You’ve eaten in Indian restaurants a few times but can never remember the names of the dishes you’ve tried. ‘What’s it seasoned with?’
‘Garam masala.’
Meena points to a bottle of brown powder. You peer at the blend of ground spices for the first time – pepper, bay leaves, nutmeg, cinnamon, cumin, cardamom, cloves, among others. You can’t remember all of what she says.
‘So it’s a kind of all-purpose seasoning?’
Meena laughs. ‘Yes, you could say that. Like Italian seasoning.’
‘What’s Italian seasoning?’
Meena opens her cupboard wide, leaving you awestruck. Row upon row of bottles, of varying sizes and colours, fill the shelves. Their contents are just as diverse: powders, seeds, leaves. She points to one.
‘This is Italian seasoning,’ she says. ‘Basil, oregano, rosemary, thyme.’
Meena smiles at your astonishment over the kaleidoscopic array of vials. Selecting one, she unseals it then brings the glass to her nose and inhales deeply.
‘You must know this one,’ she says, stretching the vial out towards you. ‘Our treasure.’
Coriander seeds. Indian cooking uses a lot of coriander too, she says. She holds the bottle and sniffs again. Her eyes are slightly closed.
‘I love the smell of spices.’
‘Because spices remind you of home?’
‘Because spices roam the world.’
Like Vijay.
You’re a little surprised to find yourself linking her answer to Vijay.
Meena, who certainly has no inkling of the voices in your head, calmly lowers the stove’s flame.
‘Do you cook with coriander leaves too?’
‘Coriander leaves?’
‘Cilantro.’
She opens the fridge and shows you.
‘Cilantro likes to travel too. You’ll find it in tacos. In tom yam soups as well.’
To be honest, you hadn’t noticed.
Meena transfers the chicken tikka masala to a serving bowl. You help set the table, which already has basmati rice on it. Meena offers you juice. She takes a glass and removes a container of orange juice from the fridge. Before pouring, she examines its label.
‘Always check the expiry date,’ she says, as if talking to herself.
You take a spoonful of the chicken. Warm taste sensations fill your mouth. The savoury, spicy flavours entrance you, leaving your tongue longing for more.
‘This is amazing.’ Your praise is entirely sincere. ‘Are you a chef?’
She laughs melodically.
Meena, originally from Delhi, came to America to study commerce at the University of Buffalo. As an international student, she had the opportunity to work for a year in the US before returning to India and decided to intern at an online media company in Manhattan. Meena earns a decent salary, though hardly extravagant for New York, and she was also happy to finally be able to leave quiet Buffalo. She found a cheap flat through the connections of local Indian friends.
‘Have you always liked to cook?’
Meena shakes her head.
Her mother taught her from childhood, but she wasn’t especially interested. In America, she first cooked to survive, then to evoke memories of home. Over time, she began experimenting with recipes from all over the world, from Cajun pasta to Shanghai-style dim sum. She roasted a turkey every Thanksgiving and made a very sweet and rich Louisiana bread pudding. Cooking for her was a form of travel.
Vijay’s name finally comes up over lunch. Meena mentions him first.
‘Vijay says you’ve met.’
She sounds entirely natural. You try to conceal your agitation. Meena doesn’t feel the need to say that Vijay is her lover. From the way she talks, you know she’s marking territory. This is mine, that is yours.
She seems to intuit that her presence is a little threatening for you. In a friendly tone she says, ‘Maybe the three of us can have a meal together some time.’
Bad idea, but you pretend to find it appealing.
‘Does Vijay like to cook too?’
‘Oh, yes. Just one taste and he’s already worked out how your dish is spiced,’ she says. ‘He knows how to use his tongue.’
You feel your face flush at the last sentence, as the moans and cries that made winter feel so steamy come to mind. Now you begin to understand how to connect the cook and the courtesan. In the kitchen and in bed, she serves up a complex masala, savoury and spicy.
Is your lack of adventure starting to feel dull? Meena interests you because nothing exciting is going on. Your life in New York is turning out to be common, not like a movie, and you’re struggling to find thrills. Maybe, though, if you’re patient, something unexpected will appear at the end of the rainbow.
Proceed to page 198.
The Rumpelstiltskin Game
They don’t know you’re a killer. My room-mate Tatyana had just returned from her village in the Ukraine and she had to do the unimaginable: call 911. That night, after hours of crying, she finally managed to control herself, mourning the loss of normalcy more than the loss of a loved one. She speculated about the cause, just as people did a month ago when Heath Ledger, the Joker, was found dead in this city, and she came to the conclusion that it was suicide, pure and simple. But I know you. I said your name clearly, with a feeble sense of victory, just before you vanished. The puzzle had been solved and your name was revealed.
Throughout its interminable journey, the windows of the Amtrak Pennsylvanian reflected dull skin and a pair of tired, swollen eyes. Glass plays sadistic tricks to make you look older and less attractive. I have never liked how I look when travelling, and even more so after sitting for seven and a half hours. I’ve had worse: a thirty-hour plane trip including transit, waiting, delays. It’s going too far for people to claim that travel is no more painful than enduring the curse of sitting around at home.
When the train pulled into Philadelphia, someone interrupted my daydreaming. You, stranger, so fresh and young-looking, perturbed me with your dizzying aroma, a perfume whose name I didn’t know, grating, almost offensive. You asked permission to sit next to me. I had hoped the seat would stay empty because when I’m on my period, the most uncomfortable time to travel, I always find companionship suffocating. It’s as if I don’t have enough space, enough room to breathe. I nodded out of compulsion, to be polite, and you thanked me as you draped your red coat over the back of a seat. I thought you were from East Asia, and you might have thought I was Hispanic. I kept reading a novel, ignoring you.
You interrupted me again, asking if I was Indonesian after a glance at my book, and when I said yes, you immediately shifted languages. Presumably you imagined that we shared some sort of bond, while I still regarded you as an interloper, whatever your nationality. I hoped you would get off in New Jersey, but, alas, we were both heading for New York. You wanted to know why I had been in Pittsburgh.
‘Meeting a friend,’ I said.
‘Me too. I’ve got an Indo friend in Philly.’
I hate that word, Indo. I have heard about an Indonesian community in Philadelphia, mostly from the middle class, seeking better income, even if it means overstaying a visa. I’ve met illegal immigrants in New York too, but we never talked to each other much beyond asking where to find spices or ‘Indo’ restaurants. We didn’t deliberately intend to build barriers, but I can’t say barriers weren’t there. You did not perceive this barrier between us, and you even thought we should get to know each other better. You worked in Greenwich Village, in a cafe you called ‘historic’. I answered, ‘Uh-huh’, without telling you that I used to visit it regularly when I first arrived in New York. The cafe made me feel nostalgic for history, or for a period of history I wanted to claim as my own. As you thrust out your hand, you mentioned a name – one that caused you to note that we should be sisters, but I knew that remembering your name would have been pointless for us both. If we hadn’t been in another country, I’m sure we’d never have greeted each other. Having
spent many years abroad, I don’t consider meeting someone from home a thrill. And I’m quite adept at erasing faces.
‘Do you work in New York?’
‘A post-doc, two years.’
And that after two years in Leiden, six years in New Haven. I didn’t have to explain, and you didn’t need to know, that I wasn’t sure what would come next. Wow, you said, though I wasn’t certain you really understood what deserved to be treated as ‘wow’. You asked if I grew up in Jakarta, and my nod made your eyes glow. Given the number of Indonesians here, your reaction was a bit over the top.
‘Is your family back there?’ You dug for more information.
‘My husband.’
A little information about me was enough for you, or so I thought. Then came your turn. Your tale of melodrama tumbled on insistently with the train, past the naked trees of winter and the stark, white landscape. You quit college nine years ago, after your father died leaving unpaid debts. When your visa expired you hung out in Los Angeles, becoming a cashier at Panda Express and a shop clerk for Forever 21. (I cut you off: that’s the store that was boycotted by migrant workers, isn’t it? You didn’t know, of course.) You married an American who took you to Chicago, then New York. After that, life entered the fast lane: you gave birth to a child but divorced after three years of marriage. You diligently saved the tips you made working at a bar, hoping one day to return to school. At least you had a green card now.
‘Are you staying on here?’
‘What do you mean by here?’
‘New York.’
‘You mean there. We haven’t arrived yet.’
‘Ah, yeah.’ You laughed. ‘You know what I mean. Here. In America.’
At this stage you have named and blurred ‘here’ and ‘there’. My perfunctory answer didn’t matter to you, perhaps because what you wanted to say was that you could stay anywhere, that you were always ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Packing and unpacking suitcases felt so banal to you.
‘Shouldn’t smart people like you be the ones to go home? They need people like you, not me.’
My face flushed. I tried to change the subject and ask more about you. Hardly difficult, because you seemed very much an exhibitionist who enjoyed peeling off her layers one at a time.
Returning home turned out to be important to you because your boyfriend lived in Jakarta. You met him five years ago, ‘here’ (in this country, not on this train – just to be clear). You thought your dalliance would come to an end quickly in his apartment, or in Washington Square Park, where you’d meet for coffee before you left for work, but in fact you began flying to Jakarta twice a year. In between these occasional meetings you relied on the Internet, which deserves celebration; it allows long-distance relationships to be reinterpreted.
‘Why not get married so your boyfriend can stay in New York?’ I asked. You agreed – and have proved – that marriage is an effective way of getting around national borders, but your situation isn’t so simple.
‘He’s got a wife.’ Your response was to the point.
I looked at the portrait framed by the window. Images of furrowed trees, their sturdy roots buried beneath a blanket of snow, were superimposed on my face, wizened and weary. A question mark materialised, like calligraphy, in the distortion of the glass, a stroke of black ink that would soon fade.
As a child, when you skipped rope with your girlfriends, did it occur to you that you might grow up to be a thief? Do you take secret pleasure in hurting other women?
Shouldn’t you hate yourself?
‘And you?’ Again you broke my reverie. ‘How do you manage being so far away from your husband?’
In a world of fusion and fission, of meetings and farewells, my husband and I had different desires that led us south and north. We promised to take different paths for a fixed period of time, heeding the demands of a world that set us, or at least me, in motion. Then at some point we will meet in the middle. Maybe I’ll go back for him, maybe he’ll follow me here, or somewhere as yet undetermined. In the meantime, we hold on to places and times that we haggle over and manage adroitly.
I can’t remember if I said more than I should have, but I heard you laugh and croon a song from the Magic Kingdom, off-key Disney. It’s a small world after all. La la la la lala lala. Dolls of the world, unite.
‘So you don’t know where you’ll be in, say, five years from now? That’s funny.’
‘Why?’
‘You don’t look like the adventurous type.’
I didn’t want to argue, so I simply replied, ‘We’ll see.’
‘What are you waiting for? The world to stop?’
I took it as a joke. The next minute you were busy checking your well-manicured nails. Focus wasn’t your strong point, apparently.
‘How do you divide your time between work and being a wife?’
Your clichéd question was too personal. I shot back, ‘How do you divide your time between being a mother and being a mistress?’
You caught my sarcasm. But, without losing your sense of humour, you asked: Are there really people willing to play all these roles? They must want to die.
‘You and I are a lot alike,’ you then murmured.
Because we both still have ties to Indonesia?
‘Our connections to Indonesia are similar. Especially when it comes to men,’ you said, blinking. ‘Hey, I hope it’s not your husband I’m seeing.’
‘That’s not funny.’
‘Remember the idea about six degrees of separation?’ you said, your face growing more serious.
Then you talked at length about your boyfriend. He likes Mexican food, Buñuel films, and has some pretty weird sexual fantasies. I was relieved for an embarrassing reason: the man sounded nothing like my husband. I didn’t even bother to ask your boyfriend’s name.
‘Your husband now or the one from five years ago?’ you asked.
The question, posed so calmly, disturbed me. A few hours later I realised that his presence marked a new chapter in our conversation. I should not have cared. I should not have let you in.
But how does one face a question that has never existed before? Novelty betrays us.
My husband talks about clients, responsibilities, expenses, plans to purchase a new car, new furniture. But what did we talk about, and where were we, five years ago? Images of passionate lovemaking in a hotel room flashed in my head. But was that him or someone else? I can’t connect the image with him. Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t even me in that hotel. Was this an older image, a fantasy, or something I dare not express?
The problem isn’t just that time keeps moving, you said. Space is so slippery too, it keeps gliding away. Spaces have their own rhythm. You felt that time slowed when you stood on the Golden Gate Bridge and stared at the peaceful waters far below. The bridge, not unlike places that can be foul – Jakarta, New York, Buenos Aires, whatever – stirred you, tugged at you.
‘My boyfriend loves me in a different way in New York.’
Perhaps the gorgeous glitter of Manhattan’s lights, appearing in memory as fine as grains of sand, makes lovers more sensual. There’s nothing strange about leading different lives in different places.
‘In an email to you, he might be polite and romantic, but with me he could be an eccentric lover.’
A helter-skelter hypothesis. But your words shook the scene I had so carefully constructed and set within my little globe. Inside it, people move to the same rhythm, within the same space. Maybe it’s time I became suspicious of you. Who were you and where had you come from?
I couldn’t even remember your name.
Somehow I’d stopped noticing the nauseating scent of your perfume. It had taken over slowly, though of course an odour can dull after a while. As the train pulled into Penn Station, the last stop, your efforts to be a good travel companion had borne fruit. We joked about our childhoods and national television. In an era when American TV series were a luxury, we both patiently awaited Little Hous
e on the Prairie on Sundays. We’d forgotten the storylines but back in the eighties when we were still five or six, every black-haired girl in Indonesia wanted brown braids like Laura Ingalls. We felt nostalgia for a country that we seemed to recognise so well, for a time when space felt solid and did not slip, mocking us as it moved. Despicable as the dictatorial regime may have been, perhaps one television channel wasn’t so bad, we concluded haphazardly.
I know it’s a bit strange, but can we be friends?
You sounded sincere, and your farewell utterance made you less harsh.
‘Nice talking with you, Lila.’
You remembered my name, and I felt a genuine pang of guilt for having deliberately erased yours.
‘Sorry,’ I blushed. ‘What’s yours again?’
There was no trace of disappointment on your face; on the contrary, you seemed elated.
‘We’ll turn it into a game. Invite me to your apartment and make me a hot chocolate. Then I’ll tell you.’
A travelling companion who arouses curiosity, indeed. You evidently loved to play around, and I was tempted. Maybe you really were having an affair with my husband, but if not, the riddle of our relationship needed to be solved. Your game reminded me of a Grimm fairy tale that, strangely, you didn’t know. So I told you: once upon a time there lived a desperate girl who, unlike women of today who can travel, was cursed to live within a sealed castle. A dwarf, perhaps an incarnation of the devil, appeared mysteriously in her room, granting all her wishes. But fulfilment of those wishes turned out to bear an extraordinary cost. The dwarf demanded the woman’s baby unless she could guess his name. After puzzling and puzzling for three days and nights, the desperate girl eventually figured out her tormenter’s secret. The dwarf was in the midst of prancing around with glee, certain he had won, when the woman stated his name. Like a mantra, or a curse.
Perhaps your name is Rumpelstiltskin?
‘And the creature disappeared from her sight.’
You laughed and said your name wasn’t as complicated as that.
‘What if I remember your name while we’re on the way?’
The Wandering Page 16