There were footsteps fading away from her door, the stranger calling out, “Hey, so sorry, I didn’t see she’d emailed me. No worries, I’ll be at Becca’s if you want to meet up, you must be that friend, I—I’ll—well, maybe I’ll get to meet you.” Once she’d confirmed the man was gone, Jayanti sent Becca an “all clear” text.
Jayanti returned to her work. The etchings of animals and cells she’d started to work on two years ago, back when she was in Biology, were nearly complete now. A firebird. A beautiful woman. Goddess in a cave, the one Jayanti prayed to every day. Fractals assembling around her, diaphanous cells like paramecia on slides, the viscous gel of them like sclera of the eyes. Everything Jayanti had paid so much to know about. To see. To engrave into memory. But as she worked on for hours, through the night, forgetting how all day she had barely talked to anyone, Jayanti believed that whatever she created would endure. That her artwork would earn her a place of belonging. And it was this belief that drove the strong force of desire into her arm that was broken and healed, that held her safe till morning light. Till next morning.
NEELA: BHOPAL, 1984
YOU ALWAYS TRUSTED THE FOREST. Here, danger can be seen and is known. The floor is layered with cool leaves that can be used to cover up faces. You’re lying here, laughing and out of breath; your brothers are lying beside you. The first one to move will be tickled by all the rest, who pretend to be monsters and fake-growl with the hunger of thin ghosts. All of you will watch out for the glint of teeth and dazzling, predatory coils.
The dense brush hides tigers, snakes, and a tiny creek that tastes fresh after the rain. Your youngest brother knows the best places
The edge of the pretend forest, a neglected city garden, is where you and your brothers purchase time by tickling each other or run and scramble over rocks as if the four of you never had to work. As if your father never accepted a packet of rupees and four quintals of wheat, one for each of you. As if he never told you, Neela, go. As if he didn’t stop you, when you were nine, from holding onto your mother’s sari. As if he didn’t hold you and your brothers back, including the youngest one, age five, from nearly tearing the sari off her body when they wouldn’t let go.
Your hands could be washed of the clay, of the hard coal, and every day your fingers moved more quickly than the legs of men who carried finished pyramids, fresh bricks for the furnace. In summer, you and your brothers first broke coal, then walked without bending into the brick kiln, cloth protecting your mouths from the smoke. December was joy and cold, the fumes of the kiln more bearable when you could rinse your mouths with water, which was not so scarce then. And after working, you and your brothers knew that you could leap over everything jagged you saw. In seconds, you could place many yards between the intimation of a threat, its small or large rustle, and yourself. You could easily outrun strangers’ hands, and rejoice at the chill. Walking outside, into the kiln and back, and then sleeping on the ground of the shanty was still better than working in the factory.
Then early one morning, coming back with a vessel of water, you spy a pile of bright folded cotton cloths on the ground and, because of the weight you carried, you carefully make your way toward it, even though you want to run.
December. Your birthday.
Maybe a pavaday from home—a dream. But all three half-naked little boys, the brothers who’d once thrown stones at palaces with you, or come at you with sticks for swords, are sleeping on the ground near the shanty, tensed and at odd angles, as if they’d tried escaping even in their sleep.
Still hoping they’re playing a game, you set down the water and tickle them. You listen for breath, but hear nothing. You’ve understood the danger too late. Eyes burning now, you run. To the forest. You arrive stumbling and unsteady, but are forced to stop because you can’t see anymore. You are afraid.
Once, when you and your brothers were caught trying to run away from the brick kiln, the debt master who’d bargained with your father punished all of you with no water for a day. How light your body felt then, how small, how free, as if you had traveled in some unseen way to your mother.
December is cool and morning fresh, but your lungs are scorched now. Not for another thirty or maybe a hundred years will the water and land be safe again, as pure and unpolluted as they were hours before. Before the air burned and became a hateful thing.
Eight thousand years ago, children huddled with their mothers in cool caves. Those caves are hidden deep in a forest, miles from here, and would have been so much safer than shantytowns around the factory in Bhopal City, the easily penetrated houses of corrugated metal and scavenged plywood. The walls of those shacks are sheets of plastic with small holes to breathe, set at the height of small children unable to refrain from peeking out.
All three of your brothers, limber and clever boys, were gifted at nosing out delectable refuse, edibles in the garbage. They were like scavenging dogs, little ponies. Long ago they nicknamed you Neelagai—antelope, for your thin quick legs, your skill at finding enough unspoiled food for all of them—and when they pretended to hunt you, none of them could find you here.
Other hunters have found you at the edge of your forest: methyl isocyanate, fleet-footed mercury, and Sevin, the most experienced killer, creeping like ground brush.
You remember rope. Remember being pulled up into the kiln, then told to walk on bricks since. Like the other children, unlike the adults, you were light enough to walk on bricks and leave them whole. Ropes hauled by strong men brought you release. Now instead of rope it feels like snakes coiling around you. Or dense vines, tight around your throat. Water. You need water now, for the burning thirst, the invisible thief of your air. Your chest hurts. You push out poison air but breathe in more.
The death toll among Bhopal’s shantytown families is estimated by the number of shrouds that were ordered. Twenty-thousand, excluding families who didn’t have money for shrouds, fathers who didn’t have money for children. Eyes watering, fathers and older brothers were coughing too much to talk, to bargain. After the burning, many eyes turned sightless. Corneas clouded; ulcers branched like thin cacti.
Cacti are plants you’ll never travel to deserts to see. You and your brothers saw some once in a comic book you found in the garbage.
A small man with a red beard and a large hat, a cactus with cockeyed spikes. Your youngest brother laughed and laughed, when you tried to imitate that frowning man.
You die seeing your brothers’ faces, but not the other faces of the dead.
In death, you match the image of one young girl, asleep after a bath, who hundreds of years ago was engraved in the emperor’s miniatures by artisans so skilled that, when they finished crafting monuments, Emperor Jahangir ordered them to be blinded. This forest, where you played, can be trusted to absorb you.
All this was caused by someone important, an American, used to ordering some work to be finished somewhere else, the back of his head under a beam of light from a window that has been opened on a summer day, allowing the Houston air into the office for a few seconds, before his air conditioning starts going full blast.
CHRONICLE OF A MARRIAGE, FORETOLD
MIKKI WAKES WITH HER HEAD TILTED to the side, her young face, neck, and whole body reaching for a person—somebody with a vague but extremely attractive description, who has been lying with great patience and anticipation next to her and must be tall—though she has been alone in bed for all the hours of the night, as she has been every night here. And yet this unknown person takes up space. During the moment of waking, she realizes that her lips have formed a kiss. She wakes kissing her hand as if it belonged to someone else, but also to her.
This isn’t the first morning Mikki has found herself curling up to an invisible, impossibly generous, unfailingly exciting lover. Kissing her hand, conjuring him in bed with her eyes tightly shut and almost feeling that he’s making love to her—it’s no wonder that her husband, passing by their bedroom once and catching a glimpse of what she was up to, shouted
in Arabic from outside their room, “Wlih, what are you doing now?”
Though Javed hadn’t come in, to see if it was something he could join.
The great difference here, at Ridgebrook, is that Mikki is unseen, alone for now, at this women writers’ retreat her husband gave her his indifferent permission to go to. Here each indigenous and Third World woman writer, her artistic ambitions as ancient as cave art, is given a literal small cave, a cabin carved out of the rock. To come here, she had to take a boat. This boat, little more than a small, fragile raft, wouldn’t have been safe for children, but in any case, children aren’t permitted on this island full of caves.
The feeling of living in a cave is balanced by running hot water and lunch delivered every day. There are strict rules about giving each other ample space to work. Naturally, the caves here have no Internet or phone connections. The decision to prohibit men came out of the cave retreat’s history, when, in the early years, some men were caught lurking at the entrances of certain women’s caves, or following especially lovely women home under the pretext of “only wanted to make sure you’re all right,” or any number of other behaviors and actions that, added up, imposed a constant pressure. Still, there are women here who want to make love to her; Mikki knows this as clearly, from their close hugs during the occasional communal dinners, as the fact that at thirty-three, she may be the youngest woman here. Those women talk about missing their kids, giving Mikki indulgent, affectionate looks as if, because she has no children yet, she might be one of theirs.
That Mikki and Javed haven’t had kids yet is a source of great apprehension to his semi-agrarian Egyptian family, but not to either Mikki, short for Malliki, or to Javed himself, since both have acknowledged, cordially and with a kind of love, that there is distance between them, and that this space, this distance, rather than being negative, will lengthen the course of their marriage indefinitely. She likes that she can’t speak Arabic, that he doesn’t know one word of Tamil. His world is one of hookahs and soccer games; hers of rice and lentils, temples resembling ships. The architecture of crushing love, which would wash over them without their trying for it, that defining love that makes every choice different—such love for their children would surely have bound them, she thinks now, the way she did a year ago, when she was actively trying to get pregnant. She still feels reverberations of this intense, imagined baby-love whenever she sees a child with its mother or a cluster of unknown children laughing and playing on the street.
Love, love. Love, love. She stirs herself to get ready, drink a cup of coffee, settle down to work, so that when the old women who bring her lunch in a basket, leaving it at the entrance of the cave, look in on her without realizing that she can see them—when these women watchers come to do their daily task, Mikki will appear in control and studious. A woman dedicated to her art.
Instead of one who, given the smallest excuse, would get back into bed to rendezvous with an imaginary man, a man who, if she were to admit it, strongly resembles a male character she’s been attempting, here in this cave, a place of fecundity, to fossilize inside her mind. Then lay his bones out on the page, see what the pieces of him can add up to.
HOW COULD YOU FUCKING TRAP ME IN A BOOK LIKE THIS?
By this time in the morning, he is talking. He’s been talking all the days that she’s been on “retreat.” But there is really no retreat from him. He’s a weathered forty to her juicy thirty-three. Unlike her husband, the man is white.
JUST COME HERE AND TALK TO ME. YOU WON’T ANSWER. I’VE WRITTEN TO YOU A HUNDRED TIMES.
She’s counted. He’s spoken to her like this, in this presumptuous tone, a hundred times—plaintive, demanding, yet self-assured, as if there is this thing between them that he can appeal to, even though she hasn’t even named him yet.
HARRY. YOU KNOW I HAVE A NAME. HARRY. CALL ME TO YOU. CALL ME BY NAME.
She can’t tell if the stranger is actually someone she knows. If the man she feels she might have spent last night with has the name “Harry” because it is the name of the beautiful boy in first grade whom she has never forgotten. The boy had milk-pale skin and unreal, painted-black lashes over blue eyes, which seemed to illustrate “violet,” the color of eyes in the story about the rich little princess from England who found a garden behind the house next door, or the color of eyes that could go coy and spill over with tears, any moment, like the baby-doll eyes of spoiled, rich, flaxen-haired Amy in Little Women.
Thinking of Little Women, Mikki imagines being warmed before small fires, making do with scarcity, writing novels by hand, only to burn them when told they’re immoral. In most legends and stories, hearth fires are endemic to caves, but there is no firewood here, despite the trees that look like they have been cut down by wind, stumps darkening the snow and and ice outside that cover the island in a bleak, impossible white. The walls of the cave are freezing to the touch, and yet thanks to the ambient heat from tall lamps and the garments she and the other women have been given, insulated robes and electrically heated pants and shirts, Mikki has started to break a modest sweat. Even though she’s been doing nothing more physical than writing in a notebook, the best quality, Swiss-bound moleskine pages with a story about Harry. Marking the pages indelibly, with a Mont LeBlanc pen.
Pretending to herself that she’s alone, she takes off some of her clothing.
YES. YES. YES M, YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL. I ALWAYS WANTED TO SAY THAT, OPENLY. EVEN THOUGH I PRETENDED TO BE DISGUSTED BY YOU.
This man, this eccentric character, whom she admits she’s been kissing every night in bed for two weeks now, despite this Harry person remaining invisible, though with a distant outline reassuring in its elegance—yes, Mikki remembers somehow (though how on earth, if this particular Harry isn’t real, unlike other Harrys she knows, whose voices she’s heard as normal voices, in real life, could such a memory have been encoded?), she remembers the moment that Harry, sitting in a room with Mikki and their first-grade teacher, accused of having bullied her and forced to defend himself, shrank back from her when she passed by, as if she reeked of shit.
COWSHIT, WAS WHAT I WANTED TO IMPLY. FRESH COW DUNG, OF A THIRD WORLD PROVENANCE. DUNG
YOU’D SOMEHOW BROUGHT FROM INDIA IN YOUR LITTLE KNAPSACK. DAMN WAS A I PRECOCIOUS SIX-YEAR-OLD.
If Harry was a real man, as Mikki has recently begun to suspect— maybe someone she’d had a real-life, passing tussle with, then blocked out like a terrible hair day—if this fellow, Harry, had harassed her, it had been by Chinese water torture, by psychological drip by drip. That was how it struck her, the process, day by day and moment by moment, by which he sought to insinuate himself into her consciousness.
It was days ago. At first, he, from wherever he was, spoke in a conversational, pleasant tone.
HOW ARE YOU? HOPE THINGS ARE GOING WELL.
Nothing different. Nothing awry. But then his words became intrusive, personal, she had thought she ought to tell someone, especially since she was alone here. That he was pressing on her, like the men who had once followed women to private caves. That talking back to him at all—a mistake! An error! The sight of her lips moving, the sound of her voice, the mere act of her responding to him—had stimulated him to press her more.
I KNOW IT’S HARD FOR YOU, GETTING ALONG WITH PEOPLE IN AUTHORITY, WITH COLLEAGUES, HELL, REALLY WITH EVERYONE. I KNOW IT’S ALWAYS JUST SO HARD FOR YOU. LET ME BE YOUR ALLY, MIKKI. LET ME HELP.
Even in what he was shouting, he kept misspelling her name. And she wasn’t sure, either, whom he meant she ought to be getting along with. Her husband? A man who never criticized her. Coworkers? Her coworkers had brought cake for her birthday, celebrating at the daycare where she taught two and three-year-old children as her day job. Authority? She’d had a big fight once with a white woman at a bank, who insisted that, since there was a discrepancy in how she spelled her name on her gas bill versus how the government spelled that foreign name on her license, she couldn’t be who she said she was and didn’t qualify
for a promotional account.
O MIKKI YOU’RE SO FINE, YOU’RE SO FINE, YOU BLOW MY MIND. YOU ARE A PASSIONATE PERSON. AN ARTIST. NOT TOO MANY MEN HAVE ANY HOPE OF UNDERSTANDING YOU. YOU HAVE TO LEAVE YOUR HUSBAND AND COME BE WITH ME. IF YOU AREN’T GOING TO LET ME OUT OF HERE, IF YOU INSIST ON KEEPING ME IN HERE, THEN WHY DON’T YOU COME INSIDE THIS PAGE, COME HERE TO ME.
If only this character weren’t so awkward, so sincere. Two qualities Mikki has learned not to associate with men. Now she leans back from the desk that faces the entrance of the cave, gets up, assumes a Warrior pose for just a few. Now she walks over to a sculpture she has built. A kind of installation is the term for it now, though in her head she refers to these works of art as dioramas.
When she was five, just on the verge of finishing preschool, she made her first diorama, a crayon-colored representation of life with her parents. They had died when Mikki was two. She didn’t remember them, strictly speaking, yet she had memorized what memories of them she’d constructed. The photo of her mother graduating from college—surely that must have been the source of Mikki’s memory, real and sure, of running toward her mother after getting off a bus, running across a field where the usual warnings about traffic and cars didn’t apply and she could just run, be a child, and not have to watch out for anyone.
Her father and mother together, in a bed the size and color of the rafts that carried Mikki and other women artists to their respective caves.
Back to the sculpture Mikki has built on this retreat. This more recent diorama Mikki has built in secret, during this retreat, is of a place she’s never been. A house on the edge of a tall cliff, white and cream, the awnings bright with red flags on which she’s painted intricate designs. A small cave opens out. Inside of it, there are rooms, like an artist’s studio, with a daybed upon which there is a woman and a man, the architecture rendered sharp, the human features indistinct. And the diorama is tiny, scaled small so that it makes the viewer live inside her mind.
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