. She doesn’t say yes or no. She bends forward a little to allow him to kiss her cheek before he leaves.
One morning Marco comes into the shop. When she sees him, she realizes that he hasn’t been around for a while. He looks shrunken, like a carrot left too long in the refrigerator. She gives him a sack of onion pakoras. He holds them in his rough, cracked hands with the chewed-off nails and shifts from foot to foot.
“What is it, Marco?”
“I was there the night those men broke into your shop and hurt you folks,” he said. “I was sleeping behind the flower lady’s stall, but the crash woke me. I saw everything.” He scuffs the floor with the tip of a torn sneaker. “I was too scared to come and help you.”
A wave of pity rises in her. “Don’t fret about it,” she says. “I would have been just as scared.”
“She was there that night, too,” he says. “I seen her. The café was closed by then, but I seen her in there.”
She stares at his face, knowing at once to whom he’s referring. She doesn’t know if he’s telling the truth, or if he merely believes he is.
His eyes are watery and red-veined, darting everywhere. “She was standing at the window looking at you guys. She stood there for a long time, until the policeman came.”
Later Rakhi will imagine that scene, even though she doesn’t want to. Coming to her at night, when she’s about to fall asleep, it will jerk her awake. In her mind, the manager stands in the darkness inside Java with her face to the cold glass of the window, her palms pressed so hard against it that they turn white. Her eyes shine with a green chemical glow, and the force of her hatred leaps across the empty street and powers the chain that’s swinging at Sonny.
“She isn’t there anymore,” Marco says. “Did you know that?”
Rakhi did not know. She’s been struggling too hard to keep her head above water to think about Java. But today she makes a point to stroll by the café. Indeed, the place has a new manager, a middle-aged, bucktoothed man, plump and hearty. When questioned, he will confess he doesn’t know what happened to his predecessor, where she disappeared to.
Can a person be vaporized by the deflected force of her own hate? Rakhi is left to wonder.
She takes out her easel, the first time since September. She closes her eyes and doesn’t fight when the images deluge her. Crash of a glass cracking, fear like slime tracks up her arm, how she couldn’t clean it off for a long time afterward, no matter how hot she ran the bathwater. She starts painting them in: a Sikh man shot at a gas station because someone thought he was Middle Eastern; terrified women peering from behind curtains that look like burkhas; Jespal’s turban unraveled like a river of blood; his eye the swollen purple of a monsoon sky. The background is a collage of faces striped red, white and blue. A fist waves a flag so mammoth that if it falls, it’ll suffocate them all. The birds have disappeared, their places taken by airplanes. Some crash into buildings. Some drop bombs as easily as insects drop their eggs. She paints in a GOD BLESS sign, she paints in tablas, bamboo flutes, violins. Kicking feet, swinging chains, cookies swept off a counter and ground into the floor by boot heels. Knives fly across painted space like the props of jugglers—but they’re deadly real. A police car glides through the broken night under a gouged-out moon. When she stands back to look, the colors and shapes come together in a rush that makes the hairs on her arms stand up. She gives it the only name possible:
You Ain’t American.
When she finishes painting the policeman, looking over his shoulder as he speeds away into a vortex of dark brushstrokes, she realizes that she has given him the face of the man in white. Is she remembering accurately? She recalls a tingling as she’d looked at his face—had it been recognition, or merely relief? Or merely a wish to find a savior whom she knew?
Tomorrow, she decides. Tomorrow she’ll go to the eucalyptus grove. Maybe among root and bark she’ll find some answers.
38
FROM THE
DREAM JOURNALS
In the caves they told us that when dream tellers work in their sleep, they each throw out a thin, invisible thread, as a spider might, from their navel. This thread reaches all the way to Swapna Lok, the world where dreams are born. Through it, the dreams that the teller needs to know travel back to her. When a teller dreams alone, the thread is thin and weak, easily broken. But when tellers live close to one another, their threads combine to form a powerful rope that can bear the weight of even the most difficult dream. This is why dream tellers should not travel too far from their community.
I said nothing, but inside myself I doubted. These are just tales, I told myself, made up to keep us close to home, under the elders’ control.
Why did I doubt what all my fellow novices accepted? Perhaps, unknown to myself, I was already preparing to leave.
Much later, when I told my doubts to my aunt, she sighed. I read that sigh to mean she was tired of my rebelliousness. Perhaps she regretted bringing me out of the slums. I had, after all, caused nothing but trouble.
But it was a sigh of exasperated love. (Since becoming a mother, I too have learned that sigh.) There is proof, she said. But asking for it is like asking to know that a glass dish is breakable. You’ll be convinced, but there’ll be no putting the pieces back together.
I listened with only half of my impatient mind. Riddles, riddles, I thought. Why can’t you just tell me what you mean?
Years later my daughter would say the same words to me.
But some things can’t be told that way, I know that now. They can only be approached stealthily, from behind, like wild birds. And even then they catch your scent and take flight before you throw your net of words over them.
My ability to dream may have weakened even in Calcutta, once I married, but in those early, dancing days I wasn’t paying attention. I was full of another kind of dreaming, for which sleep is not necessary. It was only in America, its nights stagnant as the Sargasso Sea, that I was forced to face the magnitude of my problem. Sometimes I would feel a thin, sickly tendril pushing itself out of my body. But when it found nothing outside to connect with, it shriveled and fell back into me. For a while, the bag of earth my aunt had given me staved off my despair. But each time I dreamed, there was less in the bag. And one night it was gone. With it the dreams, too, went.