I try to do the same, but my left leg, unused to stretching and bending in this manner, begins to wobble. I lose my balance and have to bring my arms down to prevent myself from falling.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” he says. “Try it again.” He puts his hands on my shoulders and turns them. He pulls on an ankle to position my legs correctly. He draws my arms all the way up and brings the palms together.
“Look up,” he says.
I stare at the white aperture in the sky, but this time I’m not dizzy. I feel the warmth from his palms passing into my hands. Between the sky and myself hangs a spiderweb. Stretched between two eucalyptus branches, laden with silver dew, it is the most intricate thing I’ve ever seen.
To think that it was there all the time,
my whisper voice says,
only you’d never noticed.
He has let his hands fall away. I stand alone, balanced, and for a split second I have the strangest sensation, as though I were a dewdrop on a web that I can’t see, a web huge beyond imagining. The man in white is another dewdrop. Right now some force— wind, gravity, planetary influence—has brought us near each other. In another moment it might push one of us away, to slide along a webbing and end up in another city, another country— even another dimension. This is how it is all the time—people go skittering out of our lives, never to be found. But they’re all still somewhere on the web.
Then my legs give way, and I have to grab his hand to keep from falling.
When we stop laughing, he says, “This is one of my favorites, a variation of the Warrior. A regular practice of it leads to balance, poise, vision and fearlessness—not to mention strong legs and a straight back.”
I grimace. “I certainly need all of the above.”
“We all do,” he says, and he looks at me with great kindness. He nods in farewell, then wheels his bicycle—an old blue ten-speed that had been leaning against a tree all this time—out of the grove and passes from my sight.
I keep my encounter with the man in white a secret, though at times I’m sorely tempted to discuss it with Belle. But she would think I was foolish. (“I can’t believe it! You wasted your time with him practicing a
yoga posture
when you had all these important questions to ask? For Christ’s sake, Rikki, you aren’t even interested in yoga!”) I wouldn’t be able to explain to her how I felt when he joined his palms over mine, as though they were petals on the same flower. Or my notion about the web.
Words are tricky. Sometimes you need them to bring out the hurt festering inside. If you don’t, it turns gangrenous and kills you. That’s how it had been between me and Sonny, why we couldn’t move on with our lives—together or separately—until we talked. But sometimes words can break a feeling into pieces. That’s how it is with my grove episode.
My mother had tried to teach me this. Once when I was pesteringly insistent with my questions, she said, “Everyone breathes in air, but it’s a wise person who knows when to use that air to speak and when to exhale in silence.” I wouldn’t lay claim to such wisdom—but perhaps I’m learning.
I try the Warrior posture from time to time. I’d hoped it would transform me, make my weaknesses fall away, but it isn’t so. Yet sometimes when I’m practicing, in front of a half-finished painting in my cluttered living room, or out on Sonny’s deck, in the blue shade of the jacarandas, I feel something loosening inside, some coil of distrust, some need to be in control. Energy flickers in my fingertips, and my whisper voice curls up like a cat and closes its eyes.
I never saw the man in white again—maybe because I didn’t need to. Something in me had been satisfied by our encounter. I would never know what mysterious link, if any, connected him to my mother, whether he was indeed the long-awaited messenger of her journals. But somehow for the first time I could accept this not-knowing. There would always be mysteries about the people I cared for, enigmas central to their lives, that I would be unable to decipher. That was all right. Love worked its slanted way along other paths. Maybe the man in white, whom I will hold inside me next to Jona and my parents, Sonny and Belle, had come to tell me that.
40
FROM THE
DREAM JOURNALS
Once I had made the decision to leave, I was no longer depressed. There were too many things to plan. The first was to collect enough money for a ticket without my husband’s knowledge. For that, I had to get a job.
I approached my husband with some anxiety. The first lie I’d told him had been for both our sakes; this one was for me alone. Could I look into the face I loved (yes, still) more than any other person’s and do it? But it was easier than easy. My voice was steady as I said I was lonely, that work would keep me occupied, that the extra money would help with our expenses. He agreed at once— he’d been worried at my black moods—and inquired among his Indian colleagues. (I cannot call them friends. We’d been too busy trying to survive our transplanting to make friends.) In a few weeks—a miracle, considering I had no work permit and no skills—I was given a job.
I worked in an Indian grocery—in the back, where no one would see me. I measured dals and spices from large sacks into plastic bags, sealed them and attached appropriate labels. Some would have considered it a tedious job, but I was comforted by the simple, repetitive nature of my task. It pleased me to apply the seal in a straight line, to attach the label to the exact center of the packet. All the while I imagined the day I would buy my ticket with the money that lay accumulating in a shoe box under our bed. (I would have enough in three months.) The day I would take the Ride-A-Van to the airport and step onto an Air India plane bound for Calcutta. Things grew blurry after that. I presumed I would catch a train to the village that lay closest to the caves. Then I would make my way on foot. This part caused me some disquiet. I remembered rumors about how the caves were hidden so that, though all could leave them at will, only the elders knew how to enter them. But I resolved not to worry. The snake had invited me back, had he not? Surely he would make things clear when the time came.
The owners of the grocery paid me a low hourly wage. It was much lower than the legal rate, but I didn’t hold it against them. They undertook a certain risk in hiring me, and they were kind in their way. They gave me a good number of hours each week, and in the afternoons, when the owner’s wife took a lunch break in the back, she always invited me to eat with her.
Perhaps it was guilt, or perhaps it was that I knew I’d soon be gone, but during this time I tried to do everything my husband liked. I cooked his favorite dishes. (I was not a good cook, having had no experience in the caves, but I tried.) I accompanied him each evening to a nearby lake to feed the ducks, an activity that bored me but that seemed to give him pleasure. And when he wanted to, which was almost every night, I let him make love to me.
I cannot pretend that I did it only for him. He was an attractive man, and I did love him—just not enough to give up my dreaming. I had always enjoyed sex. Even my fear that it was making me lose my gift hadn’t totally taken away the sharp, gasping pleasure of the act. Now, the secret knowledge that I was leaving added the sweet ache of transience to our lovemaking. If I felt uneasiness, a sense that I shouldn’t be doing this, I refused to heed it. I’m giving up everything, I told myself. Surely I deserve a few memories to take back to my chaste, caved life. I slept dreamlessly during this time. I didn’t care. Soon there would be little other than dreams in my life.
Two weeks before I was to leave—I had called a travel agent and reserved a ticket by then—I fainted at work while pulling a large sack of lentils to the measuring area. The owner’s wife heard the clatter—I’d fallen on a stack of aluminum spice boxes—and came running. She wiped my face with a wet towel and rubbed rosewater on my temples to revive me, then touched the dark circles under my eyes and pronounced that I was pregnant.
“It can’t be,” I cried, horrified.
“Have you been taking precautions?” she asked.
From my face she must have seen that I didn’t know about precautions. She nodded. “Well then, that’s what happens. I should know—I had five before I insisted on getting my tubes tied.”
She waited for me to say something, but I was incapable of speech. She made me sit down and gave me a bottle of mango juice to drink. (Even in my state of shock I registered her generosity. The mango juice was imported from India, and sold for a dollar a bottle.)
“Don’t be scared,” she said kindly. “It’ll all turn out okay. You can’t imagine how much happiness a child can bring you, how it’ll change your life.”
No, I wanted to cry. You’re the one who can’t imagine how a child will change my life. But I said nothing. What was the use? I sat there and drank the too sweet mango juice and used all my willpower to keep from throwing up.
For seven days I agonized over what to do about the pregnancy. I complained of not feeling well and slept apart from my husband for seven nights—and he, trusting soul that he was, did not question me. Each night I begged the snake to come to me, to help me decide. Each night I wept, muffling my sobs in my pillow, when he did not. Even now I wonder why he stayed away. Was it punishment for what I’d done, or was it because it was too late?
At the end of the seven days, I made my decision. First I discarded the possibility of abortion. (Yes, I confess it had been in my mind. If the snake had asked me to do it, I would have obeyed. But the snake had abandoned me, and all I had to depend on now was my own powers of navigation.)
Next I let go of the possibility of return.
For a time afterward I pretended that my decision was an altruistic one, something I did for my unborn child, but I knew it came out of fear. I was afraid the elders would not accept me back into the caves—even if I was able to find them. We had parted in bitterness. They’d warned me that once I left, they owed me nothing. And now, with the visible reminder of my transgression growing inside me, surely they would shun me. Had the snake not done so already?
What would happen then? I couldn’t bear to go back to a life in the slums. I couldn’t punish my child with the dual curse of poverty and fatherlessness that my own mother had burdened me with.
At the end of the seven days I told my husband of the pregnancy. He was overjoyed. He did not concern himself too much with my quietness. No doubt his colleagues told him that at such times women grow temperamental. When I would not share his bed, he accepted it, thinking it to be a temporary matter. When I told him I no longer wanted to work at the store, he said it was better that I stay home and take care of my health.
As the baby grew within me, I paced the apartment from morning to night because I couldn’t bear to be still. But I was no longer agitated. One is agitated only when one has hope, and I had none. My life in India was over. I didn’t care how the rest of my days here unspooled themselves, how tangled they grew.
But on the day the baby inside me kicked for the first time, I felt a different kind of movement, too. It took me a moment to recognize it: my old power, stirring once again. Diminished perhaps, but still alive. Who knows how such things work? At first I wouldn’t believe it, I was so afraid of disappointment. Then I was filled with a sense of reprieve. And also a new fear. No matter what happened, I must not lose it again.
I noticed that on the days I remained most silent, the power was stronger. On those nights the dreams of strangers came to me, and directives as to how I should find them. I began to make phone calls again, to get responses. I helped one person, then a second, then more.
I decided that I would speak only when necessary, and never of my past. To speak of something is to dissipate it—and I had already squandered so much. Happiness as ordinary people know it was not for me. But perhaps I could glean satisfaction from the practice of what was left of my gift.
I wished to be a good wife, but that was impossible. I did not dare to sleep with my husband again. I was convinced that if he touched me in desire, I would lose the faint power I’d regained. I could not explain this to him. Words had become a rare commodity, to be hoarded. Besides, he would not have believed me. I took care of him in every other way, cooking, cleaning, ironing, sitting beside him on the worn plush sofa at night, ready to listen to whatever he might say. But he grew morose and would not speak. He wanted only what I could not give him: my body, to which my soul was yoked. I prayed he would stop loving me and turn to someone else—it would have made life easier for us both—but he couldn’t. He had webbed himself in me, and the only escape left for him was into the periodic oblivion of drink.
I was not a good mother to Rakhi. I loved her, but not fully. To love someone fully is to give up selfhood, and I could not risk that. She knew this. Perhaps that is why she constantly longed to understand who I am, to become who I am. I did not have the power to give her the latter, even if I wished such a fate on her. If I gave her the former, it would have destroyed me.
And so I attempt these journals, for the written word is different from the spoken. The spoken word vanishes, frost in sunshine. The written word endures, its black frieze like ironwork in palace windows. But I am hampered by my lack of craft. Thoughts rush through me and disappear, memories. I can express only a fraction of what I feel. The rest is lost, like spores scattered by wind. I do not read over the fragments I’ve written. I’m afraid I will tear them up.
I write this for you, husband, child, to read when I am gone. Perhaps you will be baffled by my ramblings. Perhaps you will hate me for my confessions. Perhaps you will understand a little of what I could never explain: who I was and why, what gods haunted my dreams, and what serpents.