41
She stands in the long line waiting for the doors to open, fidgeting with her purse, with the piece of paper on which Sonny had written down directions. It is a windy San Francisco night, and here, south of Market, gusts blow torn strips of newspaper from unlit doorways to catch against the legs of the club’s patrons. But
patron
is too formal a word, she thinks, for this variegated group, mostly of Indian origin, though people have brought friends of other persuasions. Their hairstyles range from punk-dyed to shaved to crew cut to curls cascading over the backs of designer tops. Some wear baggy, oversize pants and caps turned backward; others have come gothic, in black capes and blood-red lips. Underneath coats she glimpses tiny gold-embroidered sari blouses, worn over capris, or transparent dupattas wound over bustiers. Pierced, tattooed, painted, hennaed, bindied, they seem to belong to a different nation, their speech casually peppered with terms she does not know. She can’t remember coming across Indian Americans of this kind, either in Fremont or Berkeley. Perhaps they’re a new nocturnal species? Or are they masters of camouflage who have been in front of her all along, in grocery stores and banks, hospitals and college campuses?
She would have felt mortifyingly out of place among this crowd, except that Sonny had instructed her how to dress. In her embroidered Gujarati vest, calf-length black skirt and old ankle boots, she blends in sufficiently that no one spares her a second glance. Not that they pay much attention to one another, either, though she guesses many of them to be regulars. Perhaps that’s what it is to be young, she thinks. You’re so consumed by the energy boiling up inside you, by all the things you have to have
right
now
in your life, that you don’t have time to look at anything—or anyone—that isn’t a fast lane to what you want.
She is surprised to find herself liking them. There’s a camaraderie in their non-attention. A confidence that the people standing in this line, with their ten dollars clutched in their hands, are culturally superior to the barbarian hordes who are spending their Friday evening elsewhere—at some yuppie discotheque, perhaps, or watching a Hindi movie on a too large TV in a too ornate suburban family room.
It had taken all her courage to tell Sonny that she’d like to come hear him DJ. When he’d told her that he played his most creative work at Must-Must, the end-of-the-month desi party in the city, she’d almost backed down. She’d imagined a riotous crowd, her expectations fueled by leftover terror from that other party-gone-wrong. She knew she had to come, though, or else there was no possibility of laying those memories to rest. Now she marvels at how patiently people stand here, chatting with the bouncer, exchanging quips with a couple of homeless people who are trying to cadge beer money out of them. Still, she’s careful not to meet any eyes, not to smile.
Sonny had offered to bring her with him, but she’d refused. She’d told him she wanted to experience the evening authentically, just as any other clubgoer would. But the truth is, it was a test she set herself. Since the assault at the Kurma House, she’d been too afraid to go anywhere alone at night. Things she’d hardly noticed before—a group of people waiting at an intersection, footsteps behind her as she walked to her car, someone asking her if she had the time—loomed in her mind, throwing out monstrous shadows. Just thinking about them made her breath fast and shallow.
Tonight, taking the BART train across the bay, she was caught by claustrophobia when the train dived underground and the windows turned black. The faces of the men in the car—there were three, one dozing, two listening to headphones—took on a predatory aspect. In the flickering light, their mouths were thin slashes. Harsh frown lines cut into their foreheads, angry shadows filled up the hollows under their eyes. Were they watching her covertly, trying to guess where she was from? She sat there wondering which one was most likely to attack her. Fear crept upward from the soles of her feet, turning them numb. She took a deep breath and forced herself to open the journal she’d brought with her.
Halfway through the final entry, she’d read about the abortion that might have been, the matter-of-fact words her mother had chosen.
If the snake had asked me to do it, I would have obeyed.
She read them over, once, twice, again, until the words blurred and fused into a string of nonsense syllables. Here was confirmation for what she, with the blood’s devastating intuition, had suspected all her life: She was less important, was an obstacle, a burden. With all the strength in her shaking hands, she had thrown the notebook across the room.
But then she’d thought of her father, how much harder it must have been for him to read it. To learn the reasons his wife had stayed with him all her life and realize that those reasons didn’t include him. To let his daughter learn them, too.
I loved him,
her mother had written,
just not enough
. In some way that was worse than not having been loved at all. It would have been easy enough for him to skip those lines, to pretend they weren’t there. Instead, he’d put aside shame and picked up truth and continued translating because his daughter had asked him to.
And her mother. As her anger ebbed, and her self-pity, she saw that for her mother it had been the hardest of all. To strip herself of silence, that lifelong armor. Had she hesitated, bending over the notebook, biting the end of her pen? Had she imagined how they’d hate her, the husband and daughter she’d abandoned even as she decided to remain with them? Each word she’d set down in the journals was a gift and a wound. It could be healed only by being read. Thinking of that had made her pick up the notebook and smooth its crumpled pages, the binding that was coming apart. With a dark gratitude, she’d kept going till the end.
In the train she turned to one of the first translations her father had done. She read the same page over and over.
The dream comes heralding joy.
I welcome the dream.
The dream comes heralding sorrow.
I welcome the dream.
The dream is a mirror showing me my beauty.
I bless the dream.
The dream is a mirror showing me my ugliness.
I bless the dream.
My life is nothing but a dream
From which I will wake into death,
which is nothing but a dream of life.
In her panic she was incapable of deciphering the meaning behind the words, but through them she heard her mother’s voice, calm, pragmatic, a little exasperated at her daughter’s tendency to drama. It held her until the train came to a jolting stop and a machine informed her that she had reached the Embarcadero. She emerged from the train on shaky legs, but all in all, it was a victory.
She identifies herself to the woman who is stamping hands at the entrance, as Sonny had asked her to.
“Wow!” the woman—a girl, really, very thin, all in black with frizzy hair and huge eyes made up Cleopatra-style—exclaims as she jumps up from her stool. “You’re DJ Sundance’s woman! He told us you’d be coming.” Despite Rakhi’s protests, she presses her ten dollars back into her palm. “We can’t take money from you!” She offers to escort her downstairs to Sonny. “He’s just the coolest. We all think he’s terribly talented.” She gazes at Rakhi reverently, as though some of his talent must have seeped into her. When an embarrassed Rakhi assures her that she’ll be able to find her way by herself, the woman calls out, in a disappointed voice, “Enjoy the evening.” The words send a frisson of uneasiness through Rakhi.
The club is cavernous and dimly lit, and she pauses, back pressed against a wall, to orient herself. Video images flicker on the opposite wall, washing over each other in monochromatic red— the ruins of some colonial building, a lake, a woman drinking from a green coconut, a cobra, a mushroom cloud. The redness makes her feel as though she’s entered a different space.
Dream time,
she thinks, as she wends her way through crowds of people. She had no idea so many people were in here already. She thinks of the long line still waiting outside. How will they all fit in?
And in case of a
fire, or something worse, how would we all get out?
But she hasn’t come here to worry. The club has survived for this long without her trying to solve its problems, she reminds her whisper voice.
Now she hears music, though it must have been playing all this time. She’s always been more of a visual person; she doesn’t know much about music and has been curiously reluctant to learn. Once she told Sonny, There’s a special charm in listening to something you don’t fully understand—like hearing a foreign language. You’re not distracted by what the sounds are supposed to mean. You can let them drop all the way down inside you. That’s what she does now, and as she does, she realizes she’s hearing Indian instruments, though they don’t sound anything like the classical music CDs she sometimes listens to. Nor do they have the raw folk quality of the music produced by the men at Kurma House. She pushes her way to the low stage in the front of the room, and sees a man and a woman on tablas. Next to them there’s a saxophonist—ah, that’s what she’s been hearing, the drawn-out molasses of notes weaving dexterously in and out of the insistent drumming, changing it into something alien and mesmerizing. A few people are dancing, mostly by themselves, eyes closed, but the majority are listeners. They sit cross-legged on a concrete floor that looks extremely uncomfortable, rapt and swaying. She’d like to stay longer, taking in the various expressions on their faces—a painting is taking shape in her mind, another collage—but she sees the stairs disappearing underground, and follows them. Behind her she hears a woman beginning to sing classical vocals, a single vowel,
aaaa,
raised and lowered, broken into syllables, pulled out in a single, shivering note. Soft, then powerful, then soft again, the sound lodges in her, oddly familiar, a déjà vu of cultural memory she hadn’t expected to find here.
The cellar is awash with a blue protean light punctuated by the pulse of strobes. It makes her think of a poem she’d read a long time ago about Bavarian gentians, about the afterworld. At first sight it seems as though a thousand people are crammed in here, all dancing. She spots Sonny right away, drawn to him by some inner radar. He’s in a corner behind a set of tables, earphones around his neck. Surrounding him is a plethora of complicated-looking equipment. Records spin on two turntables in front of him. From time to time he puts on the phones and adjusts something on a CD player. He hasn’t seen her yet. She likes that. It makes her feel invisible and powerful to watch him while he’s unaware. A dreadlocked woman sits on a stool next to him, beating on a set of African drums. A man is bent over another turntable. From where Rakhi stands, it looks as though he’s scratching at it, making it stop and start. She’d have thought it would create a disruptive cacophony, but that’s not the case.
She realizes she’s holding her stomach muscles tight, waiting to be wrested into the dark spiral of memory, she’s been so sure that hearing Sonny play will do that to her. But the sounds around her meld together to make a music unlike anything she’s heard before. It’s on edge, slightly off-key, weaving together disparate elements —she hears a moment of guitar, then a bass throbbing, then something that has to be computer generated. A woman’s voice swoops in, singing
chhaiya chhaiya
, then flies away again, and what’s left behind, a magnetic roll of drums and words she doesn’t understand, a folk beat that she recognizes from the Kurma House, snags her and pulls her onto the dance floor—she, who hasn’t danced in a lifetime!
Floor
is a misnomer, though, because people are dancing everywhere—on the stairs, in front of a video screen flashing pictures of other dancing people, on a low stage at the other end of the room. People bob up and down on stools at the bar. They’re dancing alone, or with a partner, but mostly dancing in groups. A boatman’s song from an old record her father loves comes on, but in its present incarnation it’s mixed with electronica and voices in another language. The singer’s voice, honey with an undercurrent of grit—
o majhi re
—disappearing into the background melody and emerging from it, is a surprise, every time.
She finds herself among a group of people who are dancing bhangra. Their fluid shoulder movements remind her of the men in her store. Though here the dance is speeded up tenfold, mixed in with break dancing and belly dancing and other kinds of dancing she doesn’t know the names of. They’re intimidatingly talented, and watching them she wants to retreat to the safety of the bar. But the rhythm is so catchy, so carefree, she can’t resist bobbing her head and swaying from foot to foot. No one’s looking at her anyway. So perhaps it doesn’t matter that she’s not a good dancer, that she’s not doing any of the fancy moves, that she can barely keep time. A few minutes, she thinks. Then she’ll head for that bar stool.
Now the group opens out to form a circle. They’re playing some kind of a dancing game. As the others clap and whistle, a woman dressed in zari-embroidered pants and a leotard top spins into the middle, dancing with her eyes closed, her arms high, hair whipping her face as she moves. She whirls so fast that she loses balance and stumbles into the people who make up the circumference. Rakhi flinches, but the onlookers have caught her. They spin her back into the circle, laughing and cheering. She does this a few more times, then exits, and a young man with braided hair takes her place. Rakhi watches as he, too, spins with eyes closed, stumbles, is steadied and returned to the center. Others follow. She can’t take her eyes off them. There’s so much fellowship here. Perhaps it’s induced by alcohol and adrenaline, but still! To go out blind among strangers, trust them to bear your weight, to not hurt you, to keep you, in fact, from getting hurt—could she dare such a thing after all that has happened?