I was born here, she wants to tell them. How can you welcome me?
The musicians don’t discuss what happened, though she notes the way they crowd around Jespal in a protective knot. He can’t see too clearly with his left eye yet. The doctors are waiting to see if it’ll get better on its own, or whether they’ll have to try an invasive procedure. (Invasive, now that’s an interesting word. Her mind meanders into the many ways such a word might be used.) He still wears a turban. (Would it qualify as his native dress, or his chosen one?) For the reopening, he’s picked one the color of banana leaves. Seeing it wound around his head makes her at once proud and anxious. One of the musicians pounds his fist on the table, swearing. But Jespal shakes his head in his usual mild manner, and soon after that they begin a song.
When closing time comes, the men hang around, pretending to be busy, packing and repacking their instruments. They wait outside until the store is locked up, and stroll behind Rakhi and Belle to the parking lot, chatting casually with her father. They watch the women get in the cars and start the engines. Their solicitousness makes her want to laugh and cry. They do this each night, until she grows used to the ritual, until she finds it comforting and companionable. Some days she forgets how it began.
She invites Sonny over and cooks for him—something she’d vowed she’d never do again. But there’s a warmth to being in her small kitchen, Jona and him and herself crowded around the countertop, chopping green onions, sautéing chicken with ginger. They don’t attempt to make love after that traumatic night. (When she thinks back to how they’d clung together in bed, trying to help each other remember who they were, she’s not sure whether to be glad or mortified.) But they do sit together sometimes after Jona falls asleep. They try to stick to talk of their everyday lives, but can their everyday lives be separated any longer from the search for terrorist cells, or the president’s bluster about the axis of evil? Sonny tells her that he feels guilty about making music while so many continue to die. She tells him how her neighborhood has changed. The Pakistani women barely come out of their apartments. The Afghani men take turns rounding up the children of their community and driving them to the neighborhood school, although it is only two blocks away. Sometimes they sit wordless in front of the late-night news and watch bombs being dropped on a country halfway around the world, the elegant plumes of smoke rising above the fires.
“We don’t even know what’s really happening out there,” he says. “I feel like a pet dog being fed tidbits to keep me quiet.”
Reporters interview American soldiers, many in their teens. Some look nervous, but everyone who’s on camera declares that he or she is ready to die for America. Rakhi feels her guts twist. Their faces are so naked, so unknowing. She wonders what they’ll look like by the time they come back home.
One night she finds herself thanking Sonny for saving her life. The words come more easily than she’d thought they would, perhaps because the dead and the dying have been on her mind so much recently, so present in her living room. Or maybe it’s because she’s not Indian enough. She expects him to be embarrassed, to shrug it off with an It was nothing. But he must not be Indian enough, too, because he takes her hand and says he’s happy for what little he was able to do—this time at least. She recognizes the words as his apology for that long-ago night at the party, his failure to rescue her. She touches the calluses on his fingers, wondering how he got them. His fingertips are square and neat, with the nails cut short so he won’t scratch the records. She is surprised at how distant the party seems, how dwarfed by newer, larger calamities. But as these new calamities recede, will that night regain its dark power over her? Sonny’s fingers smell faintly of wild thyme. But when he asks if he should stay the night, she shakes her head. She doesn’t want to extend a facile forgiveness only to take it back later. He asks her again to come to the club to hear him. She doesn’t say yes or no. She bends forward a little to allow him to kiss her cheek before he leaves.
One morning Marco comes into the shop. When she sees him, she realizes that he hasn’t been around for a while. He looks shrunken, like a carrot left too long in the refrigerator. She gives him a sack of onion pakoras. He holds them in his rough, cracked hands with the chewed-off nails and shifts from foot to foot.
“What is it, Marco?”
“I was there the night those men broke into your shop and hurt you folks,” he said. “I was sleeping behind the flower lady’s stall, but the crash woke me. I saw everything.” He scuffs the floor with the tip of a torn sneaker. “I was too scared to come and help you.”
A wave of pity rises in her. “Don’t fret about it,” she says. “I would have been just as scared.”
“She was there that night, too,” he says. “I seen her. The café was closed by then, but I seen her in there.”
She stares at his face, knowing at once to whom he’s referring. She doesn’t know if he’s telling the truth, or if he merely believes he is.
His eyes are watery and red-veined, darting everywhere. “She was standing at the window looking at you guys. She stood there for a long time, until the policeman came.”
Later Rakhi will imagine that scene, even though she doesn’t want to. Coming to her at night, when she’s about to fall asleep, it will jerk her awake. In her mind, the manager stands in the darkness inside Java with her face to the cold glass of the window, her palms pressed so hard against it that they turn white. Her eyes shine with a green chemical glow, and the force of her hatred leaps across the empty street and powers the chain that’s swinging at Sonny.
“She isn’t there anymore,” Marco says. “Did you know that?”
Rakhi did not know. She’s been struggling too hard to keep her head above water to think about Java. But today she makes a point to stroll by the café. Indeed, the place has a new manager, a middle-aged, bucktoothed man, plump and hearty. When questioned, he will confess he doesn’t know what happened to his predecessor, where she disappeared to.
Can a person be vaporized by the deflected force of her own hate? Rakhi is left to wonder.
She takes out her easel, the first time since September. She closes her eyes and doesn’t fight when the images deluge her. Crash of a glass cracking, fear like slime tracks up her arm, how she couldn’t clean it off for a long time afterward, no matter how hot she ran the bathwater. She starts painting them in: a Sikh man shot at a gas station because someone thought he was Middle Eastern; terrified women peering from behind curtains that look like burkhas; Jespal’s turban unraveled like a river of blood; his eye the swollen purple of a monsoon sky. The background is a collage of faces striped red, white and blue. A fist waves a flag so mammoth that if it falls, it’ll suffocate them all. The birds have disappeared, their places taken by airplanes. Some crash into buildings. Some drop bombs as easily as insects drop their eggs. She paints in a GOD BLESS sign, she paints in tablas, bamboo flutes, violins. Kicking feet, swinging chains, cookies swept off a counter and ground into the floor by boot heels. Knives fly across painted space like the props of jugglers—but they’re deadly real. A police car glides through the broken night under a gouged-out moon. When she stands back to look, the colors and shapes come together in a rush that makes the hairs on her arms stand up. She gives it the only name possible: You Ain’t American.
When she finishes painting the policeman, looking over his shoulder as he speeds away into a vortex of dark brushstrokes, she realizes that she has given him the face of the man in white. Is she remembering accurately? She recalls a tingling as she’d looked at his face—had it been recognition, or merely relief? Or merely a wish to find a savior whom she knew?
Tomorrow, she decides. Tomorrow she’ll go to the eucalyptus grove. Maybe among root and bark she’ll find some answers.
38
FROM THE
DREAM JOURNALS
In the caves they told us that when dream tellers work in their sleep, they each throw out a thin, invisible thread, as a spider might, from their navel. This th
read reaches all the way to Swapna Lok, the world where dreams are born. Through it, the dreams that the teller needs to know travel back to her. When a teller dreams alone, the thread is thin and weak, easily broken. But when tellers live close to one another, their threads combine to form a powerful rope that can bear the weight of even the most difficult dream. This is why dream tellers should not travel too far from their community.
I said nothing, but inside myself I doubted. These are just tales, I told myself, made up to keep us close to home, under the elders’ control.
Why did I doubt what all my fellow novices accepted? Perhaps, unknown to myself, I was already preparing to leave.
Much later, when I told my doubts to my aunt, she sighed. I read that sigh to mean she was tired of my rebelliousness. Perhaps she regretted bringing me out of the slums. I had, after all, caused nothing but trouble.
But it was a sigh of exasperated love. (Since becoming a mother, I too have learned that sigh.) There is proof, she said. But asking for it is like asking to know that a glass dish is breakable. You’ll be convinced, but there’ll be no putting the pieces back together.
I listened with only half of my impatient mind. Riddles, riddles, I thought. Why can’t you just tell me what you mean?
Years later my daughter would say the same words to me.
But some things can’t be told that way, I know that now. They can only be approached stealthily, from behind, like wild birds. And even then they catch your scent and take flight before you throw your net of words over them.
My ability to dream may have weakened even in Calcutta, once I married, but in those early, dancing days I wasn’t paying attention. I was full of another kind of dreaming, for which sleep is not necessary. It was only in America, its nights stagnant as the Sargasso Sea, that I was forced to face the magnitude of my problem. Sometimes I would feel a thin, sickly tendril pushing itself out of my body. But when it found nothing outside to connect with, it shriveled and fell back into me. For a while, the bag of earth my aunt had given me staved off my despair. But each time I dreamed, there was less in the bag. And one night it was gone. With it the dreams, too, went.
How can I put into words the emptiness of being without my dreams after I’d tasted them again, after I’d used them to help people? I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. All day I paced up and down the threadbare carpet of the apartment, trying to think of a remedy. I knew no dream tellers in America. Perhaps there were none in this land that believed technology to be the cure for all ills?
Even if I could have given words to my problem, I could not speak them to my husband. He didn’t know I was a dream teller. I’d intended to inform him of it before we married, but at the last moment I shied away. Many people feared the dream tellers, many thought us unnatural. What if he did, too? I could not risk losing his love, I who had given up so much for it. I told him that my family was against our marriage, and that I’d left them for that reason. I told him I did not want to speak of them again, it was too painful. He respected my wishes and showered me with tenderness to make up for the love he believed I’d lost. How could I tell him now that he’d poured out his heart after a lie?
Besides, he did not have the power to help me. He had problems of his own. We had little money, so he was forced to work in addition to taking classes at the university. He came home each night exhausted, uncertain that he could make it in this new country that had glittered so beckoningly in the beginning. Still, he was a kind man, and he could see I was unhappy. He tried to distract me by taking me to restaurants, or to the movies, or to the seashore for the weekend—entertainments we could ill afford. They did no good.
In the weekly paper I read about a psychic who would, for a fee, answer questions about your future, offer solutions to your problems, and reconnect you with lost loved ones. My heart twitched like a beached fish that senses water nearby. I took twenty dollars from my husband’s wallet without his knowledge and called her for an appointment. But when I heard her voice on the phone, raspy from too many cigarettes, too many unslept nights of her own, I knew she couldn’t help me.
My days grew unbearable. I could focus on nothing but my lost ability to dream. I’d never paid my gift much attention before, but now my life seemed unlivable without it. In my misery, I blamed my husband for my loss. I quarreled with him for the slightest of reasons. The bafflement in his eyes only made me angrier. Thoughts of suicide filled my brain like rain clouds till everywhere I turned I saw only blackness.
It was at this time that the snake came to me.
I will not describe our meeting; some things should not be set down in a book, not even a book like this that no one might see, written in a language that few in this country can read. But this is what I learned from him: each time I had sex with my husband, or even slept in the same bed, my powers—already weakened by being so far from the caves—dwindled further. Soon they would die out altogether. If I wanted to remain a dream teller, there were two things I had to do—and soon.
It is your choice, the snake said. He glistened at the periphery of my vision, a raindrop on an ear of maize. He was the only thing of beauty in my dim and suffocating existence. I couldn’t bear to imagine him gone.
It is your choice, he said. But I knew I had no choice. I had to break off all ties with my husband. And I had to find a way to get back to the caves.
39
Rakhi
All night I can’t sleep. My brain feels hot and perforated, my eyes itch as though I’m coming down with an illness. Thoughts thud through my head like a herd of elephants. Random things my mother had said to me. Using a hair dryer kills your brain cells. Don’t go to bed holding on to a grudge. Snatches of Sonny’s old music, and pushing out from behind the notes, his new music that I haven’t yet heard. A recipe for coconut chutney that my father made last week, down to its last detail, though I dislike coconut. Lists of clothes Jona was growing out of, household items Belle would need if she got married, security measures the U.S. airports should have taken. But these are not my real thoughts. My real thoughts are the ones I’m staving off by filling my mind, as fast as I can, with unnecessary chatter. When the light behind the blinds is the color of melted butter, I give up on rest.
Jona’s with Sonny, so I’m free to go to the eucalyptus grove whenever I please, but I keep delaying. I make breakfast, take a shower, throw a long-overdue load of clothes into the washer. I’m reluctant to go, afraid that the man in white will not be present. If he isn’t, I have no other way of reaching him.
Or is it that I’m afraid he’ll be there?
I’m hoping the grove will be empty, but it’s unusually crowded for a weekday. People are taking advantage of the sunshine, the mildness of this November noon. Students amble along the path, children run squealing after squirrels, dogs pull their owners along as they explore smells, lovers sit on fallen tree trunks, exchanging kisses as lovers have always done. A family has spread a tablecloth over fallen pine needles for a picnic. I peer over their blond heads to see falafel and salad, pita bread, pureed eggplant. How can everyone look so happy? Is there a magic shield around the grove that filters memory from the minds of those who enter here? Or is this how humans survive, shrugging off history, immersing themselves in the moment? If so, it’s a skill that has passed me by.
I go to the hollow at the heart of the grove where I last saw the man in white practicing his Tai Chi. There are no signs of him, but it’s quieter here. I sit on the ground, leaning against a fallen tree. There’s a ragged circle of sky overhead where the tops of the eucalyptus haven’t quite met. I look up at that. Inside me the thoughts I’ve been battling wait like submerged rocks in a river. Even one of them can make me sink if I crash into it. Immerse yourself in the moment, I tell myself. The brittleness of dry twigs under you, the scratchy bark behind your back. The sky is very pale, white rather than blue. It pulls at my chest until something pops, like a cork. And as though they were waiting for just this moment, the thoughts rush ou
t. On TV a week ago, a preacher declared that homosexuals and abortion-rights advocates must bear the blame for the terrorist attacks: they angered God and caused his wrath to descend on America. Jona awoke crying. I was afraid to ask her why. She told me, anyway. She had dreamed of a frozen cave filled with bodies. I couldn’t say, like other mothers might, Don’t worry, it’s only a dream. The weight of her gift pressed on my chest like a slab of ice. I received e-mails saying no one should go to the malls on Halloween, that another major attack was planned on that day. Many of the waiters in the World Trade Center were undocumented workers. We’ll never know who they were, or their families. Other e-mails advised me to stock up on garlic and oil of oregano—they were antidotes to anthrax. A week after the towers fell, police found a pair of hands on top of a building nearby, bound with plastic handcuffs. On board the USS Enterprise, a sailor held up a bomb on which was printed, HIGH JACK THIS FAGS. Some nights I’m afraid to go to sleep. What else in the world will have broken by the time I open my eyes again? Other times I want only to sleep, dug deep into the ground like a badger, the cool, comforting mustiness of earth, which never changes, against my skin.
Often I find myself contemplating death. Until recently, I’d experienced it only as a theory. But now it had swooped into my life like a great gray owl, taloned, eyes shining through the night. It terrified me, but it was beautiful, too. Was that why some people rushed toward it in a frenzy of unfathomable joy, calling it the Savior of the Faithful?
Queen of Dreams Page 26
