Sugar, Smoke, Song

by Reema Rajbanshi

  “They’re computer engineers,” I say. “The husband drives a motorcycle all over this town.” I roll my eyes at a wannabe hero in Aviators vrooming past pastures of cows and sheep.

  Tashi steps towards one of the four cabinets that lines the door wall and opens the leftmost door. Then the next door. Then each drawer. Of every single cabinet. She moves deliberately, like someone in a trance, while I sit on the bed, patting Nena’s rising-falling belly. For several minutes, there is no other sound but the baby’s phlegmy breath and the swish-thump of doors and drawers opening and closing, so that if I’d closed my eyes, I might’ve been out by the riled-up sea by our riled-up house.

  Dropping on her good knee, Tashi guesses at the medicine drawer, opening the lower left latch of the last bureau. The bottles are all mixed up with a stash of lingerie and, as Tashi lifts it up gingerly, a set of handcuffs.

  “What is this doing here?” she says.

  Mrs. Subrahmanian, you sneaky lady, I grin, and wonder who does what to whom. I kneel beside Tashi and pull out a frilly purple camisole. “Try it on.”

  Tashi hesitates and fingers the frill.

  “No one’s looking,” I say. “Come on. When else are you gonna wear this?”

  Tashi stretches out her left leg and rubs it, as if the answer is pulsing there. She gleans off her tee in a swift tug, arches back to peel off one jean leg, then another. Her form, this close-up, is unsurprisingly peach-soft and startlingly opalesque. She pushes herself up, grunting, and as she stands, crooked to the right as always to ease her left weight, in just her wide cotton bra and panties, her smooth back lines, her slender, scarred legs read like the statue of a Tibetan deity no one’s yet dug up. Poor Megan, I think as Tashi unwraps her bra, she’s gonna miss some breasts.

  Tashi’s breasts are longer than I would’ve guessed from her quaint blouses, almost gold gourds, and for a moment, Nena’s breath drops to a hum. Ah, here’s one thing that keeps Ramu close. Tashi slips on the purple camisole, the transparent cups barely covering her silver dollar nipples, and she murmurs, “Even after babies, she’s this size?”

  I know this game—I’ve played it aplenty with rich girls—measuring my wealth against theirs.

  “If my chest looked like yours,” I say, “she’d probably ask me to breastfeed Nena too.” I hand Tashi a larger, lacy black bra. The price tag still dangles from the back—seventy-five dollars—but Tashi wraps it easily around herself, the cups fitting as if they were made for her. She shifts side to side, a smile creeping over her face, her hand resting on the upper slope of her tummy, and when I say, “too bad Ramu isn’t here,” she laughs. Just as slowly, she unsnaps the bra, slides each strap down her arm, and shakes her head as the bra drops to her plain panty.

  “What am I doing?”

  “Take it!”

  “Oh, no, no, no.” Tashi tugs off the bra, as if my words were dark magic, and fumbles on her tee.

  “Tashi, she has a hundred! In a couple months, even the smaller ones won’t fit her.”

  Tashi turns her back to the mirror and frowns at me. “Nirmali, you think we need more bad karma?”

  I flush at we and hand Tashi the blue medicine bag, lumpy with bottles of pills and lotions. Tashi plucks out the Tylenol, crushes it between her thumb and pinky, and sprinkles half into the milk bottle she’s left on the bureau. Nena squirms when Tashi lifts her up but settles glossy-eyed into her thick-armed hold, her bottle-soothing song. As if singing to herself, in Tibetan or Nepali I can’t tell, Tashi wanders out with the baby into the hall. Her lullaby drifts in from various rooms as I slump on the bed, staring at ajar drawers, the scattered bras, the necklaces draped over knobs that I’ll have to tidy up again.

  I slide down to the carpet and pluck up the discarded black bra, cradling it in both hands like an unexpected jewel; would Mrs. Subrahmanian really notice if this were gone? I roll the bra up into a ball so soft yet dense, it could be my lump. Couldn’t Tashi have this one tiny thing, for all the things taken from her in other days? I think as I stuff the ball into my back pocket.

  Tashi shuffles back, just as I slap the first drawer shut, and sets a dozing Nena on the bed. She hugs herself, chest sloped in, as if the house and baby-holding have knocked the heat from her. “You should quit. The signs are everywhere.”

  “I keep trying but she won’t agree, no matter what I do.”

  “What kind of parent,” Tashi says, dropping her arms, trembling up on her tippie-toes to stretch her good leg, then her left leg slowly, squinting through the window onto that lush rose patch, “leaves her most valuable possession with someone who can’t take care of it?”

  FALLEN

  When I’d knocked on her door that afternoon, Megan stumbled out of bed, eyes swollen like a fly’s, whisper spittling my elbow. “Can you please read me a story?” It’s the Friday before Diwali, the Hindu holiday when Good triumphs over Evil, but I’m stuck in the upstairs bedroom while Mrs. Subrahmanian paces about, dumping each room’s linen in a hallway mound. Sucks to read The Little Prince a hundred times, repeating mantras that seem lost not only on my boss but my life.

  It is the time wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.

  Megan nods off on the hundredth recitation and the walls buzz with the back-and-forth of Mrs. Subrahmanian’s vacuum.

  Walking in a straight line, one cannot get very far.

  I remember blocks I circled as a child, counting geraniums resiliently red on apartment stairwells, marigolds abloom in the front plot Deeta had taught us to hoe, flowers nowhere to be found in this valley heat.

  You become responsible forever, and as I flip the page on this omen that ends for what you have tamed, Megan shoves up to drink her ginger ale and I feel the surge. Acidic, sulfurous, shooting up my windpipe, burning from my nostrils through my head. I rush to Megan’s bathroom and, kneeling over the toilet, hack! A green snake dribbles out my mouth. Aargh! a tide of morning bagel-egg-apple pours out.

  “Mali?” Megan stands at the doorway, eyes blinking rapidly. “Are you sick too?”

  I sit to the side of the toilet and rest my head between my knees. “I’m just tired, Megan. Go back to bed.”

  Megan runs downstairs, cup still in hand, and says, “Daddy! Mali’s fallen on the floor!”

  The surges are coming faster now, as if a squall were releasing inside, and I have to hang directly over the toilet bowl, watching my reflected mouth, my throw up that is greenish and spotted, as I grip the seat.

  Mr. Subrahmanian and Megan must see me staring into their toilet as if it were a wishing well, because Megan says, “Why is she still there?”

  “Go fill your sippie with water,” Mr. Subrahmanian says and he kneels beside me, stroking my back. “I think our girls must’ve gotten you sick.”

  I close the cover down. “I’ll clean this all up.”

  “Please,” he says and lifts me to sit on the toilet cover. “This is the least we can do for your staying.”

  Megan rushes up, cup spilling water, and holds it to my lips. I gulp in one long swig and Mr. Subrahmanian, jingling out keys from his pockets, says, “Let me take you home.”

  I push myself up—wobbling—but chop-step Ramu-style to the door, then the stairs. “I can bike back.”

  It will be the last time I see that house, as I straddle my bike and pull slowly away. On the ride down the asphalt road, one of many leading from houses with rose gardens to the campus with cops, I will turn out the complex and veer too sharply into corner shrubs. I will fall off and, for several minutes, will lie on the pavement, cars whizzing by, beside an elm like the one that had buckled that other concrete where I’d waited for Ma and Deeta to call me. They’d stood like tiny sentinels behind the screen, eyes lurid saucers, and while Deeta stood with an unsure palm on the handle, Ma had popped her neck and said, “Don’t think you can come back!” I will remember the light grayer than it is here, falling on buildings crumbling with kids running between them, and I will murmur the epitaph scattered
like puff on my train ride out: Dios te bendiga.

  Though the only thing that feels blessed, three years out of the Bronx, one sick day out of the gated mansion, is that I’m sitting beside Kosal in the Veteran’s Hall, no matter how momentarily. He’s wearing a white silk kurta I bought him, paper cups of chaat and chai steaming before us, though for now we clench each other’s hands and watch the Yolo desis come and go.

  “Isn’t that your boss?” he says, pointing to Mrs. Subrahmanian in a black-and-gold sari with white tea roses braided through her bun. She’s showing off Nena, dressed in a ghagra, ribbons in her hair, to a few other IT types, also mothers who drag their doll-like children behind them.

  “God,” I say. “I hope she doesn’t see me.”

  “If you hate it there so much, why don’t you leave?”

  “It’s the only thing I’ve got till I start the teaching job.”

  “You underestimate yourself, Mali.”

  After dinner, the young desis, mostly science grad students newly arrived from the South Indian cities, dance in a frantic crowd before the deejay. He reminds me of the NYC desi crowd, a hunched-over, cap-and-kicks-wearing Chinese American, cryptically swishing that vinyl, bopping his head to some separate beat. I pull Kosal with me—he grins and snaps his fingers, moving his muscled legs in some funky jiggle all his own—and we dance at the edge of the circle.

  But the circle won’t open and drifts away: Kosal and I the loosest bodies in the room everyone is watching, the mass of Indian scientists who will not acknowledge us. A silk-scarfed uncle who’s got an organizer breastpin runs up to the crowd, elbowing through the sweaty backs. “What are you doing? You have to dance with everyone!” Kosal and I smile at each other—it’s too late for the circles to merge—and I want to warm my hands over his face, my father’s face, a gift that feels like home.

  It’s then that Megan runs past, yanking apart our hands, but when I reach over to ruffle her hair, she doesn’t glance back, darting instead to the other circle. Kosal, who must see the tremor on my face, pulls me in. “She’s just a kid.”

  “I can’t do this anymore.”

  “You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be.”

  Which sounds like a Bihu motto, when everyone—tribal or non-tribal, Hindu or Muslim, even a stray like me—could supposedly gather. Every April, Ma and Deeta would pack us in the Camry, Ma’s Ponds fragrancing the car, Deeta reciting husori lines in his bow-tied suit, a duffel bag of dancing bells between me and Henna. We’d drive two hours to Edison, New Jersey, where Henna and I tumbled into a Presbyterian Hall of light, aluminum trays and Corning dishes laid out on a foldout table, chairs set up for games that were anything but. Henna and I were competitive though not with each other—something I refrain from telling outsiders, who name our distance thus—the will to win some janky toy, to shove some kid’s butt off a chair deflated once Henna, always unsure, was trapped in empty space. Her kneading hands only made me want to knock off the punk who’d kicked her from the circle, while she cheered me on, “Mali sit-sit-sit!”

  And just like that, I know what to say. Kosal is waiting at the exit as I search for my gray pea coat in the hall coat rack, and Mrs. Subrahmanian comes up, her first hello all evening. Mr. Subrahmanian reins in the girls to his sides and Mrs. Subrahmanian says, “Did you enjoy yourself? I didn’t know you celebrated Diwali.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” I say, toggling up my coat. “By the way, I’m not coming back.”

  She looks at Kosal, who nods slowly at me. “My parents arrive next week. How will I manage till December?”

  “You know what my mother said when I said I was working for you? She said even she wouldn’t hire me”

  Mrs. Subrahmanian flinches. “Everyone has different criteria.”

  “My mother didn’t have a real choice but I do. You make me think I’m lucky she was around.”

  Mrs. Subrahmanian steps closer, that blue blood rushing life at last to her uptilted face. “You are like our daughters, Nirmali. I’ll double your wages.”

  And just like that, I turn away, clasping Kosal’s hand through the files exiting the double doors, walking gingerly along lampless streets to the purple hippie house. Until on a side street with a flickering electric candle, Kosal hauls me up on his back and my feet, throbbing in white kitten heels, swing up cool as air.

  SNOW LIONS

  Though the office gig won’t start till December—a whole month more of hand-to-mouth—I’m itching to leave the guys too. Which may be how, one week into biking Davis blocks strewn with figs and cherries and apples rotting beside fences, counting whether I should sell my records, my eggs, or the bike beneath me, I show up at Delhi Delight. It’s right before a Friday dinner shift I haven’t been given and, as I bustle past the men plating tables, I wonder if Ramu’s mentioned the job drama to Gerald.

  Gerald’s slouched at the bar, sipping beer-foaming shots and thumbing through the menus, presumably for a million more fusion items to add. He fidgets when I stand glaring before him, as if no one’s supposed to see him hiding between the back row of flasks, the sample bottles beside him.

  “What’s going on with my days?” I say. “Why am I getting one call a week when you told me you needed four nights? I could’ve looked for other work!”

  Gerald throws up his hands. “My wife makes the schedule.” He sidles out the bar gate and steps behind the buffet trays, pretending to look for napkins. “Why does everyone think I can solve all their problems?”

  I stride over and slap my palms on the table corner—trays rattle—Gerald jumps—the chefs and dishwashers crowd the dining hall entrance, eager spectators. “Am I supposed to pay my rent on your jokes, Gerald? Give me notice if you don’t want me ’cause I need steady work.”

  “Calm down,” he says, slipping out his Nokia, dialing hurriedly. The men glance at each other half- knowingly, as Gerald mmhmms and buts to his wife’s high, relentless tone. He hangs up and frowns at me. “She says there aren’t enough days for everyone. And that you are rude to her and forgetful with the customers.”

  “When,” I say. “Give me examples.”

  Gerald adjusts his tie and says, “How should I know? Only you two know and I’m getting caught in the middle.” He smiles slightly, as if being a middleman were like winning a fucking prize.

  Ramu rests a hand on Gerald’s shoulder. “Boss, Mali is good girl. There must be some misunderstanding.”

  “Forget it,” I say, crumpling my black tie, tossing it into the nearest tray. “I want my pay for the whole last month.”

  Gerald frowns at the tie-ball, as if he doesn’t understand why it’s not aloo gobi. “Ramu is right. This is all a misunderstanding. Though hours don’t grow on trees you know. Still. I’ll see if I can find some for you.”

  I’m already writing down my address on a yellow stickie, which I give to Ramu. “He can mail me here. Good luck. I hope you all stay in business.”

  Ramu runs after me as I jet for the front door. “Come by the house again. I give you paycheck and surprise.”

  I’m shaking my head but Ramu, ever the hustler, has already turned to the kitchen. “I’ll fix things quick-quick, Mali. You’ll see.”

  Not quick enough: Kosal’s visiting his folks in Long Beach till Thanksgiving, Ma won’t talk to me long enough to make the holiday home, and Henna, a financier who wouldn’t know if I did have cancer, probably wouldn’t pick up my call even then. I marathon-ring the Woodland school district instead and begin waking at 6:00 for 8:00 a.m. subbing gigs, one day gathering toys tornadoed by five year olds until lunchtime liberation, another day chalking up grammar to mouthy fifth graders till one of us caves from boredom. When I do show up on Ramu’s stoop, two weekends out from Diwali hope, it’s Tashi who cracks open the door and reaches out her good hand again: an envelope this time that, according to her block letters, holds my CHECK and TICKET. “Our gift. Don’t lose it, huh? One of us will take you there.”

  A promise that tides me, with
four miracle days of high school music and Deeta’s insistent, mailed check, till the next weekend. I’m wearing a seersucker dress Kosal selected and gripping Tashi’s slight envelope as she drives us single-handed to a school, atop one of these endless San Francisco hills. Kids are gathered in the small playground, squirming and singing, their mismatched words tinkling down to the Corolla, under a strangely cloudless sky. The teacher pauses and they try again, a low chant punctuated by an off-key flute, and I’m almost back in the Shillong hills with its Catholic churches, its Khasi ladies with their elegantly done toenails, its nearly inaudible hum of tribal tunes and war dirges. “Shillong-Shillong-Shillong,” Ma would joke, as she does out of earshot, back from some insufferable party. “Anytime anyone sees anything pretty, they say it’s like Shillong. Call it like it is!”

  Tashi thinks I’m laughing at the kids and waves out at them. “They can’t say it right, huh? But you must have been like this too.” She steers the car slowly around to the Berkeley Marina, where Tibetans in heavy beads and embroidered skirts are streaming into an oblong pier-side hotel. “Enjoy it,” she pats my lap. “Ramu and I will pick you up at three.”

  The Tibetan Association of the Bay Area has rented out the penthouse, so that whenever you turn across the single circle wall of window, you look down at the Pacific, unbelievably blue and still. I feel breathless, as if I might keel right through glass into sea, so I sink down along a back-section of window, under a dance-like rail, and settle cross-legged on the carpet, yoga-breathing.

  Several minutes later, a round-faced woman with a blue striped scarf bends over me. Her peppery hair is surprisingly curly, like mine, so that she has the look of a grizzled lioness.

  “South Indian?” she says, scarf-mopping her face. She squints at my nametag. “Nir-mali Raj-bon . . .”

  I flinch. Duskier than anyone else in my family, the only one with double lids and a thinnish nose, I’m used to this or Bengali. “Assamese. Tibetan?”