Jasmine

by Bharati Mukherjee

  I had meant the note sincerely; they had taught me a great deal about surviving as an Indian in New York. If I had been a different person with a different set of experiences—if I had been another Nirmala, as they’d expected—then Professorji’s lesson would be life-affirming, invaluable, inexpressibly touching. They had kept a certain kind of Punjab alive, even if that Punjab no longer existed. They let nothing go, lest everything be lost.

  Kate, the ironist, heard only contempt, and began to laugh. “You have a wicked sense of humor, Jasmine, and so do the Hayeses,” she said. “You’ll love them. They’ll love you.”

  Behind a dry-wall partition I heard some rattling and scratching. “Oh, that’s Sam,” Kate said. “He hates being shut in. He knows there’s company, and he positively adores Duff. Do you mind animals? I don’t think the Hayeses have any livestock. Duffs allergic to cat dander, I know that for a fact. That’s what’s so nice about Sam. No dander.”

  I lied. “I’m not afraid of animals.”

  “Well, if you’re sure you don’t mind, I’ll let Sam out.”

  She carried him to the center of the room. Only the wrinkled, crested, wattled green head peered out from under the crook of her arm. The tail drooped well below her knees.

  Sam was an animal I couldn’t name. A small dinosaur? A giant lizard? She let him down. He stared and stretched, turning his head in every direction, yawning and hissing, his long black tongue flicking like a whip. Then he bounded across the wooden floor to sniff me out, then to paw my leg and begin to climb. Kate took out her camera again. “Oh, your face, Jasmine—priceless!”

  I picked him up and held him. Truly, I had been reborn. Indian village girls do not hold large reptiles on their laps. They would scream at the swipe of a dry tongue, the basilisk stare of a beady eye. The relationship of an Indian, any Indian, to a reptile, any reptile, is that of a fisherman to a fish.

  A giant, hideous version of a gecko lay snorting and hissing and tongue-flicking on my lap. The boys in my village used to climb into the corners of our rooms, catch the house lizards, then hang them by the neck from branches of the lichee trees. We’d watch them twitch and turn until the crows discovered them. Then we’d sit around and watch the birds pull them apart, like worms after a rainstorm.

  “Sam’s a marine iguana. Jerry was on a shoot in the Galápagos and poor old Sam hatched right at his feet. Sam’s on the cover of Smithsonian, in fact. He thinks he’s a dog and he’s ashamed of being vegetarian. We thought he’d be death on roaches. Instead, we have to purée lettuce.”

  Sam hissed. He seemed to like a scratching on his belly. He flipped right over. I had never seen anything so ugly.

  “Big baby,” said Kate.

  I looked into his beady little eyes, his ugly wattled face. Sam, I thought, we’re both a long way from home, aren’t we? What’ll we do? Look after little girls? There’s no going back, is there?

  He started thumping his tail against my shins, hard and painfully. Kate called it his kick of contentment, he was happy with me.

  23

  I BECAME an American in an apartment on Claremont Avenue across the street from a Barnard College dormitory. I lived with Taylor and Wylie Hayes for nearly two years. Duff was my child; Taylor and Wylie were my parents, my teachers, my family.

  I entered their life on a perfect spring Sunday. Kate and I left Sam in his corner of the loft, baking on a rock pile underneath a sunlamp, in the middle of a child’s plastic wading pool, and took a bus all the way up Broadway to 116th Street, at the gates of Columbia University. The sky had a special penetrating blueness, the temperature and humidity made it seem we were breathing through our skin. We went down the hill toward the river, then turned in at the first building. The street was Claremont Avenue and all the apartments belonged to Columbia teachers, true professorjis. I expected the air itself to crackle with so much intelligence.

  Wylie and Taylor and their little girl, Duff, met us with tea and biscuits. They were in their early thirties, and dressed like students in T-shirts and cords. Taylor had teeth as crooked as mine—the first crooked teeth I’d seen in America—with a gap between his front teeth wide enough to hold a matchstick. He had a blondish beard. Wylie was tall and blond, thin as a schoolgirl, with a pair of dark glasses pushed high in her hair, and a pair of regular glasses resting on her chest, held by a chain around her neck. Duff immediately asked my name and where I was from. “You know where India is, darling. Remember, we found it on the map.” She took out a piece of paper and tried to spell my name. I had never seen a small child, especially a girl, who could immediately relate to adults, call them by their first names, and break into their conversations.

  She asked Kate, “Where’s my Sammy?” Kate reminded her that Sam and city buses were not on good terms. The one time she’d taken him on a bus, wrapped like a baby but for his breathing holes, the crested tail had popped from the blanket, the tongue had darted, and a man sitting next to them had drawn a knife in self-defense. Thereafter she left him at home in what Duff called Sammy’s Ocean.

  I asked what kind of pets the Hayeses had. Fortunately, the university permitted nothing as exotic as iguanas and snakes, only the usual dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, gerbils—none of which Duff could tolerate because of allergies.

  “We might have to move if Duff wants an ostrich or something,” said Taylor. Duff giggled. Kate prompted me to smile.

  Silence fell. I nibbled a biscuit.

  “I hope $95 a week is satisfactory,” said Wylie. “I’ve checked around, and that’s a little low, but there really shouldn’t be any other expenses—”

  I had not imagined money, dollars, for sleeping with a child. “That is very good,” I said.

  “I’m not going to ask you for references, Jasmine,” she went on. “Kate’s already told us something about you. Lillian Gordon’s word is solid gold with us. You will be part of the family. Families don’t go around requiring references.”

  “Anyway, Sam already approved you,” said Taylor. “Being cold-blooded, he doesn’t warm to many people. In fact, he has a godlike perspective on the whole mammal class.”

  He smiled his crooked-toothed smile, and I began to fall in love. I mean, I fell in love with what he represented to me, a professor who served biscuits to a servant, smiled at her, and admitted her to the broad democracy of his joking, even when she didn’t understand it. It seemed entirely American. I was curious about his life, not repulsed. I wanted to know the way such a man lives in this country. I wanted to watch, be a part of it. He seemed wondrously extravagant, that Sunday morning.

  “He likes to be rubbed on the stomach,” I said.

  “Fastest way to an iguana’s heart. Everyone knows that.”

  “Oh, Daddy, really.” Duff frowned.

  “I can tell you are a refined person,” Wylie continued. “We ask only for affection and intelligence in dealing with Duff. A child raised by affectionate, intelligent people with a good sense of humor will grow up all right.”

  “That, and getting into Brearley,” Taylor remarked.

  “I don’t think I have much humor,” I said. The decent Americans I’d seen on television seemed a whimsical people, always making jokes, like Kate and Taylor. Wylie was a serious woman, all duty and business, like Lillian Gordon. The ones I’d met in person were not too funny. Humor’s the hardest thing to translate.

  Duff, she said, was enrolled in a play school at the Riverside Church. This would leave my mornings free. There would be lunch to prepare, her nap, and maybe strolls in the park or trips around town. Very little television. I was to stimulate her with questions, engage her with stories, read to her, go to museums, puppet shows, galleries. Next year she might be in an all-day school, which would leave me free to investigate classes myself. They’d help any way they could.

  “You’re probably tired of Americans assuming that if you’re from India or China or the Caribbean you must be good with children,” said Wylie.

  “Thank you,” I repl
ied. What else could I say? I had never heard such a thing. The Chinese I had always thought of as genetically cruel to women and children—even in Hasnapur we knew about foot-binders—and my experience of Caribbeans was a mixture of fear and pity.

  “Ancient American custom, dark-skinned mammies. Don’t be flattered by it,” said Taylor.

  “In fact,” said Wylie, “we assume there’ll be times when you absolutely hate her and want to wring her neck.”

  “We suggest counting to ten first,” said Taylor.

  Duff was drawing and coloring and didn’t raise her head.

  Wylie showed me around. “Sixteen hundred square feet,” she said, “so I don’t think either of us will feel crowded.” She opened and shut doors of closets, pulled open drawers on the smoothest of rollers, revealing gadgets I had no idea how to use, patted dials on the dishwasher, and rested fingertips on the start-up panel of a sleek microwave. “If you have a thing about radiation, you don’t have to use it,” she said. “You just let us know when we upset you, all right?”

  “I don’t have a thing about radiation,” I said.

  We stood on the narrow balcony and looked out on Claremont Avenue as Wylie gave me facts about Taylor, Duff, and herself. Taylor, a professorji, was an expert in an area of subnuclear particle physics. Wylie was a book editor for a publisher on Park Avenue. About her work she said, dismissively, “You can call my writers the New Sob Sisters. We ghoul around courtrooms and develop projects.” She explained about the money to be made signing up celebrity interviews, writing about divorces and drug cases, society murders, child abuse, and rape. She made them sound like grave robbers.

  I didn’t have the slightest understanding of anything they said, and they didn’t bother explaining. I liked that, the assumption behind it.

  Wylie said that Duff was adopted.

  “Low sperm count,” she explained.

  I blushed, but neither Wylie nor Taylor noticed.

  “Hockey injury,” Taylor protested.

  They planned to tell Duff everything when she was old enough. They’d even let her meet her natural mother, currently a sophomore at Iowa State University. Their lawyer had placed ads in small-town Iowa and Nebraska and Kansas newspapers, asking pregnant unwed girls to contact him. Wylie and Taylor were paying for the girl’s education. I remember thinking an Iowa newspaper must be in a language called Iowan, like a Punjabi or a Spanish newspaper. I liked the mystery. Duff looked perfectly American.

  “We could have gotten a child out of Paraguay,” Taylor explained. “The Needhams on the sixth floor got their baby from Paraguay. They had to go down and hang around for six weeks in this nothing village full of Nazi war criminals, and the way they described the whole thing, it sounded awful, sort of like a direct sale.”

  I could not imagine a non-genetic child. A child that was not my own, or my husband’s, struck me as a monstrous idea. Adoption was as foreign to me as the idea of widow remarriage.

  I looked out into the dorm windows across Claremont Avenue. The windows were long, bright, shadeless rectangles of light. No window shades, no secrets. Barnard women were studying cross-legged on narrow beds, changing T-shirts, clowning with Walkmans clamped to their heads. They wore nothing under their shirts and sweaters. Men were in their room. Even on the first morning I saw naked bodies combing their hair in front of dresser mirrors. Truly there was no concept of shame in this society. I’d die before a Sob Sister asked me about Half-Face.

  The love I felt for Taylor that first day had nothing to do with sex. I fell in love with his world, its ease, its careless confidence and graceful self-absorption. I wanted to become the person they thought they saw: humorous, intelligent, refined, affectionate. Not illegal, not murderer, not widowed, raped, destitute, fearful. In Flushing, I had lived defensively in the midst of documented rectitude. I did not want to live legally if it also meant living like a refugee.

  “We’ll give you Taylor’s study,” Wylie said. “We’ll move his junk into the dining room. You’ll have your own room that way.”

  “Junk!” Taylor laughed. “Junk!” The gap made him look sardonic. Back in his hockey-crazy town in upstate New York, he’d lost a number of teeth and they were never replaced with bridgework, so the teeth he had left—chipped teeth, crooked teeth—had drifted and settled deep in his gums, leaving gaps between them. The teeth seemed to mock whatever he said. “For you, Jasmine, I’ll be homeless. For you, Japanese research will widen the meson gap. We’ll have your room ready by next Sunday.”

  “Then where will Duff sleep?”

  “Her room, of course.”

  “Not with me?” I could not imagine a small child sleeping alone. I had trouble enough with it myself, never having spent a night alone until I got to Lillian Gordon’s. That was Lillian’s pride: that she could give me Kate’s old room, by myself, not with the Kanjobal women. I would have preferred sleeping on a floor mat. In Flushing I could at least hear the snoring of Professorji and his father. I had lain awake in the Florida cottage, watching ghosts flit across the ceiling, wrap themselves in the curtains, creak from room to room. When Kate had told me of a possible job looking after a child, I had imagined myself in a narrow bed with a baby, and the thought had brought me comfort.

  “Who will I sleep with?” I asked.

  “What you do on your own time is your business,” said Wylie. “But show discretion, for Duff’s sake. I hope you understand.”

  “Let us check him out first, is what she means,” said Taylor.

  “Who?” I asked.

  Kate came over. “Can we start again?” she suggested.

  On Sunday Taylor’s computer station was still by the window in the study, his racing bike hanging like art on the wall, and his windjamming equipment in the closet. “Give me a couple more days,” he said. “There’s another breakthrough in the lab.” He was out early, back late. I prayed he was not sorting hair. Wylie put on a martyr’s face. I’d been sleeping on a cot in his room, folding it up by day. All my T-shirts and cords fitted into a plastic bag in the closet.

  They thought I wanted a room of my own. I had no way of telling them it wasn’t necessary, that I worried about Duff all alone with her animal paintings and stuffed dolls. She was a lovely child, easy to look after. She was the only American, at the time, that I was capable of totally understanding. For her, I was a wise adult without an accent. For me, she was an American friend whose language I understood and humor I could laugh at. And she laughed at mine. I did have a sense of humor.

  She was a pale child with pale eyes and pale hair. When she raced ahead of me in Riverside Park and I pretended to chase her, it was like chasing a milkweed parachute or a feather. I was learning about the stores, the neighborhood, shopping, from her.

  Sleeping in Duff’s room was supposed to be temporary, but she and I quickly fixed that. We moved my cot in. I prayed I’d be allowed to stay. I planted the idea with her. To Wylie I said, “I don’t mind, really,” and copied her look of a put-upon saint.

  * * *

  If Duff had been born in Kansas, I think now, that’s where I would have headed when I was fleeing New York. Who lays out the roadways of our futures? What if! What if the Hayeses’ lawyer had taken out ads in Nebraska? In Wisconsin?

  The apartment was stocked like a museum. Wylie and Taylor weren’t simple acquisitors. Unlike the Vadheras, they bought useless things, silly things, ugly things—wooden ducks, two wooden Indians, a wood cutout of Carmen Miranda—and arranged them in clusters. Some of them seemed offensive to blacks or women or Red Indians. There were slave-auction posters from New Orleans in 1850, speaking of healthy wenches and strong bucks; old color prints celebrating the massacre of an entire Indian village down to the last baby; a poster of a naked woman with parts of her body labeled choice, prime, or chuck, as in a butcher shop.

  In the bathroom they hung mounted prints of flowers: Dauphinelle elevée, Pimprenelle cultivée, Helianthe commun. I had memorized the names and spellings before learning
the words were French and they didn’t grow here. I took in everything. Every morning, the news sank into my brain, and stayed. Language on the street, on the forbidden television, at the Hayeses’ dinners, where I sat like a guest and only helped with the serving (and, increasingly, controlled the menu), all became my language, which I learned like a child, from the first words up. The squatting fields of Hasnapur receded fast.

  My first live-in day on Claremont, Wylie showed me the powder room in the hall. “That’s more or less exclusively for you and Duff,” she said, “but the shower you’ll have to share with us.” For a second I caught a hesitation, an opacity, in her wide brown eyes, and then the eyes brightened again. She was apologizing for having just one shower, but I’d misinterpreted. I’d even panicked, wondering where the servants’ shower was, if I was to share it with the doorman and janitor in the basement. I never showered when they were in. American showers still delighted me, despite the inevitable, daily association with Flamingo Court, with preparation for death, with the knowledge that a naked body was outside the door, waiting to rape again, perhaps to kill. Touching a tap and having the water hot-hot, and plentiful, was still a sensual thrill.

  When Wylie talked of me on the phone, she called me her “caregiver.” “I don’t know what I’d do without her. Jasmine’s a real find. Not like that last one who threw the front-door keys in the incinerator when she walked out on us.” Or: “I won’t say I’ll definitely be at the fund-raiser until I’ve checked Tuesday night out with my caregiver.” Caregiver. The word sang off my tongue. I was a professional, like a schoolteacher or a nurse. I wasn’t a maidservant.

  In Hasnapur the Mazbi woman who’d stoked our hearth or spread our flaking, dried-out adobe walls with watered cow dung had been a maidservant. Wylie made me feel her younger sister. I was family, and I was professional.

  * * *