Go Home!

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  I was fourteen.

  Maybe your last words to me were Be careful. Maybe, as you stashed the money into my hands and retreated back into the kitchen, you called out, Hurry home soon.

  THE SEA ISN’T as cold as I expected it to be. It’s relatively warm. My arms are slicing through the water at a steady pace, like a knife through the night. I can’t see Amoy but I know it’s there. I know you’re there. I know, too, the possibilities: that I might drown, that I might be caught by the Communists and become nothing more than a pair of ears, that I might be caught by my own men and shot before tomorrow morning.

  But none of that matters. Behind me is that bastard island, Kimmui, Golden Gate. I’ve left my rifle, my helmet. I’ve left the other men, those who miss home as much as me. Behind me are the blue tears whose glow I can no longer see, though maybe I’ve already caught their magic, maybe their iridescent molecules are clinging to my hairs, buoying my skin. The sea welcomes me, it cleaves a path for me. I’m riding on the back of a water dragon, I’m coasting on the shell of a tortoise.

  Two kilometers separates me from home. Beyond this sea is beach and land and road and a light that will guide me home. Beyond this sea sleep the donkey and the stream, Ah Kong and his buns, Old Tan and his lost cat. Beyond this sea are Father and Little Sister with their faces I don’t know if I know anymore. Beyond this sea is you, and you are waiting for me. Less than two kilometers. If I keep going. If I keep going.

  Tigress

  Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  How does a man become a beast? Kishi Chikudo became a tiger.

  IT STARTED WITH the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Japan spent $650,000 on their exhibit, about sixteen million in today’s dollars. They built a pavilion and employed the finest sculptors, painters, and ceramicists to ornament it.

  Chikudo was head of the Kishi School, founded by the renowned tiger painter Kishi Ganku. In this tradition, Chikudo painted a tiger. But it wasn’t good enough. He tore it up.

  Actually, it started before the World’s Fair. Forty years earlier, Commodore Perry’s warships broke into Japan. The new kaikoku (“open country”) policy eased trade relations. Waves of bowler hats, paper money, cable cars, record players, and railway lines slopped into Japan. The turmoil was enough to send any man mad, but Chikudo stayed sane.

  The tigers arrived in boats: tigers lying on dirty straw, flea-eaten tigers, hungry tigers, real, live tigers. Try to unlearn the tiger. Unlearn the weight of her. Forget the soft curves of her ears and the deceptively gentle scallops of her paws. What would it be like to see her for the first time? Chikudo saw his first tiger when he was already in his sixties. To see her only a few paces away, a distance of less than a leap? Even behind the bars of a cage, what would it be to see the black V-stripes sweeping up her belly like migrating geese? What would it be to meet her hay-yellow eyes? This was what Chikudo tasked himself to capture.

  He tried a second tiger and soon tore it up. More than replicating light falling on a striped pelt, for Chikudo painting the tiger was an act of empathy. He wanted to capture the essence of this foreign beast.

  For centuries, images of tigers had made their way to Japan on plates and scrolls. Painting a tiger was like painting a dragon—one followed conventions. Every tiger was a copy of a copy: a Japanese artist copying a Chinese artist or a Japanese artist copying an older Japanese artist copying a Chinese artist. Many imitation tigers resembled crooked-tailed tabbies. For these artists, to imagine the tiger as sinew and fur was as hard as it is for us to imagine Chikudo.

  Chikudo advised his students to follow the principle of 写生, shasei, copy life. This might seem obvious; it is easier to draw a thing if you have seen it. But shasei does not just mean to use life as a template. It means to look for the essence of the living thing and to represent that in its truest form. Chikudo visited the tigers again and again. He looked at ribs that were larger than his wrists. He examined their bellies, soft and white as camellia petals.

  Four times, Chikudo painted a tiger and tore it up. He worked without pencil. Each stroke had to be perfect. Some marks had to be darted into wet paper. A dry dot of color might be added days or weeks later.

  By the time he began on the painting that would hang in Chicago, he had at last reached something in the tiger that was behind the two-tone green and yellow of her eyes. 心持ち, kokoro mochi, is an aesthetic standard to which a painting can be held. One in which the primary criterion is the empathy the painter feels for the subject, so that he in some way becomes his subject. Literally, heart holding.

  We cannot observe Chikudo. We know that he probably painted kneeling upon the floor, not standing up like Western painters. But did he drip ink on his sleeve? Did he let the black spread in spots and stripes? Or was he too adept for dirty sleeves? We cannot see at which stroke the madness crept up the horsehair brush. We cannot listen to him shout to an apprentice to bring him more ink. We cannot hear the growl rolling up his throat. But we can understand loving a subject so much you become it. We can feel in our own eyes the ache in his: the longing to honor himself, his country, and this greatest beast.

  ON VISITING THE World’s Fair, the Century Illustrated Monthly called Chikudo’s Tigress “a marvel of Japanese realism.” He had succeeded. But Chikudo could not know this. Chikudo was no longer an artist. He had stared and stared. He had felt the way muscle folded around bone. He knew the rush of air into great lungs and the beat of a one-kilogram heart. He had felt the tiger’s scorn for the small, bald creatures who caged her. His hands had blurred into her haunches. His ears had curved into a tiger’s semicircles. Chikudo was a tiger. To paint her, he had become her.

  The Century Illustrated Monthly reported his state as “temporary mental derangement.” Three years later, Chikudo died. There is no record as to whether he was man or beast at the time.

  Chikudo’s Tigress is in private hands, but for a few months in the spring of 2015, she emerged for an exhibit at the Japan Society. She laughed openmouthed at the Americans admiring her pelt. Behind her long teeth rested a tongue, dark as new blood. Is it not a glorious thing to be a tiger?

  The Stained Veil

  Gaiutra Bahadur

  Ramchand’s death, in Connecticut in his late sixties, was unexpected. He was a diabetic, but one who watched what he ate, strictly monitoring his calories, and who walked every day at the same hour, clocking his time precisely. He retired even earlier than usual that evening, complaining of indigestion. When his wife, Rani, followed an hour later, she found him gasping for air on her bed. They slept in the same room, but they had not slept together for many years. Later, the emergency room nurses found thousands of dollars, in immaculate one-hundred-dollar notes, stuffed into his trouser pockets. Ramchand distrusted banks. His account had been seized by the government when they fled their country, so he kept a substantial amount of cash hidden in their bedroom in Bridgeport. Even Rani didn’t know where. Although Ramchand had gone into cardiac arrest with no history of heart trouble to warn him, somehow he understood that his time had come. He understood enough to lie on that bed, hers not his, with enough money on his body to bury him.

  At the funeral home, she betrayed little emotion as she received the procession of relatives who had come to pay their respects. They had come from up and down the East Coast and a few from as far away as Florida and Toronto to say goodbye. As they filed past, they registered her otherworldly quiet, an eerie halo encircling her as she sat in the front row. A niece knelt beside her to whisper a consoling memory of Ramchand, the year he was mayor, riding around on a bicycle with a basket in front to meet his constituents in the little market town near their village. Remembering how seriously he had taken to his role, Rani smiled to herself. He had been a figurehead, really, a token Indian in the ruling African party.

  “Uncle Ram gone,” she said, squeezing the girl’s hand.

  There was only the slightest quiver in Rani’s voice. Her children did not know what to make of her composure. Over the years, they
had seen her entire body shake with emotion, during almost epileptic breakdowns. Perhaps the antidepressants had numbed her. Even at the crematorium, as the mechanical maw closed around the coffin and their son flipped the incinerator’s switch, turning on the wails of the women in the room along with the flames, Rani shed her tears silently.

  In the car, on the way back to the house, she told her son-in-law how pleased she was with the memorial service. So many people had come from so far away—and once she reprimanded their eldest grandchild who didn’t want to deliver a eulogy, the young woman had complied, finding between grief and shyness a few words of strangled tribute. Her granddaughter had done her duty as the firstborn, and this had satisfied Rani’s sense of dharma. If the girl had not found her voice, Ramchand would not have liked it.

  After this terse expression of approval, Rani retreated back into herself, humming. She looked out the window, beyond the narrow streets and the row of houses leaning together for support, beyond the squat city of ruined factories and empty warehouses where they had spent the last twenty years, their American years. The song she was humming took her back to a place where she could be alone with the task of remembering Ramchand.

  The turning point in their marriage had happened before they emigrated. While at first he could not ration his glasses of rum, in later days he was frugal to a fault, counting closely the coins he earned as a shopkeeper as well as the affection he gave as a husband. Ramchand had gone from excess to austerity, and each had been cruel in its own way.

  As a young man, he had been fond of racehorses and drink. Sometimes, he lost himself in it so deeply, he threatened violence. On too many afternoons, dread was coiled in their house on Cloud Nine Avenue, like a cobra that had somehow stolen in.

  To keep him from the rum shop, their eldest daughter would lock herself in their bedroom with his clothes. When he was forty-one, he quit drinking, yet the attention he paid Rani was no less measured out. He transferred his fervor from the bottle to Hinduism, clasped his faith with the same desperate logic and need for solace as his daughter used to clasp his clothes behind a barred bedroom door. From the moment that Ramchand found the gods, for the rest of his life he would be their devotee, just as Rani was and would continue to be his.

  She had spent almost all of her own life by his side. All her years, except the first sixteen, had belonged to Ramchand, to his shop, to his children—the three who survived and the four who didn’t. Grief would collect beneath her bones in layers, a still but gestating thing, gathering and sedimenting with each infant’s loss. This kind of mourning, this slow and silent unbecoming, wasn’t one she could ever have imagined in her first sixteen years.

  THOSE YEARS HAD unfolded in the shelter of a father enlightened enough to let Rani stay in school, just long enough to learn to read and write and count—skills that later served her well as a shopkeeper’s wife. She had been the cosseted darling, the youngest and the prettiest of the Mohabir daughters, the one who most gracefully wore the dainty shoes, respectable handbags, and store-bought dresses that were the relics of her family’s faded prosperity.

  In those sixteen years of rooted innocence, she had known place and its boundaries intimately. There was her family’s rice mill, where cattle moved in circles in the yard, crushing paddy underfoot around a threshing pole. On Saturdays, she would go to Miss Evie’s bungalow—Miss Evie who taught her to sew and knit, whose son, Esau, would one day become a composer of classical music in another country. Once, she’d peeked through a back window of the Kali temple down the road, only to run home sick to the stomach at the sight of the blood of a sacrificed goat. That was the extent of her transgression and thrill.

  The village sat unassumingly on the edge of endless rows of flowering cane, but hidden in its tall quiet, it contained well too much drama for the good of its inhabitants. Too much story, coiled like snakes in the cane. Her father used to say in rounded and swaying dialect, while observing his girls in some fracas, some private disagreement that had embroiled them: “Ayu get too much o’ story wid ayu self.”

  That’s what it was like in Lovely Lass.

  Rani crossed the boundaries of this world for the first time when she married Ramchand. Whim, his village, was a half-day’s journey from hers, near the next big sugar estate down the coast. Her father had chosen for her a young man from a devout family, high caste but humble before god. What Rani had noticed was how handsome he was, his features symmetrical and angular, his face cut with precision, like a dark jewel. He was as dark as she was fair.

  When, decades later, she and Ramchand left for America in late middle age, she would remember this first migration from her father’s home to her in-laws’. There was nothing that could match it for daring. It was the most routine, inevitable thing a girl could do. And the most terrifying. After that, what move could possibly be as bold?

  Rani didn’t understand it at the time, but ever since she was a child, the older women at work in the rice fields and the kitchens were singing her fate just as they sang their own. So many of the folk songs they taught her had been about a bride going to her in-laws’ house, and a stained veil had often featured in them. It would be her destiny as it had been theirs.

  Their in-law songs, those sasurals, held a heroine’s fear and wonder on crossing an unspeakable threshold. The songs had featured in the Bollywood movies screening at the Astor, the cinema house in New Amsterdam, the town nearby. Of course, Rani was not there to see Meena Kumari as the courtesan in Dil Hi To Hai, crooning “Laaga Chunari Mein Daag,” with eyes that mourned, yet feet that stamped and hips that pivoted. The boys in the village would skip school to catch the pivoting hips, but that was their privilege. As a girl, how did she dare? She wasn’t at the matinees, as the boys were, over and over again, to hear the sensual tragedienne sing: “How will I go to my in-laws with a stained veil?”

  A good girl from a good family, she would never settle into a scarlet-cushioned seat next to boys who might wonder how precisely the veil had become stained: Was it from sex or violence? Did they know yet that the two could exist together, in the same moment’s loss?

  The image had come from Kabir, a saint-poet from the land that her ancestors had left generations ago. As Rani sewed in the yard, or helped her mother grind dal in the kitchen, she would chant:

  You must leave your home forever

  Putting on a veil you will go to meet your beloved

  You must leave your home forever

  This veil of yours is stained

  The neighbor women jeer–

  These words written some four centuries earlier would fly away from her as she formed them, their meaning difficult and strange. When she was big enough, the old women tried to tell her how to make sense of the poems. Imagine the father’s house as the world we know, the earth, they said—and trust that the husband’s house is a higher reality, the mystical. Trust was their instruction and refrain. When you go to your marriage bed, they explained, the stain will be the spot that proves you are pure; but know also what Kabir knew, that the besmirched veil is the physical world, the impure body that we must all cast off in death. Rani was perplexed. Kabir didn’t seem to know the difference between a dirge and a bride’s ballad. Did death and marriage call for the same song? Rani might have been forgiven for wondering, as she intoned:

  You will never escape this body’s betrayal,

  Wrinkling and bunching with time.

  You must leave your home forever.

  Kabir says: when you seek to understand

  You will always fail.

  Kabir says: any song your body sings

  Is a death song

  What bride wears her veil

  In the presence of her beloved?

  Cast it off.

  You must leave for your real home.

  WHEN RANI ARRIVED at the little white house standing on stilts, so like the bandy-legged egrets that alighted in the rice fields, her in-laws were kind. They were not the cruel ones foretold in so many sasu
rals, the ones where mothers-in-law slapped their daughters-in-law for failing to make perfectly round rotis, or fathers-in-law loomed with the rancid smell of stale bush rum on their breath. Ma and Pa doted on her. Ramchand was both loving, and not. It was easy to admire him. He looked like a matinee idol, with thick, oiled curls and a cocksure grin that betrayed his knowledge of just how convincing his jawline was; on his face light and motion played, in eternal boyishness. What dealt the final blow, making him irresistible, was the vulnerable undertow in otherwise scampish eyes.

  Ramchand’s father had sweated in the cane fields, and so had his mother. They wanted better for him—and Rani was definitely that. Her family had some position. Their business, though struggling then, had once been robust. As early as the thirties, Mohabir Enterprises was exporting rice overseas, all the way to the islands; they had an office in New Amsterdam, and it even had a telephone.

  At eighteen, what did Ramchand have, besides his ambition and eyes that seduced? When she arrived, with a spangled chunari well too proud to be stained, he had Rani. To have her, as his wife, was one path to the prosperous world that his confidence had marked as his own. Success was rightly his. And when he removed her veil that first night, it was with a tender kind of possessiveness. Whose woman was she? She and all that she represented was his, to do with as he pleased.