I began to shiver. The blade need not be long, only sharp, and my hand not strong, only quick. His eyes fluttered open even before I felt the metal touch his throat, and his smile and panic were nearly instantaneous. I wanted that moment when he saw me above him as he had last seen me, naked, but now with my mouth open, pouring blood, my red tongue out. I wanted him to open his mouth and start to reach, I wanted that extra hundredth of a second when the blade bit deeper than any insect, when I jumped back as he jerked forward, slapping at his neck while blood, ribbons of bright blood, rushed between his fingers.
He got his legs over the side of the bed, he stood and staggered, and with each stagger new spatter marks gushed against the walls. He kept trying to stop the blood, but the cut was small and he couldn’t find where so much blood, his blood, was coming from. His hands kept slipping, and finally he fell to his knees at the foot of the bed. I dragged the suitcase to the farthest end of the room. He tried to rise and couldn’t. I pulled the bedspread off the bed and threw it over him and then began stabbing wildly through the cloth, as the human form beneath it grew smaller and stiller.
No one to call to, no one to disturb us. Just me and the man who had raped me, the man I had murdered. The room looked like a slaughterhouse. Blood had congealed on my hands, my chin, my breasts. What a monstrous thing, what an infinitesimal thing, is the taking of a human life; for the second time in three months, I was in a room with a slain man, my body bloodied. I was walking death. Death incarnate.
This time, my response was calm. I went back to the shower and purified myself once again. I gargled blood and cold water until the bleeding stopped. I tried to speak, but my tongue burned and refused to bend. Then I opened the suitcase and changed into my last clean salwar-kameez.
I stuffed the suitcase with my dishonored old clothes. The widow’s white sari and Prakash’s suit remained. I took out a blue-jean jacket bought for me in Delhi by my brothers. There were booklets of matches everywhere; I helped myself. And then I remembered something that surprises me to this day: I remembered the hateful police inspector in Jullundhar, his reports to us of fingerprint evidence on the bomb fragments. I’d been impressed, and now I remembered. I went back to the bathroom and wiped the sink and shower taps.
I took the suitcase with me. Out to the porch, down the spiral stairs. It was a loud, bug-infested night; frogs chorused from a nearby swamp. Fireflies winked before me like lights from anchored trawlers in a choppy sea.
Around back, there were rusty metal trash bins, punched with holes for better ventilation. I laid the suitcase inside one and lit it from the bottom. It sputtered and flared. The outside melted, but then the cotton and wool ignited.
I said my prayers for the dead, clutching my Ganpati. I thought, The pitcher is broken. Lord Yama, who had wanted me, who had courted me, and whom I’d flirted with on the long trip over, had now deserted me.
I had not given even a days survival in America a single thought. This was the place I had chosen to die, on the first day if possible. I would land, find Tampah, walking there if necessary, find the college grounds and check it against the brochure photo. Under the very tree where two Indian boys and two Chinese girls were pictured, smiling, I had dreamed of arranging the suit and twigs. The vision of lying serenely on a bed of fire under palm trees in my white sari had motivated all the weeks of sleepless, half-starved passage, the numbed surrender to various men for the reward of an orange, a blanket, a slice of cheese. I had protected this sari, and Prakashs suit, through it all. Then he had touched it. He had put on the suit, touched my sari, my photographs and Ganpati.
My body was merely the shell, soon to be discarded. Then I could be reborn, debts and sins all paid for.
If he had only killed me. If he had only left my mission alone. He made me say it, he laughed at it.
Suddenly death was being denied.
I buttoned up the jacket and sat by the fire. With the first streaks of dawn, my first full American day, I walked out the front drive of the motel to the highway and began my journey, traveling light.
18
AT the University Club over in Dalton, the woman who’s invited me to lunch says, pressing her fingertips lightly on my arm, “I’ve been wanting to make this call to you for so long! Then finally yesterday I said, What the hell, I’ll call, and if she doesn’t want to meet me, all she can say is no.”
It is not likely that I would have refused a professor’s request. I’d cashed checks for her at the bank and thought her a perfectly reasonable, attractive, soft-spoken, mid-fortyish professional woman.
Her name is Mary Webb, Dr. Mary Webb, with no husband and a big balance listed on her bank records, and she teaches sociology or social work. In the bank, she’d always seemed circumspect and sober, but here she’s alternately intense and extroverted, with a lime-green barrette in her bobbed hair, glasses rimmed in red plastic, and orange ankle socks. The socks are dyed the orange of Indian swamis’ robes. She does not look like a madwoman.
“I’m glad you called,” I say. What can I say? I look around the small dining room, three tables of ten people each. More women than men. I’m the youngest by at least twenty years. I’ve already been asked what I am studying. I say, “I’m honored to be with all these learned people.” She laughs harshly. I assume all the men and women wielding forks are scholars, more masterly than poor Masterji. I, a dropout from a village school. America, America!
She leans close and confides, “The things that really matter to me I can’t share with anyone outside the group. This is my group. You must know how it is. Then I saw you in the bank, and right away I had this frisson. I knew I could talk to you.”
“About what?” Suspicion must tinge my voice.
She makes sure the waiter is out of hearing range before she continues. “If I say the word ‘channeling.’ what do you think of?”
“Digging?” I say.
“Oh, marvelous. Exactly! Digging.’ The extrovert beams; then intensity takes over. She barely whispers.
“Digging for what, do you suppose?”
I don’t want to disappoint her. I whisper back, because something in the conspiracy compels it, “Bodies?”
She throws her hands up in delight. “Oh, you’ve got it! I just knew you would.”
Mary Webb is telling me about her out-of-body experiences. They are visceral revelations about her pre-life. They used to come upon her out of the blue, in the middle of grading papers maybe, or while shaking herself a margarita (her only vice, this time around), but now she’s learning to make them happen by going to a guru who runs a bimonthly group.
In her last fully retrievable life she was a man. Her gaze is steady; apparently I haven’t reacted. A black man. She leans closer. Not an American, no, an Australian black man, an Aborigine. I still haven’t flinched, though I’m desperately trying to process the incongruity. When she’s channeling, she speaks the tribal language perfectly, of course, and even now she remembers a few word-clots. She renames the plates, table, chairs in a strangely glottal series of articulated gulps. “Of course, we don’t have plates. We have bowls made out of skulls and gourds. I’m just approximating. Table, as well. Same with chair. I’m really just giving you verbs for sitting, eating, etc.”
She’s been unable to have a conversation with an Aborigine anywhere in Iowa, though not for lack of searching. One Australian in the music department has listened to a few sentences from her and said it sounded Abo to him.
In her most recent adventure, she is closing in on a giant kangaroo—an extinct species, incidentally, the size of a bounding bison—she can taste the meat. She might be the only person in Iowa with such vivid nostalgia for kangaroo flesh. She/he can anticipate the sexual gratitude of his/her wife, and the admiration of the children—she knows the names of all four, three boys and a girl (do I want to hear them?)—waiting for him/her back in their camp.
“Do they, you, live in tents?” I ask. It’s my first chance to break in.
“A
ctually, a cave. Face of a cliff, overlooking a vast, flat plain.” A few trees, some water holes. White men haven’t arrived yet, it’s pre-Edenic. It seems that her lives have jumped a groove, like a record arm that gets bumped, and she’s landed up there at the dawn of her immortal soul’s mutable, genetic journey, with no knowledge of the thousands of other lives she must have led in between. The other lives are just fragmentary. She has been in many wars, wandered in many forests, borne many children.
Her face is transformed as she tells me. Her voice drops, there is a slight Australian diction to her description. “My forearms thickened and muscled. It was so wonderful and weird. My arm and a giant boomerang were one long, curved line. When I let it go, it felt better than an orgasm.”
“Theoretically, I believe in reincarnation,” I say. I am astounded by all this, the American need to make intuition so tangible, to possess a vision so privately.
Mary Webb’s guru is a thirty-six-year-old woman who calls herself Ma Leela. “She needed to visit the earth, so she made contact with a woman who’d made up her mind to commit suicide in Medicine Hat, Alberta. This other woman was a battered wife, and she was severely depressed and there was no talking her out of the suicide. So Ma Leela said, If you are sure you are going to go through with vacating your body, I’d like to take it over.”
I ask Mary Webb how Ma Leela knew that a body was about to be vacated in Alberta, and she explains that in Ma Leela’s natural sphere there is a data bank of bodyflow.
“We believe the body is like a revolving door. So she split her body. The doctors thought they’d saved her by pumping her stomach clean of Seconal, but the person they released from the hospital was Ma Leela. Now Ma Leela is doing her healing all over the Midwest and the Northwest.” She looks around the room, expansively. “We’re all in Ma Leela’s group.”
My face must have a funny look, because Mary Webb manages to say, before the waiter comes to our table, “This can’t be new or bizarre to you. Don’t you Hindus keep revisiting the world?”
The waiter has HI, I’M DUANE pinned on his white shirt. I order pork chops, thinking any pork sale is good for Darrel and Elsa County. Mary Webb says, “I thought you’d be vegetarian,” and orders something called Salade au Printemps. When the waiter leaves, I tell her that yes, I am sure that I have been reborn several times, and that yes, some lives I can recall vividly.
I am moved by Mary Webb’s story. What if the human soul is eternal—the swamis say of it, fires cannot burn it, water cannot drown it, winds cannot bend it—what if it is like a giant long-playing record with millions of tracks, each of them a complete circle with only one diamond-sharp microscopic link to the next life, and the next, and only God to hear it all?
I do believe that. And I do believe that extraordinary events can jar the needle arm, jump tracks, rip across incarnations, and deposit a life into a groove that was not prepared to receive it.
I should never have been Jane Ripplemeyer of Baden, Iowa. I should have lived and died in that feudal village, perhaps making a monumental leap to modern Jullundhar. When Jyoti’s future was blocked after the death of Prakash, Lord Yama should have taken her.
“Yes,” I say, “I do believe you. We do keep revisiting the world. I have also traveled in time and space. It is possible.”
Jyoti of Hasnapur was not Jasmine, Duffs day mummy and Taylor and Wylie’s au pair in Manhattan; that Jasmine isn’t this Jane Ripplemeyer having lunch with Mary Webb at the University Club today. And which of us is the undetected murderer of a half-faced monster, which of us has held a dying husband, which of us was raped and raped and raped in boats and cars and motel rooms?
I found Taylor and Wylie Hayes through Lillian Gordon, a kind Quaker lady who rescued me from a dirt trail about three miles east of Fowlers Key, Florida. In my fake American jacket, salwar-kameez, and rhinestoned Jullundhari sandals, with only a purse, Ganpati, and forged documents, I had walked out of an overpopulated, deserted motel and followed a highway headed north; that’s all I knew. In India, I would have come upon at least a village or two, but in Florida there was only the occasional country store or trailer park. I hadn’t a penny.
Honoring all prescriptions for a purified body, anticipating only release from this world, I had not eaten in two days. I had taken no water, especially not in the glass that Half-Face offered.
Around noon, I could go no farther. My swollen, festering tongue was an agony, nearly choking me. A sandy trail tunneled through a distant row of mossy trees. Battered trucks full of produce kept pulling out. More trucks, filled with laborers, turned in. It was as though I’d never left India. After a few minutes, a station wagon driven by a lone woman followed. Fields on either side of the highway were dense with tomatoes, eggplants, and okra (still aubergines and ladies’ fingers in Masterji’s English). I had traveled the world without ever leaving the familiar crops of Punjab. Thinking I was among farmers, that I might find food, water, and work, I decided to follow the trail.
Trash cans lined one edge of the clearing. So much trash in America! Bony dogs leaped and snarled at the end of short chains. Mangy hens scuttled in and out of dried-out tire ruts. Short, thick, dark-skinned men with vaguely Asian features—Nepalese, I thought at the time, Gurkhas; can this torture all be a dream? where have I come to?—shadowed the windows and doorways of an old barracks, and a wingless parrot hopped on a rusty bar.
A boy whistled at me from behind a tree. I couldn’t tell his age. He had a child’s body: fat stomach and thin legs with crusting sores, but a wrinkled, cynical face. I had been in America nearly a day and had yet to see an “American” face. He carried a plastic Uzi, not that different from the hardware of the Khalsa Lions, and he had the Uzi pointed at me. He did impressive sound effects, too. Kssss! Kssss!
“Water,” I tried to say. “Pump.” Blood still drained from my mouth.
The boy dropped down into a sniper’s crouch and sprayed me one more time.
I made a pumping, drinking gesture.
At the far end of the clearing, by the trash cans, a man was teaching two others to drive a low-sprung old sedan. I waved my hands over my head, then pointed to my mouth. “Wah-huh!” I shouted at them. The man behind the steering wheel got out of the sedan. He mimicked the way I talked and walked. The boy and all three men laughed.
The driver of the sedan kicked a cola can and sent it clanking toward me. “No work!” he snapped. “This Kanjobal crew. Vamoose! Fuck off! Get lost!”
At that moment, an old white lady came out of the barracks. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, dark glasses, a T-shirt, and black pants. She must have been seventy. From the doorway she called, “Carlos! How dare you speak to a young lady in such a despicable fashion. She asked for water—well, get her water, man!”
She came to me and put her hands on my shoulders. “Child! What is it? You’re trembling.” She led me to the stairs and sat me down on the middle one. “What in God’s name is this country coming to!” She stood and clapped her hands and shouted out a series of names or commands in a rapid language. Soon, a woman appeared with food on a paper plate and a plastic fork. It was the first hot, prepared food I’d had in over a month. But when I laid a forkful of it on my tongue, I nearly passed out with pain. The woman walked me to her car.
“My name is Lillian Gordon,” she said. “I won’t ask yours because it’s probably a fake. This I take it—she was feeling my kameez—isn’t Guatemalan, is it? Are we talking India here? Punjab? Are you Sikh?”
I managed only to shake my head vigorously, no. “Hin—du,” I finally said.
“Lord. Well, there’s nothing we can do here, is there? And I suppose those chappies from the INS would leap at the sight of you in those sandals.” She motioned me to get in the station wagon.
Lillian Gordon took me home with her. Home was a wooden house on stilts on blackish swampy ground. But over there, she said, over the black muck and just beyond a fringe of bent Sabal palms, was the Gulf. I got her older daughter’s bed
room. Framed, amateurish photos lined the walls. “Kate took those in high school,” Lillian said. Sunsets on the beach, a dog. Pretty, but not special. In college she’d come back one summer and shot in a migrant-worker camp. Five years later she’d done work with the Kanjobals in Florida, the basis of a book that had won a prize. Lillian showed me the book. The pictures brought back such memories of Hasnapur, I wept. That daughter now lived in New York and was a professional photographer. Another daughter was in Guatemala working with Kanjobal Indians. Three Kanjobal women slept in bunk beds in that daughters room.
I didn’t tell Mrs. Gordon what she’d rescued me from. In some fundamental way, she didn’t care. I was no threat, and I was in need. The world’s misery was a challenge to her ingenuity. She brought a doctor in to sew my tongue. The Kanjobal women in her house had all lost their husbands and children to an army massacre. She forbade all discussion of it. She had a low tolerance for reminiscence, bitterness or nostalgia. Let the past make you wary, by all means. But do not let it deform you. Had I said, “I murdered a man last night,” she might have said, “I’m sure you had an excellent reason. Next time, please, less salt in the eggplant.” If I had said, “He raped me,” she certainly would have squinted sympathetically, then said, “You’re not the first and you won’t be the last. Will you be needing an abortion?” She wasn’t a missionary dispensing new visions and stamping out the old; she was a facilitator who made possible the lives of absolute ordinariness that we ached for.
I was lucky, she said, that India had once been a British colony. Can you imagine being stuck with a language like Dutch or Portuguese? “Look at these poor Kanjobal—they barely speak Spanish!” Lillian, of course, had taught herself Kanjobal. She felt it was the least she could do.
Jasmine Page 9