Queen of Dreams

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  We watch from the window of the Chai House as movers unload another truckload of expensive-looking equipment and wheel them into Java.

  Belle gives me a you’d-better-get-back-to-the-phone-and-make-that-call look.

  I give her a why-do-we-have-to-drag-my-mother-into-this look.

  “Rikki, this is not the time to indulge in false pride. We need your mom’s help.”

  “We can handle it ourselves,” I say in my most confident tones.

  But inside, I’m afraid. I’ve never been a planner. Mostly, I’ve fallen into things that life has swept up against me. Going through with the divorce is the only difficult decision I’ve made. My mother, now: she’s the fighter in the family. Once she decides on a goal, she never lets go. “Like the tortoise,” my father would say, “in the tale of the hare and the tortoise.” With a wry smile and a wink, he’d add, “And guess who’s the hare?”

  I was never sure if he meant himself or me.

  But there were races my mother didn’t win. She never could get my father to stop drinking, though periodically she’d get mad and throw out his bottles.

  “Why should I quit?” he told us once. “It gives me happiness—or keeps me from sorrow, the same thing. And I’m not harming anyone, am I?”

  His drinking was erratic. I could never understand what brought it on. Sometimes he’d go for a month without touching alcohol. Other times he’d start drinking on a Friday night and continue through the weekend. He only drank red wine—he claimed it was good for his heart—and was never abusive when he drank. He sat in the corner of the living room and played songs by dead people on his antiquated stereo, mostly love songs by Sehgal or Rafi or Kishore Kumar, though sometimes he’d surprise me by playing Lady Day. From time to time he would sing along—he had a powerful baritone—a rapt and distant smile on his face. When he got too drunk to sing, he’d curl up on the couch and cover himself with a blanket he kept ready for that purpose, and go to sleep. On Monday morning he’d go off to work, apparently unaffected by his weekend escapade.

  I never hated him for drinking. Not until my mother died.

  My mother tried to stop him every way she knew. After the binge was over, she’d cook his favorite dishes. She’d stand behind his chair, massaging his neck. “You’re going to kill yourself, drinking so much!” she’d say. She’d make her voice light. Only I, glancing across the table, would see the troubled look in her eyes. I waited for her to ask him why he did this to himself, but she never did. She did beg him to go see someone—a doctor, the priest at the Shiva Vishnu temple, an AA counselor. But he never listened.

  “As long as I don’t kill you,” he’d joke, “you shouldn’t complain.”

  “Maybe you’ll do that, too, one of these days,” my mother would say, annoyed.

  “Where’d you get that? In one of your dreams?”

  Her face would lose all expression whenever he said that, as though she’d shut something off inside. She didn’t like either of us mentioning her dreams.

  “Okay, okay,” my father would say. “I apologize. Forgive me—please?” He’d go down on one knee in front of her and throw open his arms, Bollywood style. “Mere sapno ke rani,” he’d sing in his husky voice until she smiled and said, “Oh, stop it, you ridiculous man!” His words—my Hindi was spotty at best, but I think they meant queen of my dreams. Or was it my queen of dreams ?

  6

  Rakhi

  There were two kinds of interpreting that my mother did, though there may have been others. My knowledge of this facet of her life is furtive, fragmented, gleaned through eavesdropping.

  The first—as she had reluctantly told me—was when someone came to her with a dream, and she explained to her what it meant. (But why do I say her? I suspect that men came to my mother, too, though I imagine them to be more awkward about it.)

  “A dream is a telegram from the hidden world,” I heard her say once. “Only a fool or an illiterate person ignores it.”

  The second kind of interpretation was more complicated. I’ll get to it later.

  I learned early not to question my mother about her work. Though she talked freely with me about matters that were taboo in Indian families—boyfriends, bodily changes, bad things that happened at school—she was silent on the subject of dreams. If I brought it up, she would look distressed. Sometimes she’d leave the house. Once she took the car and didn’t return for hours. I was beside myself with worry, certain she’d had an accident. I think it was soon after that that I stopped asking questions. Or maybe it was after she’d given up on teaching me.

  Let me not misrepresent facts. My mother wasn’t the one who wanted to teach me to interpret dreams. I was crazy for it myself.

  As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be an interpreter. But when I turned twelve, I grew obsessed with the idea. I saw it as a noble vocation, at once mysterious and helpful to the world. To be an interpreter of the inner realm seemed so Indian. (In thinking this, of course, I deluded myself. Weren’t the American papers filled with advertisements about psychics?) I hungered for all things Indian because my mother never spoke of the country she’d grown up in—just as she never spoke of her past. But if I could be a dream interpreter like her, surely I would understand her without the need for words.

  Not all my motives were so pure. I daydreamed sometimes of how my talent would make the more popular girls in the school befriend me, how it would force Elroy Thomas, who played drums in Band, to notice me at last. I imagined running my hands over his hair, its tight, springy curls.

  When I asked my mother, she shook her head. “First, you can’t give this knowledge to people who might want to use it for selfish gain.” (Here she looked at me until I looked away.) “And second, you can’t give this knowledge, period.”

  I wasn’t convinced. “How did you learn, then?”

  “I have to make dinner.”

  I caught the edge of her sari as she tried to escape to the kitchen. I told her I wasn’t letting her go until she told me the whole story.

  “There’s no story to tell. I had a gift. A distant aunt who was a dream teller recognized it when she came to visit.”

  “But how?”

  “I don’t remember very well. I think she made me sleep in the same room. Anyway, when she left, she took me back to live with her.”

  I stared at her, trying to imagine how it must be to leave everything you love behind and go off with a stranger. “You left, just like that? Didn’t your mother stop you? Didn’t you miss her?”

  She stared down at the backs of her hands. Her unhappiness was a tangible thing. I could have held it in my palm, like an injured bird. I’d never noticed before that the ends of her nails were ragged, as though someone had been biting them. My mother, biting her nails? It shocked me so much, I said, “Never mind. Tell me what your aunt taught you. Did she give you lessons?”

  “I guess you could call them lessons.” She spoke slowly, the words sleepwalking through her mouth. “But they came later, and only because I already had the gift.”

  “And I don’t have it?” I tried to make my voice nonchalant, but it cracked a little.

  She hesitated. “I don’t know for sure. I haven’t sensed it, that’s all. Maybe I’m just too close to you to see it.”

  I knew what she was saying, under the careful kindness. But I couldn’t bear to give up yet.

  “I want you to try, Mom,” I said. “Really try, one more time. Let me sleep with you.”

  She drew in her breath to say no—I could see it in the set of her mouth. But then she agreed. Was it because she loved me? Was it some deep, chromosomal guilt, for not having passed on the gift to me?

  I slept deeply that night, waking in the morning with a slight headache. My mother’s face was drawn, her eyes rimmed with dark circles.

  “Do you remember anything? Anything you saw?” she asked. She sounded hoarse, as though she were coming down with the flu.

  When I shook my head, she looked disappointed a
nd relieved at the same time. “It didn’t work,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Her words were like a door closing, with her on the other side, beyond my reach.

  “It’s all right,” I said, turning away, my voice as casual as I could make it. “It doesn’t matter. Thanks for trying, anyway.”

  I’ve never been able to fool my mother. I could feel her eyes on me, sharp and sad. But she only said, “Maybe it’s for the best. Being a dream interpreter isn’t as glamorous as you think.”

  A year later, I would learn how right she was.

  The second kind of interpretation occurred when my mother dreamed. These dreams were not about herself, or us, or anyone she knew. All the people in these dreams were strangers, and usually they didn’t believe in dreams. Or they believed—but in spite of themselves. Which was worse, because when you’re forced to believe in something you wish you could dismiss, it makes you an angry person.

  My mother’s duty was to warn these angry people of what was about to happen to them.

  This particular morning my mother had a migraine. She’d get a blinding headache once in a rare while—though looking back, I think it was probably more often than my father or I realized. She wasn’t the complaining type. Or maybe she kept deliberately silent because she didn’t want us to realize that the headaches occurred whenever she’d had a stranger-dream.

  But this morning the headache must have been really bad, because after she’d made my father his breakfast and he’d gone off to work, she lay down on the living room carpet and asked me to bring her a blanket and a bottle of aspirin. She swallowed a handful of the white pills and asked me to tuck the blanket around her. I did so uneasily—her limbs felt slack and heavy. In a raspy voice that didn’t sound like hers, she added that she wanted me to stay home from school.

  This was unlike my mother, for whom school was up there next to God. It scared me. What she said next scared me more.

  “I need your help,” she said.

  My mother was always asking me to help—to wash vegetables, to make a bed, to mail letters, to take a bag of ripe oranges from our backyard to the Yangs, who lived down the street. When I was younger, it had made me feel indispensable, but recently I’d realized that everything I did for her, she could have done herself in half the time. She asked me only so that I’d learn what I needed to know before she launched me into my adult life.

  But today, for the first time, she really did need me.

  I sat there by her, wondering if I should call the doctor. But which doctor should I call? I knew only the pediatrician she took me to see. Did my mother even have a doctor? My heart thumped guiltily, out of rhythm, as I realized how little I knew, or had cared to know, of my mother’s life.

  As though she sensed what I was thinking, my mother opened her eyes—they were veined with red—and shook her head slightly. Then she beckoned me close. “Go to the sewing room,” she whispered with effort, “and look in the closet. Under the extra pillows, there’s a plastic box with a blue lid—”

  I waited for her to say more, but she’d closed her eyes again. Her breath came in gasps.

  I ran to the sewing room, to the big closet that took up one of its walls. I tried to slide the door open, but it got stuck on something partway, so that I could barely wedge my body in through the opening. I’d never paid much attention to the closet before this— it was the place where household odds and ends were stored. But today as I peered in, it seemed very dark, and larger than it should be. Maybe it extended on and on, beyond my seeing? (I had read the Narnia Chronicles.) I put out a hand, my heart beating rapidly. But here was the back wall, disappointingly solid. In the living room I heard my mother cough. Abashed, I dug through the pile of pillows and found the box. It was a Tupperware box, and not very large, though it was quite heavy. I opened the lid—I couldn’t resist. It was filled with little rows of glass bottles, each the size of an index finger. The glass was a dark brown, so I couldn’t tell what was inside.

  When I brought her the box, my mother gave a wan smile. I waited to see what she was going to do with the bottles, but she sent me to look up a number in the phone book. She spelled out the name I was to look for: Raghavendra, S. P. It wasn’t a name I’d heard before. By the time I located it and copied out the number, she’d finished with the box.

  “Put it back exactly where it was,” she said. “And then get your shoes on. We have to go out.”

  “But you aren’t well enough,” I protested.

  She didn’t say anything, just pushed herself off the floor. She held on to the wall and walked with faltering steps to the shoe closet. I helped her find her chappals and locked the door behind us. The sunlight made her wince and press her hands over her eyes.

  “Do we really have to go?” I asked anxiously. “You’re too sick to be driving—”

  “No driving,” said my mother. She took my arm and, leaning heavily on it, started walking.

  In about ten unsteady minutes, we’d reached the corner gas station. My mother walked around to the side, where the public phone was located. She gripped the telephone and asked me to dial the number I had copied down.

  “Are you sure?” I asked, worried at the turn things were taking. “Do you even know this guy?”

  My mother shook her head. I could hear the ringing through the receiver. A gruff voice said, “Raghavendra speaking.”

  “Mr. Raghavendra,” my mother said, “I’m calling to inform you that your life is in danger. One of the people living in your house is planning to kill you.”

  There was a silence at the other end. Then the voice, hissing and heavy, yet small and tinny at the same time, said, “Who is this?”

  My mother didn’t say anything.

  “Is this a crank call? I’m going to phone the police, have you traced—”

  “Mr. Raghavendra,” my mother said, “you have to believe me. It’s probably your cousin, whom you sponsored from India six months ago. He’s been living in your house since then, right? Does his name start with the letter H?”

  Silence again.

  “I think he’s developed a—relationship—with your wife— and wants you out of the—”

  “How do you know this?” He sounded oddly calm.

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Someone’s put you up to this, yes? A practical joke, yes?”

  “No joke,” my mother said.

  “Then you’re crazy!” He was shouting now. “Completely nuts! I’m going to have you committed. I’m going to come after you personally and—”

  I found myself sobbing. I wasn’t sure what I was more scared of: that the man would somehow learn who my mother was and find her—and by extension, us—as he threatened. Or that he was right, and she was crazy.

  “I did my best, Mr. Raghavendra,” my mother said sadly.

  “Now it’s up to you.”

  And while the man ranted on about what he would do to her once he found her, she replaced the phone with shaking hands. She started off blindly across the parking lot, unaware of a delivery truck that had just turned the corner.

  I screamed. There was a shrieking of brakes. A large, red-faced man leaned out from the truck window and yelled. “Stupid broad! Ain’tcha got eyes in yer head? Coulda gotten killed!”

  My mother didn’t seem to hear him. She made her way to the bushes on the street corner and threw up there. I’d reached her by then. I held her head as she heaved and retched. I glared at passersby who gave us distasteful looks, and wiped her face the best I could with a piece of tissue I had in my pocket. I was ready to run back to the public phone and open the yellow pages and call a doctor—any doctor—but my mother held on to my arm.

  “I’m better now,” she said. And she was. I could see it from her eyes, which were clear again. Whatever had made her ill had left her, now that she had passed on her dream.

  A few months later I gathered my courage and asked my mother about what had happened that morning.

  She loo
ked at me with a small frown and said, “What morning, shona? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I looked at her guileless gaze. She wasn’t lying, I could tell that much. My mouth went dry. Was that part of the dream teller’s gift, this ability to erase something once your duty to it was done? Would she erase us like this one day, my father and myself?

  Or—but no. I didn’t imagine the incident. I’m sure I didn’t.

  I think sometimes of how strongly a person would have to believe in herself—and the truth of her dreaming—to do what my mother did that morning. And many other mornings, I’m sure, though she never again asked for my help. I remember the thick rage in the man’s voice and think, I couldn’t have taken on such a task.

  Thank God my world is simpler. Even my tragedies are simple ones, colored in commonplace hues.

  But here’s what’s crazy: I’m thankful, and then, the next moment, I’m filled with regret. Because I’ll never enter my mother’s underground domain, those caves peopled with possibilities, what may or may not come to pass, where one plus one can equal one hundred—or zero.

  7

  Her mother’s line is still busy. Rakhi is annoyed at this, but not surprised. Her mother spends much of her day on the phone, probably because her clients prefer not to meet her. Perhaps she prefers not to meet them, too. It would be awkward, dangerous even, if they came across each other later—perhaps at the grocery store or a social event, except her mother no longer attends those. This much is definite: Rakhi has never met any of them.

  She listens to the short beeps. Impatience pricks her skin like darts, enters her bloodstream. Like always, her mother’s busy with someone else, she thinks, then is ashamed at the lie. All through her childhood, her mother was careful to ensure that her dream work didn’t disrupt her family’s life. And so she slipped it into pouches, bottles, cracks in the wall not visible to her husband or her daughter. (Only once was there an exception, down by the 7-Eleven, smell of vomit and diesel fumes and crushed oleander leaves—) Maybe that is what Rakhi resents: that her mother, with such meticulous motherness, kept her out of the place she wanted most to enter. That she denied her her birthright and doomed her to the bland life of suburban America.