He tried hard not to feel the knife pain of imagining this. The grocery store doors swung open and closed of their own accord. Shree was entranced by them, stepping back and forth across the dirty linoleum and laughing when Gopi reached for her in outrage and embarrassment. “Ula po!” he commanded, shouting at her to go in, as if saying the words in Tamil could hide his fury.
He tried not to care about the curious stare of the redheaded boy who overheard him, a boy only a few years older than his son, whose job it was to collect the shopping carts that people left outside. Back home, he told himself, someone in that position wouldn’t even dare to make eye contact with a Gopisundaram like himself. They were all the same, all paravans, as far as he was concerned. Untouchables.
“Do you need help?” he thought he heard Shree say. He turned around. The look in her eyes was the same as usual, the sturdy body his to either take with him into the store or push out of view, onto one of the benches near the registers, where elderly ladies waited to be helped with their groceries and where Shree might even sit quietly for once, with dignity.
He told her to wait for him, left her sitting on one of the benches, and took his time buying a few things. She would wait, he knew. No one would approach her, but if they did? Imagining Lakshmi’s reaction if he told her something had happened to Shree while they were at the store, he hurried and banged one of his arthritic knees against the metal display case holding gum and magazines. She was still there on the bench, waiting for him.
Now she stood up and waved her hands, calling, “Dad, look out!” In hastening toward her, he had almost bumped into one of those elderly ladies, this one using a motorized walker and hardly aware of people in her path. It was the same thing Shree would do when they took the bus, calling out, “Dad, this is our stop” in such a loud voice that he feared one of the vicious-looking, leather-jacketed teenagers sitting next to them would decide to follow them and throw stones at Shree, as one of the neighbor’s children had done recently.
As they left the store with his bag containing iced tea, a half gallon of ice cream that she’d insisted on, and a packet of naan for the night’s dinner, it was Shree who remembered their errand. “I want to do the bottles. Can I? Can I?” She had been carrying a bag without complaint, all this time, with at least a dozen heavy glass bottles and forty crushed cans. The whole bag might give her at most four or five dollars. She gave a deep chuckle, feeding the cans to the machine first. “Grrrr,” she said, imitating the grinding sounds.
Shree looked at him. The smile was there, as expected. Smiling at him as if she were a tame and trusting animal. If she had been normal, seeing the rage that must show on his face, she would have run out onto the street, calling desperately for help, running without shame to strangers.
At that moment, Gopi was holding a glass lemonade bottle in his hand. He could feel the heft of it. The machines for recycling, he noticed, were in an alcove off the main exit from the store. No one could see the two of them. People moved inside and out of the main store, including a security guard, without even knowing he and Shree were there.
As if propelled by a curse, he raised the bottle to strike her. The ritual of Avanay Avatam took place in the ocean, as Brahmins washed their bare bodies and chanted before sunrise. Brahmin boys, Brahmin men. The glass that he held up, how brightly it gleamed, like water.
ADRISTAKAMA
TWO YEARS AGO, WHEN I WENT back to Agra, India, at the age of twenty-two, to visit my grandparents and let two of my uncles set up my marriage, my ex-girlfriend Lauren, whom I work with now on a daily basis, came after me, hoping to stop me from giving in.
We both work for a domestic violence services agency. She’s arranged her hours with care, it’s obvious, so that we won’t see each other except at big staff meetings, over a hundred strong, where Lauren melts into a crowd of pale faces. Whereas I stand out, my ego stroked, my seat at the front table assured, my smiling brown face never omitted from the shiny cover of the organization’s annual report. My face again, inside, under the section called “Diversity.”
The summer I saw my grandparents, my family was searching far and wide, preferably for a traditional man from a religious family who could get me “under control,” as my father said to all the sympathetic relatives. In my grandparents’ house, I didn’t even feel like I had the right to touch Lauren’s hand. Her visit was brief. It was the summer of 1985. We should’ve been in a bar in the East Village, doing shots and strategizing about how to fight Reagan’s budget cuts, flirting and swaggering. Instead we were in a hot, quiet place where even talking, just the two of us, would’ve been too intimate.
Lauren tried. Right in front of my grandmother, she said she was going back to Delhi after her visit to volunteer at Sangini. “Sangini” meant “soulmate,” but it was a codeword too—a helpline for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered Indian women set up a few years ago by students, social workers, and lawyers. Set up for Indian women like me. My grandmother smiled politely and offered her some more tea, a little curious about this “Sangini” fellow. But I refused to follow Lauren’s lead.
I was the one resisting her attempt to combine worlds. I was the one who wasn’t swayed by her grand gesture of following me to India. I was the one who told her It’s over, forget it. Now two years later, I’m the one here in New Haven, starving for a glimpse of her.
Fast forward to that fall and my failed, arranged marriage to a frightened gay man who insisted his “best friend” could come to live with us, even though my family was the one who put the down payment on our condo: we were expensive, but history in months. I think of my marriage as a brief penance, for hurting a woman who loved me, but I couldn’t expect Lauren to sit around waiting.
A whole two years have passed, but I remember everything. I imagine everything.
On the way to see me in Agra, to save me from locking myself up in an arranged marriage, Lauren rests her lean body against a dark grey concrete pillar, reading a Hindu comic book. An old woman squats a few feet away, spreading a large black cloth on the ground and setting out her bronze statuettes for sale. In the story Lauren is reading, the god appears suddenly as a coy enchantress, Mohini—smiling at the demons as she steals their nectar out from under them. Lauren looks up from her book only when she hears a sudden whistle blast, but there’s just some delay—men in white shouting abrupt commands, a family being helped out of a black Rolls Royce. The daughter emerges, dressed in jeans and a red silk blouse, stands long-legged on high heels, waits for a coolie to follow with the luggage. The line of people eager to get into the train sighs, stands aside as the golden girl and her parents steal ahead of them on line, wondering if she’s a celebrity.
Finally settled in her seat, Lauren pushes the hair out of her eyes, thinks she should have gotten it cut before blowing her entire graduation allowance on this trip. Her parents loved the idea, told her it was a romantic adventure, that she should enjoy her freedom while it lasts.
Lauren talking to her mother on the phone from the airport:
“It doesn’t feel like freedom, Mom. With me and Nisha, it’s a lot more like compulsion.”
“My love, you haven’t yet seen how marriages and partnerships can fail. It takes two. You want Nisha, but if she doesn’t want to be with you, you’ll move on. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Call me when you’re there, India has national phpone service now, the paper said.”
Lauren as I imagine her on a train, in India. She checks whether her cell phone is still hooked into the belt of her jeans and sits back as the train begins to move. She thinks about the first time she and I met and the first time we made love, two events that were barely hours apart.
We happened to sit next to each other at a production of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala put on by the Queens College Indian Cultural Association. The little boys who run such organizations are always enamored of Princess Shakuntala. This character is basically a hooker with a heart of gold—a sort of ancient Indian Pretty Woman. Any
way, this girl that everyone liked, Uma Narayan, was in the title role. God, she was a fox. She walked around in a skimpy forest-dweller costume made of leaves and string. We’d had a one-night stand in our freshman year; she said she’d never been with a woman before but always fantasized about doing it with her sister-in-law. But much more available was this blasé, single chick Lauren sitting next to me. She had very stylishly cut, reddish-blond hair, a buzz cut in the back and long soft bangs in the front. No lipstick, not that she needed any; a leather jacket like mine, incredible green eyes. So I leaned close and said to her, “Look at her boobs, they’re going to come out of that top.”
Lauren, winking at me: “That’ll improve things.” And there was the dirtiest expression on her pretty face. Right there I thought—it’s on.
We talked first, we did. I was a little embarrassed to tell her my major. I was studying to be a dietician back then, a degree my parents thought would go well with an early marriage. It felt so plebe. Lauren was in lit theory, interested in Marxist critiques of Harold Bloom. She’d read The Book of J, Bible studies from a feminist viewpoint, comfortable in the English department at Queens College where her father was a scholar of Renaissance studies and her mother had gotten a PhD under him, literally, before becoming a writer of freelance articles and romance novels, and going around the house in her Birkenstocks saying things like, “The Western canon is dead, I’m serious, totally dead.”
Our first night we talked on and on, confirming happily that yes, we both existed. Soon we were standing in front of Lauren’s car, about to get in. It was that moment before intimate knowledge, before the other person becomes familiar enough that on a day-to-day basis, you forget what she looks like. Then we kissed for ages, forever.
“O! That you would only kiss me with the kisses of your mouth,” Lauren whispered.
I like to think Lauren remembers that night, a singular night in our lives, when she was on her way to Agra to stop me from throwing away my life, both of our lives. The train journey from Delhi to Agra isn’t more than a few hours, especially if you take the Rajdani express and like the idea of resurrecting the British Raj in small, more or less innocuous ways, which Lauren kind of does. As long as it doesn’t involve anybody suffering. Sitting on the train, she opens her eyes, surprised to see a young man in a white turban and tunic standing near her seat and holding out a warm, damp, dazzlingly white towel in preparation for a complete lunch service. Given how much dust there is here, a lot of labor was involved in that whiteness, Lauren observes, deciding to tip him extra. She asks if they have lassis, a sweet milky drink, deciding to ignore what her mother and most people have said about avoiding ice in India. The boy is solemn and polite, not more than fourteen at the most. He has an even younger cousin who dances in the tourist park they recently put up outside of Jaipur, complete with elephant rides and puppet shows. The boy writes down her order carefully, asks her more than once if that will be all. “I ate a big lunch,” she says, smiling at him. He waits, unsure. She presses a fifty-rupee note into his hand, which crumples in his fist from how hard he’s holding it. “You’re doing a good job,” she says. Despite strict orders from the cook, about turning over all baksheesh, the boy vanishes with it and Lauren doesn’t see him or her order again.
The end of our year together, a day I’ve gone over in my mind many times. Lauren and I went to an Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights, where boys like the one on the train were the waiters.
“You look like a mermaid in that thing,” she’d said. She fingered the soft edge of my new sari as we waited outside the restaurant on a Monday afternoon. Lauren looked good too. As we made our way to a table in the back, she turned to me with an exuberant smile.
“Listen, I’m going back to India,” I said, before Lauren could ask me anything.
“What do you mean, ‘back’?”
“I mean to get my marriage arranged.”
“Honey, you’d be miserable! You know it as well as I do. Even if you don’t want to be with me anymore, don’t do that to yourself. Stay here.”
“You can’t know what makes me miserable.”
We were loud. Lauren seemed more angry than surprised.
“I thought you might drop a bomb like this one day. I knew you weren’t going to come out to your family anytime soon, and I accepted it. But you don’t have to go back to India, Nisha. Don’t put yourself into the ground. You have a choice.”
“No one has a choice. The whole idea of choice, it’s just a Western myth designed to make people uncertain, prevent anyone from taking responsibility. It makes people not know who they are. But I know who I am.”
“This is bullshit. You’re not leaving and we’re not breaking up. You just want to please your family. It’s understandable, but you have to move past it if you ever want to have a life.”
“Whatever it is, it’s who I am. It’s mine. My heritage.”
“No, baby, you’re mine. You’re mine and I’m yours,” Lauren said. “You belong here.”
“We’d like to believe that, but it isn’t true,” I said.
Lauren shook her head. She reached for my glass, drinking deep. People in hell just want a drink of water, but I didn’t pause to take a single sip.
We always drank from each other’s cups, ate from each other’s plates, but after a whole year of being together, Lauren had never been to my parents’ apartment.
Lauren rubbed my sari-covered thigh. But I couldn’t touch her. The chubby young couple trying to persuade their two little twin boys to stay put in their chairs; the old woman wearing a white sari and looking around suspiciously, picking at her teeth and eating yogurt with her fingers; the two skinny, short waiters who would have been staring anyway, but were all the more riveted by the prospect of a vanilla-chocolate live girl show—everyone in the restaurant was staring at us, I was convinced of it.
“So when are you going on this big trip to India?” Lauren asked. “Because I was thinking of asking you to go with me somewhere for summer break. Maybe the two of us could go together or something. Stop in Thailand.”
“I’m leaving next week,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier.”
“You crazy, stupid girl.”
Lauren put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me for a long time, right in front of everyone, amid exclamations in English mixed with laughter and languages she wouldn’t have been able to name.
That night we fucked in an empty classroom that we found after walking hard and fast through the deserted Queens campus, not looking each other in the face. We rarely did anything physical at school. Usually I was afraid of getting caught, but Lauren persisted. It was like she wanted to show me what being “out” meant. She opened an empty classroom with her father’s keys, unwinding the soft sari while I trembled, then pressing me against the wall, pinning my hands above my head. Lauren didn’t give me a chance to move, to call my parents so they wouldn’t get suspicious of the late hour. She wouldn’t let me hold myself back for even a minute so I could listen in the darkness like I always did, for the sound of someone coming close enough to hear us. For the first time, she made me scream, and I didn’t care who heard.
But Lauren must be dating someone else by now, I’m sure of it. Because she’s stayed away from me all this time, as if I’m a temptation. Because she looks, at least from a distance, calm and well cared for. Because she hasn’t come by to hurt me. I want her to care enough to hurt me. Thus far, there’s no proof she cares that I exist, or any sign she knows I’m not married.
What I imagine: a week after our breakup at the restaurant, Lauren, getting on the train bound for Agra, detours to make a flower offering at the temple listed in The Lonely Planet guidebook. The temple is white like a flash of lightning through a raincloud—the epithet for Hindu princesses in the religious comic book Lauren bought in Chandni Chowk. The marble floor is cold under her bare feet, but she doesn’t mind. TThe smell of the jasmine in the garlands around each black stone statue; the sweet,
intoxicating smell of sugar candies sticky in worshippers’ hands; the heavy smell of overripe bananas being offered; of raisins being thrown by a young priest unconcerned with flies—all of these distract Lauren from the cold marble floor.
She moves to where there seems to be a show, two lines of people looking at one particular, half-hidden statue. Prompted by a short blast from a conch shell nearly as large as a child’s head, a middle-aged priest draws back a black velvet curtain to reveal a large stone depiction, over six feet, of the elephant-headed god I had told her stories about.
At this small roadside temple in Agra, the priest bathes the statue in milk from silver pots. Bells clang to empty the worshippers’ minds of everything but the thought of God. People close their eyes and chant. Not knowing what this is, Lauren wishes the noise would stop and feels a headache coming on. She leaves her flowers on top of the large pile in front of the alcove, and turns to go. On her way back out to the street, she looks closely at the two stone birds that guard the temple. They have strong, outspread wings. Garuda, she remembers, from one of the books I’d read to her some night. The bird that one of the gods uses to fly across oceans, across worlds.
The street is teeming with weary, subdued worshippers. Someone has thrown a soft drink bottle on the steps below the birds, letting the dark liquid coat the feet of one of the sculptures. White tourists carry Pepsi bottles like this one, as they walk down the street and attempt to revive from the heat.
Lauren picks up the empty bottle, hoping no one thinks she dropped it there, and makes a point of throwing it away.
The Hindu comic book is a collection of epic stories told in color comic strips. In the story Lauren reads last, two people fall in love before they meet in person, influenced by talking swans. The swans have gilded wings, artistic beaks that draw lilypad pictures of the lovers and reveal them to each other. They can see each other well enough to be captured, spellbound. The prince and the princess, for of course that is who the two people are, fall in “adristakama.” Love for the unseen.
White Dancing Elephants Page 20