Sugar, Smoke, Song

by Reema Rajbanshi

  Biju’d lie in bed till I crept back, and not once asked where I’d been, what I’d done. Still, I told her, naming this one’s stinky moves, that one’s stinky breath. Still, she’d never speak, just tap her finger on my navel—until the sun flowered the dogwoods on the parkway and merengue filled the warm subway cars. Then Biju opened the window and rolled over to ask, “How do you get a guy? How do you please him?” I wanted to say, Why, give them what they want—something untroubled by time, something easy—when none of that is real? But I kissed my sister instead and whispered what I knew, and that’s how Biju landed Nikhil Reddy.

  May 1, 2004

  Maina’s ways were weird on me.

  I sputtered fast to Nikhil about the school dance but, in the discoed-out cafeteria, couldn’t look him in the eye. I tried anyways to rub my back against him, letting my hair fall on half my face. Would you believe what he said? “I can’t see you”, and turned me round, brushed my hair behind my ears.

  I took him to the Coney Island beach, where he dared me to strip into the water. I shivered as I bared myself—but waded in. And he followed, glasses and shorts still on, mouth open, little belly quivering. On the train platform, rubbing the feeling back into my toes, he said, “You’re braver than I thought.” I pulled my feet away and said, “Everyone’s looking.” And what did he do but hold my hand, the whole subway ride, till we reached Morris Park. Even then, past the stop signs, into the house, where the sun slanted through my bedroom blinds, he wouldn’t let go. Just took his glasses off and toasted my palms against the bed.

  It was only when Nikhil took me to the Met that I got to look. Not at the mummies in their fake pyramids, but at his face: copper orb on my lap, while over me, glass roof. The sun sliced onto his veined lids, his crooked nose, though to the guard twirling his stick up, we were just brown kids. “Keep moving,” he said, but I steeled my thighs until the guard poked them and sent us scurrying to the train. I was the one to press Nikhil’s hand between mine, all the way to Morris Park where, I’d forgotten, Maina would come meet us. She narrowed her black eyes into knives at our clasp, and said no wazzup, no nothing. Only at night, Nikhil gone, did my sister roll her back to me and say, “I guess my tactics worked.”

  Biju’s guy was unreal: a chubby Mr. Smiley-Face, soft voice and soft ways, devoted to a girl no other guy seemed to want. I watched him at family dinners, the way he grinned into her face, even fingered once the line running down her jaw. And how she bloomed, a sudden rose, hands rushing up to hold her petaled cheeks together. But his hands, pristine like they’d been soaking in rose water, gave away nothing, nor did his eyes, hidden by dark round discs.

  What else could the motherfucker want, but to bang my sister, then leave her? And if he stuck around, what sort of fetish freak was he? When I cornered him by the lockers, asked him what his intentions were, he laughed, said not even my parents had asked him that! But the slick operator never took her to restaurants and clubs where they could be seen. It was always nestle by our living room TV, moon over our deck at the fig tree, rustle about in the bedroom that was also mine.

  They had locked me out. Worse, Biju was letting him do something with her I couldn’t do anything about. The gasping, the tiny cries, a stabbing I couldn’t see—a train whirred through my ears.

  Not again.

  I ran out to the streets, where cars slowed to catcall me, where shopmen turned to rate my tits, my ass, where a million girls-mommies-grannies marched on by. I ran right at the columns of the subway track, and pressed my back against the quivering steel leg.

  This was where.

  Even with my eyes shut, I saw that boy’s manicured hands, groping my sister’s pieces, his blank face grunting over her shattered one. Then I knew, as terrible as it would look, what I had to do. For her, for us. Later, I’d tell her, we were twins, we were each other’s trustees, only we knew and loved each other’s ruins. No matter what, no matter who, we had to stick together through everything.

  She tried to steal him from me. No other way to put it. I came home from lab, where half the mice had died, falling slack in their own pool of urine. When I pushed open the door to those odd slidings and snaps, I found them rattling my shelf of notes. His hand under the crease of her behind, her calf flexed up, nails curling about his chin. Even here, I can’t name their expressions, just how quickly their faces parted.

  His glasses were on, still, as he was doing my sister—what did he need to see?—and I saw my mouth reflected there. Cracked wide like a mask, to the darkness within. What a village boy must’ve seen when he asked God to open his—are you really who you say you are—and Krishna had revealed the whole world swirling inside.

  Well, there was my world till now, staring at me with the eyes of a frightened fawn, my figure centered in both orbs. She drew her blouse together, stretched her hand to me, and said fast, “Biju, there was a reason for this. Let me explain.” But I heard the whirr of trains, my sister’s feet running far, from me to them. So that when she stepped to touch me, I stepped behind that door, breath caught at last. I asked it loud then, for us both, “How could you do this to me?”

  Yes, that’s how it looked, but if Biju had stayed in our room, if she hadn’t run east to those ruins I’d left for her, I would’ve explained. A boy who’d do her in for nothing more or less than her own sister wasn’t worth our time. ’Cause no matter what, I’d always returned, from all those boys and buildings, to this room and bed. I’d always come collect her. I needed her to remember this was all.

  So I write my ending to her book.

  Nothing else, sister, matters. One more boy, another hour of fun—those moments die. What stands is the structure where those moments were, even if it’s in pieces. The house the tribal king built for his daughter, a palace of love, a palace of stone, every rock marked with what we run toward: the feasting, the fighting, the vengeful gods.

  I lie in our bed tonight, lit by what’s left to us both, stars smashed against glass. And I touch my finger to the sky that must arc over my sister too, wherever she’s stowed, among the hills and ruins and their quiet, haunting voices.

  BX Blues:

  A Dance Manual

  for Heartbreak

  PROLOGUE

  This is a story, a dance, a ride in several parts. This is a story of how God saved the world, ten times in ten forms, when times got tough. This is a story of time. What the old books called Yugas, each epoch less and less graced by truth. What the regulars call train stops, each place closer or further from home. This is a manual for how to re-piece heartbreak, how to dance through wrongs, how to last a ride freighted with memory.

  INTRODUCTORY DANCE ACT

  First, you must clear the stage and cast a back screen.

  You, Biju, are the dokhavatar, who gestures each of the ten avatars to the stage. You, Maina, are God, who leaps into each avatar, then rests your hands into a flute by your face.

  You, Biju, wear white lined with gold, a Nehru cap over your bun, and only pearls on your ears. You, Maina, wear gold silk and a blue velvet cape. A peacock feather in your loose hair and bright rings on every finger.

  You, Biju and Maina, must move your hands at every chorus interval like a blooming lotus, a spinning world. You must slide your feet in a four-step slowly: keeping heel circles small, spinning on the last four-step, pressing that back-cross toe firmly.

  STOP 1

  Ali Baba: the train doors part. You slide to the corner seat, close your eyes to the light, to faces you’ll always see and never know—Kosovar mothers with deep brows, Old World kerchiefs, black men with arms crossed, Timberlands splayed, all the riders bent over milk and bread and candles, pursed mouths guarding their own train stories.

  Things are like this: you and Biju, who once roamed the city in matching brown puffy coats, are lucky if you speak once a year. You train up, the last to know of her engagement, at a dinner where she gifted you pearls, she laughed, she didn’t need. Why shouldn’t you gift her the mannequin you’ve
been piecing from city trash, a mosaic that might rise and wave, what can I sing, bhonti, to bring you back?

  Can I sing a bihu, those Oxomiya blues we danced before we could walk? Ma swathed us in gold mekhlas and we watched each other for every pentatonic stop. Can I sing a borgeet, those devotionals we clapped to every full moon? The four of us washed and seated, heads bowed as Baba rubbed brass taals, singing for salvation, for forgiveness. Can I sing the American blues you loved, fluttery notes of Si Sé, Alicia, Mariah lifting over rain-splattered streets while you spread-eagled on your bed, hopeful in the dark?

  The train heaves on to stop two—you can barely carry a note—and real people curl up around you like morning glories.

  MATSYA

  Some of you have Noah who built the ark, some of you have King Manu who built a boat. In that story, God himself becomes a fish to anchor the boat, to keep its two- and four-feathered-limbed sailors and the tsunamied world from dissolving. It was still the Age of One Hundred Percent Truth, but a demon had stolen the Vedas, and without this book (lo! the power of stories!), the Age would end without the world being made anew.

  So God swam deep into the ocean where the demon had buried the book, and bellied it up for readers to come. Then God swam, a tiny silver thing, into Manu’s hands, and begged him to save his life. King Manu’s compassion cradled the fish into a bowl, then a tank, then a river, then an ocean, as the little nickelback plumped into a silver-shackled-barrucada of a thousand whales, who warned Manu of the coming flood in seven days.

  When it was all over, God lay flopping, silvery small on the sand, gills heaving, as if saving the world had been deadlier than making it.

  DANCE ACT I

  Stage glows silver and blue, as if you were in an ocean. Cast swirls of blues and grays across the screen, to mimic currents.

  You, Biju, and you, Maina, must creep in slow unison, palms atop each other, thumbs circling like fins. You must slide in the four-step time: right heel kick front, left toe back-cross, right heel in place step, alternating right-left, till you reach the front of the stage.

  Kneel, then slowly rise. With palms shooting up, thumbs circling fast, to indicate God swimming fast, for all our dear lives.

  STOP 2

  Biju, do you remember the afternoon I lost you?

  It rained the way it does today—slanted torrents erasing everything till the clouds breathed five, four, three . . . and I shielded your fuzzy sleeping head on my shoulder. Boys with their puffy coats and unfettered manes hung by the closest pole, commenting on your milky rose, your delicate wrists. “I’d marry her for her cheeks,” they conferred.

  I shook you—our stop—but when I dashed out the doors, you rose frantic-eyed. The train slipped off—your palms pressed to the glass—I laughed and waited till you rode back.

  Your cards, when you ran onto the platform and showed me, had disintegrated into blue scraps. I could only make out two equations—E=mc2 and F=ma. “Energy and force,” you said woefully, “are the only things that made it.”

  Look how, Biju, a decade later, I’ve discovered a third: E + F = L, a hidden love, brash and raw and too blue to bury. How we are all the wild childs of the city, train-riding some afternoons, crush-jumping in the dark, with our frank glances, our sweet rumps, springs when merengue jiggles on car after car of tank tops and shorts, summers when we have to bust a hydrant to cool the roads down, all the goosebumpy nights we whisper. Yo mami, hi ma, hey bhonti, ki khobor Biju, come home, okay?

  KURMA

  God becomes a tortoise in the very first race. The gods and demons had made a truce—all to churn up the nectar of immortality from the ocean of milk—but the mountain they’d turned into a churning staff began to sink. So God morphed his back into a dappled bowl, his ancient face you can’t help but love rolling its eyes like, I can’t believe I have to save these kids from themselves. The gods and demons went back to pulling each end of a snake, the mountain re-birthing the foaming pot of nectar, so that each side rushed at a taste of Forever.

  Here’s the part they never tell you: God had to shapeshift again, into the jewel-eyed, honey-pussied Mohini to lure the demons away from the other Nectar, and into Shiva the Destroyer, who had to drink up the poison that also poured forth. His was the first throat to turn blue. Even then, God couldn’t stop one demon from swallowing immortality, and though he cut the demon’s head, the head lives, every now and then swallowing the sun.

  DANCE ACT II

  Shadowbox power players across the back screen. Let rise a mountain, let sink the mountain, a snake’s wriggle darkening the screen, the stage, the audience.

  At such a moment, you, Biju and Maina, stay together, from the back wing to center stage to front wing, in that simple four-step. Your hands too are basic, palms still overlapping but thumbs hidden. Swimming, sliding as shelled creatures do. But once at the front, you must split-shift, as God does.

  Biju, you face front-right and become Mohini the Temptress, cocking your hip, resting mudra-ed hand to your ample bum, cupping your back head with an arched, suggestive arm to distract the bad boys. Maina, you face front-right and become blue-throated Shiva, kneeling and cupping your palms to catch the poison, tipping back your face to the eclipsing moon to drink in death, to save immortality for the good kids before the lights go out.

  STOP 3

  Don’t say names, or smell Old Spice mixed with sweat, or watch that brassy face sit before you, conjuring him up. The city’s haunted by jawlines that slope like his, by crisp white shirts unbuttoned at the top, by hands dangling from overhead holds with the same gibbon grace. Today’s twin smiles at you, above his head, the ticker line flashes—12:20—and you think, déjà vu means riding with ghosts.

  The afternoon your long-gone man sat by you, he said, “It’s warmer over here.”

  “A window’s open,” you said, measuring the bangs that slanted his brow.

  Van Gogh’s wheat is what you saw, not his toothpaste smile that meant untried youth, his rum-and-coke breath that meant bachelor ways. Art was the problem. You had to find muscle under the skin, see if yes, those anatomy lessons were right. Lie down and he’ll bend his spine. Arch your neck and he’ll tilt his skull. Grip his shoulder and he’ll hold your waist, playing his fingerbones over all the tones of you.

  Art was shit. In a painting, the subject never moved, but a human being could walk in and out the frame of your days. Art never told you: one evening, while drinking soup, he’d say, “I’m tired. This isn’t working. Let’s be friends.” Truth is: only art stays.

  You painted your long-gone’s face on a pale, blue tile and cemented it heart-smack at the center-right of your mosaic.

  BARAHA

  This might be the least flattering avatar of all: God the wild, white boar. Oh, he was beautiful even then, but the plot twist begs the question, does God save some at the expense of others, all for Himself?

  He’d turned into a long-tusked boar with shiny, white spindles when Hiranyaksha, an immortal human, gathered the ball of earth under his bicep crook and dove to the bottom of the unbreathable sea. The arrogant kid was looking to pick a fight with Vishnu, God’s Preserver form, who was the only one stronger than him. So God the boar wrestled with the kid for a thousand years and, after slicing the kid’s head with his disc, lifted the Earth like a dark pearl on his glistening tusks.

  Thing was, Hiranyaksha had only ever become human because he had once been God’s godly bodyguard and, on duty, had blocked four other gods from bothering his master’s sleep. Those gods had cursed Hiranyaksha to human life but promised, when an apologetic Vishnu awoke, Hiranyaksha would be relieved when Hiranyaksha met his death at God’s hands.

  You tell me: what kind of reward is death for a duty done? How come Hiranyaksha never was reborn when he lost his only home? How come, for us to live, Hiranyaksha had to die?

  DANCE ACT III

  Cast against a roiling screen of blue-and-black waves, clangs of thunder and steel, bellows of enraged bulls. Girls, char
ge in fast on your three-step, hands in a cowabunga sign that means tusks, by your cheeks. At the front center, close to each other, jump onto your right knee, then rise in a wave sway, as if lifting the world on your hand-tusks. Keeping your right hand up by your right cheek, grab with your left hand your string of dark costume pearls. Tug them loose, glare with squinted eyes and pouted mouth at the audience, while a hundred earths scatter and lose their way.

  STOP 4

  Halfway there now. Parking lot: Julian and Abe pass a blunt, watch the girls wafting by. C-town: Mr. Chakraborty walks to his Toyota, weightlifting a bag of soda, a bag of carp. Flower show: Mr. Lee jabs lilies into a base, while Maribel flicks through roses for her quinceañera. Train tracks: Felicia and Eve teach Patrick double Dutch, chanting, sticking gum on the ramp.

  Strangers step off these streets and, for several minutes, ride with you, blank faces that’ll disappear into night, that mean home when you’re far enough away. Church ladies dozing in bright hats; brothers brushing their iPod screens; Bangladeshis clutching kids like precious cargo. You wanted them reflected in your gift, so you painted that mannequin taupe brown, laid on it a straight, black wig, and cemented your map, square by square, on it. Now, you’ve got one tile missing, right on the face, and nothing left to say.

  You too stared wordlessly, bhonti, from the mud one afternoon.