“Sonil.”
With a start I realized I had drifted away from the conversation, and smiling, ate a sweet.
Ten
Thoughts of Richard often occupied me the entire day if I did not see him. I didn’t understand this at first, and wondered why it was so. I tried to think about other things, but my mind was disobedient. I had grown used to his slow smile, his slouch as he sat, his American jeans. I felt embarrassed, as if everyone around me could guess at my thoughts. My grandmother didn’t notice my distracted air, so distressed was she at Jani’s departure. She began to devote herself to the garden and mutter under her breath. My mother of course ignored me, and in any case, she was not often at home, having found someplace else to fritter away her afternoons.
When Richard first invited me over to his flat, I didn’t want to go. I was comfortable with the cafes, the visits to Maria. To see him at home would seem strange. I reluctantly agreed.
He rented rooms above a restaurant that specialized in North African food. It was in a part of town which was half American and half French, most of the people belonging to a local ashram. There were some islanders, too, mostly college students who preferred cheap rents and the Western atmosphere. He took me to see the ashram.
It was a quiet place with one courtyard, a walled-in garden, a tiny fountain. The bowl of the fountain, its pond, was completely covered in rose petals that rested on the surface of the water, Richard and I sat at the edge. He dipped his hand in the water and drew out a petal. He tucked it behind my ear as I became perfectly still, holding my breath, alert.
We returned to his flat. It was clean, spacious, with only a few pieces of furniture, and crates of books everywhere. His bed was a mattress on a webbed frame, covered with a rough Indian-print cloth.
I can still remember that afternoon as clearly as if it happened yesterday. I remember pausing at his doorstep and slowly undoing the straps of my sandals. I remember lingering over this task, lining up my sandals just so. Barefoot, I stepped inside onto the tiled floor. I stood in front of a bookshelf, reading the titles on the spines. Turning, I found Richard right behind me, reaching to take my hand, and my reaching, too, I can remember the scent of the English-milled soap he used, the dampness of his just washed hair, “Let’s eat,” he said, and I blushed.
He made me pancakes in his kitchen. His father had taught him when he was eight, before I was even born, He mixed eggs and flour, honey and milk, added vanilla and sour cream, and poured circles into a hot skillet. He flipped them with ease and served them to me with real maple syrup, “It’s from Vermont,” he said, a place that to me sounded as exotic as Paris. Syrup burst around my fork as I pushed it through the spongy surface. It tasted wonderful, foreign, rich.
Then we had grapefruit. I was horrified to discover that he ate the inner membrane, the thick white threads and tough skin. I taught him to peel away the skin so only the soft, juicy, jewel-like pieces of fruit were revealed, to suck them away from their frame. My fingers wet, I fed him the choicest bits.
He kissed my mouth full of grapefruit tenderly. Swallowing, I kissed him back. I pressed my mouth all over his skin, sipping at his neck, his throat, his eyelids. I felt dizzy, transported, in another world. I didn’t have time to think about what was happening, I just knew that my body was responding to his urgently. “We need some music,” he said, smiling.
We sat cross-legged listening to a famous veena player on the radio. When the music started I forgot myself. I knew I was in a room, that it was late afternoon, but here was this exquisite sound that seemed to carve steps in the air, on which I was ready to place my heel and toe and climb, climb for as long as it was required of me. Richard seemed as if in a trance; so inward was his gaze that I just closed my eyes and leaned back. I must have been lying there for a long time, my shoulders, my legs all soft, and I must have been dreaming, for the music had stopped, and here was Richard kissing me awake. I began to kiss him back, and he drew me to him, and I curved to him until it was like music, no end or beginning, just this feeling of body to body, his mouth, my mouth, his shoulder, my throat, my breast, my little baby breast, his smooth stomach, his tummy, his thighs, my tummy, my thighs, until he put his mouth on me, and it was the most lovely sensation, as if a thousand eyes inside me were slowly being opened.
Eleven
Now began a period of my life when the days were long and thick with desire. I lied to my grandmother that I had made new friends. Every afternoon, I met Richard in town, and we made our lust-soaked way to his apartment. But there was a world outside his four walls, full of gossipy mouths and lingering glances. I think because we made such an unlikely couple, however, and because of the distance between our ages, we did not attract too much attention.
The cost of seeing Richard was not something that I took for granted. It meant that I had to lie to everyone and sneak away to meet my lover. I had to plan and carry out the logistics of our trysts. It was thrilling. Not all of our meetings were full of unbridled passion; sometimes we just talked or listened to music. Sometimes we went for walks, but always I was afraid someone I knew might see us. Yet I loved to have my hand held suddenly, just as I was thinking that it was Mrs. Narayan I spied in the distance.
Once we did meet C.P.’s sister-in-law. We had not heard from her family since Grandmother had the unpleasant task of informing them that Jani had gone to a convent. The sister-in-law was surprised to see me in the company of a white man, or maybe just in the company of a man at all, or maybe she was just surprised to see me.
“The zoologist,” she said. I had forgotten her name, so merely presented Richard. And I had forgotten zoology during these past days of my involvement with Richard. I did not pay much attention to the conversation. At some point, we said goodbye and continued with our walk.
Over and over, I saw him, I felt him. I remembered everything. If he rose to fetch us mineral water, or sometimes wine, I’d lie in his bed, in the warmth, and find myself blushing. It was like in the books, and sometimes I’d tiptoe over to the mirror and see if I could see any change; I’d run my hands over my breasts, feel the groan down there, but I still looked like myself. And when he finally climbed the stairs with the slender green bottle of divine liquid, I’d wrap myself immediately around him, in the open doorway, no shame. You are a beauty, you are bella, bellissima, beauté, my world, my love … he’d whisper, words I completely believed, words I wanted to hear again and again. I grew dizzy, I gulped for air, I could not separate my dreams from my waking life. I wanted to remain in bed forever, I wanted to do it, it, infinitely.
There’s a Bob Dylan song, “I Want You,” You feel he’s singing with his heart, but also with his member. You know it is a song of ultimate longing. We made love to everything, the complete Dylan, old-fashioned punk, Talking Heads, and once, without paying attention, to the entire Bangladesh album.
Of course, it had to end. He said, I’m pretty old for you. He didn’t say, you’re too young. He said, you weren’t even born when my parents would take me Queens to eat cheese blintzes with my grandparents. You weren’t born when I hit a grand slam and broke Mrs, Moskowitz’s window. You were a baby when I first read Vonnegut and Hesse and went to my first rock concert. You were a kid when I took Carolyn Maisel to the eighth-grade prom, and my brother told me his class never had dances because they were all hippies then. And on and on he went, hypnotized by the fact that he had been alive, and I had not.
I went to live with my aunts in Madras while he was a junior counselor at sleepaway camp in the Poconos. I was playing hopscotch when he decided to come to India and discovered Eastern religion. When he came to the island I was in grade school, having my hair braided in two parts.
I was already smarter. He was still reading Hesse, I was reading Tolstoy. He was a B+ student; I was straight A’s. I knew I would do better than he had on the College Board exams. But he was an adventurer, more experienced in life, while I was merely school taught.
I told him about my fath
er. I imagined him a cowboy, and Richard laughed. “There are no more cowboys, Sonil,” he said. But I believed my father had been a cowboy, someone who wore checkered shirts and pointy boots, who someday would rescue me from my mother. I worried I would take after her. Everyone said I resembled my father, having his hair and mouth. I was too anemic-looking to resemble my mother, who always seemed years younger than she was, with glossy thick hair and pearly teeth. My hair had been cut so many times for sickness that I wore it short. My grandmother told me that I looked like Louise Brooks, a favorite actress of hers, but I thought I resembled Alfalfa, one of the Little Rascals. “I love Alfalfa,” said Richard, kissing my hair, but I wasn’t sure. “Tell me more about your father,” he asked.
“Okay, my father. I think he lives in Montana.” I thought of Montana, what it represented. I had looked at a photograph once in a library and saw a sepia-colored sky and sepia-colored grass. I saw farm buildings set in a great expanse of grassland. Prairies. I liked the sound of that word. In America, I thought, I would learn. I would see what Willa Cather had seen. I had read Death Comes for the Archbishop, and I liked that story, all about a priest and his guide making their way through vast areas of land, helping the poor.
My English teacher, Miss Julie, had told me about the importance of the word, of language, of music, of invention, of giving yourself over to love. She asked me to read Cather and the Romantic poets, to read books about freedom—Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Sarojini Naidu.
“I once wanted to be a cowgirl,” I said.
“A cowgirl?”
“A girl who wears a cowboy hat and a kerchief around her neck, who rides a horse and lets fly a lasso, who can ride with a herd of cattle.”
“The wild cattle of Boston?”
“In Oregon or someplace. I wanted to be a trailblazer.”
“You are a trailblazer,” he said, kissing me. “So why not just go to the Wild West?” he asked.
“Radcliffe first, then the Western states.”
“How do you know so much?”
“I study,” I said quite seriously.
“And you read newspapers?”
“And I listen to music.”
Richard told me about a music teacher he’d had early on who’d shown him the light.
“She was black. She taught us spirituals. One day she asked each of us in the class how many black friends we had. When it was my turn, I said, ‘None.’ I felt bad about that for a long time. My world was so white.
“Later, I began to question Judaism, and I started to read about India, about China, about Japan. I even turned to Christianity and Islam, wanting to tie all the religions together with music. Every church, every temple, celebrates with some kind of song.
“I came to India because I wanted to learn to meditate, and I wanted to meet a holy man. I wanted purpose in my life. When I did meet a holy man, I had been on the island for sixteen months. He told me to teach English to young students and maybe contribute a tape machine to the temple.”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Buy them a tape player?”
“A Sony with auto reverse.”
We spoke about color. Richard disliked his white skin, which seemed even whiter when we held hands. He thought I wanted to be white.
“But I’m half white already,” I said.
“I think you’d like to be all white.”
Maybe he was right. I read white books, tried to dress more white than brown. And in being with Richard, I felt I was choosing white over brown. Yet I liked his whiteness, the sense of other in him, the foreign, the mysterious. I liked to place my hand next to his and compare the difference. But I didn’t quite forget my darkness, my color, my me.
Sometimes, I told Richard, I got very anxious. I feared I would be left out of whatever was exciting in the world. There was a line in Mrs. Dalloway that always made me breathless. I had copied it out in one of my notebooks. She had gone up in the tower and left them “blackberrying in the sun.” It made me ache, some solitary soul climbing dark, dank steps to a narrow room with a narrow bed while her companions have sun at their backs, purple juice staining their chins and hands. It was too awful. I resolved never to enter that tower, but to spend my days blackberrying. There were so many months of the year I stayed in bed, shut up like a Victorian invalid, having food brought up to me on trays, reading, reading until my eyes swam with tears. I was sick of it, sick of my room, sick of my sickness, sick of the pitter-patter of my aunts’ steps as they stole in for just one more glance, one more peep, as if I were dying, a delicate china doll whose bloom had gone. No! I wanted to be in the fields, never mind my desire for whiteness, my hands scratched and bleeding from the brambles yielding the divine berries, the sun at my ankles, my hands purple. I wanted to defy them with the darkness of my skin, my aunts whose idea of beauty was a pale complexion bought in jars of “Miracle Turmeric” vanishing cream. I wanted to do a blackberry dance, color my face violet and stamp my feet in wine-making rhythm, exalt in the sun and spin naked.
“Spin naked to me, my blackberry beauty,” whispered Richard. So I did.
Twelve
Jani wrote from the convent on thin foolscap with a smooth ball-point pen. I guess I must have expected her to scribble with a piece of charcoal or burnt wood, but then, I reminded myself, she was not in a prison, merely a nunnery.
Dear Sonil,
I am sorry I left so suddenly, but there was no other course of action I could take. It is nice here. I have met the novices, and other girls like me who just need a place to be. Some are expectant mothers thrown out of their families, and it is shocking to see how young they are. You and I have been very protected. Everyone is nice. Our days are full, from sunrise to sunset, with chores like cooking, gardening, repairs, and washing. The nights are hard, for I find it difficult to sleep. I lie awake and look at the curtains. A powerful nightlight makes shadows of pouncing tigers on the fabric, and the trees shake hard in the breeze. It is an eerie noise, like crying.
Here I feel very alone, not sure of anything, and see my own mortality every night. I have spoken to Sister Bernard about this (she is in charge of us new girls), and she says I must trust in Our Lord and has given me some prayers.
I say them, but my mind is still tormented. It will pass, though, as I gain more faith in Our Lord, and soon I will be able to sleep at night.
I like the quietness of my life here in the daytime. I tend to the vegetable garden where we grow the foods we eat. I cannot tell you the joy of watching the green leaves grow, the busy indication that the fruit is ripening. You and I like the market in town, but Sonil, there is nothing like pulling a tomato off the vine, the fuzzy prickliness of the stem, the way it drops—plop—so neatly off into your hand.
We have silent time like you thought we might. It is very pleasant to close one’s mouth and not worry about words, especially in the presence of someone else. We’re so compelled to speak all the time, to constantly shout at one another, we utter such senseless things. The joy of being around two, three, even five people at one time and not saying anything is so sustaining I look forward to it.
I hope you are not too lonely and are finding something to occupy your time.
Your loving cousin,
Jani
Jani’s letter worried me. That she couldn’t sleep seemed troublesome, indicating a unquiet mind. What was tormenting her? Was it merely what she should do with her life, or was she haunted by the specter of the past, like the baby that died? In turn, I wanted to tell Jani about Richard, but when I wrote back, I just spoke of the daily goings on in the house, about Grandmother’s health, and so on. I told her about our great-uncle, who had not been home for several days. No one is worried, I wrote, for he is probably curled up asleep on a tattered couch in a hazy den in town. I didn’t mention my mother.
Richard, Maria, and I went on a picnic. Richard drove a borrowed car, and I sat beside him, Maria in the back. We drove with the top down,
the breeze in our hair, speeding past all the other cars through town. We passed a red Fiat full of college boys who honked and hooted, and it felt good to be going that fast. Soon, the town was behind us, and the open fields, wet with rice, were at our sides, and groves of trees full of monkeys with captive fruit in their mouths. We stopped at a grassy bank and ate chapatis filled with onion and potatoes and ripe tomatoes. We drank chilled bottles of ginger beer and passed around a joint. We napped in the sun. When I woke up, Maria was packing up the picnic.
“How are you getting on with Richard, Sonil?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said. “Why?”
“I just wondered. I’ve known Richard a long time and have seen him with a few girls. He’s like a little brother to me, and I want good things for him.”
“You don’t think I’m a good thing?”
She laughed, “You’re young; your life is just beginning. Richard, well, he’s young, too, and he doesn’t yet know where he’s going in this world. I don’t know, I probably sound like a mother hen. I just worry about the two of you.”
“Did you have many boyfriends after you left your husband?”
“No. At first, I kept to myself. Then I began to date younger men.” She hesitated, then went on. “Richard and I dated for a few months. No, don’t look like that—it was not serious. We were both lonely and scared of being alone. We’re just good friends now. I got busy with my books. I think my big love is still out there, waiting for me.”
“My mother is alone, too. Sometimes I think she’ll marry again.”
“How would you feel about that?”
“I don’t know. She never speaks to me. Maybe she’ll go away. She’s already so distant. It’s like I don’t exist for her.”
“Maybe you remind her of her past.”
I said nothing. I was still thinking of her and Richard.
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