Love Songs for a Lost Continent

by Anita Felicelli

  It had been her dream since childhood, seeing the creased faded blue aerogrammes that came from the States from her three aunts who had moved there. Devi’s mother would write detailed missives back to Susannah’s mom and the other aunts in the States boasting of Devi’s long list of accomplishments—that she’d been a finalist for Miss India, that she’d won a national essay-writing competition, that the British ballet company believed she was the best ballet dancer in all of India, that she’d been admitted to Yale and would live in a place that looked like a stone castle on the brochures, Saybrook College. But now this blow—there was no way to save face except perhaps to get some boring office job with an enormous corporation. She resolved to contact the alumni foundation for leads.

  In the lobby, Susannah was grinning and shaking Jake’s hand. “We’ll be in touch with the details, but plan on extending your stay in Manhattan,” he said. Devi tried to make eye contact with him, but he pivoted and disappeared down the hall.

  As the cousins boarded the elevator, Devi asked what had happened. Her stomach rose into her throat as the elevator sank. Susannah’s eyes were glowing, and she demurred, but Devi pressed for details.

  They were walking out of the burnished steel elevator when Susannah said, “They took some preliminary headshots, and there’s already some interest in a makeup company that does foundation. I never thought something like this could happen to me.”

  “Me neither. You know, at the convent school there was a little black Dalit girl and I remember the others used to chase her down the street screaming kaka kaka. I never wanted to play in the sun for fear of that.” Devi laughed bitterly and continued, “America is so different. Here people try to tan.”

  Susannah didn’t say anything for a moment. She looked hesitant like she was weighing her options, and then making up her mind, she said, “I’m going to go stay with Lucy Marie for a few days.”

  “What? You can stay with us. I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all. Why would you go stay with her? They live in Queens, no? You definitely don’t want to stay in Queens.”

  “Come on.” Now Susannah sounded bored.

  “Come on what?”

  “You know why.”

  “You’re offended?”

  Susannah didn’t answer.

  “I’m sorry. I was just pointing out one of those interesting cultural differences.”

  They trekked back toward the apartment in the silent dusting of snow. Devi led Susannah through Greenwich Village and stopped in front of an unmarked red door. “Just give me a moment.”

  Susannah followed her into the crowded speakeasy. Its fading, dark pine communal benches were lined with patrons and the lingering smell of old smoke. Large black-and-white portraits and the dust jackets of famous books lined the walls, lending the bar the magical weight of history Devi had expected to find everywhere in New York, too. Behind the bartender was a mirrored ledge that made the room seem more spacious.

  “Devi!” John, the bartender, was a friend of Veronica’s. He wiped the inside of a highball glass with a limp rag. “What can I get you? On the house.”

  “Lemon drop?”

  As he busied himself pouring the vodka and triple sec, she leaned across the bar and whispered. “Actually, I was hoping to pick up some coke.”

  The bartender blushed. His eyes darted around, looking at the other patrons in their pressed button-down shirts and jeans. He cut a lemon clean in half. “I don’t know why you’d think I have any. Will you and your friend settle for a drink instead?” He smiled at Susannah.

  Fury swelled in Devi. Why should Susannah of all people get a free drink? She’d robbed Devi of her opportunity. “Veronica told me she buys from you.”

  “I don’t need anything, thanks,” Susannah replied. She touched Devi’s arm. Devi flinched, letting a jangle of dark emotions—resentment, rage, bitterness, and frustration—consume her. Rage like the whitest light. So incandescent, she gave in to it.

  “Veronica doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” John placed the lemon drop in front of her, mopping up some cloudy liquid that had sloshed onto the bar. He crossed his arms, as if daring her.

  “Yeah, right. Well that’s just great. I know you’re lying.” She could hear herself talking, as if from afar, as if watching a ship from the shore. She wanted to jump up and down and shriek.

  “Look, you got a drink on the house. I’ve got other customers.”

  “No, you don’t. Come back here! I want my coke!” Devi shouted, as John turned to walk to the other end of the bar. She stomped her foot, and then she stomped again. She started to cleave in two.

  He returned to hiss at her. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “Devi, let’s go.” Susannah tugged her arm.

  Devi slapped her hand away hard. “Let go of me.” It was all too much. Why didn’t anybody want to help her? Devi grabbed the cocktail glass and flung it at John’s head. He ducked. The glass smashed against the mirror and the row of bottles behind him. Incandescent shards, a cloud of sugar, a cloud of sparkles, a cloud of white sand descended on the bar. Everything glittered in the light as if with fairy dust. As Devi stepped backward to escape the beautiful wreck, somebody slammed against her shoulder. She stumbled in her high heels, lost her balance and fell face-first toward the bar, starry with glimmering glass splinters. The last thing she felt as her forehead slammed the elegant dark wood was a piercing pain, as if a cold tooth had sunk deep into her eyeball.

  ***

  As Devi slid forward into consciousness, she could hear the whir of a machine, and when she ran her hands over her arms, she could feel an array of thin wires. She opened her eyes reluctantly. From one eye, she could see the hospital room in which she was confined. Susannah was reading in a wooden chair in front of the window, and glanced up with a wary expression, like she was expecting a tantrum. It was snowing again, spectacular white fireworks in the grey twilight outside the glass. From the other eye, darkness.

  Devi touched her face and felt something hard and secure taped around her right eye, pressing her cheek. “I’m confused.”

  “Some of the mirror must have gotten into your eye.”

  Images came to her, glancing images from before her blackout—her shameful screaming at the bartender, the glee she’d felt whipping the cocktail glass at him, the pain in her eye. She hoped she was wrong about what she remembered. Surely someone else had done those things. “That’s why I’m wearing a bandage?”

  “Are you anorexic?”

  “No.”

  “They asked some questions. I think they think you are. You haven’t eaten a full meal since I’ve been here.”

  “I diet. All models diet.”

  “I don’t diet,” Veronica said. She was standing at the door, sipping from a waxed paper cup of coffee. “I keep myself fit with Pilates. You do have a dreadful coke habit, dear.”

  Devi fingered the taped edges of the eye bandage, wondering what would happen if she ripped it off.

  “Leave that alone,” Susannah ordered.

  The doctor arrived with a flock of nurses. They said she would need to stay overnight. Susannah and Veronica said they would return in the morning and left.

  “How long will I be a cyclops?” Devi pointed at the bandage.

  “Your eye needs a chance to heal.”

  “What are we talking about? A week? A month?”

  The doctor waited and shook his head. “It might be better to have that conversation later, when you’ve had a little more chance to recover.”

  “I’d rather know.”

  The doctor said, “We’re pretty sure you’re going to experience blindness in one eye.”

  Devi took several deep breaths as he shifted in and out of focus. “Can you fix it or not?”

  “We plan to have an eye surgeon, a specialist, take a look at it. But right now, I’ll be honest with you, the forecast isn’t good.”

  “Surgery’s probably expensive?” She had no insurance, nobody
who could afford to loan her the money. She thought of her parents struggling to pay even a portion of her college tuition and felt nauseous.

  The doctor looked pitying. “If it can make a difference.”

  ***

  She slept in fits and starts. When she woke, the snow lay so thick outside the window that the glass appeared to be another opaque white wall. No outside light could seep into the room. She lay awake, brooding over her lost career, over how ugly her life looked. She dug into her memories but couldn’t think of who or what to blame for what had happened, except perhaps herself, but the thought of how wildly she’d behaved made her stomach roil in shame, and she didn’t want to stay with that memory. She kept her good eye closed against the fluorescent hospital lights, trying to forget the humiliating sound of the cocktail glass smashing, the shower of glass splinters.

  Later that morning, Susannah returned, bearing a black plastic box with a clear lid. She opened the box to reveal golden brown vadas from a South Indian restaurant nearby. “I snuck these in. I thought they might remind you of home.” She looked pleased with herself.

  “Where’s Veronica?” Devi asked.

  Susannah shrugged and glanced away. “She said she had something she needed to get done, and she would be by later.”

  Devi knew she would not, especially not after she talked to John the bartender and found out what had happened. She ran a finger along the starched hospital sheets and eyed the fritters. All that oil. Reflexively she calculated how many calories might be in them.

  “Do you remember visiting us in India when we were ten and eleven?” Devi said as she bit into a vada, even though she could tell it was still too hot. The trace of steam released the scent of curry leaves—home.

  “Yes.”

  Dark brown bits of vada dropped on the hospital bedsheets. “We all thought you were so weird. You wore green eye shadow! And you thought our pizza and soda tasted bad, as if yours was so much better. You got sick all the time.” It felt good to confess this, to see the look of consternation and pain as Susannah’s eyebrows knitted together, to see someone else just as confused as she was.

  “I don’t remember all that. I thought we had so much fun together. We brought you a Hans Christian Anderson book. You introduced me to Enid Blyton and the Five. I never had any cousins, or anybody to play with, and you guys all had each other.”

  Devi continued to stuff vada into her mouth, shocked at how comforting it was to eat this spicy, salty comfort food without worrying about the pounds the vadas might pack around her hips, the puffy bloat they might trigger. Who cared? “We all imagined you had this decadent life in America, that you had all these fancy things, and ate bonbons and took bubble baths. You were just so strange, and yet for some reason, you looked down on us.”

  Susannah crinkled her nose as if the dissonance of what Devi was saying was too much to understand. “Actually, we were poor for the whole decade before we came to visit. It was so lonely here. We had nobody and nothing. Everything was just a constant struggle of trying to figure out what different things meant, what the correct pronunciation was for words so as not to get laughed at, how America worked.”

  Devi considered this disturbing thought—poor—for a moment. Snowflakes flew past the window, whirligigs of white. Poor seemed such a bald-faced lie. Of course, if you lived in America, it meant you were richer than those who lived in Chennai, and Susannah’s parents had built an enormous, successful restaurant chain. Her voice was accusing. “All your mom’s letters for years were about expanding the restaurant. About the awards she got, about being featured in food magazines.” You couldn’t be considered truly poor with all that wealth. Susannah did not have a clue. People didn’t change, Devi reminded herself, remembering that awful disagreeable girl with the ugly, decadent magenta hair.

  The chair creaked as Susannah leaned forward. Utterly baffled, hair in two messy braids, wearing shapeless overalls, tiny cheap zirconium studs in her ears, the rose-and-metal scent of her hair gel floating about her face, clasping her cheeks between her palms and wanting to understand. “I don’t get it. You had everything when I visited. You had a huge family, and grandparents, and aunts and uncles and cousins. You all belonged to each other.”

  Devi could feel the iciness around her heart begin to thaw. As she stared at her cousin, she began trembling with a dark, terrible guilt. Perhaps she’d been looking at everything the wrong way if there was nobody else, nobody besides dumpy old Susannah, to visit her in the hospital.

  “Are you still going to stay with Lucy Marie? You can stay with me, you know. I’m sorry for how I acted. I was just on edge from not eating, and the coke.”

  “Yes, I know. I understand.” As if she suddenly knew who Devi was and didn’t care anymore, Susannah sank back in the chair and fussed with her satchel. Her desire to understand Devi had faded into something else. “But I’ve already moved my stuff to Lucy Marie’s.”

  Devi picked at the edge of her bandage. Sharp pain. “Do you want to move it back though? Please, I should make it up to you.”

  “She invited me there. She actually likes having me around.”

  “But I need you here.”

  “It’s snowing again.” Susannah gestured at the window as if this were an answer.

  Devi was reluctant to let Susannah go. Would she rat her out to the family? Would she forgive her?

  Susannah wore a stoic expression, like she’d already made up her mind, and there was nothing Devi could do to change it. She reached over and hugged Devi with stiff arms, holding herself as far away from the hospital bed as possible. Devi tried to hold her there a little longer to emphasize how truly sorry she was, but Susannah extricated herself without meeting Devi’s gaze again.

  After her cousin left, Devi began composing a letter to her mother in her head, explaining what had happened. It was more peaceful in the hospital bed wearing an IV than at the walk-up trying to figure out what to eat or not eat for dinner or deciding whether or not she had enough money to go out. She felt utterly calm and cared for. She wondered, what if she told her mother the truth? What if she explained how horrible her life here was, how there was no recovering from the person she’d transformed into in Manhattan? But her mother wouldn’t understand this idea of reinvention—she didn’t understand how rapidly you could change in America, how quickly your fortune could shift, how Devi had turned into somebody else here, and then turned into somebody else again, somebody else who’d failed—a reality that would have been unthinkable six years ago when she’d shone with so much promise. Back at home, where everyone on the block knew each other’s business, people didn’t reinvent themselves just for fun, the way they did in the States. They were defined from birth by the stars, and her mother would expect her to be the same glittering figure as that gifted teenager who’d boarded a plane at Chennai International Airport.

  Instead, Devi would start the letter by explaining how well Susannah’s visit had gone and segue into a spare account of this horrible freak accident that had partially blinded her. The bar would become a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, no, some middling restaurant that Susannah with her poor taste wanted to try. Someone else, a drunken troll perhaps, would stamp his foot and fling a hurricane glass. She would tell her mother how important it was for her to be around family right now, how she needed to start over. She consumed the last vada with a voracity she hadn’t experienced since childhood, feeling the pain and contentment of her stomach expanding. Perhaps she would want to throw it up later, but she continued chewing, letting the glassy false comfort, the illusion of home grow, until she was satiated, and there was nothing true left.

  When we first arrive on the great red island, Leon spends a few nights in the bustling capital, Tana. He has plans to meet with a handful of Indian and Chinese vanilla dealers. “This could get boring. Here—get a little sightseeing in, why don’t you?” He holds out ten crisp bills.

  I stare at the wad of cash without moving, feeling a little queasy. We’d pl
anned to visit the rainforests east of the city together, but the lodge is going to be far more expensive than I can afford on my meager savings. Blushing, I wonder what my girlfriends back home would think of Leon’s largesse. My parents taught me to spend frugally, to refuse even tiny indulgences, to worry incessantly about the invisible encroaching poverty they’d always felt as Tamil immigrants. Occasionally, after college, I’d rebel by spending a sum for luxurious beauty that would have shocked them, succumbing to the allure of an obscenely priced tasting menu, and then stewing in despair when the credit card bill arrived. But looking at the slat of sunshine from the hotel window grazing Leon’s relaxed jaw and sincere grey eyes as he hands me the money, I swallow my pride. I can’t afford this escape without him. I take the money from his warm dry fingers, and he squeezes my shoulder. I travel ahead in a cream Renault 4 that smells like cheap cigarette smoke and vanilla.

  ***

  I spend my days hiking in a hazy eastern rainforest preserve with a group of tourists led by Solomon, a seasonal nature guide for the lodge. He alerts us to hot pink frogs, brilliant purple orchids, chameleons stock-still but for their long, darting tongues. There’s so much beauty, such vastness here! It shocks me. I didn’t know being alive could feel like this, like there’s something so much larger at work. How far from civilization we are. Fewer people, less stuff, no expectations. There won’t be any suffocating office conflicts to wrestle with, no relentless water cooler chatter. It will be just me and Leon in paradise. How light I feel imagining our future.

  “It is taboo to hunt the Babakoto,” Solomon notes, pointing at an indri crouched overhead. “One of the legends says that villagers used to send a honey hunter to venture among the rosewood trees. He would examine bee droppings on the leaves and watch the wild bees as they swarmed by, a dark swarm against the glowing red of the sun. They needed to determine where the swarm had settled to know where the honey flowed. When the honey hunter found a dark hole in the tree where the swarm lived, he would light a piece of dried sisal and draw the bees out of the tree with smoke. Slowly, he coaxed all the bees, including the queen bee, from their hollow and when they were out, he would gather the honeycomb.