Queen of Dreams

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  Where could the black car have gone?

  She drives down the narrow road. There’s nothing else she can do, no place to turn. The lane is lined with buildings that look like warehouses. Through the closed windows of her car she smells salt, fish, rancid oil. Ahead, piers jut into water, cranes raise their rusted arms like prophets who have outlived their day. But there shouldn’t be a port here, she knows there shouldn’t. The street-lights are few and cocooned in fog. She waits for them to emerge and fly away. She drives onto a dock, turns off the engine. Water slaps hard at the pylons, a sound an angry parent might make. She thinks of how her mother (whose face grows indistinct in her mind) was never angry with her, not even when she failed and failed. Is it true, what Sonny accused her of, that she wanted to control her mother’s life, whom she gave her attention to, whom she loved? She puts her head down on the steering wheel, squeezes shut her eyes as tightly as she can, grinds in with the knuckles. Perhaps pain will bring the tears that otherwise refuse to oblige her. But no tears come. Only shooting stars, and her mother’s voice, very clear, saying, I want you to become a fox.

  The day comes back to her in all its detail, instant and whole and vibrating, though all these years she had forgotten it the way sometimes, if we’re lucky, we forget events that humiliated us. But now she sees herself: eight years old, gap-toothed, dressed in a pink top and faded jeans, sitting next to her mother on the couch. Her hair is tied in two braids, her top is machine-embroidered with blue flowers, courtesy of Kmart, where her mother, innocent of the intricacies of American haute couture, often shops. The top is one of Rakhi’s favorites, though after this day she will ball it up and hide it in the bottom of her drawer until she can throw it into a Dumpster. Her mother turns toward her with a smile and says the words easily, as though it were just a game they were playing. The girl knows it is no game, but she isn’t worried or nervous, not yet, because she’s certain she can deliver whatever her mother asks for.

  I want you to become a fox, her mother says, so that you can learn to dream what the fox dreams. It is good to start with foxes, because they are intelligent and suspicious, and so their dreams are not unlike ours. Then you may learn to dream like birds, and snakes, and fish, creatures that are far more complex than we are led to believe.

  The girl waits for instructions, but the mother gives none. She watches the girl for a while, then gives a sigh. Look, she says. I will demonstrate.

  The girl can see the stillness that takes over her mother’s body. Only the tip of her nose has the slightest quiver in it. And her eyes: they’ve turned moist and flecked with brown. In the light from the windows they shine like iridescent marbles. The girl waits for more: a musky smell, the reddening of hair. It doesn’t happen. But it doesn’t need to, because she can see that her mother has gone somewhere else. Even though her eyes are open, the girl knows that if she waved her hand in front of their beautiful opaqueness, her mother wouldn’t blink. The girl begins to cry. She feels panic cramping her knees, her fingertips. It is not because she doesn’t know where her mother has gone or that she fears she might not return (these, too, she feels) but because she, Rakhi, cannot follow. It is her first introduction to failure, her first awareness of herself as a separate, lesser being.

  Later she will recall these movements, but only faintly, like a photograph seen through discolored glass: turning the car, driving up the one-way street, going in the wrong direction. (She’s broken more laws today than in her whole lifetime.) The freeway sign looms suddenly from the fog as though she were in an old Twilight Zone episode. If she looked back, would there be nothing behind her? She does not look. She holds the fox memory inside her as she drives across the bridge to the Fremont house, the fog lifting with each mile. The minutes stream past the car window like clues she’s failed to understand. At the front door she fumbles, dropping the key twice because the porch light isn’t turned on the way her mother would always keep it when she knew Rakhi was coming home.

  At the end of the failed fox episode, her mother had taken her by the shoulders and kissed her on each cheek. It’s okay, she had said. It doesn’t matter. Rakhi had been angry at her mother’s disingenuousness because of course it mattered. But tonight she sees what her mother was really saying. It doesn’t matter because I love you just the same. Could this apply to all the other ways in which she failed? As she walks in darkness up the stairs of her parents’ house (balancing on the balls of her feet so as not to wake her father) she carries this understanding inside her like a newly received gift she hasn’t opened yet.

  Later she will wonder: Is this why the man in white appeared to her, to bring her something old, something new, a crumb of memory, a sliver of understanding? Little enough, when placed against the great, gaping mouth of her loss. Yet significant.

  (But her father is awake. He does not move from the bed, but the whites of his eyes shine in refracted moonlight as he swivels his head. He can hear her move in the sowing room, bumping into things. He can hear her drop onto the makeshift bed she’s made there on the floor, an ascetic’s bed, just a pillow on the carpet, a thin blanket for cover. But she’s no ascetic yet, he knows this even if she doesn’t, his daughter with all kinds of wants bubbling up inside her. He would like to come to her, touch her shoulder to indicate he understands more than she thinks he does, though not as much, perhaps, as she needs him to. She’s overcome by exhaustion, he can tell by the way she tosses and turns, trying to get comfortable. By the way she doesn’t hear the small crackle of the paper he has placed on her pillow, the next translated entry from the journal, which he has titled “Beauty and the Beast.”)

  21

  FROM THE

  DREAM JOURNALS

  I never thought I would marry. I knew it was not allowed. The first question that the gatekeeper asked us novices before we were allowed to enter the caves was whether we were willing to give up all thoughts of husbands. And lovers too, she’d added drily. Some of the girls hesitated and were sent back home. I had no hesitations.

  How little I knew myself, to think that I would not desire human loving. To think that my longings would be always in my control.

  The interpreters I saw did not appear unhappy. This made sense to me. What I had seen of wifehood made it seem a drudge’s life—all day at the beck and call of in-laws, husband, children. Wives worked endlessly and without hope of praise, though if things went wrong, there was always plenty of blame. The invisible life of wives, the one carried out in darkness in closed bedrooms, I knew little about. From what the elders let fall from time to time, that was a drudgery too.

  Be thankful of the lot you have chosen, the elders said. Your body will always be your own. No one will invade it except your dream spirits—and to be invaded by them is a blessing.

  Looking back, I question what I did not question then. How would they—women without men—have known of the joys of the flesh, the giving that is also a gift received? How would they have known the body’s craving to be invaded by another body like itself?

  But perhaps they did know. Perhaps that is why they spoke as they did, over and over, in the hope of keeping us from going astray.

  My aunt, my first teacher in the way of dreams, told me this: One life is too little to be divided between the outside world and the inner one, the world of daylight and that of shadow. She said, A man’s kisses will suck your life force from you. You will have nothing left to offer the dream god. And if then the god in anger leaves you, you will spend the rest of your life bereft.

  If you turn from your husband to preserve your gift, he will resent that, for he will know he is not foremost in your life. Husbands do not like to know that.

  Either way, she said, it is a path that leads to bitterness. With all my heart I wish you would not take it. But she said it sadly, for by then I had made my decision.

  In the spring of my last year as an apprentice, along with twenty-four others who were judged ready, I was taken to Calcutta.

  It was a trip we ha
d waited for all year, had whispered about in the dark of our sleeping quarters after lamps had been extinguished. Calcutta, home to ten million souls, a place full of newness, of news from the world. It was the total opposite of the sleepy calm of our caves, our life that seemed so distant from everything. And we—no more than girls—longed for change.

  It was to be a trip to further our education. Calcutta was full of dreams: not only the ones being dreamed by its present inhabitants but old, interrupted ones that hung motionless over the sluggish brown Ganga and colored the night with their confusions. We were to be tested on how well we could pluck these disembodied dreams out of the air and interpret them.

  Dreams, the elders said, continue to affect the waking life, even after the dreamers are gone. We were to examine the patterns of these old dreams and determine their effects on the city’s future.

  Picture this: twenty-four young women getting off the train at Howrah Station, an elder ahead of us and one behind. We did not wear uniforms because dream tellers do not believe in external marks. Still, surely onlookers would have known that there was something about us that bound us together—a certain inward look, as though we were always searching, and unsatisfied.

  But on this day we didn’t look inward. Giddy with excitement, we ran from one end of the station to the other, and called to each other in amazed voices: look at that, how about this one, can you believe! We ate the too sweet old-woman’s-hair candy the vendors sold, and wondered at the seriousness on the city dwellers’ faces. How could they be so sad when they lived among such diversions? One of the elders bought a kaleidoscope, and we took turns looking through the shiny tube at the bright and changing patterns that didn’t have to mean anything.

  The years pass, I forget much. But I remember our visit to Victoria Memorial. Huge white anachronism of marble and brass and foreign pride where no one had slept in many years—how out of place in a city where so many crowded into a single room, a single bed. Where so many slept on pavements, with only the sky for a quilt. But in this variegated world there is a place for everything, even vanity. So the memorial stood in a huge green space surrounded by fountains, and the black angel on its dome balanced on one pointed toe and looked down with regal uncaring on a city it had once ruled. We walked into the largest hall, our footsteps echoing and hollow, and stared. Thrones and plantation chairs, crowns, robes encrusted with gold. A globe with RULE BRITANNIA etched across the equator. Seals the color of sunset affixed to documents that took or gave away things that weren’t the signer’s to give or take. In an alcove were muskets, army uniforms in scarlet, boots. Cannonballs with plaques below them telling the names of battles. Standing there, I couldn’t breathe. Smoke festered around my head, I could smell voices from ancient nightmares. Someone asked for water. Someone whispered hoarsely of treachery, gates opened from the inside. Someone gabbled a prayer to Shiva that was cut off halfway through a word. Someone lay in a puddle of blood and thought on a childhood forest, the dark green of mango trees and shal. Someone begged someone else to kill him quickly. The voices made me dizzy. For the first time in my life I knew what hatred was. What kind of people, I wondered, would preserve such a place and make an attraction out of it? I would have razed it to the ground ages ago.

  I must have looked unlike myself, for one of the elders stared at me. Then she motioned me over to a lady’s ball gown, yards and yards of ruffle ivoried with age, a whalebone corset. Touch it with your mind, she signed, and I did. Straightaway I was plunged into a bedroom, a dim four-poster with a canopy of net to keep out mosquitoes. I was afraid, for I was living in a strange country, one I’d never wanted to visit. I longed for the gentle, rolling hills of home, the familiarity of daisies and daffodils, not these overlush vines that coiled around my house like snakes. I could not tell my husband my fears; he had already told me that he expected me to be brave and noble, as was proper for an Englishwoman. If I could not possess those virtues, he’d instructed me, then I must pretend them. So I lay under his weight at night, stranger that he had become since arriving in this land, and pretended. I tried not to think of the morning, when I must face the servants and give them orders and see them smirking as they whispered to each other about me in their strange, sibilant language. When finally I fell asleep I dreamed of snakes with tongues of fire.

  Later the elder whispered, There are many sides to history, are there not? Most of them are never heard, except by those who know how to recover dreams.

  She said, It makes it harder to judge, does it not?

  Inside myself, I heard the young woman scream as men in turbans broke into the compound. I saw the sun flash on their bayonets. Once, twice, three times. Then the pictures were gone.

  I did not answer the elder. I was upset with her for having divided me into so many parts, each in conflict with the other. I walked out of the dead palace. The other apprentices were silent, too, and some wiped angrily at their eyes.

  But outside was the last of a beautiful sunset, orange against the black palm trees. The electric lights came on in many colors, making the fountains shimmer like a fairy display. Ice-cream sellers sang out pista kulfi chahiye, pista kulfi. The other apprentices pushed the dreams into corners of their minds, to be analyzed later. They pressed around the elders, begging to be taken to the cinema, to a Chinese restaurant, to the shops in New Market that sold lipstick and scented powder.

  But I refused to let go of my agitation. I turned my back on them and walked into the garden filled with the smell of pink roses, flowers that women from a distant land had planted in their home-sickness. I wanted to hate, but the flowers would not let me. Their petals were so soft, so easily broken. I knelt among them, and they were like entreating fingers on my arms.

  When I opened my eyes, he was watching me. He sat under a tree, leaning against its massive trunk, and there was an ease about him that intrigued me. Living among dream interpreters for three years, I had grown used to intensity.

  When he spoke, it startled me because I was not used to being addressed by young men, and also because what he said was so unusual.

  Would you like to hear a song about flowers? he asked.

  I nodded, and he sang. I did not understand the words very well—they were in a language different from mine. I didn’t care. I liked his voice, rich and unself-conscious even when he forgot words and hummed to fill in the gap. What I didn’t understand, I imagined, and thus it became a love song.

  When the song ended, I knew I should leave without speaking. Already by looking and listening, I had disobeyed. Now I broke a third rule.

  Sing me another song, I said.

  This time he sang in Bengali about a woman whose eyes were as dark as those of wild deer, and he looked into my own eyes as he sang so that I felt like that woman. I knew I would break more rules to keep feeling this way.

  The elders found me soon after and led me away, chastising me all the while. The other novices stared at me in mingled horror and admiration. I had to remain in the hotel room as punishment while they went to the cinema. One of the elders stayed to watch over me. As we recited the twenty-nine cardinal tenets together, I thought I saw pity on her face. Perhaps, like many experienced tellers, she had the gift of future sight.

  I could see the future, too, though I was not experienced. I knew that tomorrow when the group went to the Kali temple, I would slip away and go to the address the man had given me, to the little room he rented on someone’s rooftop. I would wait there until he returned from work. A storm would begin, and we would make love on the night terrace in the rain. I was not afraid of this. I was prepared to follow him wherever his destiny led us. I wanted his destiny to become mine, too.

  Ah, but there were things I did not see.

  They found me, of course—the elders had their ways—and the next day when he was away at work they took me back by force to the caves. They brought me first to my aunt (but was she really my aunt? I had begun to suspect otherwise) so that she could convince me.

&
nbsp; It isn’t too late, she said. You can still return to us. I’ll intercede with the council to take you back, even though you are no longer a virgin. There are purification ceremonies. It is difficult, but it can be done. Come back, she said, or you’ll regret your decision for the rest of your life.

  But regret was just a sound without a meaning, buzzing like a fly in my ear. I was crazy with love, and I told her so.

  How can you love someone you don’t know? she asked in dismay.

  I turned away, and though I had always respected my aunt, for a moment I felt contempt. What can a shriveled old woman teach me about love, I thought, about this dizzying excitement that runs through your body like electricity until you think you will die of pleasure?

  But knowing what I know now, I would have answered her question in this way: Isn’t not knowing the only way it is possible to love?

  22

  Rakhi

  We’re closing the store today.

  Waking in the morning, I pulled the blanket over my head. A gesture from childhood, when I’d believed that if I remained in bed, hidden, I could escape from whatever unpleasantness hovered over the day. My mother would come and whisk the covers off me. My little ostrich, she said.

  The difference between being a child and an adult: after a while, I throw off the blanket on my own. I roll up my bedding and place it in the closet, not exactly neatly but not untidily either. It’s more than I would have done in my own apartment, an acknowledgment that it’s my mother’s space I’m inhabiting. In the bathroom I stare in the mirror, noticing new wrinkles, an age spot. I can hear my father puttering around in the kitchen downstairs. His cast came off the day before yesterday, and he’s fixing his own breakfast. Good! The sooner he’s able to take care of himself, the sooner I can get back to my own life.