Queen of Dreams

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  “I don’t like the way we do business,” my father says, “charging our customers for each little thing they order, keeping track of every paltry pakora and jilebi. Can’t we ask them to pay a minimum amount and eat what they want? Like a buffet?”

  I bristle with objections. They’re big men, many of them, with the healthy appetites of men who work with their hands. What if they take “All You Can Eat” as a challenge, a matter of machismo? We could go bankrupt, I fret to Belle.

  “I’ll set out the food in warming trays and put a large bowl on the counter for payment,” my father says. “People can pay at the start of the evening and help themselves whenever they want.”

  I can feel my frown solidifying into a permanent fixture on my face. “You mean you won’t even check to make sure they’re paying?”

  “Honor system,” says my father. “Makes everyone feel trusted, and doesn’t disturb the musicians.”

  I frown. “Is this how you did business in the tea shop in India?”

  He bursts out laughing. “Are you kidding! Customers there would have robbed us blind.”

  “Then how come—?”

  He shrugs. “But now we’re in a different country, with different people. We can’t just follow old ways. We’ve got to be flexible, no? This feels right to me.”

  It doesn’t feel right to me. I fear that our customers who are immigrants will not understand the honor system. I fear that the others can’t be trusted. But at the end of the first evening, I discover, with some embarrassment, that we’ve collected about as much money as we usually make, and gone through a similar amount of food. In the next few days, I watch carefully and find that if people want several helpings, they put more money than we’d asked for in the bowl. They do it silently, not making a big deal of it.

  “But why?” I ask my father one night as we walk to the parking lot.

  “It may be that Kurma House International has become more to them than just a place to pick up something to eat. Maybe because they helped rebuild it, they feel it’s theirs. They don’t want to lose it. So they’re doing their bit to ensure we stay in business.”

  Was this what my mother had hinted at when she’d spoken of a unique attraction? Had we, willy-nilly, managed to create what she’d wanted?

  “I’m so ashamed,” I confess. “I didn’t really trust them at first.”

  “You find it hard to trust people, don’t you?” he says.

  His tone is uncannily like my mother’s. Startled, I glance at him. But his eyes are his own: kind and happy and a little tired. For a moment I’m tempted to tell him about the party that changed me. But the moment passes.

  “The honor system was a good idea, even if I say so myself,” he adds with a chuckle, then gestures toward the darkened windows of Java. “Bet their customers don’t feel the same way about them.”

  “I guess not,” I reply. I chuckle to keep him company, but there’s a tingle of uneasiness inside me, as though I’m overlooking something important.

  32

  It is silent in the apartment, and dark. The woman comes from the shower, the ends of her wet, curling hair soaking into the thin material of her robe. She turns on a lamp and sits by the small oval of yellow light with the package on her knee. It is actually a large manila envelope, stained and grimy from the fire, forgotten for all this time. Only today a workman rescued it from the back room, from under a pile of rubble. She does not recognize the smudged handwriting, but the message is clear: For You. She tells herself not to hope too much, but she can feel the blood swirling in her head. She has been waiting so long for a sign.

  With trembling hands she tears open the envelope, discards the bubbled plastic, the cardboard protector sheets. She is left holding five photographs. She lays them on the coffee table. They are photographs of paintings—all by Indian painters, though she is not sure how she knows this. Neither the subject matter nor the style is Indian in any traditional way, though one of the compositions places words from an Indian script in the midst of geometric shapes. She cannot tell if they are photos of the actual paintings, taken in a studio or a gallery, or images of images taken from books. It doesn’t matter. They are clear enough, and—her throat grows dry with excitement—like nothing she has seen before.

  The first is an abstract landscape in flesh-pink and chalky yellow, with startling insertions of blue and red. There is a river, emerald green, flowing by cliffs where flowering shrubs hang. There is a triangular shape that could be a temple or a rock. But what strikes her most is the energy behind the lines, a sense of a hidden presence. She stares awhile, mesmerized, then turns the photograph over, hoping for a further hint: a name, a title. But the back is blank. The backs of all the photos are blank. She is left with only her imagination as guide.

  The second painting is a dark submarine blue. A woman’s torso is submerged in this color. Light and shadow play over its curves, its absolute, held stillness. Petals, the waxy white of plumerias, float on a current across it, catching for a moment on the island of the breast, the rounded promontory of the hip. Could the blue represent not ocean but night, the current of dreaming? What kind of expression would the woman’s face hold, if Rakhi could see it?

  The third painting has a background of neon yellow. A many-armed purple being with a moonlike face floats above a nest of serpents. Is he (she? it?) a god or a human? Or the representation of an idea? Her breath is caught by the strident juxtaposition of color and shape, the brilliant jewel eyes, the surprise of the composition, like a twist in a complex plot.

  The fourth painting pulls her into the dark circle at its center, a black hole, magnetic, inexorable. She saves herself from falling by holding on to the border: squares made up of geometric shapes, richly textured rugs. Crosses, arrowheads, concentricities in earth colors. She did not realize a triangle could fill space so beautifully.

  The final painting is made up of two parts, side by side. The left gives her the sensation of bending over and peering into a blue-green well, spheres within spheres, like ripples. At the very center, where one would have expected darkness, a brilliant white light. The image on the right is that of a closed door with an arch above it. (Or is it a sacred shape she cannot fathom, a lingam, a stupa?) Blacks again, blues, pale greens. At the top of the door, that same light. When she closes her eyes, she can see brightness branded into her lids.

  She’ll never know who sent her these paintings, but she has no doubts as to why they were sent. They’ve exploded the boundaries she had put around what art must be, and given her possibility. They’re Indian—but in such different ways! All this time she’s been putting boundaries around that word, too, what it can mean. Why, that word encompasses her just the way she is, with all the gaps in her education, all her insufficiencies. She doesn’t have to change to claim her Indianness; she doesn’t have to try to become her mother. Things are breaking down inside of her. She waits to see if she can build new, satisfying shapes from them.

  33

  FROM THE

  DREAM JOURNALS

  In the third year of our training, we were put in the care of Elder Jahnavi, a bent-backed woman who could walk only with the help of a staff. We paid her little attention when we first saw her. Among the more flamboyant elders, she appeared as muted as a night-blooming flower in daytime. But when she addressed us, we knew at once that we were in the presence of power.

  Jahnavi’s expertise lay in the study of dreams out of history and myth. She would ask us what they meant, and what they revealed about the nature of dreaming and its relationship to our waking lives. We spent many afternoons in the dim sand cave assigned to her, examining dreams that, correctly interpreted and faithfully followed, had transformed lives and nations. Others, ignored, had brought about ruin. The dream of Sage Narad who turns into a monkey, the dream of Markandeya and the flood, the demon king Ravana’s dream of defeat and death, sent to him in warning—they all come back to me, though the years have eroded their details. But I remember the dream
of Tunga-dhwaja in the forest as though I saw it yesterday.

  Yes, deliberately I say saw, for in Jahnavi’s presence we were able to dream these ancient dreams again. We would lie down on the soft floor of her cave and close our eyes, and the dream would appear to each of us, though each saw it differently, based on the level of her understanding, and colored by her desires and fears. One of my sister dreamers had a sweet tooth, and for her, every dream celebration had a golden bowl filled to the brim with kheer. Another feared scorpions. In her dreams disaster took the shape of a scorpion bite. And I—but I will write of my own weaknesses another time.

  Here is the story of King Tunga-dhwaja:

  The king is a fearsome warrior, a conqueror well aware of his reputation. He is also a lover of the hunt. And on this day, accompanied by his nobles and his huntsmen, he rides into the forest that borders his palace. It is a good place for finding boar and tiger and deer—though Tunga-dhwaja considers deer too easy a target and will go after one only if nothing else is available.

  But this day, despite the efforts of his beaters, not a single animal appears. The disappointed king is ready to return to his palace when he sees in the distance a white boar, that rarest of creatures. He rides after it—he cannot resist—entering deeper into the forest’s darkness, leaving his companions behind. Engrossed in pursuit, he does not notice how the forest is changing its nature, how the trees have grown foreign, how the flowers release a heavy, mesmerizing fragrance into the air. Until the boar disappears behind the trunk of a tree, vanished inexplicably, and an exhausted Tunga-dhwaja realizes he is lost. He dismounts. He is not afraid—he has been in worse situations. In the morning his huntsmen will find him. If not, he will retrace his tracks and find his own way back.

  As he rests under the tree, the king hears a sound as of many people moaning. When he looks to the side, he notices a group of dwarfish wildlings dressed in tree bark performing a primitive worship. He strides over to ask if they can lead him back to his palace, but they do not seem to comprehend him. They have set leaf bowls filled with porridge in front of a stone they have decorated with flowers—and suddenly he realizes how hungry he is. He asks for some porridge, but the men—though surely they see that he is a king, their king—pay him no attention. They continue to pray. When, angrily, he reaches for a bowl, they stop him, and in sign language indicate that the food must first be offered to the stone god. Then they will share it with him.

  But the king refuses to wait. Sword in hand, he pushes them aside and takes what he wants. They do not protest. They merely watch him, eyes glinting under their matted hair. When he looks up from eating, they have melted into the trees.

  The king pays them no mind. They are smaller than him and have no weapons. He sleeps, and when he wakes it is day. His horse is gone. He curses the woodsmen, who must have stolen it while he slept, and sets off on foot. An experienced tracker, he retraces his steps easily, reaching the edge of the forest by late afternoon. There is his palace, its crystal dome gleaming in the sun! He makes his way to the gate—and is stopped by the guards.

  “Beggar!” one of them cries, holding up his spear in the king’s face. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Beggar?” shouts the enraged Tunga-dhwaja. “Don’t you know your king? I’ll see you buried alive within the hour, with thorns at your head and feet, as payment for that insult.”

  The guard is about to strike him, but the other guard, an older man, holds him back. “Brother,” he says, “it is not proper to take offense at the words of a madman. Has God not punished him enough already?”

  At this the king looks down at himself and sees that his kingly garments are gone, that he is clad in tree bark, that his hair is matted. Looking up he sees that the banner flying from the palace dome is not the familiar three green elephants on a ground of red, but a new one, silver lightning against a field of blue.

  “What is the name of your king?” he whispers to the older guard.

  “Why, it is Aniruddha, the righteous one,” says the guard. “All love him for his mercy. You are in luck, for today is the prince’s birthday, and the royal family will appear on the palace steps to give alms to the poor.” Seeing the stricken look on the king’s face, he adds, kindly, “I will take you there, if you like.”

  Tunga-dhwaja follows the guard to the steps. He does not recognize the king, but the queen—she is his own dear wife, and in her arms she carries his son, a child of three. Surely she will know him!

  He rushes toward her, calling, “Wife! Wife!” But she stares at him in distaste and without recognition. He is intercepted by guards, and it is only by the king’s command that he is spared a severe beating.

  “Throw the madman out,” the king orders, “and see that he never returns.”

  Sprawled in the dust outside the city gates, in a world that is and is not his own, Tunga-dhwaja realizes that this calamity has occurred because of his behavior toward the woodsmen and their deity. He returns to the forest, resolving to beg their forgiveness. But though he wanders for many days, he does not find them. Finally, filled with despair, he decides to drown himself in a forest lake. When he has waded in up to his neck, he senses a movement out of the corner of his eye. It is the white boar.

  The boar leads Tunga-dhwaja back to the clearing where the wild ones—he guesses them to be sages—are performing their worship. Everything appears the same as on the fateful night when he was here last. But perhaps it is the same night, perhaps the boar has taken him back in time? In any case, Tunga-dhwaja knows what he must do. Weeping, he prostrates himself before the stone and, when the ceremony is concluded, humbly accepts the blessed food. He lies down beneath the same tree where he had tethered his horse a lifetime ago. At first he is too agitated to fall asleep—but sleep he must, for he knows that only through a dream can he change back to who he was. At last oblivion drops its merciful shroud over him, and in the morning he finds himself dressed once more in his royal hunting clothes, his horse grazing close by.

  The king leaves the magic grove, finds his anxious companions and returns to his palace, where all is as it was before the hunt. The king, though, is a changed man. No longer arrogant, he lives out his life prayerfully, ruling his kingdom with justice and mercy. He is especially kind to beggars and madmen, and upon his death his subjects mourn the passing of Tunga-dhwaja the righteous.

  34

  Rakhi

  The phone rings in the morning, in the middle of my efforts at painting. Efforts, because even though the photographs had showed me exciting new directions, I hadn’t internalized them yet. I still didn’t have a subject I felt passionate about. I’d started a landscape and a still life and abandoned them both. I was now trying for a portrait of Jona in an abstract style, but the colors clashed, the composition lacked energy and the figure in the center didn’t possess my daughter’s spirit. When I hear the phone, I’m so glad to be interrupted that I pick it up on the second ring.

  It’s Belle. Instead of apologizing for calling during my painting hours, she tells me to turn on the TV.

  “But Belle, you know I don’t like to watch—”

  “Just turn it on, Rikki!”

  “Which channel?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Any of the main channels will do.” She sounds as though she’s coming down with a cold. “Hurry! I’ll hold on.”

  I see the explosion and think I’ve caught the middle of a scifi film, or one of those gruesome disaster movies that people are so inexplicably fond of. I’m about to change the channel when there’s a rapid arc of a movement on the screen, followed by another soundless blast. It takes me a minute to process what I saw: a plane crashing into a tall building that looks familiar, looks just like the one that exploded. The scene comes on again. I become aware of the newscaster’s voice telling me that the World Trade Center has been hit by terrorist planes. As if on cue, the skyscrapers begin to crumple in on themselves. The scene changes to show the Pentagon. It has been hit, too. I see smoke, shat
tered walls, people screaming in terror as they run. A briefcase falls open and scatters papers all over the street. The camera zooms in on a woman’s high-heeled shoe, lying on its side.

  There’s a sick feeling in my stomach. My legs are trembling so much I have to hold on to the wall as I stumble back to the phone. “Is it really real?” I whisper.

  Belle gives a hiccup of a sob on the other end.

  “How can something like this happen?” I say. “Who would want to do something so terrible?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know, Rikki. I’m so scared. I was getting ready to go and open up the store, but I don’t think I can manage it. There was another plane with hijackers that went down somewhere in Pennsylvania. Who knows how many more they’ve planned—” She gives another sob, sounding more like a little girl than a woman.