“Thank you,” my mother says in her formal voice, “but it’s not necessary. My daughter and I are used to exchanging things.”
This is somewhat less than true. In all my life, I can remember only one instance of us exchanging things. A dream for a dollar. And even then I’m not sure one could call that an exchange.
The manager glances at me expectantly, as though waiting for me to deny my mother’s statement. When I don’t oblige, she gives a small, elegant shrug. “Enjoy!” she says, with an expansive wave of her hand.
My mother stares at her thoughtfully as she walks away. She takes a sip of my coffee and makes a face, then drinks the rest very fast, as though it were an unpleasant but necessary task. She shakes her head very slightly when Belle picks up a cookie. “I wouldn’t if I were you,” she says.
Belle drops the cookie as though it were radioactive.
“Let’s go,” my mother says. “We’ve seen enough.”
As soon as we step outside, Belle bursts out, “What did you see, Mrs. Gupta?”
I wait for my mother to tell Belle what she says (I know this from eavesdropping) to her clients: she’s a dream reader, not a fortune teller.
But she only says, “Patience, Balwant. Not until we’re back in our own territory.”
Once we are inside the Chai House, she places the SORRY WE’RE CLOSED sign on the door (not that we need it), gets a cup of warm salt water and goes into the bathroom. I can hear her gargling and spitting. Finally, she comes out and gestures for us to join her at a table. When we’re huddled together like modern-day Machiavellis, she says, “Don’t go in there again.”
“But why not?” I ask. “And why did you take my coffee? And why didn’t you want us to eat the cookies?”
“The cookies I can explain a little more easily,” my mother says. “In life, it’s best not to take anything for free—unless it’s from someone who wishes you well. Taking places you under obligation. And the coffee—well, maybe I’m just suspicious. But I didn’t like the way the manager brought our order over herself. She didn’t do it for any of the other customers, if you noticed—”
“You think she put something in Rikki’s coffee?” Belle breaks in.
“Oh, please!” I burst out. “You’re making her sound like Lucrezia Borgia.”
Belle ignores me. “Something bad luck, isn’t it?” she says to my mother. “It happened like that once in Turlock to a new bride—my mom told me about it. This woman’s husband’s old girlfriend sent her a gift, a gorgeous silk sari. The bride, who’d come from India and didn’t know any of the history, wore the sari and got so sick she nearly died.”
“That’s crazy!” I say. “It could have been a coincidence.”
The two of them look at me, identical expressions on their faces. I can almost hear what they’re thinking. And what’s a coincidence?
“You’re both getting carried away,” I say. “And even if it were true, why would the manager want to harm me?”
“Perhaps she sees you as a threat,” my mother says.
“She sees me as a threat? When she’s the one destroying our business? But in that case, wouldn’t she want to harm Belle, too? You didn’t stop Belle from drinking her coffee—”
“It was an instinct,” my mother says. “I can’t really explain it. But it’s clear now that the situation is serious. I did what I could, but it won’t help in the long run. You’ve got to find a whole new angle for the store, something with spirit and energy to bring people back in. And you must do it quickly, before you grow weaker.”
“But what kind of new angle, Mrs. Gupta?” Belle cries. “We ’ve been racking our brains for weeks and can’t think of a thing. Can’t you help us?”
My mother looks tired. There are smudges of black under her eyes; her collarbones push out from under her skin. “The reason you don’t have enough power to fight that woman there is that she knows exactly who she is, and you don’t. This isn’t a real cha shop”—she pronounces the word in the Bengali way—“but a mishmash, a Westerner’s notion of what’s Indian. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe if you can make it into something authentic, you’ll survive.”
Heat floods my face, years of anger, a sensation like falling. How dare she accuse me! “And whose fault is it if I don’t know who I am? If I have a warped Western sense of what’s Indian?”
Belle gives me a shocked look. She’s never heard me speak this way to my mother. My mother bites her lip, something I don’t remember her ever doing. Her teeth are small, with serrated edges like a child’s. How is it I hadn’t noticed this before? When she replies, it is in Bengali, so that I have to really concentrate to understand. “You’re right. It is my fault. I see now that I brought you up wrong. I thought it would protect you if I didn’t talk about the past. That way you wouldn’t be constantly looking back, hankering, like so many immigrants do. I didn’t want to be like those other mothers, splitting you between here and there, between your life right now and that which can never be. But by not telling you about India as it really was, I made it into something far bigger. It crowded other things out of your mind. It pressed upon your brain like a tumor.”
After she leaves, Belle asks, “What was she telling you in Bengali? And what does she mean that this place isn’t authentic?”
I can tell she’s upset, and with good reason. But I don’t have any answers. I’m still trying to process everything my mother told me, her slanted logic. Leaving, she had turned to me, said something else. Maybe I misunderstood the Bengali words, but this is what they sounded like: All this time I thought I was doing it for you. But I’d only been protecting myself.
That night after Jona has fallen asleep I work on my painting. I paint over the man in white completely, then redo the foliage in that section of the canvas. When I’m done, there are only trees and grass, fallen bark, hanging branches—and behind them, a man-shaped gap of darkness you wouldn’t even see if you weren’t looking right. A man with his left arm arced high over his head, at once in the picture and absent from it, the final element the painting needed.
Later, I lie in bed, still high from the excitement of finishing, unable to sleep. As so many times before, my thoughts swoop and circle over my mother. How was she protecting herself by not telling me about India? What did she see—or think she saw—inside the coffee shop? And finally: if she drank the cup that was meant for me, the bad-luck cup, what would it do to her?
Years later, when I’ve begun dreaming again, dreaming with a vengeance as though to make up for all those barren, mud-brown nights, dreaming in neon hues and strobe flashes not only my own dreams but those of my mother and my daughter also, I will dream the inside of Java. By then there will be no Java and no Chai House either, and America itself as I had believed it to be will have ceased to exist, but this is what I will dream:
We are in an underwater café, filled with a deep, bottom-of-the-ocean blue. Everything sways and shivers in this space, and words echo like sonic booms. The table we sit at is made of coral— or is it porous bones? There’s no one in the room except for my mother, Belle and myself. I turn to speak to them and find that they have turned into sea creatures. Belle waves her pink anemone tresses at me. My mother turns to me with her intelligent seahorse eyes. (And I? What am I? But I cannot see myself.) The manager swims in, but she is outside my line of vision, and I’m not sure what kind of creature she is. I see only her shadow against the wall where the kelp sweeps back and forth. It looms in the shape of a cloud or a net or the head of a hammer. The drinks we’ve ordered come floating through the water at us. The coffee is black as squid ink. I reach for it, but my mother is quicker. She takes my cup in her fragile seahorse hands and drinks. The color seeps into her, staining her like Shiva of the dark throat, who took in the world’s poison to save it from destruction. But my mother, well intentioned though she is, is not as strong as a god. She begins to crack apart. Little bits come off her like branches of coral. She’s trying to tell me something. The water g
rows turbulent, the booming is a huge echo in my ears, the manager smiles at me with her shark mouth, her eyes are as white as toothpaste, her blond fin points at something on the undulating wall. It is a clock, with the number 2 positioned in its center. I know that it is a clock of days, set to move backward. Next will come the number 1, and then 0. And then time will run out.
13
Rakhi
I stand in a corner of the Atelier, wishing I could disappear. I’ve been to the gallery many times in the past for other shows, but it has never seemed so huge and cavernous, so empty.
“Belle,” I’d whispered in dismay as I walked in earlier. “There’s no one here.”
Belle gave a patient, maternal sigh. “Naturally. The gallery doesn’t open for another thirty minutes.”
“What if nobody—”
“Have you ever been to a show where that happened?”
“This could always be the—”
“Spare me!” Belle said. She aimed a brilliant smile at Kathryn, who waved at us from the far end of the studio, and grabbed my arm before I could slink off to a corner. “Uh-uh,” she said. “I want you to stand right here, where people will be sure to notice you as soon as they walk in. And I’d much appreciate it if you refrain from slouching. Quite ruins the effect I took hours to create.” She adjusted my scarf, gave the back of my dress a discreet tug, handed me a glass of champagne, and went off to consult with Kathryn.
I shift nervously from foot to foot—no mean feat, considering that I’m wearing Belle’s stiletto heels. I take a wary sip from my champagne glass and hold it in front of my body as though it were a protective device, and wish once again that I hadn’t let Belle dress me for the occasion.
“No, no, and no,” she’d said when I’d discussed my plans with her. “This is a milestone event in your life, and as your friend it is my moral duty to make sure you don’t attend it wearing khakis and a sweater.”
“Belle, all I have that’s even halfway formal is a black granny dress from when we used to usher at the Zellerbach so we could see shows for free. You tore my other dress, remember? My Indian outfits are way too gaudy for this kind of event. And you of all people should know that I can’t afford to buy anything right now. Anyway, I’m a painter, not a model. Why do I have to look good?”
“You just do. Take it from me. But not to worry—I have exactly the thing for you. It’s lucky we’re pretty much the same size, isn’t it?”
So here I am, dressed in a black sheath of a gown with a slit up the side of one leg and spaghetti straps that live up to their name. My hair is swept up in a chignon, battling to escape Belle’s pins and beginning to succeed. My eyelashes droop from the weight of Belle’s mascara, and my lips are slathered with Belle’s lipstick, which is aptly named Dragonette Crimson. The one thing in the ensemble that’s mine is a gauzy Indian black-and-silver scarf Belle found in the back of my closet. “Perfect,” she’d crooned, arranging it around my shoulders. “Just the right fusion of East and West!”
My parents have arrived. My mother, dressed in an elegant hand-embroidered sari in earth tones, beams at me, but Belle waylays her at the entrance. My father is dressed, amazingly, in a suit. I’m touched. The only other time he’d worn a suit was at my wedding. He waves shyly, but waits for my mother to lead the way. As I watch them cross the room, it strikes me that that’s how he’s always been where I’m concerned, happy to trail along behind her, letting her take care of whatever I need. One day I’d like to know what made them marry each other, sparrow and bulbul.
“Was your marriage arranged?” I asked her once.
She was startled into laughter. “Heavens, no! In fact, my people were dead against it.”
“But why?”
She smiled that familiar let’s-drop-it-shall-we smile. Maybe rephrasing would work. “So, how did you marry him?”
“We met when I was visiting Calcutta—and fell in love.” She looked surprised, as though she had forgotten this fact.
“What was it like?”
But she had regained her composure. “No different from what happens to other young people, I imagine,” she said, shrugging. “Now, don’t you have something better to do than waste your energy on things that are long over with?”
What she didn’t know is how much energy I would expend later, trying to fill in the gaps. Trying to imagine, over and over, a man and woman, very young, meeting on the streets of a city I’d never visited. In my fantasies they looked at me, but their faces were not the parent faces I was familiar with. There were only two things I knew about them for certain.
1. What happened to them was not what happens to other young people who fall in love.
2. Whatever it had been, it was gone now, its place taken by something so different that even they would be baffled, if they allowed themselves to examine it, by the transformation.
“ Congratulations!” my mother says, kissing me on the cheek. “Your paintings are just beautiful.”
Of course she’d say that. She’s my mother. I keep my eyes away from the walls. I know that the paintings are worthless and that viewers—if any do eventually come—will hate them.
My father pats me on the back murmuring something about being so proud. He’s sober and holds a mineral water in his hand. I throw my mother a grateful look.
“You look beautiful, too! Very chic. Why, you’re wearing my old dupatta.” She touches my scarf lightly.
It had happened the day before my marriage. She’d opened an old trunk to take out a silver cup I used to drink from when I was a baby. It was valuable, and she wanted to give it to me for my children-to-come. But my eyes had been caught by the scarf, balled into a corner. I’d lifted it up and its silver threads had shimmered the way a web might, if spiders danced on it.
“Can I have this?”
She hesitated. Then she said, “This old thing? Why ever would you want it?”
Because it’s from your other life, I wanted to say, the one that’s magic, the one you won’t let me enter. But I didn’t want to spoil the moment. Besides, it wasn’t all her fault. If I’d had the gift, the way she did, nothing could have kept me out.
She had handed the dupatta over, with a smile and a shake of her head. She did that sometimes, as though my actions were mysterious beyond fathoming. When all along it was she who was unfathomable.
All this I’d forgotten, the way we forget so many things without knowing what we’ve lost.
“Where’s my granddaughter?” my mother is asking. I tell her that Sonny was supposed to drop her off at the studio before the show opened. But of course he’s late.
“He probably has a reason,” she says.
“Yeah, it’s always the same one: me, myself and I.”
My mother purses her lips. I know she thinks I’m too hard on Sonny. But then she doesn’t know what happened that night. A champagne bubble of a smile forms inside me and bursts before it reaches the surface, leaving a bitter aftertaste. Well, Mom, I guess I do have my own unfathomability, after all.
All of a sudden the room is full of chatter and laughter. A few people are acquaintances, but there are many I don’t know. I’m torn between the desire to eavesdrop and the fear that they might be saying my work is no good. Or—worse still—maybe they’ll be discussing the weather or their holiday plans.
Then I spot him in the far corner, alone, looking intently at a painting. The man from the eucalyptus grove. I can’t see his face from here, but I’m sure it’s him. The build, the way he holds his body. The white jacket. There’s a quietness around him even here, in the middle of this bustle.
I start toward him, but a whirling dervish hurtles into me, almost making me spill my champagne.
“Jona!” I kiss her runaway curls, which Sonny-the-delinquent-dad has obviously not thought to comb.
“Mom, you look great! And all your paintings are up on the walls! Cool! How many did you sell so far?”
I find myself grinning. “Do they look okay?” Some of my nerv
ousness melts as I hug my daughter and take another sip of champagne. I’m glad that I arranged for her to come and share this special evening with me, even though Kathryn had expressed some concern at having a child present.
“Can I try some?” Jona asks.
“No, sweetheart. It has alcohol. Come with me to Auntie Belle. She’ll get you some apple juice.”
“Apple juice! Yuck. Yours looks much more interesting. Why can’t I have just a little bit? Sonny lets me—” She sees my face and backtracks. “Only sometimes, of course.”
I take a deep breath and hold on to my smile. Later, Sonny-boy. Later.
“So, how is it Dad was so late getting you here?”
“He couldn’t find parking. Oh, there’s Gramma!”
I start to say that he didn’t need to find parking—all he had to do was drop her at the door. But she’s gone. A terrible thought comes to me and, along with it, a prickling at the nape of my neck.
I turn slowly toward the entrance, and there he is, even though I have expressly not-asked him to come. He looks good, I’m forced to admit—far better than someone with his degenerate lifestyle has any right to look. That slightly tousled, boyish look, as though he just got out of bed, the full lips that remind me— much as I would like to forget—of how they felt on various parts of my body. Except he’s not smiling that crooked, half-mocking smile that I’ve come to expect of him. He’s standing there, lean-hipped in black pants and a form-fitting black silk shirt that shows off his muscles, and he’s looking at me with dark sympathy. His look implies that he knows me more intimately than any other man ever will. That he can sense the little voice in my head that whispers, You shouldn’t be here, there’s some mistake, you aren’t good enough. As though he, too, has heard a voice like that sometimes.
But that’s impossible. Sonny has the sturdiest ego west of New York. If a little voice ever got inside his head, it would shrivel up and die quicker than a slug in a salt mine. Besides, I don’t want his sympathy. I don’t want anything except for him to stay away from me. Especially on this, the most important night of my life. (As I think this, there’s an echo in my head, the most important night, the most—. When had I said those words before? Not remembering makes me angrier.)
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