Antiman

by Rajiv Mohabir

  “What time did they say she died?” I didn’t have to ask. I already knew.

  “Between six and seven.”

  That was when I’d woken up, pressed into the mattress.

  Smear the Queer

  One of my father’s sisters lived in Forest Hills.

  She didn’t invite me to her home when I moved to the city.

  She didn’t invite me to eat when I was hungry, living on a small summer stipend.

  E train from Roosevelt Ave to 71st Street.

  One stop on the express train.

  The night of March 16, I heard, she held a wake in her million-dollar home.

  She didn’t invite me into her house even when my grandmother died.

  You are nothing.

  No one will ever love you.

  You are fat and hairy.

  You are good-for-nothing.

  Christian or Hindu Burial

  Three years before her death, Aji was hospitalized for an aneurism—not cerebral but aortic, brought on by aging. While she was unconscious Aji saw a line of women from her Guyanese village of Crabwood Creek—the pandit Hardowar’s wife, Beti; Rupa; and Premwati—all women whom she had known when she was younger.

  “Utho, Betiya,” the pandit’s wife called to her in Bhojpuri. “Get up, Betiya, you have to join us now.”

  “Ham na uth sake hai, didi, me na hable git up from hiya.” She replied. “An’ kaise ham jaibo, chunari mein lagal daag—how will I go with this stained veil?”

  The women all standing in line looked at her, sucked their teeth and gradually began to fade away. Aji remembered hearing manjira and dholak playing faintly as they were waiting. No bright lights. No Aja—this time. The stained veil, how could she wear it to meet her love? It was a metaphor for the human body as worn by the jiva—that small part of the universe that lived inside her. The flesh could corrupt, but not the jiva. How would she go with a human body to the home of her beloved?

  When she woke up, she narrated this story to my father. He quickly called all his sisters to ensure that Aji would have a Christian burial. He was horrified that all the people who Aji saw queuing up for the hereafter were Hindu women whom he believed were certainly burning in hell—his thinking a kind of postcolonial Stockholm syndrome.

  When we were alone, Aji whispered to me in her gritty voice, “You must make sure they bury me in Hindu rites, beta.” She wanted her body reduced to ashes and taken to Ganga ghat, which meant the ocean.

  She wanted to merge with the divine through connection of all waters—the Ganga River flowing into the sea purified the brine, transforming it into the mystical waters, despite the truth and punishment of Kalapani.

  But her children who’d become Christian wanted something else for their mother.

  She had no recourse; Aji was a pawn in their game of class ascendancy. She was never educated by missionaries.

  There were only a handful of people to whom Aji expressed that she did not want a Christian burial. But in my family, the people who speak loudest are the ones who are heard. To most, Aji couldn’t even speak. She wanted to create as much peace in whatever situation she was in. She told her Christian children to bury her in a Lutheran service.

  No one listened to me as I spoke what I knew to be the truth—that Aji wanted to be cremated. She wanted to pacify the insistence of her children. She wanted merger. She wanted to go home, not to be buried in frozen soil.

  I thought back on all that my Aji had given to me. She entrusted her songs and stories to me. She expressed her final desires to me. I now had a problem: how could I give my Aji what she wanted, what she deserved? I wanted to send her soul off with love. It was poetry, in the end, that connected us profoundly, and I sent her off with a poem in which I set her ashes adrift in the flow of the Ganga ghat—the Ganga River, the river that I bathed in, the river she was named for.

  Kashi, City of Light

  for Aji, named Ganga

  A silver moon bass clefs a still river;

  clay lamps lick golden the water,

  ink swirls with stars. Marigold petals

  drift before dawn, constellations.

  Ganga sings, brushing her silver hair:

  ham kaise jabo sasural,

  chunari mein lagal daag,

  how will I go to my in-laws,

  my veil is stained.

  Toward her lover’s humid voice,

  her cheeks studded with diamonds,

  she descends into the holiest of cities.

  Toronto

  My family made arrangements to go to Toronto first thing. I would meet my father at the Toronto Pearson International Airport. He picked me up in a rental car and we went straight to Auntie Nisha’s house. She was his first cousin and Leila’s mother—the only aunt I felt safe with in Pap’s extended family. Auntie Nisha never said anything bad against me, never tried to cut us down with her words. We whispered to each other. Mom would be delayed, as would be Emily and Emile.

  The next morning, we went to the funeral home in Brampton. It was cold. Spring had not yet decided whether to commit to its carpeting of crocuses. I looked around the gray suburban sprawl. What flower would want to spring here in this desolation of grief and concrete?

  The hallway was carpeted in checkered purple and yellow, fresh lilies perfumed the foyer. The funeral director asked us who we were there for. I held onto my father’s coat. I didn’t want to take it in.

  He led us into a well-lit room with the casket propped up like an altar. She should have been wrapped in a white cloth. This all felt so wrong. The top half of the casket was opened, on the bottom half, a lace spread. It was the shape of horses crocheted into a large doily.

  Soon Auntie Baby arrived from New Mexico and began to speak to Aji’s cold body. “We heard the owl and we should have known. And we heard the shoveling outside—the dog barked three times. Now you’ve gone to Pa.” The halogens hummed above us.

  Aji told her Christian children what they wanted to hear, not what she wanted to say. She knew how to play a game where she vanished completely for the good of her family. I couldn’t do that myself. I had to speak. The family ostracized me anyway—what difference would it make if I were vocal about what I knew to be true?

  My aunts had assembled in the viewing room. Each one tear-smeared, grief-stricken. Auntie Sonia held Pua whose lip trembled. She held her weeping sister in all of the tenderness that she had.

  “Don’t cry,” Auntie Sonia said to Pua as she patted her hair down. Auntie Rani stood behind and fished out a tissue from her pocket. Pua wiped her eyes. I went up to the casket and touched my Aji’s feet. Her body was cold. Her lipstick was the wrong color. Aji never wore lipstick. I sang quietly to Aji’s body.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Auntie Sonia. She pulled me in for a hug and said, “I’m so sorry, Raimie.” I held her and she cried.

  “They gave her the wrong lipstick,” I said. We both laughed with wet cheeks.

  I looked at my father. His lip quivered. I wasn’t the only one who loved this woman. She had so many people who respected her and admired her for who she was—no matter how she said the word car.

  A Poem for Aji

  My mother and siblings were held up because of snow on the day of the funeral. They were not there when it came time to make speeches. Uncle after aunt spoke about Aji and how they loved her. She was their best friend. After the main eulogies had been delivered the pastor asked if there was anyone else who wanted to speak to the crowd.

  I lined up with Aji’s thirty grandchildren who were able to come to the funeral to say something on behalf of my brother and sister. I was alone before my father’s entire family, the entire family who whispered about me behind my back. The church was long and made of dark wood. Dark wood paneled the ceilings and made the white marble altar gleam.

  I walked up to the microphone and began with a Hindu mantra that I knew, one that accompanied both daily meditations and Hindu death rites from Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. I chant
ed while the Hindu elders joined me.

  om asato ma sadgamaya

  tamaso ma jyotirgamaya

  mrityor ma amritam gamaya

  om shanti shanti shanti

  Lead me from untruth to Truth

  Lead me from dark to light

  Lead me from death to immortality

  Let there be peace, peace, peace

  My father looked away from me, from his mother.

  I continued, “I speak on behalf of my brother and sister who are not here. This is a poem that I wrote for Aji that I’ve entitled “Ajiya.” In Bhojpuri the ‘ya’ at the end means that my Aji was very dear to me. In the poem are words to a song that Aji used to sing that you all must have heard. We are lost without her.” I unfolded the poem and read.

  Ajiya

  I want to sing a dirge whose words

  you will ride into forever.

  I know you are singing too. You have taught

  us all the sounds a heart can bear.

  When they cover your body—

  I will wrap you in your own song:

  aawan yaawan kahe gaye

  ke dole barhomas

  patta tute daar se ke

  legaye pavan urdai

  aise chhute yaar se

  ki man kahan na jai

  kaise kaise zabana

  badal gaye re

  Eighty-nine years is a long song to sing, unhurriedly,

  even when the heart stops, love does not.

  dil roke ta piyar kabhi nahi ruki hai.

  It endures states of matter, span of continents,

  time between grand and pickni.

  Ajiya,

  I sing you to love in its native language.

  Disavowal

  Three months after Aji’s death I received word from Finishing Line Press. They had accepted a collection of songs I translated from Aji’s Bhojpuri into Creole and English. These were only some of the songs she taught me when I asked her to sing.

  My father’s brothers and sisters and their children refused to buy it except for one uncle—the other one whom Aji had told that she wanted to be cremated, Uncle Naresh. I wrote to Jake to tell him that Aji’s words would soon be in print. We used to talk about her songs and stories when we were children and I thought he would share my excitement. I thought my family would think better of Aji’s knowledge, that it was vast and nuanced.

  Jake replied to my email and told me to stop selling our grandmother’s words. They are not mine. No one should have to pay for them. He said that he wouldn’t stop me from publishing or try to stop anyone from buying the chapbook but that I should be ashamed to profit off our grandmother’s death. That all the aunts thought so, too.

  I was confounded. I wouldn’t make any money off a chapbook that translated my Aji’s Guyanese Bhojpuri folk songs—how could they not see that? This was never about money for me, it couldn’t ever have been about money. I wanted people to be able to understand my Aji as I understood her. I thought that I was doing something for the family, preserving an inheritance.

  I called my mother.

  “If any other cousin had written anything about your Aji, your father’s family would have all praised them,” Mom said. “They are embarrassed that their mother was a Hindu. You’re holding a mirror up to them and showing them what they refused to see when Ma was alive.”

  Did they really not want to hear these songs and stories because an antiman collected them? Or was it because it made them confront the truth of their Hindu pasts? My veil’s stain was this: I was an antiman unworthy of support. They wanted me to believe that what I thought and knew was wrong. That I was wrong. That Aji didn’t know what was best for herself. That I should try to wash off the stain, for it would forever bear the marking of the sinful, the bullah, the antiman who doesn’t belong in the family.

  “There’s something else,” my mother continued. “Before she died, Ma gave me her engagement ring—you know the one?”

  “Yeah, the ring with SM engraved on it? She give you that ring? All of her daughters will be pissed if they find out.” My words stuck in my throat.

  “She said, ‘Aw beti me na get nut’in’ to gi’ a you. Tek dis,’ and she pulled it off of her finger and pressed it into my hand,” Mom said.

  “Do you think it was because she knew that Pap was so mean to you and tried to keep you from your family?” I asked.

  “No. I mean, she was aware of that—but the real reason is because I think she really wanted you to have it,” she said. I felt dizzy. “What makes you say that.”

  “Well, you know she thought of you as someone who wanted to know all her history and stories. I think she wanted you to have it so that you would always know that you belonged—that you belonged with her,” Mom said. “When you come home next time I will give it to you.”

  As I hung up the phone I was shaking.

  The next time I saw my mother she gave me Aji’s ring on a gold chain so that I could wear it around my neck, grazing my heart.

  Pieces of Aji’s Songs

  Kabir says, “Listen my brothers,” and does not mention any women.

  We used to sing this song to plant rice.

  I will not go to my in-laws—a veiled attempt to articulate women’s

  trauma of leaving the father’s house, a piece in a patriarchal game.

  The veil is the body. We will leave it when we go home.

  India mein, langtime people been mad like a hell.

  How the world has changed.

  Leaving Toronto

  The night after the funeral I went back to Auntie Nisha’s house and turned down the comforter. I remembered how one of Aji’s nephews—her sister’s son—had come up to me, his gold rings shining in the spotlight that illuminated the casket.

  “Your Aji was really proud of you, you know. She used to talk about how she had one grandson who spoke Hindi and was learning all of our traditions.” People milled about after the ceremony and before we put her in the ground. It was raining outside and cold. “She said that you knew her like none other of her grandchildren, that you took time to learn her songs.”

  I hadn’t realized that Aji talked about me, or that anyone was proud of what I was doing. People only told me I was wasting my time—Aji had nothing important to teach. But there on that purple-and-yellow checkerboard carpet, an unexpected play. Aji trusted me. She could see me, too. I am something. I will love myself. I am beautiful. I am worthy.

  I lay at night and stared at the ceiling fan, my brother snoring beside me. I drifted off into sleep and was in Aji’s Scarborough tenement in the early nineties long before she was moved to Brampton. It didn’t feel like a dream. I poked my finger into my palm to see if I was awake. I was awake.

  The apartment smelled like curry. Barah was frying in the kitchen. Aji was in the bedroom, her long hair tied back in a bun. She was ill. The lead paint had not yet begun to peel—it was her one-bedroom apartment that she’d had when I was a child. She wore a pink floral nightgown and sat up in bed. A faint buzzing whined in the background; the sound was said to keep cockroaches at bay.

  “Aji, me gone.” Aji, I’m leaving, I said, folding my hands in pranam.

  “You gone?” She turned her head to face me. Her glasses were on—large cataract lenses that made her eyes look like two bright celestial bodies.

  I approached her to touch her feet and to kiss her cheek. She grabbed my face and kissed my forehead and each cheek.

  “Me love you, Aji.” I said, choking on the words as they pricked my throat.

  “Me know. You me loving son. Jug jug jiye, beta. You must care you self, you hear?”

  The next morning, I didn’t tell anyone about my dream. They wouldn’t be able to hear me anyway. I had my final goodbye. Aji came to me again like Zeke said she would. I could smell the curry of her Scarborough flat. Aji no longer lived only in Toronto. Now she was everywhere.

  Barsi: One Year Work

  I.

  I dream I am a humpback

&nb
sp; afraid of where

  light does not penetrate

  past layers of ocean,

  thick with living.

  How swimming is like flying:

  pectorals like wings,

  the water ripples

  bending for miles—

  dhire dhire aaja nindiya

  more piya jaibe bidesiya.

  Sleep come slowly, slowly

  at dawn my love departs.

  II.

  A child traces the body of a pilot whale

  who swam too far inland.

  The first day we see it, I hold my nephew.

  Over the deep, a cloud twists

  until it spins into nothing,

  the last breath

  expelled into a fifteen-foot cloud.

  Drops again become sea.

  We return the next day

  to the carcass in saline outline,

  a fallen palm frays. My nephew says,

  Look. Feathers.

  III.

  I woke one night

  to my canaries trembling,

  a red-shouldered hawk perched

  outside the window.

  When they died

  I wrapped their bodies in plastic,

  harrowed dual graves

  beneath the oak sapling

  with my bare hands.

  I could not bear the quiet—

  after six months

  I dug them up

  to hold their fragile bones.

  So little was left.

  Emily ran to mom—

  I couldn’t hide

  the dirt under my fingernails.

  She said, I will never forget their colors—

  I did not tell her

  I found only one.

  IV.

  I sing back to you,

  bird- or whale-song,

  chunari pahen ke

  piya se milenge.