Jasmine

by Bharati Mukherjee

  On his last crossing, Little Clyde fell into vigilante hands in Texas. “Dey cotched dat boy like a fish,” Kings-land said, “and dey cotted him just like dey do fish. We find him like fish, guts dryin in de sun. Why de world go de way it do, girl?”

  I didn’t console Kingsland with Vedic slokas about fish and fishermen. He needed to gorge his paranoia. Little Clyde’s vigilantes had ways: wet mattresses, electric cattle prods, quart bottles of cola. What was the bottle of cola for? He said that first the vigilantes forced the Coke up Little Clyde’s nose. “Den dey shov de empty bottle up his arsehole, girl.”

  Little Clyde smiled. “Dis time I do it right, mon.”

  The woman from Mauritius, the only other woman on the boat, and mostly Indian, to look at, cried when she heard the story about Little Clyde and the vigilantes. She was a fervent Catholic with a French accent. She cried for her father, who would turn in his grave if he knew that she was subjected to words like “arsehole.” In Port Louis she had studied in a convent school. I disappointed her. To her I was a coarse, common girl, a peasant. She kept herself sane singing Gilbert and Sullivan songs, which she said were British. Kingsland also knew Gilbert and Sullivan. I’d never heard of them. I was born into India’s near-middle age. British things were gone, and in our village they’d never even arrived.

  One evening Half-Face lectured us on deck about some dos and don’ts. He said, “Listen up. Here’s the emergency drill. Three blasts of the whistle and you hit the water. Comprende?”

  The dead dog in the river never seemed so close. I smelled softening flesh.

  “After landfall, if the Border Patrol picks you up and hauls your ass off to the detention center, you don’t know us. You never sailed The Gulf Shuttle. You fucking walked on water, okay?”

  The Mauritian wept delicately into a handkerchief. I asked her why she was with us, with her education and soft hands, but she never answered. No work, dead parents, bad marriage, and you end up on a shrimper in the Gulf, under a tarp. You end up bait-fish, Kingsland said.

  “What’s the problem, hon?” Half-Face asked. “I don’t see the problem.” To the rest of us he said, “You need accommodations, we got accommodations. It’ll cost you, but we got them. You need transportation, we’ll truck you anywhere you want.”

  Kingsland whispered to me, “Don’t truss dat mon, no way.” Then he slipped a surprise farewell present into my palm. I felt the nicked handle butt of a knife, not much bigger than the penknives that my brothers had whittled sticks with to play their danda goli games. “You con count on dat at least, when de end of de world come in.”

  * * *

  Deeper into the night, Half-Face’s crew took down the tarp tent. Their flashlights bobbed in blackness. I smelled the unrinsed water of a distant shore. Then suddenly in the pinkening black of pre-dawn, America caromed off the horizon.

  The first thing I saw were the two cones of a nuclear plant, and smoke spreading from them in complicated but seemingly purposeful patterns, edges lit by the rising sun, like a gray, intricate map of an unexplored island continent, against the pale unscratched blue of the sky. I waded through Eden’s waste: plastic bottles, floating oranges, boards, sodden boxes, white and green plastic sacks tied shut but picked open by birds and pulled apart by crabs.

  In a clearing by the cove, white men with sneering faces waited in panel trucks with engines running to transport us to points south and north. Little Clyde and Kings-land shook clean slacks, shirts, leather shoes out of plastic bags and changed into them. Their old clothes were balled up and tossed into the ocean. Kingsland even had a pack of Fresh-Ups on him. His well-fleshed face glistened clean as he climbed into a truck. I still had Prakash’s heavy suitcase.

  Du also remembers clothes lying flat on the beach, as though the people inside had been zapped by aliens. I’ve told him this much of my arrival. The assholes.

  * * *

  The better-heeled got in panel trucks. Little Clyde got in the rusting trunk of a sedan. The Mauritian girl got put in the back seat. We didn’t wave.

  I dragged my suitcase up the sandy trail. Crabs scuttled underfoot.

  “What, no takers for you?” Half-Face honked at me from a great boat of a car.

  I kept walking.

  He stopped the car and got out. He put his hand over mine on the handle of the suitcase and waited for me to withdraw it. Then he picked up the suitcase and slung it into the back seat of the car. “Get in,” he said. He fixed me with his dead eye and said, “There’s some bad fellows up yonder. Best you and me keep us a little company.”

  17

  IWONDER if Bud even sees the America I do. We pass half-built, half-deserted cinder-block structures at the edge of town, with mud-spattered deserted cars parked in an uncleared lot, and I wonder, Who’s inside? What are they doing? Who’s hiding? Empty swimming pools and plywood panels in the window frames grip my guts. And Bud frowns because unproductive projects give him pain. He says, “Wonder who handled their financing.”

  My first night in America was spent in a motel with plywood over it’s windows, its pool bottomed with garbage sacks, and grass growing in its parking lot.

  Half-Face whisked me inland off the keys, deep into pine and Sabal palm country, off narrow roads with scooped-out ditches on either side. It felt as if we were driving on the tops of dikes, with fields of swamp grass between us and the walls of leggy trees. The landscape was not unfamiliar: monsoon season in Punjab.

  No tourist would ever stay at the Flamingo Court. The neon bird was browned out, the only lights that worked blazed a big red NO in front of VACANCY. Plywood panels didn’t matter much. I’d grown up sleeping four sisters to a bamboo mat on a cold adobe floor. I was seventeen years old. Why shouldn’t I have been taken in by the splendors of an abandoned motel?

  Half-Face looked at me, amused. “So, you don’t mind ending up here with me instead of in the back of a cattle truck?” Six of one, he said, half dozen the other. He leaned across my lap to unlock the door on my side. The mangled side of his face came at me, like a bat in a night-black forest. I stepped out of the car, fast.

  Ours seemed to be the only sedan in the parking lot. The rest were panel trucks and pickups. A cabless semi all atilt was parallel-parked by the chain-link fence in the back of the motel. The abandoned semi was a bunkhouse, too, for cut-rate undocumenteds. Short, dark-skinned, black-haired women sat outside it, tending a fire. Beyond the fence was woodsy blackness.

  Someone called to Half-Face from the ground-floor porch of the motel. It sounded like “Baba!”

  In the sour yellow light of the porch, I made out a fat black man in a T-shirt and jeans. “No way you goin stuff one more body into 201, Bubba. You caint stuff even one mo mouse into dat room!”

  “Wasn’t plannin on it anyhow, Lonzell,” Half-Face snorted. “This’n here’s my own special lookout. Me’n hers been traveling a long ways together.” He hefted my bag up the pink spiraling stairs that could have been straight out of an Amitav Bhacchan film set.

  “How come you have an Indian name?” I asked as I spiraled up just behind him.

  “Come again?”

  “The man called you Baba.”

  Half-Face looked lost for a second. Then he grinned on his good side. “You better reset your ears, honey. It’s Bubba,” he said. “Bubba ain’t no Indian name, no way. In the nigger-shipping bizness we don’t bother with last names.”

  He strode down the entire length of the second-floor porch; I kept up as slowly as I dared. What was fated to happen would happen. My mission, thank God, was nearly over. Half-Face set my bag down in front of the door to the corner room. “What would a little girl like you be needing with such a heavy bag?”

  He unlocked the door and shoved the bag over the threshold. “Note,” he said, “you are entering because you want to. No coercion involved.” He faced me, hands at his side, palms up. “Haven’t I been a perfect gentleman? Offering a ride, carrying your bag? Well?”

  “Yes,” I admit
ted. “Thank you for everything.”

  “What do I get?” I extended my hand and he nearly ripped it off, pulling me into the room. His leg flew waist-high in a show-offy kick and the door thumped closed. He grabbed me and pulled me against him and started kissing.

  I could feel the dead half-mouth against mine, and the one glass eye staring down.

  “What’s your problem, cold fish? I thought you’d be different from the others. A spark, you know?” I wiped my mouth.

  “I saw you carrying on with that jigaboo Jamaican. You don’t like white men, that it?” He strutted around the room—his office, he called it, his home away from home. There were framed pictures on the dresser, men in T-shirts with caps on, a trophy with a man crouching and holding a ball no larger than a cardamon pod. Mrs. Half-Face and maybe some children. A pair of shoes with the number 12 stamped on the back.

  “Well, I reckon we’ll have time to get used to each other. Kind of adjust and get comfy, you know?” He turned on the air conditioner, the TV, the radio, the bathroom light-and-fan combination. “See, see? Deluxe stuff.”

  I said, “My husband is a genius at repairing televisions.”

  “Is he, now. That’s very interesting. Give him a call, tell him to come over and watch.” He started laughing, great croupy wheezes, and pulled me to him for another kiss. “Look, just don’t fuck with me. I been to Asia and it’s the armpit of the universe.” He dragged me to the television and pressed my forehead against the screen. Then he brought my head back and slammed it against the set, again and again. “Don’t tell me you ever seen a television set. Don’t lie to me about no husbands and no television and we’ll get along real good. I got things I can do for you and you got something you can do for me, and I got lots of other things I can do to you, understand?”

  There was a small crack on the television screen. “Now look and see what you done to my television. You sorry, or what?” I reached for my forehead, no blood. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt my scar tightening, and the heat from the screen on my swelling.

  I remembered Prakash, sitting cross-legged on our bed under the fan as he repaired Mrs. Jagtiani’s VCR and Mr. Jagtiani’s old German shaver. His hand on mine, directing the tweezers, “There! Perfect!” and sighing, “That bloodsucker Sindhi is destroying my spirit.”

  I started to cry.

  He pulled me off the floor and dropped me on the bed. “Okay, baby, we’re going to keep this simple. I got one use for you, and you got no use for me, and you know what? That don’t bother me at all. In fact, it’s sort of a turn-on.” He started undoing his belt. “I don’t think you like me much, do you?” He turned his bad side to me. “This sorta makes you sick, don’t it? You’re afraid I’m going to rub the scars all over your pretty little face, aren’t you?”

  He looked at me, and at the suitcase, then he rubbed his jaw, a man with too many options. He hefted the bag onto the bed and unsnapped the catches. Out came my sandalwood Ganpati. He propped it up against a picture on the dresser. He noticed my photo album and picked it up. Pictures of Prakash and of Pitaji, wrapped in an old sari. He flipped through them all, raising an eyebrow at pictures of me in a sari, leaning on the old Bajaj. Some clothes. At the bottom, the blue suit, unworn, still folded with its BABUR ALI/MASTER TAILOR/JULLUNDHAR on the sleeve. He got a kick out of this, slipping on the jacket, only to find that he couldn’t button it or move his arms.

  “Who’s this for?” he demanded. “A kid?”

  “It is my husband’s,” I said.

  “Kind of a scrawny little bastard, ain’t he?” He laughed and dropped the jacket back in the suitcase. “You made me carry this shit up here? You carried all this shit halfway around the world? You crazy or what? Travel light, sweetheart, always travel light. If you hadn’t been carrying this bag, you wouldn’t be in the deep shit now, you know that? Ever think of that? ‘Course, I’m not objecting.”

  “I promised,” I said. “It is my mission to bring my husband’s suit to America. I am taking it to his school and burning it where we were going to live.”

  “Yeah, where?”

  “Tam-pah,” I said.

  “Well, shit, that’s not far at all. I’ll drive you down there in the morning. Wouldn’t burn it, though, might seem a little suspicious.” He laughed the wracking series that ended in spit.

  “Christ,” he said. “Getting your ass kicked halfway around the world just to burn a suit. I never heard such a fool notion.”

  He laughed again, ending in the cough. We are all put on this earth for a purpose, Mataji would have said. All acts are connected. For every monster there is a hero. For every hero, a monster. He closed the suitcase and laid it on the floor.

  “As I was saying.” He laughed. “Just you keep it coming and I’m your meal ticket outta here. Give me any grief and you’re dead meat.”

  He went into the bathroom and came out with a glass of something in his hand. He sloshed almost all of it down in one long gulp before dropping heavily back on the bed. I watched him drink. He had slack, flabby, inefficient lips.

  “Water,” I said. “Water would taste very good.”

  He stayed on the bed. “You staring for a reason?” I asked for water again. I wanted him out of the room. “You know what’s coming, and there ain’t nobody here to help you, so my advice is lie back and enjoy it. Hell, you’ll probably like it. I don’t get many complaints.”

  “My husband was killed,” I said. “Please don’t do anything to me.”

  He pulled the drawstring of my salwar pants. “I’m real sorry, but I didn’t do it, lady. Like I said, don’t give me grief.”

  He turned his back and pulled down his pants. “You better be getting out of that shirt.”

  “He died in my arms. He’s here, you know.“

  Half-Face turned. “Sure he is. In the closet, right? I told you about the shirt.”

  “He’s in this room.”

  “Okay, I’ll buy that. You’re a grieving widow. But you’re also one prime little piece, and where I come from, that cancels out.”

  Half-Face stood, totally naked. He was monstrously erect. Prakash had always been so concerned for me. He was afraid of youthful pregnancy, of children bearing children. He talked to me of muscles tearing, of the girl’s body only looking mature, no matter what the rituals, the feudalisms, said. For the first time in my life I understood what evil was about. It was about not being human. Half-Face was from an underworld of evil. It was a very simple, very clear perception, a moment of truth, the kind of understanding that I have heard comes at the moment of death. I had faced death twice before, and cheated it.

  Yama will not sneak up on me.

  “I want water, please.”

  “Yeah, okay. You’ll get your water.” He went to the bathroom for me, and when he came back, the glass of water was brown and smelled of the liquor on his breath. He pulled off the puffy panties from Europe I’d been wearing.

  He stared. His hands were trembling and then he whooped, “Oh, God!” and tried to kiss me, but he was all hands and face in motion. I twisted, only delaying the inevitable, making it worse perhaps, more forced, more violent. I tried to keep my eyes on Ganpati and prayed for the strength to survive, long enough to kill myself.

  “Use a drink?” He lay back beside me, one thick arm over me, the other one with the glass. “I must use the bathroom,” I said, and he let me up. I picked my pants up off the floor and tried to be modest. He balled up my shirt and put it under his head, a second pillow.

  “Get yourself cleaned up, but don’t take all night,” he shouted. “Second time’s the sweetest.” He seemed to find it amusing. I turned on the shower, making it hot. With water pelting the shower curtain, I vomited. Then I showered. I had never used a Western shower, standing instead of squatting, with automatic hot water coming hard from a nozzle instead of cool water from a hand-dipped pitcher. It seemed like a miracle, that even here in a place that looked deserted, a place like a madhouse or a prison, where the most hi
deous crimes took place, the water should be hot, the tiles and porcelain should be clean, without smells, without bugs. It was a place that permitted a kind of purity.

  I determined to clean my body as it had never been cleaned, with the small wrapped bar of soap, and to purify my soul with all the prayers I could remember from my fathers and my husbands cremations. This would be a fitting place to die. I had left my earthly body and would soon be joining their souls.

  The bathroom steamed like a smokehouse. I reached into the pocket of my salwar for Kingsland’s knife. Until the moment that I held its short, sharp blade to my throat I had not thought of any conclusion but the obvious one: to balance my defilement with my death. I could not see myself in the steamed-up mirror—only a dark shadow in the center of the glass. I could not see, as I had wanted to, an arm reaching to the neck, the swift slice, the end of my mission.

  It was the murkiness of the mirror and a sudden sense of mission that stopped me. What if my mission was not yet over? I didn’t feel the passionate embrace of Lord Yama that could turn a kerosene flame into a lovers caress. I could not let my personal dishonor disrupt my mission. There would be plenty of time to die; I had not yet burned my husband’s suit. I had not stood under the palm trees of the college campus.

  I extended my tongue, and sliced it. Hot blood dripped immediately in the sink.

  I had planned it all so perfectly. To lay out the suit, to fill it with twigs and papers. To light it, then to lie upon it in the white cotton sari I had brought from home.

  I put on my pants and wrapped myself in the towel for the iciness outside. He was, as I had hoped, asleep in his total nakedness, hands clasped peacefully around the glass of half-drunk whiskey balanced on his chest. I drew close to the side of the bed, next to the nightstand, where I could study the good side of his face. My mouth had filled with blood. I could feel it on my chin.