Jasmine

by Bharati Mukherjee

  I apologize to Du. “I won’t bug you anymore, then. You’ve got your Big Stick to learn up. I’ll leave you alone.”

  “Before you go …” he calls to me. He hunts for something in the top left-hand drawer of his desk. It is a drawer he keeps locked with a mechanism he improvised out of tossed-out farm equipment. He’s an inventor, a little like Prakash, exceptional and impatient. We’re getting him a computer this summer, and sending him to Iowa City for college-credit training.

  “I got something for you.”

  He’s a magpie, or a fence. Soon he won’t be able to close that drawer. He’s a materialist, no question, and his room is a warehouse. He’s hoarded things, big things like road signs and Drug Town posters, medium things like record players and radios thrown out even by Goodwill, and little things like nail files. What he owns seems to matter to him less than owning itself. He needs to own. Owning is rebellion, it means not sharing, it means survival. He ate bugs and worms and rodents. He lived. He’s a quick study, all right.

  A rhinestone ladybug winks in Du’s cupped palm. “Du!” I stare at the ridged and calloused skin welted by thick brown fate lines. “They look like diamonds!”

  “What if they were?”

  He pins the ladybug on my shirt. For a moment his face glows and I think he will kiss me. “You were meant to have pretty things,” he says.

  Secrets roll like barbed wire between us. I don’t ask where he bought or found the pin that glints on my Madras shirt. But as I lie awake this night, the first night that gives signs of not cooling down, Du joins the ghosts of men. He is a phantom lover, he watches me; perhaps he has been watching every night, in his secret, inventive ways.

  5

  TWO days ago I was sitting in the Gynecology Annex of the University Hospital down in Iowa City waiting for Dr. Mrs. Jaswani to get off the phone and call me in, when the woman next to me on the sofa started sobbing into a book she held pressed tight to her face. There was a man’s picture on the back of the book, just about the right size for the woman’s head; I almost laughed out loud. I couldn’t tell her age because of the book, but she looked fitly scrawny in sweat pants. Frizzy gray hair spewed out on either side of the dust jacket, not that gray hair meant that she had come to see Dr. Kwang in Infertility instead of Dr. Jaswani. The University Hospital’s gotten into infertility and gerontology in a biggish way. I know this from Bud, because he’s processed home mortgages for three of the Infertility guys and they’ve all bought properties for over two hundred thousand.

  Kwang, Liu, Patel, I’ve met them all. Poke around in a major medical facility and suddenly you’re back in Asia, which I find very reassuring. I trust only Asian doctors, Asian professionals. What we’ve gone through must count for something. “It’s going to be all right,” I said to the woman with the book over her face. “Can I get you some coffee?”

  We were the only two people in the waiting room. I could hear the nurse but I couldn’t see her. She was reporting on somebody’s endometrial biopsy results in her broad booming voice. The girl at the reception desk was scrolling information on her computer screen. She had her Walkman on, anyway.

  “Thanks, no,” the woman said. She had a striking face, all sharp angles. Crying didn’t puff it up. “Caffeine and I aren’t friends.”

  “I’ll get some water, then,” I said.

  “I don’t know what happened,” the woman said. “One minute I was thinking about the Ricky doll I used to love to death and the next minute I’m this wreck.”

  “I’m so sorry.” I got her water from the fountain. The Dixie cup was tiny to begin with, and even the water it held I managed to slosh on the way. These mornings my fingers feel quite swollen.

  She shrugged her thanks. The sip she took was out of politeness. “You probably don’t know what a Ricky doll is.”

  * * *

  She must have been an older student, or a professor. Educated people are interested in differences; they assume that I’m different from them but exempted from being one of “them,” the knife-wielding undocumenteds hiding in basements webbing furniture.

  In Baden, the farmers are afraid to suggest I’m different. They’ve seen the aerograms I receive, the strange lettering I can decipher. To them, alien knowledge means intelligence. They want to make me familiar. In a pinch, they’ll admit that I might look a little different, that I’m a “dark-haired girl” in a naturally blond county. I have a “darkish complexion” (in India, I’m “wheatish”), as though I might be Greek from one grandparent. I’m from a generic place, “over there,” which might be Ireland, France, or Italy. I’m not a Lutheran, which isn’t to say I might not be Presbyterian. About which they’re ignorant; farmers are famously silent, and not ashamed.

  Taylor’s friends in New York used to look at me and say, “You’re Iranian, right?” If I said no, then, “Pakistani, Afghan, or Punjabi?” They were strikingly accurate about most things, and always out to improve themselves. Even though I was just an au pair, professors would ask if I could help them with Sanskrit or Arabic, Devanagari or Gurumukhi script. I can read Urdu, not Arabic. I can’t read Sanskrit. They had things they wanted me to translate, paintings they wanted me to decipher. They were very democratic that way. For them, experience leads to knowledge, or else it is wasted. For me, experience must be forgotten, or else it will kill.

  But the other girls in the building, the other day mummies—sorry, “caregivers”—who descended on the lobby at eight o’clock every morning, down from Harlem or over from Brooklyn, and took over the children while the mothers went out to teach or study or edit or just do what they do, assumed only that I was from “the islands,” like they were. That was democratic, too.

  They assumed I had a past, like them, about which I didn’t tell too much. Most of them had children back in Jamaica or Trinidad or Santo Domingo. They assumed I did, too. I didn’t have a child, but I had a past that I was still fleeing. Perhaps still am.

  “Little Ricky Ricardo,” she said. She squeaked her nails up and down the spine of the book. I could tell she was hurting. “It can’t mean much to you.”

  “You’ll be okay.”

  “So I waited too long,” she said. “I wrote poems. I was going to be the next Adrienne Rich. I mean, it isn’t the end of the world or anything.”

  She got me there, too.

  “You have nice hips,” she said. But she gave the “you” a generic sweep. You teeming millions with wide hips breeding like roaches on wide-hipped continents. “Wide. Nature meant you to carry babies.”

  “Thank you,” I said. What else could I have said?

  “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?” I didn’t deny it. “It was easy, wasn’t it? You didn’t wait, you’re lucky.”

  The truth is, I am young enough to bear children into the next century. But. I feel old, very old, millennia old, a bug-eyed viewer of beginnings and ends. In the old Hindu books they say that in the eye of the creator, mountains rise and fall like waves on the ocean.

  It wasn’t hard to get pregnant, but it wasn’t very natural, either. It shames Bud that now, for sex, I must do all the work, all the moving, that I will always be on top. I will do this. But for having this baby, I required Dick Kwang’s assistance. Bud was very nervous, made jokes about “Dick and Jane” that Dong-jin Kwang and I didn’t understand. Bud said he’d watched the inseminators do their job a thousand times, but he never thought he’d be so intimately involved.

  It was Mother who got us together. Professionally. The first time she met me, she asked if I was good with numbers. Passably, I said. She assumed I was a student at the university; I didn’t disabuse her.

  “My son is always looking for smart, reliable tellers. Let’s take a trip over there.” She thought we’d hit it off. The hours were flexible, good for a student. I took her up on it.

  He came running out of the office that day. “Mother! Who have you brought us, a maharani? I hope you haven’t eaten, Your Highness, because I’m just headed out the door.”<
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  * * *

  “Oh, God, I love you so much,” he says. “I have never seen anyone so beautiful.” He doesn’t often make these pronouncements, they are part of his abject position, his helplessness. We are back home from Mother Ripplemeyer’s. Du in the living room watching television, Bud and I are in the bedroom. Bud may no longer be a whole man, but desire hasn’t deserted him. Lust deprived of spontaneous fulfillment: that’s what shames him now. Once he had been in control; once he had been an impulsive pursuer.

  After I prepare him for bed, undo the shoes, pull off the pants, sponge-bathe him, he likes me to change roles, from caregiver to temptress, and I try to do it convincingly, walking differently, frowning, smiling … I take off my Sunday clothes very carefully in the bathroom, with the door open, the light on. I am to linger there, and act as though I am alone. I brush my teeth, a long, long time; I rub myself against the lavatory’s edge. When we first met and began making love in my rented room and in the motel rooms of neighboring towns, he was active and inventive, very sure of himself, he loved games. Now I must do all the playing, provide the surprises. I don’t mind. His upper body is enormously strong, the bench press of love. It isn’t the preparations (for all their awkwardness and crudeness) that I rage against. What kills me in this half-lit bedroom is the look of torture, excitement, desperation on Bud’s face as he watches me.

  Desire can end only one way, tonight or any other night. I come to bed, crawling over the covers, until a pair of immensely strong, blond-haired arms enfold me. He can lift me, even from his prone position, lift me and center me and keep me in the air till I feel his arms trembling, and as my legs, my breasts, my face dip to touch his chest, I can feel the ripple of his heart; our flesh makes loud slapping noises. Then it is my turn to take charge. There are massages I must administer, pushing him on the prostate, tools I must push up him so that, at least on very special nights, he can ejaculate.

  Bud’s eyes are closed, face contorted. “Sweet Jane,” he mutters. “I’ve brought you to this. The old big beads trick.”

  I hush him with my lips. I do not know the pain he suffers, if any, if bliss lies this close to agony, if he is on a different plane. When love collapses, I let myself fall to his chest and his heart is like a fist beating me wherever we touch.

  Tonight, as Bud’s breath shivers back to normal and the hard thumping of his heart softens to a beat, I can almost follow, a sliver of blue television light exposes two small pools of darkness at the base of our bedroom door. Our bedroom door is open, just a crack. The shadow pools gather into one, and disappear. A line of blue light edges our door, then snaps off.

  A few seconds later we hear, “Night, Mom and Dad.” He moves so quietly.

  It is still spring, hot days, cool nights, Iowa’s gentlest month. Bud is already in the first flutterings of sleep. The house is dark, full of unacted drama. Lying awake, trying to regulate my breathing with my heart, with Bud’s light snore, trying to put my head back on the pillow, I watch the patterns on the ceiling, framed photos on the dresser, my lover falling through layers of private pain. I get up, briefly, and move his wheelchair back to the corner, and fold it. On nights like this, with a full moon beating down like an auxiliary sun, the farmers say you can practically hear the corn and beans ripping their way through the ground. This night I feel torn open like the hot dry soil, parched.

  6

  IN a makeshift birthing hut in Hasnapur, Jullundhar District, Punjab, India, I was born the year the harvest was so good that even my father, the reluctant tiller of thirty acres, had grain to hoard for drought. If I had been a boy, my birth in a bountiful year would have marked me as lucky, a child with a special destiny to fulfill. But daughters were curses. A daughter had to be married off before she could enter heaven, and dowries beggared families for generations. Gods with infinite memories visited girl children on women who needed to be punished for sins committed in other incarnations.

  My mothers past must have been heavy with wrongs. I was the fifth daughter, the seventh of nine children.

  When the midwife carried me out, my sisters tell me, I had a ruby-red choker of bruise around my throat and sapphire fingerprints on my collarbone.

  When I revealed this to Taylor’s wife, Wylie—I was their undocumented “caregiver” during my years in Manhattan—she missed the point and shrieked at my “foremothers.” Listening to Wylie I thought I understood the philosophy behind Agent Orange. Wylie would overkill. My mother was a sniper. She wanted to spare me the pain of a dowryless bride. My mother wanted a happy life for me.

  I survived the sniping. My grandmother may have named me Jyoti, Light, but in surviving I was already Jane, a fighter and adapter.

  God’s cruel, my mother complained, to waste brains on a girl. And God’s still more cruel, she said, to make a fifth daughter beautiful instead of the first. By the time my turn to marry came around, there would be no dowry money left to gift me the groom I deserved. I was seven then, a reader, a counter, a picture drawer to whom Masterji, the oldest and sourest teacher in our school (B. A. Patiala, failed), lent his own books. I was a whiz in Punjabi and Urdu, and the first likely female candidate for English instruction he’d ever had. He had a pile of English books, some from the British Council Library, some with USIS stickers. I remember a thin one, Shane, about an American village much like Punjab, and Alice in Wonderland, which gave me nightmares. The British books were thick, with more long words per page. I remember Great Expectations and Jane Eyre, both of which I was forced to abandon because they were too difficult.

  God is cruel to partition the country, she said, to uproot our family from a city like Lahore where we had lived for centuries, and fling us to a village of flaky mud huts. In Lahore my parents had lived in a big stucco house with porticoes and gardens. They had owned farmlands, shops. An alley had been named after a great-uncle. In our family lore Lahore was magic and Lahore was chaos.

  Mataji, my mother, couldn’t forget the Partition Riots. Muslims sacked our house. Neighbors’ servants tugged off earrings and bangles, defiled grottoes, sabered my grandfather’s horse. Life shouldn’t have turned out that way! I’ve never been to Lahore, but the loss survives in the instant replay of family story: forever Lahore smokes, forever my parents flee.

  Nothing is fair. God is cruel. Now I hear these words as love’s refrain. Mataji loved me fiercely. Love made her panic at what was in store. All over our district, bad luck dogged dowryless wives, rebellious wives, barren wives. They fell into wells, they got run over by trains, they burned to death heating milk on kerosene stoves. She scolded my father into letting me stay in school after classes were over and daze myself with Masterji’s hoard of English-language books.

  * * *

  My father was a man who had given up long before I was born. People said of him that he looked like a Lahori landlord; refined, delicate of feature. He maintained authority even while lacking a position. I have his looks. Except when it was absolutely necessary to plant or to harvest, he would lie on a charpoy under a flowering jasmine tree all day. Even without money he dressed well, in what he insisted were the last of his old Lahore kurtas.

  He would tune in to the Pakistani radio broadcasts from Lahore, and listen for their Punjabi-language shows. The names of those singers and actors from the Pakistan side were more familiar to me, growing up, than their Indian counterparts. Otherwise, he detested Urdu and Muslims, which he naturally associated with the loss of our fortune. He refused to speak Hindi as well, considering it the language of Gandhi, the man who had approved the partition of Punjab and the slaughter of millions. After fleeing Lahore, Pitaji had been cast adrift in an uncaring, tasteless, corrupt, coarse, ignorant world.

  “These Bombay mangoes would choke a goat!” he’d say when I brought him the Alphonsos I’d haggled smartly for in the bazaar. He said the Punjabi you heard a beggar mutter by the trash pits of Lahore was poetry compared to the crow-talk Punjabi of the richest merchants in Jullundhar and Hasnapur. “You
should have heard those Lahori barristers and politicians give speeches. Their words had wings.” Lahore visionaries, Lahore women, Lahore music, Lahore ghazals: my father lived in a bunker.

  Fact is, there was a difference. My father was right to notice it and to let it set a standard. But that pitcher is broken. It is the same air this side as that. He’ll never see Lahore again and I never have. Only a fool would let it rule his life.

  7

  I WAS born eighteen years after the Partition Riots. My whole world was the village of Hasnapur. It wasn’t a deadend corner of a flat, baked, violent land at all. I remember sneaking into my friend Vimla’s house and clicking the light switch on-off/on-off when electricity came to the brick houses of the rich traders down the road. My brothers hated Vimla’s father; they called him Potatoes-babu behind his back, but I didn’t care. The naked light bulb swaying at the end of a braided cord was magic! With my palm on the light switch, I felt totally in control.

  In our house we had to finish eating, cleaning up, sewing, reading, before nightfall. Oil for clay lamps was expensive and not always available. Ghosts and spirits took over in the dark. If you had electricity, you could drive out even the most tenacious spirit. When electricity came to Hasnapur and more and more people got it, at least enough for a light, my mother complained that now all the ghosts in the big houses would be chased to the ring of unlighted huts—ours, and the Mazbis’ even farther out—where they could hide and cause mischief.

  I remember when the hand pump was put up by a government man, and we didn’t have to trudge with our full pitchers all the way from the well or from the river-bank. In the doctor’s storefront clinic I saw my first television picture. The doctor was a tall, mustached man, and he showed stern how-to videos about the efficacies of small families and clean hands. I had the scrubbed-rawest hands. I boiled the river water three and four times, when everyone else just let the mud settle before drinking.