It’s hard to know how he learned what he pleased to do that night. He could not have learned it from the Bollywood movies at the Astor, with their strategic cutaways, leaving kisses suspended in the imagination, somewhere between intention and execution. There were no scripts for it there, nor in the songs that Rani was taught. Or perhaps she just hadn’t known how to decode them. She knew only that she liked Ramchand and wished to please him. She knew, too, that blood rushed to her shoulders when he took her by the hand and led her into their bedroom. The sensation was bewildering, a strange kind of levitation, as if she were both anchored in her body and floating outside it.
“Come,” he had said.
The command was gentle. And he spoke softly to her, admiring her beauty, expressing wonder at the depth of innocence in her eyes, telling her how proud it made him to nuzzle a nose as sculpted as hers. Her fair shoulders, again, blushed. He undid her blouse to reveal them, a few shades less scarlet than her sari, and instead of turning those innocent eyes away, she looked directly into his own. They had a liquid quality that made her dissolve, but in that instant they crystallized with purpose, as if before him lay an impossible target that he had to apply every muscle and all his wits toward hitting. It was that single-minded look, fixed with determination on his sudden goal, that she would most remember about their wedding night.
This stalactite quality in the eyes would appear again during the course of their marriage. It was there when, on the edge of orgasm, lying on top of her, he yanked at her hair, giving her an unexpected thrill. And it would be there the time he had her on her hands and knees, and she looked back over her shoulder to hear him express an intention that she could never have imagined him expressing, much less with such blunt, profane brutality. Then his eyes became something darker, fired by entitlement, stunned by disbelief, as she said no and turned over. How dare she deny him? In a fit, faster than either of them could register it, he completed an act that he would, much later, recognize required forgiveness.
It wasn’t Rani that he ultimately asked for forgiveness. In prayer, seeking quiet in his conscience, he acknowledged to himself: “She said no, but I turned her back over and took it anyway.”
It provided some comfort to him to remember that, afterward, he had held her, stroking her hair as if she were a bruised child. He had been, at once, her violator and her protector. And she, like him, would for a long time afterward tether and untether feeling to fact: her pride in who she was to what she had allowed him to do, her adoration of him to what he had been capable of doing. How could she have fought him? Wouldn’t resisting have made his actions even more wrong, his character even more compromised? And how untethered would she have been then?
Under his spell, she had gone to a place where ego had not mattered. She had climbed down into the unconfessable cave of what it meant to be in love: to be willing to submit, even to choose it. Was she mirroring what the world told her she was, as a woman? Was she choosing a psychological prison like the many legal and physical ones that society had constructed for her? What he did that night wasn’t a crime. They were married, after all. And he never did it again. Once he had asserted his right, he never again exercised it. The world was what it was: Paddy did not grow without flood. Sita did not let Ram go into exile alone—no, a good Hindu woman never abandoned her husband. Nor did she refuse him. Love was its own dictatorship. Of this, she had no doubt.
WHEN THEY CAME to America, Rani and Ramchand were running from a political dictatorship which they had resisted in modest ways. When the police came to his shop and tried to seize his goods as contraband, Ramchand jumped on top of the counter to stop them. He had performed many such acts of bravery, shopkeeper’s bravery, during the days that flour, potatoes, and imported brands were banned. In the end, their greatest act of resistance was to leave. Like everyone else, they had queued outside the American embassy. Sponsored by their daughter in Connecticut, they waited long, drowsy years for their green cards.
Driving home from the crematorium in Bridgeport, Rani traveled back to the day that finally convinced them it was time to go, the day of Ramchand’s first brush with death. Flashbacks often found her there, remembering how a bullet found its home beneath his left shoulder blade.
When the robbers arrived at Cloud Nine Avenue, Ramchand was pulling shut the shop’s wide, barnlike doors to reveal the faded Pepsi-Cola ad painted across them. The bandits came with guns in the middle of a crime wave, a spree of what the papers called “choke-and-rob.” The opposition parties, in the underground pamphlets they pressed secretly into receptive palms, declared petty Indian shopkeepers the targets, and the dictator the prime mover behind the scenes.
The family responded as if they had expected their turn at any moment. Rani was in the back of the house, in the kitchen, attacking dough with a rolling pin, and the children were upstairs at their evening routines, the girl ironing her school uniform and the boy cradling his shortwave radio, his ear cocked for the cricket scores. When she heard the gunshots, and the screaming, the girl undid her golden earrings shaped like bells, placed them gingerly on her tongue, and hid behind the clothes hanging in her mother’s wardrobe, as terrified of swallowing the jhumkas as of being discovered. The boy slid under the bed, pressing his rail-thin body into a corner, trying to make himself even smaller than he was. Rani had run out into the front yard with her rolling pin still in hand, raised as if to defend her family. She was in time to watch Ramchand reach beside the shop door for the cutlass that always waited there, its long, curved blade too rusty to be any real threat to the six armed young men she saw encircling him.
“Coolie man, nah even try da,” one warned, drily.
Even though they wore red kerchiefs with white polka dots across their mouths, Rani recognized the robbers as village boys, barely out of their teens. The one who cautioned Ramchand with such composure was the son of the bowlegged policeman at Whim station. And the one who shot Ramchand was the old lady Winifred’s nephew, the light-eyed one everybody called Hazel. The first Sunday of every month, at four o’clock, Rani went to Winifred’s house to receive phone calls from her daughter in the States. Had Hazel overheard Rani talking about the black market flour and Enfamil formula hidden behind the parlor cases displaying pine tarts and Chinese cakes? Had he been there when Rani described the baby bangle, a slender, fretted rope specially ordered from the goldsmith for her first grandchild, born in America?
It was Hazel who fired when Ramchand grabbed the machete. The slur had made her husband act the hero. She was sure of it. The insult must have wounded him as deeply as the bullet. His attackers didn’t address him as Mr. Maraj or Uncle Ram or Mayor, or even Bicycle Uncle, as the village boys sometimes mockingly called him. Instead, as he reeled from the bullet’s impact, Ramchand heard: “Coolie man! Nah man! Keep de cutlass fo’ you wife.”
His entire life, Ramchand had been belittled by that epithet. He had inherited the hurt from his parents, who had been branded the same by plantation overseers. Ramchand couldn’t seem to save—or marry or Brahmin—his way out of the shame of it. Not even joining the ruling party had helped. And it didn’t seem to matter that he sold the banned wheat flour to Winifred too, to Indian and African alike. He was from cane country, a son of indenture lacking high school or Christ, town ways or creolized polish, and no one was ever going to let him forget it, certainly not his neighbors who had come to rob him. As he lay there bleeding and humiliated, just another coolie with a cutlass in his hand and a bullet in his back, the bandits shot his sister to death. She had bolted out of her house next door, yelling bloody murder from her veranda when the first shots rang out.
Rani was too stunned to scream. In her trance, the men took easy charge of her, disarming her of the belna before taking her by the elbow and leading her into the house. “Where de gold, auntie?” Hazel asked.
All Rani could see as she took him to the room where her jewelry and the last of her children were secreted was Ramchand collapsing. His eyes were
open when he hit the ground. Where, she wondered, was the stalactite in them then? That afternoon, the robbers almost added another layer to Rani’s grief. Among the things they carried that night were her wedding jhumkas and mangal sutra, the necklace of sovereigns that her mother had thrice pawned when the family rice mill had failed, the bangle for the baby in Connecticut, jute bags filled with flour and sugar, and all the petty cash in the register; but they did not succeed in taking Ramchand’s life.
In the years to come in America, whenever the illness that never stopped growing inside seized her, she would ransack every room searching for lost jewelry. The police had ultimately rounded up the thieves and recovered the precious necklace strung with pound sterling coins, a rarity from plantation days, and the rest of the stolen goods—everything but the money. Rani remembered going to the station to identify the young men and her things, but it had done no good. The police released the robbers and kept the jewelry.
Afterward, whenever depression took hold, she would hunt madly for bangles that were exactly where she had left them. She would phone her children, accusing each in turn of taking the jewelry without asking. Rani repeatedly acted out the loss of what she still possessed, as intensely as if she were mourning the proud man cut with precision who once made her shoulders blush, as if the robbers had in fact stolen her dark jewel that day, as if he had departed long before he lay down on her bed to die.
When his soul was actually about to depart, his ashes in an urn on her lap, she found herself returning to those two other thresholds in their lives. As she remembered leaving for marriage half a century before and for a new country more recently, she sang of stained veils. It seemed appropriate. Had there not been blood, both times? Weren’t both migrations tarnished with violence? So Rani sang the verses that the old women had taught her. The bride cries, she must go to her lover’s. She cries because she must go. She was an old woman now. My love will beat me with a bamboo rod. My love will hold me by the neck and beat me. Finally, she understood what the words meant.
She hummed to herself until she saw before her eyes Ramchand, wearing jhumkas and a red chunari with golden beadwork. He looked young again, his curls blue black and glistening under the veil, his eyes rimmed with kohl, a bride before the gods, ready to go to his last home. His lips moved, forming the words “laaga chunari me daag,” and he danced with bells on his ankles, the spark coming from his hips, the grace from the nimble flight of his hands. Their coquette’s tracery framed his eyes, those eyes that had always contained want and wrong and the fire of this world. The vision tossed its head. How will I go to my in-laws / With a stained veil.
Ramchand threw off the veil, slowly crossing over to another realm.
And Rani, forgiving the body’s betrayal, let him go.
I’m Charlie Tuna
Jason Koo
I’ll be sitting at home, eating a tuna salad sandwich,
when the awareness kicks in: Well this is a little sad.
The 2 p.m. light, weak through the trees, the crooked
cloth napkin on my lap, crusted stains in the creases:
sad. The lunch looks almost professionally made:
wheat bread lightly toasted, pickle perfectly placed,
just the right smattering of BBQ chips to fill out
the gap of plate, but still I am conscious of a blight
on it all, something that makes me stop my chewing
and notice the minute dirt speckling the carpet,
the cat hairs clinging to the couch, all the fine grains
of my slovenliness. I feel too grown for my chair.
I am attacking my sandwich, really wolfing it down.
Look at this barbecue pollen on my fingers. What is it
about lunch alone in my apartment that makes me
feel I am not evolving into my life but becoming
sweepable, material for a dustpan? I can hear my mom
in the silence: None of my friends asks about you anymore.
They all feel sorry for me; they think you’re a failure.
Where did you get that shirt? You look like an orphan.
Hard to disagree as I watch myself picking lint
off my sweater and dropping it on a small helipad
of books to my left, licking the orange microbes
from my fingertips and dipping them right back in
to the chips. Not my solitude but my narrowness
bothers me, how eagerly my mind takes to this
focal field, delighting in the thought process
of sandwich, pickle, chip, sandwich, pickle, chip,
then the variants, chip, pickle, sandwich, sandwich,
chip, pickle, sometimes studying one of the components
at a slower chew, the tender, watery seeds tattooed
on the inner skin of the pickle, the pockmarked canyon face
of a chip, when it could be studying the face
of a man, looking for the inner skin of him, the seedbeds
there beneath the deadgrowth, combining that face
with other, far-ranging things of the world in a process,
opening out from the cell of my apartment, taking in
the Pentagon and penguins, car bombs, marriages,
mudslides and satellites, helicopters disintegrating—
already I can see the details thinning as my mind reaches
its limits. But would there be any limits if I were living
differently? If I let more people into my life, even those
I couldn’t stand? People who act as if they’ve never had
a feeling, never experienced a single moment
of transcendence—already I am doing it, keeping people out.
I like to think I am generous, a jazzy Falstaff
to the world, but the dirt and silence of my apartment
read like an indictment. My mom calls, I don’t pick up.
Jason, are you there? Are you there? Jaaaay-son. I know you’re there.
Why don’t you call us once in a while, let us know we have
a son. Gee. I finish my lunch, look at what I’ve left
on my plate: dimpled pool of pickle juice, breadcrumbs,
splinters of chip. Part of me just wants to shut down,
staring at that plate, feeling the pressure each small thing
is putting on it, asserting its last life before being swept
by water down the drain. I don’t know how my plate
manages it, holding so much scrappy smallness up,
not just the smallness but the lame air above it, polluted
by my exhalations, unleavened by the light, but it does, it
takes the weight, just as the table below it takes its weight,
the floor below the table, the table’s, the whole apartment
below me, the floor’s; so that I can get up, clean my plate,
feel the majesty running in my veins again, gift of so
much water from an unknown source, walk confidently
down the hall into the other room, type Hello hello
at the top of a new page, beginning to get past myself,
the privilege of my emotion, this grainy actual window
lacquering my vision: into the world ongoing
and vociferous, my fingertips tapping on the keys
as on the smooth foreheads of cats, releasing me
into alleyways and nooks, the shade of tanks, prying open
all the cabinets and closed doors, poking into trash.
Bon Chul Koo and the Hall of Fame
Jason Koo
Boston to Cleveland, ten hours with Dad in the car,
and I’m thinking, How am I going to get through this,
remembering the last time we took a road trip,
ten years ago, stadium-hopping through the Carolina League,
Class A ball, Kinston, Winston-Salem, Lynchburg
and, of course, Durham, back in high school
when I was
writing The Great American Novel
about a starting pitcher on the Kinston Indians (which
began, “Ball four,” and went on for 147
single-spaced pages) and told him I needed to do
some on-site research, getting the exact dimensions
of fields, the colors of uniforms, the feel and flavor
of local crowds, as well as a few good player names
(such as Wonderful Monds, outfielder for the Bulls),
and he surprisingly agreed to take me, only to get
food poisoning on the second day of the trip
and spend the rest of it lying down in the backseat
of the car or, if he had space, right there in the bleachers,
never saying, Let’s go home, but not happy either,
sighing every few miles we’d drive in silence, as if to say,
I’m barely able to eat a nacho, going to all these stupid games
and still I cannot talk to my son, and even though I knew this,
I didn’t break the silence, not even to say, Thanks,
Dad, I appreciate what you’re doing or How’re you feeling?
and when he would break it, finally working up the courage
to ask me a question, as if I were a famous poet
and he a lowly MFA student at a post-reading Q&A,
articulating it in his head beforehand, getting the English
right, making slight clicking noises with his mouth
as he prepared to speak, building up the right tension
of tongue against teeth, he would go for too much,
asking, So, Jay, what do you see yourself doing in ten years?
or How come you hate your mom? and I would react badly,
almost violently, and he would go back to sighing again,
and I would drift away. I don’t want to repeat that
silence yet don’t exactly want to make the effort to talk,
would, truthfully, much rather be driving alone
listening to one of my favorite bands, the music coalescing
with my mind over the landscape, my body going weightless
with speed, so I feed Dad questions about Korean
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