Chocolate Cherry Chai

by Taslim Burkowicz

  In our tiny courtyard, ashy chickens pecked at each other, causing clouds of dust to settle on the bed sheets — stained yellow with body oil. They hung to dry, flapping in the wind like saggy elephant ears. Smells from the pit latrine wafted in, mixing with my brewing curry of goat’s trotters.

  I could not remember the poems my master-ji taught me in India. Instead, I taught my daughters how to read basic Gujarati and trained them to do the chores I scrunched my nose up at in youth. Wahidji talked about industrializing and colonializing the nation as our African servant, poorer than even us, scampered about in the background, cleaning out our outhouse. Wahidji’s goal in life was to be seen as equal with the British. He prided himself on his knowledge of Shakespeare and crumpets. Yet he did not care that the British Magistrate Richard Dickenson once drank English tea at our house. He did not know that Richard Dickenson would have married me if I had chosen to jangle my bracelets that day. Meanwhile, I wondered how I could belong to a privileged people when my own champals had holes in them. When I walked, my heels became as black as the night.

  Now it was my youngest daughter’s turn to get married. I taught Sukaina the art of sewing because the art of dancing was not only unaffordable, it was useless. I taught her how to make chai using a syrup made from Ugandan orange cherry omuboro, which could be found at the local market, toasted almonds and a little bit of the chocolate powder, imported from Britain, that Wahidji liked to keep. In Surat we had a variety of specialized tea leaves, but in Africa I had learned to create a tea my daughters could remember me by.

  Sukaina did not ask me whom she should marry, but it was my opinion that she should not marry Salim. Salim was like Zuhair. Men like Zuhair always chose their politics before their women. After all, Zuhair himself had been caught firing shots at an official of the British Indian Government and had been sentenced to be hanged years ago.

  Wrapping my fingers through the iron bars of our hut, I closed my eyes, imagining the courtyard in our bungalow in Gujarat. I saw Zuhair in my mind’s eye, standing with his chest held out proudly as if he were not a launderer’s son but a warrior. I saw him bidding the goodbye he never got to bid me, pigeons cooing as they flew overhead, a blur of gunmetal and violet against our brilliant mosaic tiled walls. But standing beside him I also saw Nafeesa, cradling the toothless woman’s dead baby, waving farewell.

  14

  DYLAN AND I SIPPED early evening cocktails at a lounge in Yaletown, our table overlooking a busy street. A skinny punk rocker crossed the road, the torso of a naked female mannequin tucked under his arm. A lady walked her Louis Vuitton-outfitted Chihuahua. A shop window display featured tulips and upsidedown umbrellas. It seemed that Valentine’s Day had safely been buried, and spring was already on the horizon.

  “Zoolander and Space Balls are two of my favourite movies. And you can’t appreciate either.” Dylan playfully punched me in the arm.

  “Zoolander was funny, sort of. I just wouldn’t put it on my all-time favourite list. I’ve never watched Space Balls.”

  Clink-clink. “Can I get your attention everyone? My girlfriend hasn’t seen the movie Space Balls.” He turned to me laughing. “Don’t you like those weird foreign movies with a French bakery and five characters?”

  “Guilty as charged. My friend Matt and I even have a list of our favourite foreign movies. City of God. Amelie. Devdas … ”

  He shook his head and shrugged. “Were these movies based on books?”

  “The English Patient was. Have you read it?”

  “I am not a big reader, Maya. Anyway, enough shop talk.” He slid my martini glass to the side. “Have you given any more thought to my proposal?”

  “Moving in? I don’t know. I’m sort of old-fashioned when it comes to all that.”

  He scrunched his face in distaste. “Is this still about your culture? Geez, you lived abroad for four years. You had a serious boyfriend there, too, didn’t you? That motorcycle guy, what was his name? You’re not going to live with your parents forever.”

  “What do my parents have to do with this? This conversation is about you and me.”

  “Okay, let’s focus on you then,” he said smiling at me with his very blue eyes. “It just feels like you don’t want to grow up. And living at home with your parents really allows you to do that.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” Dylan said, reaching to touch my hair. “Eating rice out of banana leaves in some third world country is fine in your early twenties. You don’t have to do that shit anymore, now. I mean there are classier places to visit right here. In BC. There’s the wine country. We could go skiing in Whistler. It’s like you idealize this whole bloody ‘finding yourself’ moment. I mean, it’s something my mom picked up on, too.”

  “Your mom?” I was starting to feel under fire.

  “She said you seemed jumpy and unsettled the other day at dinner. On edge, like you’re just not happy here.”

  It was hard to address the elephant in the room, but I felt pressed. I forced myself to look at him. “Dylan, you asked me to move in with you and we haven’t even discussed how we feel about one another yet. It’s like we jumped a fairly huge step, you know?”

  “Are you talking about me not saying ‘I love you’?”

  I flushed a dozen colours of red.

  “That’s so fucking dumb, Maya. What a bullshit thing to be hung up on. Look at my actions, for god’s sake. I am asking you to move in with me. Words are not important. We don’t have to be so damn traditional about everything. Just imagine who you want to spend tomorrow with and the decision is easy, really.”

  I looped his heart-shaped necklace around my finger, tightening it to my throat. “Can you excuse me for a second?”

  The bathroom looked like a club. All the walls were painted black. A portrait of a red-lipped supermodel kissing a revolver hung over the sink. Sitting on the velvet purple couch, I flipped open my cell phone.

  “Hello? Is this the giveth of the answer?” Matt said.

  “It’s me,” I hissed. I pulled at my knee high boots and adjusted my Chloé tweed shorts. “I don’t have time to translate your Dungeons and Dragons talk. Giveth of the answer? What are you, a pink-haired troll guarding a bridge?’”

  “Trolls do not have electric pink hair, or gems in their bellies. You would know that if you ever actually played Dungeons and Dragons. As I remember, you forfeited your chance in grade twelve, even after I showed you the illustrated book of fairies … ”

  “I am willing to go on one date to see if I can see you in a different light. One.”

  “I think you already do.”

  “I think you might be right.” Wait. Was I flirting?

  “How is your date going with Mr. Valentine?”

  “He’s not a bad guy, Matt. So what if his favourite movie is Zoolander … ”

  “Did you tell him we already have a laminated movie list? I mean, c’mon.” The phone line crackled. Techno music poured under the door crack. “Did you really think you were going to marry this guy?”

  I stared at the gold-framed mirror. My eyes flashed like canary diamonds. “Hmm,” I said teasingly, dotting gloss on my lips. “Marry which guy? Be specific, please.”

  Matt paused. I imagined him smiling into the phone. “You know, in another time it might not have been so easy for us. People might have actually bought into the idea that because I am European and you are Indian, we couldn’t be together. We might have bought into that idea ourselves,” Matt said.

  “I think we tripped ourselves up enough without even considering our supposed ethnic incompatibility. But,” I said, playing along, “perhaps our ancestors had failed love stories and somehow we remember them. Like through our DNA we might remember a tornado in 1870 or a drought in the 1700s. If tree rings hold the secrets to ancient history, humans can’t be all tha
t different.”

  “Perhaps. I guess this time around, our love story has a few less hurdles to jump through.”

  Our love story.

  “But Dylan and I are also both technically from different backgrounds,” I protested.

  “Mr. Valentine can’t keep up with you, beat for beat.”

  “Are you saying you can?”

  “I think you’re about to find out.”

  ***

  WHEN I GOT HOME, the electricity on the whole block was down. I opened the door, finding the house black and a faint glow coming from the back porch. There I discovered my mom and Nanima sitting by candlelight at the patio table, a deck of cards spread between them. They were draped in heavy shawls, armed to weather the cold.

  “Your mom isn’t very good at cards anymore. She doesn’t remember any of the games we used to play in Africa.”

  “Gulaam Chor,” I said, seeing that my mom had been left with a Jack of Hearts in front of her. “Mom is the Jack Thief!”

  “Your ‘mom’ has been the Jack Thief the last three games. Look, Nina, how good Maya’s Gujarati has gotten. Maya speaks like she is a child again. You didn’t even remember the name of this game, let alone how to play it!”

  “To be fair it’s been years since I played this game, Mummy. Probably the last time I played was in Africa. And with the electricity gone it’s like we’re there again. Maya, Dad even turned on the barbecue to boil water so we could make chai.” Mom pointed to the cement floor where the grill and propane tank were sitting. “Like the mud stove back in Uganda,” she smiled.

  I nodded, looking at the water rolling and bubbling in the pot. Without being asked to, I took the spice container from the patio table and added in two shakes of fennel. Light green seeds immediately turned over in the water. I pulled out cloves, touching their sharp edges to my fingers before throwing them in. I tossed in cinnamon sticks, which rose to the top like logs floating on a river. I sprinkled in sugar, a touch of pepper, and a few tea bags. Puncturing the cardamom pods with my eye teeth, I turned them over in my hand before releasing their black particles. When the chai became so dark it was almost as black as the night, I poured in the milk.

  We waited. Three pairs of eyes shone like gold medallions in the night. I poured, and we watched the moonlight bounce and shimmer in our cups.

  “The tea smells delicious,” my mom said, her nose to the cup. A smile of contentment settled on her lips and she leaned back in her chair. “When did you learn to make such good chai?”

  Nanima spoke in the darkness. “Maya has always known how to make chai. She didn’t learn, she remembered.”

  I looked at my palms in the light of the flickering candles, as if seeing them for the first time.

  15

  ONCE UPON A TIME, not too many years back, I was sitting in a festive Mexican restaurant in Tokyo. Rainbow-coloured ponchos, Mexican flags, and velvet sombreros covered the walls.

  Outside, Tokyo looked the opposite; monotonous, white, and frosty, like a sad painting sold at a mobile cart in a mall. The foot traffic was constant: where one person disappeared, another appeared. On our table, festooned with llama placemats, were two motorcycle helmets and a fresh assortment of burritos. As with every kind of ethnic food in Japan, the burritos still tasted Japanese. When I bit into the fleshy part of the refried beans, I tasted authentic Okinawan flavour.

  The Japanese woman behind the counter nodded at me fervently, no doubt thinking I was Latina as she searched my face for registry of authenticity. Latte-coloured skin with Naples yellow eyes always threw people off. I smiled and nodded back. I was whatever the Japanese wanted me to be. In Japan, a foreigner was a foreigner. Indian was Spanish was Native American was Indonesian. After a while, everyone foreign began to band together as one lump — this was both the beauty and downfall of Japan.

  I looked at Elias, deeply absorbed in his burritos. Our relationship was intense and exciting, like Tokyo itself. We never discussed the future and somehow I found dishevelled blonde hair paired with shirts emblazoned with snakes, sexy.

  I looked down at my plate while trying to decide if the background music was actually Mexican. This lunch involved none of what was expected of me: using the right cutlery, sipping wine slowly, and spacing out my canapés. There were no other guests dining with us, but still I felt obliged to fulfill my other all-important task: making conversation.

  “I came across an interesting article tying to the whole Mexican theme.”

  “Oh?” Elias munched away. He was a man who loved to be entertained. Trophy girlfriends used to be blonde buxom types, but recently there had been a shift toward demure brunettes. But no matter how I spun it, all I was in this relationship was a jazzed up arm accessory.

  “It was about two Mexican male lovers. One killed the other. But it was romantic, I could understand his reasoning.”

  “How can death possibly be romantic? How could you understand his reasoning?” Elias fixed me with a cold stare, the kind reserved for when I did not want to try escargot.

  “The reason one lover killed the other was to become one soul. Maybe they just fought a lot, who knows? After the murder, the lover preserved his boyfriend’s body, with salt or smoke, or whatever it is you do to preserve meat. Over the next weeks, he cooked the lover’s body, making Mexican dishes, no less. The lover was an exquisite chef. He made ground round from the body, using it for meat filling in tacos. The police caught him while he was grilling the heart of his lover for a stew, made with onions and tomatoes.”

  “That is disgusting! How the hell is that romantic? Why would you tell me such a thing when I am eating, Maya?” Elias shoved his plate of food away.

  “I guess it is macabre. But it somehow struck me as romantic — he literally wanted to absorb his lover’s body into his own. What better way is there to show love than to consume another’s flesh?”

  “I cannot believe you would tell me this over lunch. Is this your idea of a sick joke?” Elias looked green and angry at the same time. Occupation of Palestine? No reaction. Inappropriate social etiquette? Sirens went off. He wiped grease from his lips and shook his head furiously, looking like a mop gone wild.

  “You don’t see the romance in it all?”

  “It’s like I don’t even know you.”

  Of course he didn’t, but it would be a while before I figured that out.

  “I’m sorry, please don’t stop eating.”

  “Ugh. I can’t eat now! What is that English word you all use? It’s gross what you girls find romantic.”

  “You girls?”

  “Oh, don’t tell me we are going to get into this again!”

  “I thought it was fascinating. You know, like in the book Perfume, where the public eats the killer. It becomes a sort of act of communal love.”

  “I have never read the book. I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “The book is on your shelf. And I thought you liked my stories. You always make me tell them.”

  “Storytelling requires class. Panache. I am giving you a chance to perfect the art. I have a busy job, one that allows me to take you to clubs and art openings, so I don’t have idle time to just read. Who in the world has read every book on their shelf?”

  “I did use panache to tell this story! I took a risk in telling it, and it was flamboyant. Actually, I have read all the books on my shelf — why else would I display them for all to see?” Well, mostly I had. The fiction, for sure.

  Elias shook his head, making a face like he was sad for the type of person I was. “No one can read every book on their bookshelf. What about gifts or recommendations or books you haven’t gotten to? I don’t understand you, your choices in conversational topics, or your music, for that matter.”

  “You ask me about my music all the time. You always say you want to learn more about hip-hop.” I pronounced “h
ip-hop” like it was exotic fruit.

  “I am not into that vile nonsense.”

  “I suppose the Gipsy Kings sing about world hunger and toppling capitalism.”

  “See, there you go again. I have no idea what you are talking about.” Elias scanned the restaurant, like a politician looking for a hidden camera. “This meal is ruined. Let’s not do the same to the fresh fish and champagne on Saturday, eh?”

  We had plans to meet clients of his at a sushi restaurant that charged 10,000 yen for a set course.

  I sighed. “Please, eat.” I pushed the food toward him like he was a child.

  Slowly, he picked up the burrito. “If you told your story in Europe, everyone would just get up and leave you at the table, saying they lost their appetite. But I have been looking forward to this all day. Authentic Mexican food right here in Tokyo. Who knew, huh?”

  “Yes,” I said, taking a small bite of the flavourless burrito. “Who knew?”

  ***

  “Babe!” I called out. I was sitting on the couch with my legs propped up, flipping through channels. I saw a Mexican fast-food commercial, and a smile pulled at my lips.

  At our house it was always “Babe!” this and “Babe!” that. I wondered if the “Babe-ing” would continue when we were old and grey. Our future kids would be so embarrassed.

  “Did you hear that story a few years ago where the Mexican man murdered his male lover?” I yelled.

  Matt yelled back: “No, but I bet you’re going to tell me about it.”

  “One lover killed the other after a spat.” Matt had come closer so I didn’t have to shout. “The killer then preserved his lover’s body, and ate portions over time. Cooked it in stews, tacos, you name it. The goal was to become one soul with his lover.”