Queen of Dreams

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  My father looks a bit shaken, too, but he pats her shoulder. “Cheer up, Miss B!” he says. “Didn’t one of your American heroes say, It ain’t over until it’s over?” He disappears into the back room. We can hear the banging of pots and pans, and after a moment, the sound of whistling.

  Belle gives me a push. “Go in there and stop him. It’ll be terrible if he makes more of those lovely things and there’s no one to eat them.”

  But when I go in there, I forget what I’ve come to say, because there in a little alcove next to the big gas burner, sits the black-and-white photo of a young woman. I think it’s my mother—but it’s an old photo, from a time before my birth, and so I’m not sure.

  Where had my father hidden it all these years?

  In the photo my mother, if that’s who she is, looks worriedly off to one side of the camera. I peer closely, hoping to catch a glimpse of the dream caves she wrote of in her journal, but the land around her is open and flat. What place is this? There’s no grass, no trees, only tarmac under her feet and a blurred metal-gray shape far in the background. Then it comes to me. She’s in an airfield, getting ready to board the plane that will bring her to the United States. No wonder she looks anxious. She’s about to leave everything she knows to follow a man she’s met only a few times—a decision everyone close to her thinks of as a huge mistake. Maybe she’s wondering if crossing the ocean will indeed cause her to lose her abilities, as she’s been warned. And yet there’s something else in her face—a determination, a strange joy. I realize I’m seeing something I never saw in my lifetime: my mother in love.

  I close my eyes, trying to call up the face of the mother I’m familiar with. What was her habitual expression? Wry amusement at my follies? A guarded sympathy? But all I can see is the face in the photograph. Annoyed, I shake my head, trying to clear it. But the photo has taken me over. From now on, this is how I’ll be forced to picture my mother, as a stranger younger than myself, and more hopeful.

  If my mother could risk so much to follow her dreams, then as her daughter can’t I take this small risk that faces me today? She had to take on her journey alone—I’m fortunate enough to have a friend and a father with me.

  I don’t tell my father to stop. Instead, I watch as he mixes a huge bowl of pakora dough, adds chopped onions, spinach, an assortment of spices. How lovingly his hands gather the besan flour, pour the warm water.

  “Don’t just stand there,” he tells me. “Cut up the green chilies and throw them in.” He tests the oil, starts releasing the first set of balls into its sizzle. Then the doorbell rings.

  Our first customer!

  “Just in time,” says my father.

  I rush to the front and find Sonny entering the store. Sonny, of all people! When we were married, nothing less than a natural disaster would have forced him out of bed before noon. When we started sharing custody, he had to hire a woman to get Jona to school, because he couldn’t wake up on time.

  “Oh, it’s you,” I say. “I thought it was a real customer.”

  “You really shouldn’t get this excited when you see me,” he says. “It’s bad for your heart, now that you’re getting on in years.” He turns to Belle. “I thought I’d come and check things out. What’s the matter? I was sure there’d be more people here.”

  Belle points glumly out the window at the SELLABRATION sign. Sonny lifts an eyebrow, which means he’s thinking. After a moment he says, “Well, I’m going to start you guys off here, then.” He orders a plate of pakoras and a box of sandesh to go, and saunters into the back room to talk to my father.

  “Should we be charging him money?” Belle whispers to me. “After all, he is family, kind of.”

  I hesitate, not sure about ex-husband etiquette. It is decent of him to come by, especially after that dinner fight, which was more my fault than his. We decide we’ll give him the pakoras for free but let him pay for the sandesh.

  He comes out of the back room munching on a plateful of pakoras that my father must have handed him. “They’re good! Didn’t know Dad had these hidden talents. Want one?”

  He isn’t your dad, I tell him inside my head. He grins as though he knows exactly what I’m thinking and compliments me on the paint job. He jokes with my father about the new name, and tells him he expects to eat some real kurma next time he comes.

  “Sure thing, beta,” my father says. “I’ll make a special order for you. Just give me an hour’s notice.”

  He isn’t your beta, I tell my dad inside my head.

  Before he leaves, Sonny walks over to Belle. “You’re looking even prettier than usual,” he says. “What’s up? Are you in love?” When she flushes, he laughs, a delighted, infectious sound. We watch him as he walks down the street, packet of sandesh swinging from his left hand, cell phone in his right, still smiling.

  “I can see why you married him,” Belle says. “He can really turn that charm on.”

  “And off,” I say acidly as I watch him talk animatedly on his phone. “Probably calling his girlfriend,” I add. “It’s her turn to bask in five minutes’ worth of Sonny’s charm.”

  Belle looks at me with narrowed eyes. “And why should you care if he’s calling his girlfriend? Riks, are you still—”

  “I am not,” I snap. “And don’t call me Riks.” I go over to the tables and wipe them down once again, though they are spotless already.

  But I have misjudged Sonny. As the day goes on, several of his friends—musicians and fellow DJs—stroll in. I haven’t seen them since I moved out. I feel awkward welcoming them into the shop, but they seem to have accepted the fact of our breakup with scarcely a blink. In their world, such things probably happen every day. Sonny must have called and asked them to show up. Several express interest in meeting the new chef, so he must have told them about my father, too. My father makes a dramatic entry from the back room, bearing aloft an emerald-green bowl of chutney, and impresses them by reciting the history of various dishes. The rice pudding, he says, is one of the oldest desserts of India, mentioned even in the Ramayan. It is what the gods sent to King Dasharath’s barren queens to make them fruitful. He points to the laddus and informs Sonny’s friends that they are made from the same recipe that Duryodhan’s cook used in the Mahabharat to lure and poison his cousin Bheem—minus the poison, of course. I give him a suspicious look, but Sonny’s friends love it. They order substantial amounts, leave large tips on the table. Jespal brings in a group of coworkers for lunch, and promises to come back after work with some more people. It’s more traffic than our shop has seen in months, but I’m not happy. We can’t run a business on the support of friends. Strangers—like the ones jostling to get into Java—is what we need.

  But how to attract them?

  After lunchtime the shop empties. Belle pokes around in the back room. I rearrange the plate of laddus and look out the window from time to time to check the crowd outside Java. It’s still there. We’ve made only a small dent in the laddus, and some of the other desserts are still untouched. If a significantly larger number of customers don’t show up by the end of the day, we’ll be forced to do what Belle predicted—throw it all away.

  My father, too, is looking concerned. He says he needs some fresh air and pulls a chair outside the door. When I leave to get the car and pick Jona up from school, I hear him singing under his breath as he massages the arm that had been broken. The words are not familiar, but the current of melancholy resonates inside me even after I can’t hear him anymore.

  At the intersection, I glance back and am surprised to see that he’s talking to a man I don’t know. The stranger is about as old as my father and, like him, Indian. I know this last fact not from his face (his back is to me), nor from his clothes (he is wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt), but by his gestures. My father, too, uses the same curving, insistent arm movements, the same dramatic bobs of the head. They are not gestures that Belle or I—or even Jespal, in spite of his zealous turban wearing—use. The rhythms of the body—how they
separate people from each other!

  The light turns green, the crowd surges forward and I follow, all of us with our identical, hurried, American gait.

  I arrive at the school to find Jona in tears. She can’t find her lunch box. It’s a new one, she tells me, red and black, with a dragon stitched on top. It’s special. We search her classroom and then the grounds, but there’s no sign of it.

  Finally, we give up and get in the car. I’m tired and frustrated, and Jona’s still crying. I should have been back at the store an hour ago to relieve my father so that he could go into the back room and lie down for a while.

  “We should have looked some more,” Jona says. “Now my dragon will fly away and never return.”

  I don’t mean to snap at her, we’ve spent so little time together lately, but the words come out before I realize what I’m about to say. “Don’t be silly. That’s not a real dragon. But you should have been more careful with the box.”

  “You’re always scolding me,” she says. “I wish Sonny was picking me up instead of you. He would have looked some more. He wouldn’t have said I was silly.”

  I tighten my fingers on the wheel to stop myself from turning around and smacking her. How do children know the exact procedure by which a gentle, considerate parent can be transformed into a raging maniac?

  I take deep breaths until I can control my voice. Then I say, “I wish your dad wouldn’t buy you all these fancy things that tempt other people to steal them.”

  “You don’t know that someone stole it,” Jona says. “You shouldn’t blame people until you have proof.”

  Where do they learn to talk like this?

  “It could be under one of the maple trees in the other corner of the playground,” she adds. “You didn’t let me go there. And besides, Sonny didn’t buy me the lunch box.”

  “Who did, then?”

  “Eliana.”

  I swing the car over to the curb and turn off the engine. I turn around and look at Jona. The tears have left dirt streaks on her face, and for a moment I’m tempted to drop the matter. But no, this has gone too far. I can’t let her confuse reality and fantasy anymore.

  “Jonaki,” I say firmly. “There is no Eliana. I want you to tell me who really gave you that lunch box. Or”—my voice shakes now, and not just with anger—“did we just spend an hour and a half looking for a lunch box that doesn’t even exist?”

  She stares out of the window.

  “Jonaki, I’m speaking to you!” I’m shocked at this hard, loud voice that comes out of my mouth. I’ve never spoken to my daughter like this. But I can’t seem to stop myself. “Answer me! Right now!”

  Jona cringes back against the seat. “It’s just like Eliana said,” she whispers. “She told me not to talk about her to you. She said you wouldn’t believe me, and that you’d be mad.”

  Her whispering voice, with a little break in it, goes through me like a knife. I close my eyes tightly. What in hell am I doing?

  When I open my eyes, I see Jona looking at me from behind a lattice of fingers, her eyes large with fear.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” I tell her. “I really am. Things have been tough at the store today, but that’s no reason to take it out on you. I’ll buy you another lunch box if we don’t find this one.” I’ll have to wait on the questions that fly around me like mosquitoes, waiting for the chance to bite. Such as, When and where did Eliana (if there is an Eliana) give Jona the lunch box? And if not, what is going on inside my daughter’s head?

  Perhaps Sonny has some of the answers. I’ll have to catch him by himself, so I can ask him.

  “Forgive me?” I say to Jona, smiling as best as I can. She nods, but she doesn’t take the hand I offer, and when I drop her at the Kurma House before parking the car, she runs in without a backward glance.

  T he man walks into the store just as dusk is falling, and after a moment of confusion I see that he’s the stranger my father was talking to earlier in the day.

  We’re getting ready to close up. A few people trickled in through the afternoon, but not enough, and enormous quantities of food sit inside the display counter, awaiting disposal. Belle’s lipstick is chewed off, her hair stringy with defeat. My father’s shoulders slump, and before he disappears into the back room I notice him limping, as he did in the first days after the accident. As for me, I’m mostly numb. I feed Jona and help her with her homework (I have plenty of time, after all), and she helps me clean the plate glass on which I’d written our new name barely twenty-four hours ago. I see the sweets—so caringly prepared, so carefully stacked—reflected in it and feel like crying.

  The man asks for my father and, when he emerges from the back, talks to him in a rapid Indian language I don’t know. My father answers him, though more haltingly. Both of them punctuate their speech with those emphatic, coded hand movements I’d noticed earlier. The language isn’t Bengali, I can tell that much. I look inquiringly at Belle, but she shakes her head. Her parents insisted that she speak Hindi and Punjabi while she was growing up, but after leaving home, she made a concerted and mostly successful attempt to forget them both.

  When the men finish their conversation, the stranger gives my father an unexpectedly graceful salaam and leaves. My father stares after him.

  “What is it, Grandpa?” Jona asks. “What did he want?”

  “It’s the darnedest thing,” he says. “He heard me singing this afternoon—humming, really—and stopped to listen. He asked me if I knew any other Hindi songs. I told him that I knew quite a few. He didn’t say anything at that time, but now he came to ask if I’d be willing to sing for his friends if they came to the store. They all love songs from the movies, especially the old ones, and there’s no place where they can hear them sung live. I said I’d be happy to. He said he’d go and get them. So, ladies—can we stay open a little longer?”

  We agree. What have we to lose, at this point? An hour passes. Jona dozes off. I’m beginning to suspect that my father misunderstood the man. Then there’s a noise at the door, and a group of people around my father’s age come in. Some wear Western clothes, and some are in kurta-pajamas, but what I notice most are their faces. Lined, unabashedly showing their age, they hint at eventful pasts lived in places very different from this one, difficulties and triumphs I can’t quite imagine. The word foreign comes to me again, though I know it’s ironic. They’re my countrymen. We share the same skin color. I look from them back to my father’s face. Does it hold the same expression? But I’m too close to him to tell.

  The men order modestly: tea and jilebis. They take a few sips, a nibble or two. With awkward politeness—perhaps they’re not used to talking to women they don’t know—they tell Belle and me that everything is bahut achha. But their attention is not on the food. As soon as my father pulls up a chair, they begin to question him. Does he know the songs from Anand? From Guide? Could he sing “Gaata Rahe Mera Dil”?

  And my father, who has sung only for himself until now (we had merely been backdrops for his vocalization) launches into the melody, his voice made truer by the hopes of strangers. The men nod their heads to the beat—clearly, they know the words, too, but they defer to my father’s talent. After a few minutes, one of them takes a mouth organ out of a pocket, while another lifts a small, two-ended drum out of a bag I hadn’t noticed. When my father starts on another song (“Sing us a gana from Sholay, Bhaisaheb!”), they accompany him, filling our shop with gaiety, causing Jona to sit up with a sleepy smile. They’ve forgotten our presence—even my father. The music continues for the next couple of hours, song after song, without break. When the tune is particularly catchy, two or three of the men get up and dance, their steps unhurried, unself-conscious, the bright handkerchiefs that materialize in their hands like magician’s scarves rising and falling in slow motion.

  When my father finally stops, out of breath, the men don’t applaud. For them, what happened in this shop isn’t a performance but a ceremony, something they were part of. Belle and Jona
and I applaud, though. The sound of our clapping fills the room, echoing from behind us, and when I turn, I see other people. Did they notice the music makers and come in to see what was happening? Sonny’s here, too, come to take Jona home. He gives a piercing whistle and calls out something that I don’t understand. The men break into smiles.

  “Last call for food,” Sonny yells as the crowd begins to disperse. “Here’s your chance to try Bengali snacks freshly made by one of Calcutta’s greatest chefs!” I don’t think it’ll work, but a number of people wander over to the glass cases. We end up selling more than we’d expected. We still have to give away food to Marco, but when we lock up it’s with a curious sense of accomplishment.

  “Well, Dad,” Sonny says as he follows us out of the store, carrying Jona, “maybe you’re on to something.”

  My dad gives a cautious shrug, but he’s smiling.

  Every evening the men come back to make music. If my father doesn’t know the song they ask for, they good-naturedly request a different one. (But my father’s learning, too. Sonny has brought him more tapes, and even a karaoke machine so he can practice at home.) Word of our soirees must have traveled, for one day an African American comes in with a tall, carved drum, and a flute player who looks like he’s from South America. A week later there’s a hippie with a braid and a tambourine. The men eye the African American’s shaved, gleaming head with curiosity. Some stare at the mermaid tattoo on the hippie’s bicep. But they shift around and make room for them, and nod approvingly when they hear how the new instruments add timbre to the songs. A small but regular audience gathers to hear them. They’re music lovers, not big eaters, but our business starts to pick up.

  “I’d never have imagined people would be interested in listening to old-time Indian songs,” Belle tells me. “Why, most of them don’t understand a word they’re hearing.”