Queen of Dreams

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  She takes out the big clear-glass plate that serves as her palette as she thinks this; she takes out a new, primed canvas. She feels its spackled surface; its smell is as familiar to her as Jona’s breath. She squeezes out Naples yellow and yellow ochre, cobalt and cyan and burnt sienna, a bit of Prussian blue for the shadows, and considers the unfamiliar geometry of foliage. Her thick black hair, tied back mercilessly with one of Jona’s old ribbons, threatens to escape and curl around her face. Deceptive, those baby curls. Along with the ridged planes of her cheekbones, her high, unlined forehead (which is shiny right now with concentration), and the small mole in the exact center of her lower lip, they charm strangers into believing that she is innocent and high-spirited and optimistic, and that this is so because nothing bad has ever happened to her. If they looked into her eyes, wide, with a depth in them that is almost purple (like night, like a new bruise, like the aparajita flower that her mother has never described to her), they would see that this is only partly true. But few people care to do that—and of these even fewer know how to go about it. Rakhi is not unhappy about this. As she told Belle once, she prefers to remain misunderstood.

  The eucalyptus grove was wet when she got there this morning, a fact that surprised her. It hadn’t rained near her house, though it was misty the way it usually is in Berkeley. But in the grove there were puddles of water. She had to step around them to keep her shoes dry. And then another surprise: there was a man in the eucalyptus grove. A rare occurrence, so early on a weekday. He was practicing Tai Chi.

  She had come to the grove because she planned to paint it, and this made her nervous because she’d never painted trees before. Until now, most of her paintings had been about India—an imagined India, an India researched from photographs, because she’d never traveled there. She’d painted temples and cityscapes and women in a marketplace and bus drivers at lunch, but never trees, not as her main focus. But last night it had struck her that she needed to do something new, something challenging. It was a thought she was already regretting.

  She was annoyed when she first saw him. She had wanted the grove to herself, its energies undisturbed. But he was far enough away that after a while she did not mind. She watched his clean underwater movements and thought, This is how people were meant to use their bodies. From where she stood, it seemed to her that he had beautiful hands. He was dressed in loose-fitting white clothes, and the sun, filtering hesitantly through eucalyptus branches, lent iridescence to his black hair. She could not see his face clearly— just a hint of olive skin and high cheekbones. For a moment she wondered who he was. If he was Indian. She wanted to walk up and look into his face. There was a tingling in the soles of her feet, precursor to desire, which she’d thought she had put away after things went wrong with her marriage. She shut her eyes to control it. She was older now; she was a mother. She knew from experience that the tingling pointed the direct route to trouble, and she’d had enough trouble in her life already.

  She fastens the canvas to the easel, tightens the screws to hold it steady. She loads a brush with color and makes that first pure sweep across the virgin background. This is the moment when anything is possible.

  The phone rings.

  Annoyed, she wonders who it could be. Belle knows not to disturb her in the morning, which is her painting time. Her mother would be busy with her clients. Her father would be at work. Besides, he calls her only when he is drunk, on weekends.

  She waits impatiently through the rings for the machine to turn itself on. A voice begins to leave a message. The phone is shut in a closet at the other end of the apartment (she puts it there at painting time), so she cannot decipher the words. But she knows the voice.

  Sonny.

  She should have guessed it! She feels herself tensing, a tightness that starts in the backs of her calves and moves up her body into her fingertips. She grips the brush more firmly. I refuse to stop for him. But the truth is that she can’t stop for anyone, not right now.

  She tried to explain this to Sonny once. How at a certain moment the colors take over the eyes, the hands. How she must surrender her body to their rhythm. How, until the movement is done, nothing else matters.

  She had not expected him, who was not an artist, to understand.

  They were at the table, finishing dinner. He was eating and flipping through a music magazine. She can never remember the names of his magazines—except Playboy, over which they once fought. He took small bites of the sandesh she had made. This was when she still cooked elaborate meals—appetizers, rotis rolled out fresh, rich curries in almond sauce, traditional Indian desserts that required hours of culinary acrobatics. He was careful to brush the sweet white crumbs from his fingers between bites. It never ceased to amaze her that a man like him, so Dionysian in his other appetites, should have such dainty table manners. He didn’t say anything for so long that she thought he had not heard. He was often off in places in his head. Or perhaps he had nothing to say. But as she was taking the dishes to the sink, he murmured, “It’s like being in the middle of lovemaking, isn’t it?”

  She had been silenced by the exactness of the comparison. He humbled her like that from time to time, making her see invisible things about herself, articulating what she had no words for. It was one of the things she had loved in him before the night that had spoiled everything.

  As soon as she thinks the words, she knows they aren’t true. A relationship doesn’t spoil in one night, like milk. There had been hints for a while, but she had chosen not to see. She had gone around and around the millstone of her life that she was so in love with, like the blinkered bullocks she had seen in a photograph of an Indian village.

  Bulls can be forgiven their blindness. She had never forgiven herself for hers. That is why her calves grow tight when Sonny calls, and there’s a pain like a stuck fishbone in her throat.

  She finishes a set of strokes, drops the brush into a jar of turpentine, and picks up another. She adds colors, shapes. She thins the paint carefully with linseed oil so that the lines of objects grow fluid. When their edges bleed into each other to form unplanned-for designs, her scalp prickles with pleasure.

  But the phone is ringing again, just when she needs all her concentration.

  If it’s Sonny calling back, he’s going to be one sorry puppy.

  But this time the voice is female. Muffled and closeted as it is, she can’t quite place it, though it is tantalizingly familiar. She registers the gritty purple anxiety of the tone. The whole world, yin and yang, is conspiring against her today. Well, this woman will have to wait, too.

  She’s halfway into the first layer of the painting, which is a close-up of a tree, texture of leaves and peeling bark. Sunlight glints at its edge like an uncertain memory. A breeze shakes the chunky eucalyptus blooms in the left corner free of their pollen. She stares at the easel, trying to feel the life behind the brushstrokes. Below what she has made, there are other layers waiting. New colors to introduce. Ivory, black, vermilion, a hint of sea salt heavying the air. She touches the lower right corner tentatively. She needs something more here. Perhaps—? She hadn’t planned on it, but suddenly she decides to paint in the man with the beautiful hands.

  The phone calls have done their job, though, waking the whisper voice that lives inside her skull. What if Sonny was calling about Jona, who’s staying with him this week? it asks. What if that second call was from Jona’s school? What if something terrible happened to her? If you were a good mother, it says with disapproval, you’d stop right now and check. The whisper voice calls up catastrophes behind her squeezed-shut eyes. It makes her hand shake.

  If she paints any more now, she’ll ruin the entire composition.

  She abandons the painting and goes to the closet where the answering machine waits, winking its malicious Cyclops eye. She jabs the replay button. A line from a movie she once saw flits through her mind: Life gets in the way of art.

  That pretty much sums up my existence, she thinks.

&nbs
p; But as she’s told Belle, she’s not complaining. Compared to how things were three years ago, when she’d just moved out and was waiting for the divorce to come through, her life is roses, roses all the way.

  Sonny called her apartment every morning those days. His messages, excruciating in detail, were always the same. He didn’t understand why she was doing this to him. Whatever she thought he’d done, he was sorry for it. They (he really meant she) had made a terrible mistake, they needed to get back together. He adored her. He used his most helpless, guilt-generating voice.

  “I wouldn’t pick up,” she told Belle, “but he knew I was there, listening. He knew I wouldn’t be able to paint anything decent the rest of the day. After a month of those calls, I was ready to kill him.”

  “Then what happened?” Belle asked.

  “He stopped.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Yeah,” she said, but inside she wondered, as she had often before, if her mother had had anything to do with it.

  Sonny’s message says: Dearly beloved Riks, this is just to inform you that Jo and I are taking off up the coast for Mendocino. Paul says there’s a bunch of whales up there, some blues even. He says we can bunk with him for a couple of days, maybe go out on the water in his boat. Jo’ll miss a bit of school, but I’m sure you won’t mind. She’ll be learning more important things from the great university of life.

  She hates it when he speaks in clichés like that. He knows this. That is why he teases her with them. Here are some other things he knows: She disapproves of Jona missing school—her daughter has little enough stability in her life. She disapproves of Paul, who’s an okay photographer but who smokes far too much pot to be trusted with a boat or a child. She hates it when Sonny upsets the routine she’s worked so hard to establish for Jona and herself, and exposes her daughter to dangers both physical and moral. And all without asking her permission.

  Okay, okay, she tells herself. Let’s not get melodramatic.

  You’re just afraid Jona will have too much fun with Sonny, interjects her whisper voice, which never misses an opportunity. You’re afraid she won’t want to come back to you.

  I’ll deal with you later, she tells the voice.

  The second message is from Belle. It says, “Rikki, please please please come down to the shop right away. Something terrible has happened.”

  She sighs. She loves Belle (a.k.a. Balwant Kaur, though not even her parents are allowed to call her that) and always has, ever since they were roommates during their freshman year at Berkeley. They’ve nursed each other through romantic troubles, failing grades, bouts of flu and the pressures that only Indian parents know to apply to their offspring. They’ve loaned each other money and underwear, courage and lipstick, and held each other’s heads when they threw up after drinking too much at parties to which they shouldn’t have gone. They’ve confessed to each other things that they’ve never dared to tell anyone before, and seen themselves newly through each other’s eyes. They’ve stayed up nights talking about how Rakhi sometimes feels too American, how Belle would love to shed the last vestiges of her desi-ness. Without Belle, Rakhi doesn’t think she could have survived her divorce. Belle knows her weak points, her stubbornness, her suspicions, her passion for her art, and her fear that she’ll never be good enough at it. How hard it is for her to change her mind once it’s made up. How she can’t bear to let a mystery be. How much she hates Sonny and loves her mother. How much they both aggravate her. Rakhi accepts Belle’s wildnesses, the way she’s often restless, as though something’s gnawing at her insides. The way she moves from boyfriend to boyfriend, never letting them become important. Her constant fights with her parents, good country folk bewildered by their hummingbird daughter who refuses to let them pull her back into their safe Sikh nest. She knows how Belle loves the store and how she loves drama, a combination that often lures her into exaggeration.

  It’s probably the espresso machine broken down again, she thinks. Still, she pulls off her painter’s smock and pauses only to soak her brushes in a jar in the sink.

  The small kitchen is in its usual disarray of good intentions gone awry. The dinner dishes haven’t been washed. The mung beans she soaked with virtuous resolution three days back, intending to cook dal, have begun to sprout. She’ll have to call her mother and find out what one can make with mung that has sprouted already. The table in the dining alcove is piled with library books and art catalogs and a big blue bowl filled with apricots from the landlady’s tree—and unpaid bills. (Ah, the banality of bills, another curse in the artist’s life.) Leaning on the western wall is an oil painting, almost done: sunset on the peaks of Kanchenjunga. She has left it there so she can examine it from time to time and ascertain what needs to be added. Jona’s discarded tights and ballet slippers lie by the window, next to the avocado plant she’s been trying to grow in Rakhi’s favorite mug. The eastern wall has been given over to Jona’s artwork, rainbow drawings of dwarflike people with intense black-markered eyes.

  Rakhi likes the comfortable clutter of her life, the things she loves gathered around her like a shawl against the winterliness of the world. It surprises her (when she thinks of it, which is deliberately not often) that she used to be such an anxious housekeeper when she was married to Sonny, arguing with bitter fervor about picking up wet towels from the bathroom floor and replacing caps on toothpaste tubes. She feels a certain pity when she thinks of that time, that self. Such an earnest wife-self, wanting so much, her stance one of perpetual leaning forward, as though perfection was a town just a little farther down the road. She didn’t know then that perfection had nothing to do with happiness.

  And now you’ve learned that happiness lives in messy rooms? her whisper voice taunts.

  Tomorrow, she tells herself as she makes her way to the door, wincing as she steps on a sharp piece of Lego camouflaged by carpet. I’ll clean it all up tomorrow. Be a good example to Jona. I’ll even vacuum.

  Yeah, right, says her whisper voice.

  4

  FROM THE

  DREAM JOURNALS

  In the night I dreamed of a golden chain breaking. I could hear the links, snap-snap, like chicken bones. When I woke it was three A.M. The tendons in my back ached with my attempts to hold the chain together. I knew I wouldn’t sleep again.

  I went to the landing and looked out on the sickle moon. When I opened the window, the night was full of the smell of wild fennel, which doesn’t grow anywhere near our house. The elders used to say fennel healed internal wounds. We cultivated it in the caves and gave it to the dreamers who came to us. Could I take it as a hopeful sign?

  But as I stood there the wind turned, and now the smell was of salted fish. I went and sat on the empty bed in Rakhi’s room, where she sleeps with Jonaki when she comes to visit. I touched the pillow to gain a little comfort. It was hot to my hand. In troubled moments, the elders would recite from the Brihat Swapna Sarita. I did the same now, though I have forgotten many of the cantos:

  The dream comes heralding joy.

  I welcome the dream.

  The dream comes heralding sorrow.

  I welcome the dream.

  The dream is a mirror showing me my beauty.

  I bless the dream.

  The dream is a mirror showing me my ugliness.

  I bless the dream.

  My life is nothing but a dream

  From which I will wake into death,

  which is nothing but a dream of life.

  But in the morning, after my husband has left for work, when the woman comes (as I knew she would), it makes it no easier to tell her what I must say.

  She’s older than I thought she would be, with gray woven into her short, curly hair and crinkles cut into the edges of her eyes.

  She says, We’re thinking of having a baby. We’ve been married just a year now, but we met late and we’re not getting younger. That’s why I came to see you. People say you can tell if this is a lucky time for me, or not.

 
Have you had a dream recently? I ask. One that you remember?

  I dreamed of a hillside twice, she says, grasses swept by wind.

  I ask what color the grasses were, were they dry or living, but she cannot remember.

  Far away there was a light. She knew it to be the light of her home. It glimmered welcome, but she couldn’t find the path to it. There were thorns; they pricked her feet.

  Was there pain?

  But no blood, she says. Her voice pleads for me to say something hopeful.

  Then, halfway up the hill, her husband appeared. He held out his hand. From the concern in his eyes she could tell how much he loved her. Her voice grows shy and grateful as she says this.

  She put out her hand and miraculously, their fingers touched. But it wasn’t her husband anymore—the face was a stranger’s, dangerous and attractive.

  What was he wearing?

  Her brows crease. Maybe a coat, or a shawl.

  Was it gray, like fog? Was it white, like bones?

  Maybe, she says doubtfully. Then she lowers her eyes.

  I wanted that man more than I’ve ever wanted anything. I was ready to leave my husband and follow him. The longing was like someone had thrust a knife into me. My stomach ached even after I woke up.

  How can I tell her of the cancer that has started spreading its web through her? Soon the pain will be so bad that one half of her will long for death while the other half struggles to escape it. And her husband, paralyzed by his own misery—he won’t be strong enough to help her.

  Who is that strange man? she asks.

  The elders, who believed in saying the truth whole, would have told her. But I broke from their ways long ago. I say, The dream is a warning to take better care of your health.

  It is? she says doubtfully. That’s what those images meant? But I do take good care. Exercise, vitamins, soy powder, breast self-exams—you name it. I feel pretty healthy.