Antiman

by Rajiv Mohabir

  Dulha ki mayi re bhuje lage lawa

  She looked at me through her round glasses. She was named after the river Ganga, and my Aja was named for Lord Shiva, creating together this sacred story once more. Behind her gray eyes were songs that could crush the earth with their impact. I knew that she had stories she could sing with the voice of the sea. She said that here, every ocean is the holiest river, because that is precisely where it flows. The stream starts in the Himalayas as glacial melt and trickles through the land, through Lord Shiva’s matted locks and deltas in the Sundarbans, and loosens her own tresses into the Bay of Bengal. Ganga was a journeyer like Aji. It made sense that she would call the sea Ganga Ghat—or the steps to the Ganga—every time we took her to swim at the beach.

  Behind Aji’s eyes, the Himalayas pushed up into cataract crags, river dolphins traded their eyesight for echolocation, and I understood the reason for prayer. It was to connect me to this woman, this living ancestor.

  “But sing me the oldest song you can remember, Aji,” I asked, the cassette recorder meting out its pulse. It was a drum by which Aji could remember.

  “Me na hable, beta. Me boice na good,” she closed her eyes. She opened her mouth and out streamed the Ganga’s crash:

  kekahi chaho to mango

  rani tu hamar jaan bachaiyal

  ajodhya tohar hoijai

  je mango to mango rani

  je mango to mango rani

  ham mange ram banbas jaye

  aur bharat raja chalaye ho

  je mango to mango rani

  “Da song mean dat Kekahi been mek one trick. Kekahi tell ‘em me na want none t’ing now—me go ask later. ’E want Ram must go in de forest and ’e son Bharat must rule the t’rone,” Aji explained.

  “Kaikeyi? You mean King Dasharath’s wife?” I asked, correcting her pronunciation of Kekahi. I didn’t realize then how I was enforcing Hindi pronunciations on my Aji.

  “Yes, when she been young she been save Dasarath an’ take out a pimpla from he fingah. He been so overjoy dat he give she two bardaan dat whatsoevah she wan’ he go give she. She can wish fe what she want. She wait until Ram been ready fe mek king an’ den she ask Dasarath. And Ram been go. ’E left ’e mummah an’ puppah an’ go a banbas in de forest fe live fourteen year.”

  “But Aji, Kaikeyi saved Dasharath’s life on the battlefield. What do you mean that she pulled out a splinter from his hand?” I asked.

  “Beta, the splinter bore he hand an’ he get sick an’ dat is how.”

  “But Ramanand Sagar’s TV show says something completely different.” I thought she must be mistaken—she even referred to Kaikeyi as Kekahi: a clear corruption of the names and story arc that I had learned in books written in English by white scholars.

  I scribbled in my notebook. I knew the story of the Ramayana—of Ram and Sita and how they were exiled into the forest because the evil queen wanted her own son to be king. King Dasharath had three wives and his four princes were born under magical circumstances. I felt a connection with this story beyond its magic, because it was about exile and return, the defeat of evil. In my mind this was a mythological metaphor for the suffering of colonization, indenture, and sugar servitude to the British. I could see how these colonial damages played out in my ancestors’ stories and in my family. I translated Aji’s song to mean:

  Kekahi, wish what you will

  Rani, you saved my life that day—

  Ayodhya is yours,

  What you wish is yours.

  Whatever you want, ask.

  I want Ram in exile,

  For Bharat to rule the throne.

  Whatever I want is mine.

  My Eyes Are Clouds

  WE SAT IN Auntie Sonia’s Brampton living room, some of my cousins sipping tea and others brandy. It was winter and the snowbanks were taller than the car. Aji had recently cut her hair; her arms could no longer reach to comb it. It was so white, it sparkled blue and gold. She oiled her white tresses before twisting them into a bun that she piled on her head. Aji never wore it down; it was a wild Guyanese bird.

  Auntie Sonia’s house was filled with laughter in English. My father, mother, sister, brother, and I loaded up the rental car and drove from Orlando to Toronto in a nonstop haze of coffee and calypso music blaring from the radio. I had just turned twenty-two and would be leaving for India in six months. Emile, three years older, came along; it had been ages since he’d seen our father’s family. Emily, three years younger, was a new undergraduate at the University of Central Florida. I was the middle child, restless and ready to cross the ocean.

  It was Auntie Sonia’s birthday and she was having a simple celebration, inviting only her siblings—which worked out to be four of the twelve families, plus Aji.

  Aji’s leaving Guyana was not of her own volition—she went where her children went. I remember in my young adulthood my father telling me the story of their arrival in North America. According to him, in 1975 she had been widowed for ten years by the time her youngest made the motion to go to school in Toronto. Her other children had already left Guyana in pursuit of fortune in London and New York. The four—Aji, Sonia, Rani, and Pua—went to visit Toronto on tourist visas and overstayed, like my father, whose visa was for students. Pua married to stay in Canada and then sponsored Aji to move herself. Because Sonia and Rani were minors, they were allowed to stay, too.

  When we visited Aji in Scarborough, a Toronto borough, we mostly spent time with Pua and Pupha and two of my cousins, Jake and Clarice. Jake was one year older than I and knew everything about computers. We wrote frequent letters to each other and later, after Pua and Pupha moved to New York, we communicated via email, with a hand-written letter sent at least once a month.

  Jake was one of the few people in my extended family I could talk to in a serious way. He was shorter than I, skinnier, and he had straight black hair. Mine was curly, which caused my father’s side a lot of anxiety.

  My Aji was Jake’s Nani—my paternal grandmother, his maternal grandmother. As children we would sit with Aji and ask her to tell us stories. Our favorite was “The King and the Koyal.” Like me, Jake was interested in her stories and learning about where we were from, but he stopped shy of trying to learn her languages.

  Jake knew me. I told him over the phone, in my early twenties, that I was into guys.

  “Like, sexually?” Jake asked from Queens.

  “Yeah, I’ve been with girls, too, but I just know I like guys,” I said. I could trust Jake. He knew what it would mean if our family found out.

  “There is no word for it in Hindustani, I don’t think,” I remember saying to him.

  “Well, there is antiman.” Our conversation stalled.

  “Antiman,” I repeated. I had heard my aunts and uncles laugh around the table enough to know antiman meant pariah. To be an antiman was to be laughable, it was a secret that could cost me my family if they found out.

  “If I were gay and ever told my mother, she’d disown me and kick me out of the house,” Jake confided in me.

  “Me, too,” I said. “I mean, if I told my father, he’d never really accept it.” I feared worse. It would mean fire and brimstone. I was certain that he would disown me fully, given his rants about homosexuality being a perversion of God’s order. I could lose my brother, sister, and mother, too. Pap’s word was law, the bricks that were the structure of our patriarchal home.

  Though I knew no way to say it in Hindustani, Aji might have known the scorpion’s sting of the word antiman. Or she could have had other ways of understanding it. In any case, I didn’t need to worry about it yet.

  Aji acquiesced to the wishes of her children and left her mango and coconut trees, the hourie and gilbaka sea, the parrots and twa-twa birds in the sky, the black trenches filled with hassa fish, to grow bora and tomatoes on a concrete balcony in a Scarborough tenement. Aji left the Mahrajin, the pandit’s wife, the milkman, brothers and sisters, neighbors, the colorful village gossip. She was caged in an endless winter
, friendless except for the Jamaican woman down the hall. No one in the market was able to speak to Aji; she knew no “proper” English and called her Hindustani “broken.” And that’s how people treated her, like she was broken. That’s how the missionaries treated my family, like they were broken. When she arrived in Toronto her children told her not to speak her broken languages in public. Jake told me once that our uncle told Aji, “You must say CAAAAAAR, not CYAAAR.” It was better if she didn’t do anything to embarrass them. I feared that I had done the same thing to her by correcting her pronunciation of Kekahi to the more bookish Kaikeyi. I could understand wanting to recognize myself in the world around me. Was this anxiety also an ancestral inheritance?

  Now she sat on the floor in Auntie Sonia’s living room, not entirely following her children’s and her grandchildren’s fast English. She hunched over her plate of daal, rice, and bhaji, and ate with her fingers. I sat next to her, chatting while she gnawed whole wiri wiri peppers like candy.

  This woman who has come so far lives like a bird with clipped wings, I thought. How can she cope when no one speaks her languages? Being so isolated in this hostile and racist place must be difficult for her—those stares from people in her building, the sideways glances from white Canadians upset that she is benefiting from the welfare system, her children who ignore her during their get-togethers. She must feel like Sita, exiled from her own home, again. What does it mean to be completely dependent on a system that thinks you’re an idiot?

  “But Aji, Ram bura rahe, Sita ke ban mein chhordawe khatir, na? Wasn’t Ram bad for what he did to Sita?” I asked her. I was glad to hear her talk about the Ramayana again. It was her protest: a sparkling ruby of dissent against the conservative patriarchal thinking of her homelife, resistance to the forced colonial education of her children. She used the story to lament her plight but also to dream a possible future for herself.

  Ram abandoned Sita in the forest after she faithfully followed him into exile for fourteen years instead of living like a princess. Ram abandoned Sita when she was pregnant. It’s kind of like Aji being widowed at the age of forty-four, I thought—to fend for herself and her thirteen children alone in Berbice.

  “Yes, he was, beta. What men do in this world is awful. But what can a woman do?” she asked.

  “Well, Sita eventually told Ram that when he abandoned her in the forest, she was pregnant with Luv and Kush, then asked Mother Earth to swallow her whole,” I piped up.

  “True-true t’ing, beta, what Ram do no one else go do. He exile he pregnant wife.” She looked out the window at the snow, which had begun to fall again. The flakes scraped the windowpane with their crystalline bodies. Some in clumps of twenty. Some solitary yet ornate.

  Silence. My mouth burned.

  We sat looking outside at the snowfall for several minutes. “Ek go gaana sikhao, na, Ajiya?” I asked, “Teach me one song, na, Aji?” Aji unfolded a song of separation and the loneliness of betrayal.

  akhiya hamar badal rukhi

  kahi naahi sukhi sukhi

  tinhu lok me hamesa

  tohar birha se hi bhigal

  sare duniya me ghumat hai

  pavan aur nadi ke pani se

  ekgo hi nisan paye ke

  baras me kehar aram karab

  hamar saiya baahar bhejaile

  “What does that mean?” Pap walked into the sitting room. He put his cane down as he lowered himself onto the couch. In 1984, the year Emily was born, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and filed for disability, which, even back then, was not a livable amount of money. He narrowed his eyes as he looked at Aji and then at me. I could see that he was fuming.

  I started to learn Modern Standard Hindi from books and from speaking with friends in my teens. Pap had insisted that I learn some useful language like Classical Hebrew or Greek—that way I could translate the Bible instead of gyaffing with my elders.

  I wanted Hindi and Bhojpuri instead: these old Guyanese and Indian traditions sparkled on the horizon, catching my eye from their past lives. Through them I could learn the deep ocean of stories of where we came from and breathe into them new life. At these family gatherings and whenever I saw her, I would spend hours sitting, recording, and later transcribing and translating my Aji’s Bhojpuri songs. Pap hadn’t wanted to hold on to these things. He and his siblings all started taking communion and going by Christian names for the sake of assimilation or genuine faith. It must be genuine faith when the only way to get an education was to go to the Lutheran school. It must be genuine faith when the only way to get scholarships was to mimic the British. To survive they had to create social distance between their Coolie home culture and the English world through mimicking the latter. In certain conditions when my father addressed white people, daal became split pea soup, aloo, potatoes, and he called himself Glenn when his name was Surjnarine. Split pea soup and potatoes for Glenn—the phrase itself a code for survival.

  Pap did not want any of his children, especially his sons, to learn about the Ramayana. The year I was accepted to the University of Florida, a friend gave me a book filled with art from the Hindu epic.

  “I’m worried that you’re going to turn Hindu if you leave home and go to Gainesville,” Pap said. “I will forbid you from going if you don’t remove that book from the house this instant.” As he decried the paintings of a feminized Ram shaded in blue, draped in gold and pearls, it felt like he was trying to communicate something else to me. That in living beyond his watch, I might experiment with who knew what.

  “Get rid of it,” he repeated.

  He called my mother over, and she appeared in the dark dining room. “Bring your Ramayan,” he commanded. My mother kept the R. K. Narayan translation of the epic in her section of the bookshelf. It was hers from long ago—a vestige of her natal family before she left them forever in England.

  When she handed it to him as he reemerged from the study, he opened it up and ripped it into the smallest pieces as he could. “Now bring the incense,” he commanded.

  My mother went to the cabinet drawer and withdrew a single packet of sandalwood incense marked with an image of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god said to have been the transcriber of the Mahabharata.

  Grabbing it out of her shaking hands, he threw it in the fireplace and burned it up. I remember him later that evening cleaning the ashes into a gray plastic bin—a kind of cremation ceremony for his previous life.

  Mom’s eyes darkened, but she said nothing. I searched her face. She gave me a faint smile and sighed. She had kept these things as a last connection to her family.

  From that day, everything that reminded him of his childhood, the religion of his parents and community, was banished from the house. No Indian clothes. No incense. But he couldn’t banish his mother’s songs, the same ones she sang as he formed in her womb.

  I spent many days like this, sitting and listening to Aji’s songs. Now I translated the best I could. I looked at Pap and said:

  My eyes are clouds,

  nowhere is dry.

  The three worlds are forever

  soaked in grief.

  I roam the earth

  for signs in wind and river.

  When rain falls, will I stay dry—

  my love has exiled me.

  “So Sita is in the forest?” he heckled and laughed. I looked at Aji. She looked at the floor, avoiding my eyes. “Ma, what are you teaching Raimie? The Ramayan is for Hindus—not us.”

  “Not for us?” I said. “This is your own mother singing a song that her own mother taught her. How is this not us?”

  He broke into Creole as his face reddened. “You wan’ go a pandit an’ ask ’am to open de book an’ give you answer?” The next room, where his sisters and their families sat, went quiet.

  “Nothing—me na know what kine madness dis one a talk,” Aji replied before I could answer. She didn’t want to upset her son. Aji’s survival strategy: Make as many people happy as you can. She turned to me and said, “Beta, you mu
s’ mine you daddy.”

  A different kind of instruction: Listen to and respect your parents.

  “You mean, ‘I don’t know why he’s asking these sorts of questions,’” Pap said, correcting his mother’s English. He glowered at me and considered the subject closed.

  It was time to cut the cake. Pua called us all into the kitchen, where she lit the ten candles. The cake was white. White as refined sugar. White as snow. White as English. Auntie Sonia blew out the small yellow flames that flickered and died, releasing their last breaths of smoke: white and curly. Outside winter kept brushing its feathers against the doors and windows.

  Everyone: my cousins, aunts, uncles, mother, father, brother, sister, and I took the white cake deep into our intestines. We were warm inside, drinking tea and sugaring ourselves. We ate cake and licked the frosting from plates and forks. We laughed and painted our lips in white frosting. We curled our tongues around the frills, the letters on the cake that read “Happy Birthday Edith.” Edith was Auntie Sonia’s Christian name. We spoke fast English with correct grammar, my Canadian cousins with the proper eh’s and us Floridians with the requisite y’all’s. It was a blizzard of ascendancy. We no longer lived in the village and only dreamed of eating cake. This was all ours.

  Aji was eating her daughter’s Christian name in the next room when I came in and sat next to her. She ate with her hands.

  “Raimie! Come!” I could hear Auntie Sonia calling for me from the couch. It was time for us all to sing. Usually during these events, Uncle Willie brought his guitar and everyone assembled would sing old calypso songs. “You can’t leave until you sing us all a Hindi song,” Auntie Sonia said, half testing me to see if I actually knew any.