Now, here on the balcony, I feel bare female arms around my waist, woman-soft while a radio plays a song below. My hands on hers, flat against my stomach, we brace each other gently, waiting for dark to settle on the street.
THE BANG BANG
MILLIND COULDN’T EXPLAIN WHY, of all days, he chose that one to duck inside the bar. He didn’t drink and wasn’t looking for a drink. He would have had ten if he could tolerate them. But thirty years before, by age nineteen, he had already known, from sneaking drinks out of a dissipate uncle’s grasp, that he would never find much comfort in liquor.
Sound from the basement was what moved him inside. Loud voices reading words stretched tight. Occasional shouts of laughter but, more than that, big grand compelling silences, human breath caught and talk quieted, as just one single voice spoke. The quiet in the basement seemed to be absorbing sound from outside, and also exerted a gravitational force, pulling Millind, who was timid like an old man, yet still graceful, down a dark set of stairs, to a place where over a hundred people might have their eyes fixed on just one, making Millind less afraid and more eager to get down there than if there’d been music and steady conversation, the sounds of tinkling glasses full of wine that didn’t interest him, forks clattering on plates of food that he could not afford.
With a slow, deliberate push, he opened the black door. He was at the foot of the stairs, grateful no one was standing watching guard either in front of or just behind it. In other places, there were hulking pale-faced men, thick around the collars, angry even before they caught your eye, their huge hands constantly adjusting, cracking, smacking, punishing, the sheer size of their grip on a man’s shoulders humiliating to him as a man.
Before he’d come to this country twenty years earlier, Millind had never come to these places, because of men like this, whose light-colored eyes would narrow in malice and satisfaction at his wrinkled-brown skinny man’s fear. “Worse than police,” he warned his daughter and his son.
But in this basement, there were other men who were equally strange but in no way terrifying. They were as thin as Millind, and though there was no food now on the tables, none of the young men looked hungry. Their faces, though pierced through the nose or lips or even cheeks in ways that struck Millind as deeply cruel, turned toward Millind, nodded and welcomed him.
One of them pulled out a chair for him, perhaps respectful of his new and stiff black suit, or else his age, which might have been closer to sixty from his appearance. These men were the same age as Millind’s son, who was twenty and the reason Millind had come to the U.S. with his pregnant wife, so their first-born child could be American.
Millind listened closely. Someone was reading about fire. Another person on the stage, a very light brown girl with green eyes like a snake’s and huge curly hair, kept repeating some phrase in a language he suspected, but wasn’t sure, was French. She must be Arabian, Millind thought.
From somewhere, other words configured in his head. His own. When he stood up, thinking to leave and maybe write them down, a young woman, physical sister to the men, with the same piercings and thinness yet kindness, the same lack of hunger or animosity, tapped his shoulder and asked with a gesture toward the mike, “Would you like to?”
Soon, flanked by the woman and a man, Millind was up on the stage, in front of a mike. On some impulse, he would say later, he closed his eyes and began speaking in Sanskrit. Just a few words, invoking blessings from the goddess of learning. It was 1981. People were angered by politics, completely certain that the world was getting worse. Yet there was Millind, praying with an equally certain confidence that if Saraswati blessed him then, right there on stage, everything would only get better.
His poem composed that night wouldn’t be one that got published. But when he opened his eyes, reciting phrases like “diamond miners shafted” and “lone bird with the power of aeroplanes,” people listened, visibly deciphering, their attention clear on their faces, clapping when he finished suddenly, wanting to know when he’d be back.
Who wouldn’t want to be happy for him? But if I’d been there, sitting in the audience, watching Millind become a new person, I couldn’t have been.
On the same day our father discovered poetry, my only brother disappeared. As if the incantations Dad dredged up could hurt the two of us. As if, because our father had found joy, my brother and his quiet sadness had to become invisible.
By the time Millind found the Bang Bang Poet’s Café in the Village, on Charles Street and Greenwich Avenue, he had been in the US for twenty years, not leaving once; not driving to Canada as his brother did, to flee the draft for Vietnam, a war Millind was too old to fight by then; not even leaving New York to go home to Tamil Nad. Millind, at forty, was trying to make a house for his two children while his older but pleasant wife worked full-time as a home health aide, only five blocks from where they lived on Union Street in Flushing, Queens, precariously close to a city sewage processing plant.
Maybe Millind wanted so badly to make a house that was cozy because his ideal life meant always staying in the house. He’d sit for hours in his “study,” smoking and pondering something. This was a closet his motherly wife had converted to a puja room-slash-sewing closet. It smelled of camphor and darkness in there, but he protected it, annoyed to the point of making real threats when his daughter and son pretended to be royal knights, crashing the gate of the castle that was Millind’s rightful place. The children didn’t care. Squealing at how it provoked his anger, the boy and girl kept trying to get in, until Millind pushed a cabinet against the door so that, hard as they battered it, and him, from the outside, there was no movement inside, where Millind, soundless, did something besides smoking, became someone they didn’t know, but desperately wanted to see.
Whatever he was doing in there, it couldn’t be work-related. Millind had not done well in school. His immigration history was spotted with failures—leaps across continents in search of places where he’d start over. “The right start is all I need,” he muttered, wandering through the house, instead of paying bills. In fact, sitting in his closet alone, Millind was not writing poems, as his being so pulled in by a poetry “slam,” a word he’d never heard used in that way, might suggest.
“What do I know about that,” he’d muttered resentfully, when, at age nine, long before his own poems came, I showed him my handwritten essay on The Odyssey. Years later, he’d break a clean plate in the sink, shouting, “What do you know about writing a play?” when I joined a preteen playwriting workshop, when I was twelve and he was forty-two and hadn’t yet been to the Bang Bang.
Long after, when he was seventy and we weren’t speaking, I read in a famous and elite culture magazine that several of his poems were adapted for the stage.
I thought of writing the magazine a letter, explaining my brother’s and my family’s history, but never did. After my father’s death, that was the magazine that hired me, made me a regular writer, partly or even mostly because I bore Dad’s name.
Millind, though only newly literate in English, wasn’t a man of the dark soil. No, he wasn’t some “I’ll dig with it” kind of farmer father who could be observed wistfully by a poet-child who’d once pledged fealty to the pen. Millind had never been a farmer, period. His hands were always clean and carefully kept. He had been trained as a bookkeeper since boyhood. There was some sort of scholarship? Where he was supposed to use it to turn into a financial expert? But according to Millind’s younger brother, a drunk gossip before he disappeared to Canada, when Millind presented himself, on the first day of class at Pace University, for Finance Wizardry, he with his dry dessicated skin and thin aging face, throats were cleared, white faces lowered, and Millind was quietly shown out, advised that he should not have lied about his age in the essay, in which he’d said that he was twenty-five.
At that time, he was only thirty but looked fifty at least. Over half his teeth were yellowed and weak from chewing paan. Given his skin color, those benefactors might have a
ssumed he had bad teeth from smoking crack. Millind swore that he was born very handsome and fair, but he had gotten dark and thin, as if a faint curse settled upon him, when in his youth he was sent to live with relatives who wouldn’t buy him milk or shoes. He swore that drinking dirty coconut water and living on leftover rice ruined his looks. Either way, he was no match for the people who, sight unseen, on the basis of a competent letter he had asked his wife to write, awarded him thousands of school fees to study finance in the US. They’d gotten visas, on account of his wife being a nurse, in the days when Vietnam took hold of young doctors and nurses, forced them to remove the boots of soldiers who had had both feet blown off, pinned these doctors and nurses to makeshift medical tents where they hid from mortar under their beds.
Yet Millind and his wife were not afraid of failure, not afraid of Vietnam.
“It wouldn’t be worse than Partition,” he reasoned. So he was not demoralized by losing the scholarship, or even by the fear that if he was not at a university, the government could decide thirty was not too old to fight and send him to Southeast Asia. Millind’s jewel of a daughter wasn’t born yet, and the princely boy was still suckling at his wife’s breast, the baby tiny and content. Instead of studying finance, Millind got a job driving for a rich Indian family on Long Island. He was able to look reassuring yet not understand a word they said, since they were Sikh and spoke Punjabi. “Thank God they aren’t Hindu, or Brahmin,” his wife whispered to him, comforted that no one whose opinion she really cared about would see or indeed ever know how Millind had become a servant, despite his noble but poor Brahmin origins, in spite of them making it to the U.S.A.
Millind couldn’t complain about his job. No drugs or shouting or late nights, no illegalities. Generous with food. Polite to each other. Regular about going to gurdwara, visiting elders, taking care of properties they owned and rented to Americans. The father also had some sort of import-export clothing business. The tall, imposing daughter of the family, though no one knew it at the time, would marry a white man when she grew up, convert to Christianity, and become a U.S. senator.
Comparing himself to taxi drivers who smoked pot and crack on the highway, weaving and cackling like despots on their way to LaGuardia, Dad rightfully ranked himself as superior. And anyway, it was much easier to drive than keep track of many narrow columns of numbers, or be a clerk in the post office, or, God forbid, train to be a priest. If he had gotten admission to a good college in India, things would be different. But those sorts of colleges were for his brothers, the two older ones who had been kept at home while Millind was sent away to richer but mostly indifferent relatives, who barely fed him.
My dad, a reasonable father—an employed driver with a small nest egg built up by a stable family who had started a business, who reassured him with unfeigned affection that they couldn’t function without him—could not understand the discontent with his own life that started long before my brother was born.
But then my brother came into this world, imperfect, smiling though there was nothing to smile at. Repeating himself, unable to stop eating, unable to stop being anxious. Afraid, and rightfully so, of my father. From the beginning, my brother was strange, with his body and his face and his hard voice that seemed to have changed earlier and faster than normal. My brother, playing at knights with me while our father locked himself in a closet. My brother, sitting next to me at the piano in the Unitarian church on Bayside Avenue around the corner from us in Flushing and banging out jarring melodies, indifferent to the cold stares of white women who wanted to say we didn’t belong and that we didn’t deserve to make a noise, but didn’t dare say cruel words in public to a young man who was so obviously handicapped.
Millind’s wife didn’t object, once she learned of the poetry. Here was the routine the two lived by. Number One, get everyone ready for school in the morning. Number Two, give her son all of his medicines, fretting and throbbing over each of them, holding her head as if the grey capsules had penetrated her own skull. Number Three, prayers and flowers, filling the closet where, eventually, great books were composed. Millind’s journeys through Samarkand, his musings on forgotten peasant revolts. Images of famines and of wars. There were other stories, moments, in Millind’s poetry that his wife, though keenly listening, never did understand, though she had read his book in the bathroom, the only place she was alone. She tried reading his book on a public bus with all the ladies around her reading fat, indulgent, sexy books, or else sleeping.
But other people understood his work. They were the ones who counted, not his wife. Slimmer ladies, ladies with frizzy and unfashionable hair but intense, inhuman eyes and townhouses. Women who would have been insulted by the word “ladies,” unless they used it themselves. Ladies who lunched and, through their lunches, controlled publishing. They championed Millind, who was thin, frightened, mysteriously asexual and sage-like, whose home life no one knew or asked the details of, who existed, in 1981 and beyond, as a reminder of “other voices,” “from the margins,”and all sorts of phrases and symbols that Millind himself, not through shrewdness but just luck and ignorance, succeeded brilliantly by completely ignoring.
It was as if they could see, and anyway already knew, how uncertain he was of even standing before them. How reluctant Millind was, to dare to aspire to be anything but invisible. How fearful he remained for years that all the thin women and vigilant but kind men, the same ones who had welcomed him onstage, would suddenly turn away from him, look at him with incredulity, contempt, even anger, for stepping on his own into the light, up there on stage. For daring to believe had something to say.
But he was never invisible, my dad. Even at temple, while he was praying, people came to him asking for advice, or simply wanting to hear his voice, mellifluous and full of conviction. He never revealed how, having barely passed the class in middle school, he didn’t know very much Sanskrit, only verses he’d memorized. He recited each prayer like the poem it was. He made me love poetry, though it makes nothing happen—that is the truth.
My brother, at twenty, left a note before he disappeared. My parents searched for him half-heartedly. He might appear, my father said, on the book tour my father’s generous publishers had set for him through major towns in the U.S. and Canada, Britain even, where Dad stayed in a small hotel with tubs in the living rooms. Dad said he’d look for him in the back of each auditorium, walk around each town searching for him.
By then my brother was gone nearly two months. The police had exhausted their searches. My mother couldn’t quit her job but came close, taking vacation and sick time to search for him. She faithfully prepared food for his return. There was no clue in his letter to us, only the promise, “I am going.” We knew he didn’t mean for only a short time. All of his clothes and the toys he still played with, Legos and figurines bought for a younger child but still vital to him at twenty—he’d put them all into a knapsack, along with the money he extracted from the dresser where I hid my wealth. Four hundred dollars, all in twenty-dollar bills, folded and stuffed neatly into the Superman wallet he’d begged Ma to buy for him when he was ten.
On a night my father was away, at a reading, my mother asked if I thought that we should do sraddha, death rites for a beloved, to prevent my brother’s soul, if he was dead, from wandering unloved. She never would have asked me such a question years ago. Ma would’ve been the one teaching me the rites of her civilization, the rituals she performed so quietly, like combing her hair or putting certain combinations of salt and spices in our food. I kept saying that we didn’t know if he was dead until I succeeded in making my mother stop weeping.
Within a year of his first prize-winning collection, Millind was adopted by a university, advised that he had become a great man. He started wearing velveteen sports coats, smoking cigars, and with the help of a transcriber, an amanuensis, the word he learned from the woman he hired to be one, began writing and publishing essays critical of the West as well as of the country he used to think of as his
motherland.
In interviews, when he was asked about children, Millind shrugged his shoulders, mimicking cosmic gratitude. “I have known what it is to be loved by a child,” he said, with the air of someone who’d tried out this particular experience. As if he’d savored being looked up to by such a creature, “child,” before moving on to something else, writing another book.
“And before your gifts as a poet were discovered, the story is that you used to be a chauffeur?” the inerviewer might ask, intrigued and sniffling, a person way too young for allergies who’d maybe been snorting cocaine or heroin hours before. Such drugs were activities, pastimes, that Millind would dabble in during his later sixties, once he had been prosperous long enough so he could become bored. But when interviewed, he answered every single question right.
“Driving a decent family, like my employers were, taught me that there is no shame in a decent work,” he said, charming the interviewer with his authentic, accented wisdom.
My father’s second wife was from a wealthy family with robber baron lineage. His new marriage sent my mother packing back to India. Dad was “only sixty-two,” he said, “with still so long to live.” He said all of this only in a letter, not bothering, or perhaps not daring, to tell Ma or me in person. We hadn’t been invited to the wedding because, as he said, “it would mean too much suffering.” When I first heard what had happened, I dreamed my brother would magically appear at the wedding, which took place at a writer’s residency in upstate New York that was named after a famous white woman poet. I wanted him to come wearing his dinosaur T-shirt and brandishing whatever he’d managed to put into his wallet with the S on it, which must have been faded by then. I dreamed he’d offer money to the guests, show them he’d managed to escape from our father, reveal to them he’d left because our dad had never wanted him. Make them look at our dad with disgust.
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