Queen of Dreams

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  The third choice, of which they informed me reluctantly, and only when I rejected the first two, was this: I would be allowed to keep my powers, the lesser ones, so that I might help others in the world. In return, though I could live with a man if I chose to, I had to promise not to marry him. In the eye of the Great Power, then, my spiritual essence would not be joined to his. The door for my return to the sisterhood would thus not be closed completely in case I saw (as they hoped) the folly of my choice and wished to come back. But this was a dangerous choice, for it might go wrong in numerous ways.

  It was this third I chose, though not with good grace, for it hobbled me with its many conditions. After, when my aunt tried to give me cautionary counsel, I turned from her angrily. Nothing would go wrong, I insisted.

  I did not know that my choice would suspend me for the rest of my days between a world of inexplicable forces and the love of a man who insisted that such a world did not exist.

  T he night before I left for Calcutta, my aunt brought me a gift. It was a small cloth pouch the size of a fist. When I opened the drawstring, there was another bag within, and then another. I reached in and took out a pinch of the reddish powder that lay there. For a moment, I was confused. Was it sindur? I wondered. A gesture of conciliation from my aunt, a wish for my happiness in married life? But when I touched it with the tip of my tongue I realized it was not the powder brides wear on their foreheads. No. My aunt had given me a handful of earth.

  It is from the walkway in front of the caves, she told me, ground that centuries of dream tellers have stepped on. You’ll need it where you’re going.

  I did not ask her what she meant. I was angry with her still, and disappointed at what she’d chosen to give me at my going-away. It was not until later, when I found myself in California with all the dreaming gone from me, that I realized the importance of the gift.

  In the beginning I was not worried. I needed time to settle, I told myself. I needed to get used to my new life. There was much in it that I found novel and charming: how to manage a household, how to please a husband. (It was important for me to please him because I’d displeased him deeply by insisting on a legal ceremony instead of a temple wedding. He complained that this made him feel we weren’t really married.) There were dishes to try out, rooms to decorate. His lips tracing the lines of my collarbones at night. My hands feeling the corrugations of his spine, the smoothness of his thighs. But there came a day when these could not hold my attention, and when I looked in the mirror to apply sindur to my forehead, my face looked transparent, like a glass oval that was emptying out.

  Dreams would not come to me in California because it was too new a place. Its people had settled there only a few hundred years ago, and neither its air nor its earth, the elements from which we most draw sustenance, was weighted yet with dreams. Yes, there had been older inhabitants, but they had been driven from the land, and in going had taken with them, along with their hopes, their ways of dreaming. They had left only tears behind, and curses that smudged the air.

  At first I didn’t know what to do with the earth in the pouch. I sprinkled a little in my garden, but though it made my dahlias and gardenias bloom, it did not help me dream. I mixed a pinch of it into my rice and lentils, but beyond giving me cramps, it did nothing. Finally I placed the pouch under my pillow.

  That night my sleep was filled with the colors and scents of home—things I had never missed while there. I awoke with a sore heart. But the dreams I needed, dreams that went beyond my own small life—I could sense their presence, but they wouldn’t come to me. My husband awoke with a headache, and a complaint that his sleep had been filled with terrible images, blood and rubble and dying animals.

  I knew then what I had to do. The following night, when he fell asleep, I took my pillow to the living room and lay down on the scratchy carpet. Almost before I had closed my eyes, a dream descended on me. It spoke to me in a raven’s voice, giving instructions. It told me whose dream I was dreaming, and where I must meet him the next day, and how to help him. I felt the power of the dream flow into me until my bones grew phosphorescent and my blood buzzed as though I were drunk. I awoke weeping. I knew now how much my link with the dream spirits meant. I couldn’t give it up. I wept, too, because I realized the price I would have to pay—never again to spend the night with my husband. Spend. For the first time I realized the weighted accurateness of the verb, for dream tellers cannot squander their nights as ordinary women do. Never to hold the warm curve of his back pressed against me as we both drifted into oblivion. Never to wake and watch him still asleep, his hair tousled as a boy’s, the corner of his mouth twitching in a smile that I could only guess at. The small intimacies of pulling the quilt cover over him on a cold night, of rubbing his shoulders when he moaned in a nightmare.

  I knew he’d be angry when I told him my decision. I would make up for it, I promised myself. I would please him in bed, make his room (already I thought of it as not mine) spin with stars before I left it each night. I didn’t know it would not be enough.

  When I lifted my pillow and picked up the bag of earth, it felt lighter. I opened it with shaking fingers. The dust inside had diminished. It was as though my dreaming had used up a portion of it. My heart beat jaggedly as I looked at what was left. How many nights before it was all gone? And what would I do then?

  25

  Rakhi

  We are going to reopen the shop tomorrow, on a Wednesday. It’s not the best choice, says Belle, but it isn’t the worst either. Wednesday is the day of the week named after Budh, the planetary deity of intelligence. Thursday, Brihaspati, would have been more auspicious—he is the wisdom planet, the teacher of the gods.

  “Since when did you become an astrological expert?” I ask, half amused, half amazed.

  “Jespal looked it up for me.”

  “Ah, Jespal!” He’s been dropping by in the evenings to help with our redecoration efforts. Now it seems that’s not all he’s been doing. “Do I detect the blush of a rose on yon dusky cheek?”

  “Quit teasing. It’s important to have the planets on our side, especially when battling the dark forces. But I’m thankful it isn’t Saturday. Shani can be a very destructive agent.”

  “Dark forces! Destructive agent! You look too intelligent to believe in such nonsense,” my father says.

  Belle’s mouth falls open in outrage. I brace myself, but she pulls herself together. “Mr. Gupta,” she says with a patience bordering on the saintly, “you know that’s not true.”

  She must be growing fond of my father to make such allowances for him. It strikes me that I am, too.

  “What’s not true, that it’s nonsense or that you look intelligent?”

  I hide my smile behind my hand, but Belle is not to be deflected by paltry humor. “How could you not know, living with Mrs. Gupta all these years?”

  “Ah, my dear, living with Mrs. Gupta was a most amazing experience, and a wonderful one. I wouldn’t have given it up for anything in my life, but perhaps it wasn’t quite what you’ve imagined it to be.”

  We both pause in our tasks—Belle polishing the countertops, I mixing red paint (the shop is to have a new name; Jespal has already scraped the old one off the storefront window). Of all his stories, this is the one we most want to hear.

  My father has been telling us stories all week, while he tries out snacks and sweets on us. I’m rusty, he claims. Got to get in shape. But I suspect he just loves to feed us. I enjoy the snacks, but it’s the stories I really crave. He has told us about his early days as a student in America, about the odd jobs he held to make money— a janitor in a hospital, a slot-machine repairman in a casino. About the people he met in these places. I would never have guessed that such a consummate storyteller lay waiting all these years inside my father. He prolongs the suspense until we’re about to shake him; he makes us burst out laughing at unexpected jokes. My favorite stories are about his life in India. But so far he has not told us any stories involving my m
other, though he does mention her—lovingly, ruefully—in passing.

  From time to time my father sings as he cooks, mostly songs from the movies, though sometimes a haunting tune that sounds far older will wind like wood smoke through the store. They make me restless, these tunes, as though there is something inside my chest that wants to escape. There’s a feeling like pinpricks in my fingers, a need to paint—something I haven’t been able to do since my mother’s death.

  When I ask, he tells me these are folk songs that field hands sing in Bengal. He picked them up during school holidays when he visited his uncle, who was the subestate manager for the royal family of Nataal. I sense a story there. No, stories tucked within the envelopes of other stories, an entire post office worth of them, filling me with giddy anticipation.

  But today my father tells us this is no time for lolling around, listening to foolish tales. Tomorrow’s a big day. Flyers have been passed out via Marco and his friends, advertisements have been placed in the East Bay Express and India West. I’ve given in and let my father deploy Sonny as our publicist, and he’s been talking up our new concept at the nightclub. We must be ready, my father insists. He needs to make another batch of gawja, those crisp diamonds of fried dough crusted with sugar. He wasn’t satisfied with the consistency of the melted sugar last time. We assure him that the gawjas were delicious, but he shakes his head. Nothing less than perfection will do for our grand reopening, as he calls it. He assigns Belle the task of writing our new menu on the board. She asks if she should provide brief descriptions of the items, but he says no. No pandering to tourist types here, he adds sternly. This is a real cha shop. If people ask, you can explain. But you’ll be surprised at how much they know already—and how much they can learn on their own. Jespal, who has just come in, is set to dusting the furniture. As for me, he shoos me outside to paint. The new name has to be dry by the time we open tomorrow. I comply, a little taken aback by his bustling, managerial manner. Is there no end to the personalities hiding inside my father’s skin? Don’t rush it, he warns as he disappears into the back room.

  I trace the letters, then begin to fill them in. Kurma House. My father is the author of this name. He likes the pun, the idea of a word hidden beneath another word, to be revealed when the wind shifts, or when the viewer narrows her eyes. I pointed out to him that kurma is a dinner dish, something we don’t plan to serve. He shrugged. We are artists, Rakhi, he said loftily. Must we be bound to literalities?

  The heft of the brush in my hand, heavy with paint, feels so right. Even though this isn’t the same as composing a painting, there are resemblances. The dip of the wrist as I tap it against the edge of the can, the curve of the arm as I trace the top of the K. I hadn’t realized how much my body had missed such movements.

  As I paint, my eyes stray to the inside of the store. Jespal has done a good job of cleaning the glass—it’s almost as though it doesn’t exist. He reads out items from a list my father has jotted down while Belle writes them on the board. From time to time their eyes meet and they smile shyly. Suddenly it comes to me that within the year they will marry. (Is this prophecy, intuition, or just a guess? How far can I trust it, I who am not my mother?) Watching them, I feel at once happy and lonely. It’s not the loneliness of being without a mate, but something more primal. As though I were the only being left on this side of the glass, while the rest of the world—happy, uncaring—lived out its life on the other side. They were aware of my presence, they even waved to me from time to time, as Belle was doing, but they didn’t know how it felt to be looking in, waving back, unable to cross over.

  Is this how my mother felt when she left her community of interpreters and lost her ability to dream?

  After his initial slowness, my father has made great strides in translating the journals. He tells me he has fallen into a rhythm, has become accustomed to my mother’s style. I think he’s as addicted to them as I am. That he searches them with the same hunger. We’ve come to an unspoken agreement not to discuss them. I fear it will make him self-conscious, defensive, now that so many of the entries are about their life together. But sometimes I can’t help watching him with sideways surreptitiousness, trying to see him with my mother’s eyes.

  I’m halfway through painting when I experience that strange prickling again on the back of my neck. Why should this be? People have been watching ever since I started the lettering. Marco strolled over to ask what I was doing, Mr. Jamison from the art store came to find out what we were going to sell now, strangers waiting at the bus stop stared, trying to guess the words before they were completed. But this is different—there’s a maliciousness to this gaze that goes through my clothes, through my skin, and into my spinal column like a needle of ice.

  I look cautiously in the glass, but already I know. It’s the manager, standing outside Java, smoking a casual cigarette. She isn’t looking this way, but I can feel the intensity of her attention. There’s a heaviness in my shoulders. My arm aches with the effort of holding itself up. My hand shakes, and when I try to continue, I smudge the O beyond repair.

  “How’s it going?” says my father from the door, making me jump and smear the H as well.

  “Look what you made me do!” I say, hiding fear behind irritation. It isn’t totally true, and he knows it, but he doesn’t say anything in self-defense. He brings out a box of rags and dips them in thinner and helps me clean off the ruined letters. While I redo them, he stands beside me, arms crossed. I consider saying, Don’t watch, you’re making me nervous, but then I realize something. His presence feels calming, protective—as though he’s a shield. I sense the malicious force hitting him and ricocheting away, unable to pass through. It gathers itself into a wave and hits him again, hard. I watch him carefully in the glass, but there’s no sign that he feels any of it.

  “Dad,” I say, “don’t look now, but did you see that woman outside the coffee shop?”

  He turns to stare. My heart hammers and I grab his arm and jerk him back. “Didn’t I just tell you not to look!” I hiss. I don’t inform him of the thought that went through my mind like a lightning flash—if his eyes met hers, she’d turn him into stone, like Medusa, or enchant him, like Circe.

  Such nonsense, he would declare—and wouldn’t he be right? He dips his head conspiratorially, looking at me in the glass. Whatever it is you’re playing at, his good-humored expression says, I’m willing to play along.

  “Your competitor, hunh?” he says with a grin. “But not anymore! We’re about to do something totally different, something she can’t match. You just watch, beti!” He gives my shoulders a squeeze. “I must inform you—rather immodestly—that I outdid myself with the gawja. Come in and taste some. It’ll—as you girls like to say—blow you away.”

  He holds the door open. I go in. Behind me, tentacles of malice grasp for me one last time, slide off my skin. I nibble on the gawjas, which are as delicious as my father promised, and try to arrange my confusions.

  This is what I end up with. It’s by no means satisfactory.

  1. If there is another level to existence, my father isn’t aware of it.

  2. His lack of sensitivity to it protects him from it in some way.

  3. Or does his blindness place him in greater danger?

  4. Can this level be called dream time?

  5. Does the man in white belong to dream time, just as, in a different, darker way, the manager does? Is this the world to which my mother’s gift allowed her access?

  6. None of this is true; the only truth is that I’m cracking up. “Rikki!” Belle exclaims as she comes in from the back room with a towering stack of paper plates. “I can’t believe it! You ate the entire tray of gawjas! There must have been forty thousand calories in there, girl! Now you’ll have stomach cramps and throw up all night and we won’t be able to open the store tomorrow!”

  I look down in horror at the empty tray. She’s right. I can feel myself bloating up already. I’m probably breaking out in a rash, too.


  “Girls! Girls!” my father says. He’s smiling proudly at this evidence of his success, never mind that his daughter feels like an overinflated blimp. “My gawjas can’t hurt you! Remember that song you used to sing over and over in your college days, driving us insane? Don’t worry, be happy.” He sings the refrain, sounding uncannily like Bobby McFerrin. “Everything’s going to go perfectly tomorrow.”

  T omorrow comes sooner than I think it will. I’d expected to lie in bed, awake with worry and anticipation, but my sleep is sweet and immediate and refreshing, like a mouthful of rasogolla syrup. I wake to a cool, clear morning, a sky like white oleanders. When I step out to the car, there is a bird in the maple tree, one I haven’t seen in this part of the state before. It is large and gray, with bright orange mihidana eyes. It watches me intently, without any sign of fear. I run inside to get my father, but by the time we return, the bird is gone.

  Could it be an omen? I ask.

  What’s an omen? he says.

  I sigh. I don’t want an argument between us today, but I know this: the universe does send us messages. The trouble is, most of us don’t know how to read them.

  It’s at such times I miss my mother the most.

  When we get to the store, the first thing I notice is a big banner over Java’s entrance. ANNIVERSARY SELLABRATION! it screams in multicolored glittery letters. DOOR PRIZES! FREE FOOD!

  I turn to my father in outrage. “That is such a lie! They’ve only been here a few months.” But no one else seems to have noticed. Or maybe they just don’t care. In front of the entrance to Java, people are milling around like sheep. Of the manager there’s no sign. She’s at the cash register, no doubt, gloating as she rakes in money that should have rightly come to us.

  Inside, Belle is slumped against the counter, too despondent to be indignant. “She’s outwitted us once again,” she whispers. “What will we do with all the supplies we bought? And those sweets you made last night, Mr. Gupta? They’ll all be wasted. All your savings gone down the drain, all your effort, just because you tried to help us.”