Queen of Dreams

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  “Some of the time,” he continues, “it’s like reading a novel written by a stranger—I don’t recognize anyone, especially myself. And the parts about the caves, and her—uh, skill—why, it’s like one of those old tales I heard when growing up. Then she has those entries about clients coming to her for help. I can’t believe that all of that went on right in my house.” He sighs. “But they must have happened. At least in her mind.” He gives me an apologetic look, and I know he’s struggling with the same doubt that has plagued me. Did she only imagine it all?

  But I’m not ready to discuss my mother’s failing—if failing it was—with him. While I’m beginning to like the man I’m finding as I peel away that old label father, I have no doubt as to where my loyalties lie. I turn up the car radio to signal that our conversation is over, and the rest of the way we listen to Simon and Garfunkel on the oldies channel, singing about darkness my old friend.

  23

  They sit at the dining table late into the night, father and daughter, compiling lists, trying out ideas. Through their excitement they are dimly aware that this is a first-ever event. Before this, all their interactions took place in the presence of the mother, through her, as it were. She was their conductor, their buffer zone, their translator. She softened the combative edges of their words and clarified their questions, even to themselves. I’ll take care of it, she whispered without words. Don’t you worry. It was like making sounds underwater, the daughter thinks. Soft, rounded, beautiful, ineffective. Now that aquatic mother-medium is gone, taking all comfort with it, and her own words startle her, arrowing through the air with their new, harsh speed.

  They have decided to transform the Chai House into an Indian snack shop, a chaer dokan, as it would be called in Calcutta. They’re going to model it after the shop the father worked in so many years ago, with a few American sanitary touches thrown in. He’ll teach Belle and her to brew tea and coffee the right way, and he’ll cook the snacks himself. He lists them on a sheet of paper: pakora, singara, sandesh, jilebi, beguni, nimki, mihidana. The daughter stares at the list in fascinated misgiving. She doesn’t recognize half the names, has tasted the others only occasionally. Can her father really transform himself into a chef extraordinaire and turn out these items from the mundaneness of flour and sugar syrup, chili, eggplants, peanut oil? Is he heroic enough to take on such a metamorphosis? But she doesn’t wish to lose this brief moment of camaraderie, this floating together on the cloud of their shared dream. So she says, instead, “Tell me about the shop where you worked.” And is plunged into her first Indian story.

  I was only fourteen, he says, when my father lost his job. This was a great blow for our family, for though his job as a clerk in a government office was nothing special, it was the only income we had. Added to the problem was the fact that my father had developed a hacking cough—folks feared it was tuberculosis—and it kept him from finding a new position. He was always tired. The doctor advised us to move him to a place with cool, dry weather, Deoghar maybe, or Hazaribagh.

  I remember that day in the doctor’s office, my mother, embarrassed, whispering that we couldn’t afford such an expensive move. The doctor, a young man, was sympathetic. My mother was a beautiful woman. I would soon learn that most men were sympathetic to her. He told her he’d give her the medicines for free. But my father needed more: clean air and bed rest and an ongoing, expensive diet of chicken soup and fresh fruit—things the doctor couldn’t do much about. Nor could we. We could barely afford a basic meal of watery rice and chilies. Every night for a year my mother and I went to bed hungry so my father could have more to eat. We didn’t let him know this, of course. He already felt he had failed us, and the doctor had warned us not to upset him further.

  My mother found a job in a garment factory, where she spent twelve hours each day stitching quality shirts for men, handling rayon and dacron and polyster silk, materials her husband and son would never wear. At first she was thankful to get the job, but soon she found out that it had its drawbacks. It was strenuous work. The women were crowded into a hot warehouse shed with small windows and only a couple of wheezing ceiling fans. When all of them worked their sewing machines together, the sound was deafening. Many women lost their eyesight. They developed arthritis or chronic back pain or lung diseases from breathing in fabric dust. Some suffered from dizziness, and some told my mother that even at home, they kept hearing the dim roar of the machines. When they grew too ill to work, they were fired. There were always more women to replace them.

  My mother observed all this. The money she was getting was not enough to run the household and take care of my father. Much against her wishes, she’d let me work at the tea shop down the street from our house, and she feared my studies were suffering. Even so, we could barely pay the rent. She knew we’d soon have to move into a smaller place with less light and air, and my father would die.

  So when the overseer on her shift made her a certain proposal, my mother accepted. She began to work fewer hours and bring home more money. The overseer (I learned about him years later) often made her gifts of clothing (stolen from the factory) or food (he had a brother who was the overseer of a canning plant). Did she appreciate his generosity? Did it make her grow fond of him? I don’t know. She told my father she’d received a promotion. She had me cut down my hours at the tea stall so that I worked only a few morning hours. She was able to cook proper meals for my father and spend time with him. In the evenings as I sat at my desk, wearing a new shirt in the latest design and doing my homework, I’d hear their voices as they conversed. The low murmurings would fill me with contentment.

  Such a precarious contentment could not last, of course. Time came for the overseer to retire and move back to his hometown. He wanted to take my mother with him. When she hesitated, he threatened to expose her to my father. My mother was faced with three choices. (She told me this much later, when I was on a visit home from the university.) To leave with the overseer—but to fashion her departure so that my father, who had by now regained his health, would think she was dead. This way he would continue to love her, and remember her as a virtuous wife. Or to dare the overseer to tell his story, and hope that my father would understand that what she did was for love of her family. Her third choice involved poison mixed into a drink—. But that’s another story, and will have to wait for another day. You asked me about the tea shop, and I’ve digressed enough.

  The tea shop was a small one—just a shed, really—at a crossroads, no more than a few wooden chairs and tables set in front of two large clay firepits. On the first Keshto, the owner-manager-cook, boiled tea all day in a large aluminum kettle. On the other, he would cook sweets, stirring the white granules of sandesh in a huge iron wok until they became a smooth paste, or squeezing the dough of jilebis through a hole in a cloth onto sputtering hot oil. Some days he would fry chili pakoras instead, their pungent smell reaching all the way to the bus stop, making passengers late for work because no one could resist stopping for Keshto’s pakoras.

  She leans forward, her eyes shining. Here is the kind of story she has waited for her entire life, has begged, cajoled, badgered her mother for—in vain. And to think it was waiting all this time inside her father, the drinker, the singer, the skeptic who never believed in dreams. The parent she always dismissed, although affectionately, thinking he knew nothing she’d have any use for.

  Were they magical, she asks, the pakoras? Did they give special powers to those who ate them, or make them feel a certain way?

  Not that I know of, her father says. People joked that their unique taste came from the fact that Keshto never changed the oil in his wok—nor washed it either.

  Other rumors, too, floated around Keshto’s shop. How late at night when the city slept the important criminal families of Calcutta would meet in the back of the shop to hand out payments—or collect them. There were seven important families, one night a week reserved for each of them. While Keshto, impassive as a stone Buddha, sat at his wo
k, stirring pantuas till they turned just the right golden brown, inside the shed they decided which of their enemies should live, and which should disappear.

  And was it true? she whispers, reluctant to break the spell.

  He shrugs, though there is a twinkle in his eye. Who knows? People love mysteries. If there isn’t one, they’re quick to make it up. The inner room was ordinary enough. Keshto’s bedding was kept in there, though I never saw him sleep, and a painted tin suitcase that contained his few possessions. Ah, that suitcase! There were stories about that, too. In any case, the room was tiny—no more than six people could have fitted into it at one time. But some mornings when I swept it out, there would be torn scraps of paper, parts of names, some slashed across with red.

  All I know for certain is that though Keshto was gruff toward most people and a hardheaded businessman, for some reason I couldn’t fathom, he was kind to me. In the mornings after I had cleaned up the store, before I went off to school, he made sure I ate well. He wouldn’t let me drink tea—he believed it stunted growth—but he gave me a full glass of milk and a choice of whichever snacks I wanted. And when I came back in the afternoon, he taught me his special recipes, sharing with me little secrets that gave them their special flavor. I learned that to make rasogollas that would be soft and yet not fall apart when boiled in syrup, one had to knead two spoons of sooji into the chhana dough. And that half a cup of oil added into the pakora mix would prevent the spicy balls from soaking up more oil when deep-fried.

  She closes her eyes to hear better, but later she isn’t sure if what she hears are his words or her own longing.

  I learned to grind my own spices and herbs on a pockmarked slab of stone, to curdle milk with lemons and make fresh chhana of just the right consistency. The granules of my mihidana were orange as sunrise, and as addictive as an affair. My cauliflowerstuffed singaras were so crisp that customers whispered that the new assistant had outdone even Keshto himself. Keshto had been well known before, but now people from all over Calcutta came to our little shop to order food for weddings and funerals, housewarmings and sacred-thread ceremonies. Keshto and I worked late into the night trying to accommodate them, but still we had to turn many away.

  By this time my mother was bringing home plenty of money. She asked me to quit my job at the tea shop so I could put all my efforts into studying for the entrance exam for engineering college. It was her dream that her son should become an engineer. I wanted to please her, so I agreed. But I couldn’t stay away from Keshto. I would wake before dawn and slip out of the house, and when I got to the shop, though we never discussed anything the night before, he would have already lit the fires and set out the ingredients. We worked feverishly, in silence except for the few instructions he grunted from time to time. Our time together was short, as I had to be back in my room before my mother knocked on my door to make sure I was awake for school. In those days Keshto taught me the most difficult dishes he knew. We made rabri, where milk is boiled and thickened, cooled and poured, layer by slow layer. We made rasogollar payesh, which is two sweets in one, the fluffy white balls floating in a thick, delicious cream. We made dhakai parota, where the dough is cut and rolled in such a way that it forms thin, flaky layers that melt on the tongue. The week before I left for college, he taught me his special recipe for sandesh, the milk sweet for which Calcutta is famous, but he wouldn’t let me write it down. He insisted that I learn it by heart, the way he had.

  Before I went away, I wanted to tell him how much he meant to me, that I’d never forget him. In some ways I loved him more than my own father. But I’ve never been good with words, and Bengali is a language in which thank you is an awkward word. So I went off to college without saying anything and didn’t return for a year, and when I did come back, Keshto’s shop was gone, and a hairdressing salon had sprung up in its place. I asked around, but no one seemed to know what had become of him.

  The story hangs in the night air between them. It is very late, and if father or daughter stepped to the window, they would see the Suktara, star of the impending dawn, hanging low in the sky. But they keep sitting at the table, each thinking of the story differently, as teller and listener always must. In the mind of each, different images swirl up and fall away, and each holds on to a different part of the story, thinking it the most important. And if each were to speak of what it meant, they would say things so different you would not know it was the same story they were speaking of.

  But the sharing of the story has created something that stretches, trembling like the thinnest strand of a spiderweb between them. And it is this that makes the daughter tell the father (without looking at him, as she doodles on the pad where he has written the new menu of their tea shop) about her night adventure. She describes the black car she followed onto that rusted, Hopperesque dock, she tells of the water as it slapped blackly against the pier, the loneliness of that sound. She hesitates before she mentions the car’s license plate, its impossible disappearance. But then she thinks of the story her father has told her, which is impossible in its own way, and writes down the letters from the back of the car onto the pad. Emit Maerd. Are they words from an Indian language, she asks? A name he recognizes? A mantra perhaps, or part of one. He shakes his head, staring, turning the pad around and around.

  Are you sure it wasn’t Amit? he says. Amit is an Indian name. Are you sure that it’s the same name the lady at the art exhibition took down?

  I’m not sure of anything anymore, she says. That’s my problem.

  Who knows, he says. It may be the beginning of a solution.

  Look carefully. Were these the words on the license plate of the car my mother followed?

  I’m sorry, I can’t remember. Maybe it’s a Middle Eastern name. Turkish, maybe?

  They bend over the pad together, their heads almost touching, reluctant to relinquish this single, unsatisfactory clue. He plays with the letters, writing them down in random order, mixing them up, leaving out some and keeping others. It’s when he gives up that they see it, in synchronicity. It’s so simple they wonder how they had missed it for so long. Written backward, the letters spell Dream Time.

  In bed she wonders about those words, what message they hold for her, if they hold any message at all. Is she reading too much into a quirk, someone’s private joke? As she meanders toward sleep, her thoughts settle on her father’s story, the vibrant, violent colors of the streets and the factory. The tea shop at once run-down and resplendent. The lineage of sweets. Now, finally, she has a way to bring it all into her own American life. She’ll resuscitate the Chai House with the tastes and smells of the old country, with the whispers of stories learned by heart. Something else is being resuscitated—between her and her father, though she’s not sure what shape it will ultimately take.

  It is the first evening since her mother’s death that grief hasn’t been foremost in her mind. Even as she acknowledges this, the pillow beneath her head yields the smell of her mother’s hair, and she is plunged anew into loss.

  24

  FROM THE

  DREAM JOURNALS

  When it became clear that I was determined to marry and move across the ocean to America with the man I met at Victoria Memorial, chaos broke loose at the caves. No dream teller had ever done such a thing—not in the living memory of the elders—and the shock of it cracked the sisterhood in two. The senior elders claimed that I should be stripped of my powers and turned out. It was clear that I had betrayed my art and my gift (and that, too, for a mere man). A funeral ceremony should be held for me, as ordained in the Brihat Swapna Sarita, for to them I was worse than dead. The other group, which included my aunt, felt I should be kept in the order so that the lore of healing I had learned should not fall to waste. They went to other ancient text, the Swapna Purana, to see what could be done to save me from myself. The two factions fought vehemently until the chief elder decreed that until my fate was decided, they were not to speak to each other. Bitterness and silence filled the caves
where before only friendship had existed.

  In my sorrow and guilt I thought to run away, believing that my going would restore peace, but my aunt guessed my mind and begged me to stay until the council came to a decision. I assented, for she was my first teacher, and this much I owed her. But later I wondered if it would have been better to have refused.

  The meeting of the council (I thought of it as a trial) took days—or was it perhaps weeks? I attended some sessions; others were closed to me. At times I was asked to speak, at others ordered to remain silent while arguments were made for and against me. But perhaps it all took place in one afternoon, for time moves differently in the caves, and when I left to join my husband-to-be, less than a week had passed since we first met beside the roses.

  I was sent to wait in my room while the council deliberated, and when I was brought back to the assembly hall, only the chief elder and my aunt were present. They told me I had three choices. The first was to remain in the caves with the elders for the rest of my life, and be a teacher. In doing so I would not suffer. This very night, with my permission, the elder would dream-walk into my memory and remove the man’s image from there, so that when I awoke I would no longer remember him. This was the safest and happiest of the three choices, they told me, for it was clear that I had a wayward mind and the outside world would present me with temptations too strong to withstand.

  My second choice was to give up my talent and live out my life as that most ordinary of women, a wife. Again, the elder would adjust my memory so that I forgot the caves and all I’d learned there. I would go to my husband blank as new paper for him to write on, and he would be happy, for (they said) it is the wish of all men to construct without interference the story of their wives’ lives. This, too, was a safe choice, if not a happy one.