Queen of Dreams

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  When Rakhi finally gets her on the line, her mother seems disoriented. “Who is it?” she asks, sounding breathless. “Who?”

  “Mom, it’s Rakhi! Your one and only daughter, remember?”

  “Sorry, shona,” her mother says, her voice contrite, but they both know she’s not really apologizing. “What is it?”

  Rakhi feels a familiar twinge of jealousy, that suspicion of being less important than them that stalked her through childhood. She pushes it aside and tells her mother about the new store, attempting to speak in an efficient, adult fashion. It’s a little difficult, with Belle hyperventilating in her other ear, prompting her in loud whispers.

  Her mother says nothing. She never responds to bad news the way Rakhi imagines other mothers must, with horrified exclamations or coos of sympathy. She is not sure if she should be thankful for this or resent it. Today her mother’s silence annoys her. Perhaps she’s the same way with her clients, but as her daughter, doesn’t Rakhi deserve at least an exclamation or two of dismay? How can she be so unnaturally self-possessed, so different from everyone else? Is it because she already knows what people are telling her?

  Her mother is still silent, but there’s an intensity to her silence now. Rakhi pictures her standing in the kitchen, the way she’s seen her so many times. She’d be leaning against the wall, threading her fingers through her long black hair. (There’s no white in her mother’s hair, a fact that disconcerts Rakhi, who has recently plucked a few offending strands from her own head.) Her mother’s eyes are closed so she can focus better on what she’s hearing. Her face is abstracted and emotionless, like the faces of the goddess statues Rakhi remembers from her infrequent childhood visits to the Vedic Dharma Samaj. She wouldn’t answer if Rakhi happened to speak to her at such times. It’s different now, Rakhi thinks with an ironic smile. This time I’m the one getting her full attention.

  She has a great relationship with her mother, she knows that. They’re happy whenever they meet, and they enjoy talking to each other. Her mother would do everything possible to help Rakhi if she were in trouble. She’d go beyond what Rakhi asked. Perhaps that’s why Rakhi is reluctant to bring her problems to her. Or perhaps it’s because her mother never talks about her own sorrows. Rakhi has no idea of what might keep her mother awake at night.

  But maybe thinking that is her first mistake. Maybe dream interpreters don’t ever sleep.

  She remembers something her mother said to her when she was about ten years old. It has stayed in her mind because her mother so rarely gave her advice. They’d been in the garden, planting chili peppers. Her mother lowered a seedling, its boll of hairy roots, its chilies like tiny red bird beaks, into the hole that Rakhi had dug.

  “Shona,” she’d said in her burnt-sugar voice with its slight, delicious rasp, “the best way to love people is not to need them. That’s the purest love.”

  Rakhi didn’t quite know what her mother meant. But for years after that, she tried to love people in that need-less way. And failed. Sometimes she wonders if those words were one reason why things broke down between Sonny and her. Was it because he’d grown accustomed to her not needing him that he couldn’t come through when she finally did require help?

  Act like a grown-up! she thinks angrily. Take responsibility for your own mess.

  But she allows herself this much: those words were the reason why, on that night when Sonny let her down so completely, she didn’t go to her mother.

  “You were just too pigheaded,” accuses Belle (who knows only a fraction of what happened). “You just wanted to prove to her that you could make it on your own.”

  Rakhi doesn’t know how to explain, even to her best friend, that what she was really trying to prove was that she loved her mother with the purest love.

  Rakhi finishes up the phone conversation by informing her mother that she didn’t want to disturb her. “Belle made me,” she says.

  “Damn right I did,” Belle calls out, loud enough to make sure Rakhi’s mother hears. “Rikki’s in her usual denial mode, but I know an emergency when I see one.”

  Outside the new store, two workmen have unpacked a large Java sign in a jubilant, ominous orange.

  “I know this isn’t exactly a dream, Mrs. Gupta—though it is kind of a nightmare,” Belle is saying into the mouthpiece, which she has grabbed from Rakhi. “But I felt you’d know what to do.”

  Rakhi didn’t allow her mother to accompany her to the divorce proceedings, though she offered. She didn’t tell her about the bitter custody battles. Afterward, she shared only the barest details of the settlement with her. Her mother probably doesn’t realize what losing the business would mean for Rakhi, what greater losses it could lead to.

  There’s a long silence, all of them waiting for something, though it’s not clear what that is. When her mother speaks, her voice startles Rakhi. “It is a situation, isn’t it,” she says. (Her mother prefers not to use the word problem.)

  “It sure is,” Belle says. “And we’re counting on you to give us the right advice.”

  Rakhi glares at her and grabs the receiver back.

  “You must act fast,” her mother says, “before they expect you to. They’re going to try to steal your customers, lure them with deals you can’t beat. You can succeed only if you do something different. Create a special attraction, something that means more to people than money.”

  Belle, who has her ear glued to the outside of the receiver, bobs her head up and down in emphatic agreement.

  “What do you mean? What kind of attraction?” Rakhi asks, but her mother is silent.

  “Maybe she’ll come in and interpret dreams for us!” Belle whispers. “We could take out an ad in the Berkeley Voice—”

  Rakhi puts her hand over the mouthpiece and gives Belle her stop-it-right-now look.

  Belle sighs. “I guess it wouldn’t be proper to ask her to prostitute her genius for commercial purposes. Even if it does mean saving the life of her daughter and, more importantly, her daughter’s best friend. I bet she’s never taken a penny for all the wonderful things she does for people—”

  Belle’s probably right. Rakhi doesn’t think her mother charges a fee for what she does. But she suspects that grateful clients give her thank-you gifts, including money. How else had she managed to keep the household running smoothly all those times when Rakhi’s father was laid off? Rakhi has seen the jewelry—her mother has a whole drawer full of it, though she never wears any. They’re mostly trinkets, but it wouldn’t surprise Rakhi if there were expensive items there as well. For a whole year when she was in high school, a box of fresh produce was left outside their door every Sunday. Rakhi never saw who delivered it. Once her mother received a state-of-the-art food processor in the mail; once she was sent a $500 Neiman Marcus gift card (she gave it to Rakhi); and once when Rakhi was little, she opened the front door to find a cage containing a cougar cub, which, to her lasting regret, her mother donated to the Oakland Zoo.

  Belle’s right, too, in that she’d be a great Special Attraction.

  But here’s Rakhi’s shameful secret: she doesn’t want her mother in the store. The Chai House is her sanctuary, the one place she has made her own. Much as she loves her mother, she doesn’t want her taking it over—the way she (effortlessly, without a single word, without even wanting it) dominates other areas of Rakhi’s life.

  Her mother gives a small laugh, as though she knows what Rakhi is thinking. “Tell Belle I can’t do that, and even if I could, having me there wouldn’t solve things. You need to find something authentic to offer your customers, something that satisfies a need in them that’s deep and real. I know you’ll figure it out. I have full confidence in the two of you.”

  Rakhi looks morosely out the window, wondering what she means by authentic. The Java employees are out on the street, watching the workmen put up the sign. They cheer and clap when it’s in place. She can hear them all the way in here. The blond manager seems to be dauntingly good at motivating her sta
ff.

  “You’re just giving us a motherly pep talk,” she grumbles.

  “Well, what do you expect? I am your mother, after all.”

  “But Mrs. Gupta,” Belle says, wresting the phone from Rakhi again, “can’t you give us a little hint as to what we should do? Maybe it’ll come to you as you sleep—”

  “It may—or it may not,” Rakhi’s mother says. “I don’t control my dreams, Balwant.”

  Belle begins to apologize, but she goes on. “If I did, they wouldn’t be of use to anyone.” In a lighter tone she adds, “If I can help you in any way, I’ll do it—you know that! Meanwhile, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of you hears some good news soon.”

  “Wait a minute.” Rakhi leans over Belle and shouts into the mouthpiece. “Did you get that from a dream, or is it just a motherly feeling?”

  “It’s one of the primary laws of the universe,” her mother states. “There is no darkness but light follows. Haven’t you heard of it?”

  She hangs up, leaving Rakhi to wonder if this is ancient Indian wisdom or New Age Californian.

  8

  FROM THE

  DREAM JOURNALS

  Once my daughter came to me weeping, and I couldn’t help her.

  You don’t love me, she accused me later. You do it for everyone else, but you won’t do it for me.

  Impossible to prove your love to someone who doubts it.

  The warnings of the elders came back to me. Those you love the most, you’ll help the least. You’ll be defeated by the oneness of your blood. I’d thought, What do these dried-up old women know of love? If love is strong and pure, it can overcome all barriers. That’s the kind of love I’ll possess.

  Rakhi was thirteen that year, a young and worshipful thirteen. She was so unlike other girls her age. Her Indian classmates wore tank tops and tight-fitting jeans. They smoked and wanted to go to Madonna concerts. They hated anything to do with their culture—or their parents. My daughter came back from the library with a stack of books on India. She observed me from behind doors. She started Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams but lost interest because it focused too much on Western methodology. I tried to turn her attention from the long ago and far away, to get her to focus on her American life, but she continued to believe that what I did was amazing and wonderful.

  In these pages I can admit what I’d never tell her. It was a disappointment to me, too, that she couldn’t decipher dreams. To have had her company on this path would have eased my loneliness. I’d wished for it when I was pregnant with her. But that gift wasn’t mine to give.

  The night I’m writing of, she came crying to where I slept on the floor of the sowing room, where the seeds of dreams fall into me. It was two hours past midnight. She was sobbing so hard that I could barely understand what she was saying. I held her and stroked her hair, and slowly I gathered that she’d had a dream. She didn’t tell me any more, and I didn’t ask. I took her back to her bed, and when she fell asleep, I returned to my sleeping mat. But an hour later, she was back, crying again. She’d had the same dream, only more of it.

  In the first dream, she told me, she was walking through a crowded department store. She was alone, but she thought nothing of it—there were so many people around her. She was looking for a mirror. She asked a saleswoman where she could find one. The woman pointed her in a direction. She moved past lingerie, lots of lingerie, hanging from racks placed so close she had to push through them to move ahead. She was sweating. She couldn’t see any other shoppers. Then she heard the footsteps. They were so heavy they made the floor creak. She was sure they weren’t a woman’s. What would a man be doing in the lingerie section? She spun around, but there was nothing. Or almost nothing. She thought she caught a blur, like a hand pulled back fast. She knew that if she turned away, it would be back. She was afraid of what it would do. That’s when she woke up the first time.

  The second time she fell asleep, she was already in the lingerie section, pushing through nightgowns and camisoles. They crowded around, their slippery silkiness pressing against her face. She couldn’t breathe. She tried to go back to the entrance of the store. But her body moved onward, as though it had a will of its own. She knew what was coming—the footsteps, lurching around the corner of her vision. She saw the hand more clearly this time. No, it wasn’t a monster hand, just an ordinary male one. No, it didn’t hold a weapon. She looked past the hand to the arm, the torso encased in a white shirt. She couldn’t see the man’s face—it was hidden behind a rack of slips. She didn’t know why his hand, reaching out to her through gauze and silk with its neat, blunt nails, should frighten her so much. The hand came closer; she was frozen with fear; the index finger touched her wrist. Then she woke up.

  Now she clung to me, refusing to go back to her bed, refusing to sleep again. “He’ll be waiting there,” she kept saying. “He’ll do something terrible, I know he will. And the worst thing is, a part of me wants him to do it.” Then she asked, “Why do I keep dreaming this dream? What does it mean?”

  There was a threat in the dream. It radiated heat, like a burner someone had forgotten to turn off. But I couldn’t gauge its nature, or where it might come from.

  She said, “Help me, Mom.”

  I tried to remember what I’d been taught about recurring nightmares. What to do about them. But none of the answers seemed to fit. The only way to help her was to see the dream for myself.

  I lay down beside Rakhi and put my head on her pillow, though I’d promised myself I’d never try that again. I kept thinking of what had almost happened the last time, when I’d been trying to teach her to read dreams. How I’d almost lost her. Yet how could I abandon my daughter to her terror?

  I closed my eyes and willed my breath to slow, my conscious mind to fold itself inward. I could feel heat pulsing from my daughter’s head, her frantic thoughts whirling like broken glass. I loosened my hold on my body and dropped into that whirlpool. I’d done something similar once or twice, with clients I couldn’t help in any other way. I expected the same pull into the vortex, the images slowing down and becoming clearer, myself passing through the whirlpool into my daughter’s dreaming eye.

  But it wasn’t so. I passed through the whirlpool, yes—but when I emerged on the other side, I was swathed in a veil. I could see nothing. I could only hear. I heard Rakhi push through the racks of clothes, the satiny swish of them closing behind her. The man’s footsteps were cautious at first, then fast and sure. He knew she couldn’t get away. He was saying something, but the words came to me only as gutturals. I knew she heard them differently. To her they were full of promise. I heard her turn toward him. I tried to tell her no, but the veil had blocked my mouth. A sharp, delicious intake of breath, a sound a girl might make before she’s kissed for the first time. But I couldn’t be sure if that was what I heard. Through the veil, all was uncertain. I couldn’t decipher what the man symbolized. When in her life he would appear, or where.

  When Rakhi awoke weeping, I was weeping, too. It was a hard fact to come to terms with—that I, who interpreted dreams for a worldful of strangers, would never be able to explain to my daughter what her dreams meant. I’d never be able to warn her away from the disasters of her life.

  In the morning, I did the only thing left to me. I bought the dream from Rakhi. I bought it for a dollar bill, since I didn’t have any cowrie shells. I’d read of the ritual in the Brihat Swapna Sarita, but I’d left before I had a chance to see it done. Learning from reading isn’t the same as having an elder teach it to you. So that, too, I botched.

  I would realize this only later. But already I sensed that my efforts were as useful as a thumb pressed over a torn artery.

  I’d been defeated by the oneness of blood.

  9

  Rakhi

  Belle and I have been driven to break one of our cardinal rules: never snack during working hours. We munch gloomily on Delhi Dietbusters and watch the GRAND OPENING!! banner across the street. It flutters merrily even thoug
h there isn’t a breath of breeze anywhere. I am about to remark on this fact when the phone rings.

  Belle reaches for the phone with a listless hand. But then she perks up. “It’s Kathryn,” she announces, “from the Atelier!”

  I rush to the phone, my heart thudding.

  “The board has reviewed your portfolio and has agreed to hold a show of your paintings,” Kathryn tells me in her white-wine-and-black-evening-dress voice. “There was a cancellation, and a space has opened up in two weeks’ time. Do you think you can have your paintings ready in a couple of weeks?”

  Can I! I’ve been waiting for over six months to hear from the Atelier, considered the most prestigious gallery on this side of the bay. I curb my inclination to let out a wild whoop and inform Kathryn that I’ll be able to bring the bulk of the paintings into the gallery by next weekend. We agree that the opening reception will be held on a Friday evening two weeks from now.

  As soon as I hang up Belle flings herself at me and hugs me tight. “Congratulations! Your first show—and at the Atelier, too! Rikki, I’m so proud of you!” She kisses me loudly on both cheeks, then pulls back, eyes wide. “Why, it’s just like your mother predicted! It hasn’t even been an hour since she said one of us would receive good news!”

  “It could be chance,” I say drily.

  Belle shakes her head. “You can say what you like, but you’re one lucky girl to have a mother like that.” Another thought strikes her, widening her eyes further. “Maybe she made it happen! You think she could have—”