Jasmine

by Bharati Mukherjee

  She gave me her daughter’s high-school clothes: blouses with Peter Pan collars, maxi skirts, T-shirts with washed-out pictures, sweaters, cords, and loafers. But beware the shoes, she said, shoes are the biggest giveaway. Undocumented aliens wear boxy shoes with ambitious heels. She opened her thumb and index finger a good six inches, like a crocodiles mouth.

  Suddenly it all came back: Jullundhar, Prakash, a day just before the end, at Bata Shoes. An image triggered the tears, the screams. The Kanjobal women left the room; Lillian stayed with me, brewing tea.

  Prakash in his peach-colored bell-bottomed slacks, kicking off his chappals and asking to see their best “Western” burra sahib leather shoes. Oh, he looked so tall, so proud, lifted in those shoes that gleamed like oiled hair in their boxy brilliance.

  “See how tall I am, Jasmine?”

  “Put these things away,” he said to me back in the apartment. “No more chappals for me.” I felt love like a razor slash across my eyes and tongue, and now with a touch of shame.

  “My daughter calls them Third World heels,” Lillian said, laughed, after the tea had calmed me down. Walk American, she exhorted me, and she showed me how. I worked hard on the walk and deportment. Within a week she said I’d lost my shy sidle. She said I walked like one of those Trinidad Indian girls, all thrust and cheekiness. She meant it as a compliment.

  “Tone it down, girl!” She clapped as I took a turn between the kitchen and bath. I checked myself in the mirror, shocked at the transformation. Jazzy in a T-shirt, tight cords, and running shoes. I couldn’t tell if with the Hasnapuri sidle I’d also abandoned my Hasnapuri modesty.

  We drove into a mall in Clearwater for the test. Time to try out my American talk and walk. Lillian called me “Jazzy.” In one of the department stores I saw my first revolving door. How could something be always open and at the same time always closed? She had me try out my first escalator. How could something be always moving and always still?

  At the bottom of the escalator she said, “They pick up dark people like you who’re afraid to get on or off.” I shut my eyes and stepped forward and kept my eyes closed all the way to the top. I waited for the hairy arm of the law to haul me in. Instead, Lillian said, “You pass, Jazzy.” She gave me two dollars. “Now, how about buying me a Dairy Queen?”

  I remember Dairy Queen as my first true American food. How it soothed my still-raw tongue. I thought of it as healing food.

  The Kanjobal women didn’t speak any English. For them Lillians small house on stilts must have felt like a safe garrison in hostile territory. At the time I felt a little bitter, nostalgic for their locked and companionable world. They showed me how to pat grainy tortilla dough into shape, and I showed them how to roll the thinnest, roundest chapatis. And Lillian taught us all to cook hamburgers and roasts, to clean toilets with cleansers that smelled sweeter than flowers, and to scrub pots and pans with pre-soaped balls of steel wool instead of ashes and lemon rinds, so we could hire ourselves out as domestics.

  At the end of a week, Lillian said in her brisk, direct way at the breakfast table, “Jazzy, you don’t strike me as a picker or a domestic.” The Kanjobal women looked at her intently, nodding their heads as if they understood. “You’re different from these others. I better put on my thinking cap and come up with something.”

  I said, “I want to go to New York. I have an address there.” I showed her the back of Professor Devinder Vadhera’s aerogram.

  She read off the address. “Kissena Boulevard, Flushing,” she repeated. “I suppose Queens isn’t what it used to be.”

  She packed me a suitcase full of her daughter’s old clothes that evening, and two days later she put me on a Greyhound bus. At the bus station she gave me her final tips. “Now remember, if you walk and talk American, they’ll think you were born here. Most Americans can’t imagine anything else.” She penned a Manhattan address on the back of a blank check and slipped it to me. “But just in case you get picked up at the Port Authority—you never know how the Good Lord intends to test you—call my daughter. At least she’ll be able to get you a lawyer.”

  And then she gave me a hug and a kiss. “Quite uncharacteristic,” she said, “but impulsive and sincere. You’re a very special case, my dear. I’ve written that to my daughter, so don’t hesitate to call her.”

  19

  BEFORE the courts busted her for harboring undocumenteds, exploiting them (the prosecution said) for free cooking, cleaning, and yard work, Lillian used to send me twenty dollars and a pair of hand-knitted pink wool slippers every Christmas. She did the same for everyone she’d ever helped. They would arrive care of her daughter, Kate Gordon-Feldstein, the photographer and friend of Taylor and Wylie. Lillian made certain that my name and address never appeared in her files. I have three sets of identical slippers. Once she learned a pattern, she never varied. I treasure them as a devotee might a saint’s relics.

  I couldn’t testify for her, given my own delicate status. My anonymous letter of support was ruled inadmissible. I wrote that she saved my life, after others had tried to end it. She represented to me the best in the American experience and the American character. She went to jail for refusing to name her contacts or disclose the names and addresses of the so-called army of illegal aliens she’d helped “dump” on the welfare rolls of America. In prison she got sick, and they pardoned the contempt charge to let her die at home.

  About a year ago, Wylie wrote me out here in Iowa. She was trying to get her bosses interested in An American Kind of Saint, the Lillian Gordon story. She wondered if I would participate. Anonymously, yes. The project looked good for a few months. As the editor, maybe even the author, Wylie had public access to Kate and confidential access to me.

  “We could get a made-for-TV movie out of it. Katharine Hepburn to star,” she said. “Crusty and unvarnished, but with very good bones.” Then the project crashed. The demographics weren’t there. People were getting a little scared of immigrants and positively hostile to illegals.

  Kate, the ironist, wrote me that she and her sister sold the house on stilts to a retired orthodontist from Tampa. For back taxes, he’d already picked up and remodeled a deserted motel down the road (the Flamingo Court, did I know it?), then he bought the barracks and the land around the Kanjobal settlement, and now, with Lillian’s property, he was advertising a “Key West-style cottage,” for people accustomed to “a slower, more gracious time.” He’s developing the whole area into something called Paradise Bay Complex: A Mixed-Use Vacation and Residence Community.

  A sanctuary transformed into a hotel; hell turned into paradise—to me this seems very American. The brochure says that Paradise Bay is situated “just steps away from a private marina.” Is this the scummy, collared cove bobbing with garbage sacks where Half-Face beached us? Now the new Flamingo Court Hotel is a ten-minute drive from a 2,400-foot airstrip. Goodbye, nigger shipping! Hello, America! New Half-Faces have found a more profitable product.

  At Paradise Place, a one-bedroom unit with Gulf front, bath, and balcony costs $280 a night. That would be Kate’s old room and mine. The Kanjobal women’s room is described as having a “Gulf breeze.” During our cut-rate residence with Lillian, we stayed away from the windows. We didn’t check out the fishing promised in the brochure either. Pompano, grouper, cobia; trout, mackerel, redfish, flounder, mullet; blue crabs and stone crabs. I do remember flying fish striking the deck of The Gulf Shuttle, and crawling after them before they slithered overboard.

  In the brochure, fit blond young couples charter fishing boats, play tennis, train binoculars on bald eagles and spoonbills, slather each other with sunscreen lotions.

  It is by now only a passing wave of nausea, this response to the speed of transformation, the fluidity of American character and the American landscape. I feel at times like a stone hurtling through diaphanous mist, unable to grab hold, unable to slow myself, yet unwilling to abandon the ride I’m on. Down and down I go, where I’ll stop, God only knows.

&nb
sp; At ten in the morning on a Monday I arrived in New York City. There were scores of policemen swinging heavy nightsticks, but none of them pounced on me at the bottom of the escalator. They were, indeed, watching. A black man in shredded pants asked me for a handout. Beggars in New York! I felt I’d come to America too late. I felt cheated. I had Lillians parting gift of one hundred dollars, of which I’d already spent twenty on food, and a bag of Florida oranges and grapefruit as a house present for Professorji.

  This American beggar kept clawing at me, grabbing and touching in familiar ways, and when it became clear that I had nothing to give, he yelled, “You fucking bitch. Suck my fucking asshole, you fucking foreign bitch!” As passengers stared, he bounded up the down escalator.

  In the taxi to Queens I wept hot, bewildered tears.

  “Look, lady.” In the rearview mirror I caught the drivers watchful glance. “You got American dollars?”

  I nodded. He was from my part of the world, given to bitterness and suspicion. I could have spoken to him in Punjabi or Urdu, but I didn’t. I wanted distance from all his greed and suspicions. “And if I run short,” I said, “Professorji will take care of it. He was my husbands friend.”

  The driver said, “In Kabul I was a doctor. We have to be here living like dogs because they’ve taken everything from us.”

  I said nothing.

  He went on about the wrongs. Bitterness seemed to buoy him, make him special. I would not immure myself as he had. Vijh & Wife was built on hope.

  We took the bridge into Queens. On the streets I saw only more greed, more people like myself. New York was an archipelago of ghettos seething with aliens.

  20

  YOU want to know what’s wrong?” Darrel says on the phone. “Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s fine.”

  We’re on a party line. The whole town seems to be hurting. I can hear the sighs of eavesdroppers. Last week a tenant farmer went to feed his hogs after supper. Three hours later his wife found him in the manure pit with a bullet in his head. His farm wasn’t one of the ones in trouble, Bud said.

  “I think you should go to Dalton. Go talk some more to those people about their golf-club idea.”

  “Dalton’s not far enough,” Darrel says. “I think I should go to Tahiti. Introduce beans and hogs to Tahiti, what do you think? I should get the hell out of Iowa.”

  “So, go to Tahiti.”

  “You’re saying I’m running away from my problems.”

  “Running,” I say. “Not running away.” And to myself I say, Why should you care what I think?

  The farm country is closing over Darrel. And over me, over Du. Tomorrow I’ll plead with Bud.

  I know what Darrel’s going through.

  I got out of Flushing within five months. Flushing was safe, a cocoon to hatch out of. Then one night—I was unrolling my sleeping mat on the floor of the Vadheras’ living room—something came over me, and early the next morning I picked up my bag and my pocketbook and took the #7 train out of the ghetto. One more night and I would have died. Of what? I might have said then, of boredom, but boredom is only a manifestation of something worse.

  Can wanting be fatal?

  Professorji and his family put me up for five months—and it could have been five years, given the elasticity of the Indian family—just because I was the helpless widow of his favorite student. I was also efficient and uncomplaining, but they would have tolerated a clumsy whiner just as easily.

  I want to be fair. Professorji is a generous man. Somehow, the trouble is in me. I had jumped a track. His kind of generosity wasn’t good enough for me. It wasn’t Prakash’s, it wasn’t Lillian Gordon’s.

  The family consisted of his aged parents and his recent bride, Nirmala, a girl of nineteen fresh from a village in the Patiala district. The marriage had been arranged about a year before. She was pretty enough to send a signal to any Indian in Flushing: He may not look like much over here, but back in India this guy is considered quite a catch.

  In what I already considered “real life,” meaning America, he was at least forty, thickening and having to color his hair. He had a new name in New York. Here he was “Dave,” not Devinder, and not even Professor, though I never called him anything but Professorji. When he answered the phone, “Dave Vadhera here,” even the Vadhera sounded English. It sounded like “David O’Hara.”

  They had no children. He had avoided marriage until he had saved enough to afford two children, and to educate them in New York. Male or female did not matter, he was a progressive man. They’d been trying, according to Nirmala, who blushingly confided the occasional marital intimacy. I took enough interest in their problem to look and listen for signs of dedicated activity. Perhaps they were more imaginative than I gave them credit for. Nirmala was nineteen: According to my forged passport, I was nineteen too, but I was a widow. She was in the game, I was permanently on the sidelines. Professorji blamed his long hours and back pains. She blamed impurities in the food.

  Pleading lab work, Professorji was out of the house by seven o’clock, five days a week. They both came back at six o’clock, harassed and foul-tempered, looking first for snacks and tea, later for a major dinner.

  Should anyone ask, I was her “cousin-sister.”

  Nirmala worked all day in a sari store on our block. Selling upscale fabrics in Flushing indulged her taste for glamour and sophistication. The shop also sold 220-volt appliances, jewelry, and luggage. An adjacent shop under the same Gujarati ownership sold sweets and spices, and rented Hindi movies on cassettes. She was living in a little corner of heaven.

  Every night, Nirmala brought home a new Hindi film for the VCR. Showings began promptly at nine o’clock, just after an enormous dinner, and lasted till midnight. They were Bombay’s “B” efforts at best, commercial failures and quite a few famous flops, burnished again by the dim light of nostalgia. I could not unroll my sleeping mat until the film was over.

  I felt my English was deserting me. During the parents’ afternoon naps, I sometimes watched a soap opera. The American channels were otherwise never watched (Pro-fessorji’s mother said, “There’s so much English out there, why do we have to have it in here?”), but for the Saturday-morning Indian shows on cable. Nirmala brought plain saris and salwar-kameez outfits for me from the shop so I wouldn’t have to embarrass myself or offend the old people in cast-off American T-shirts. The sari patterns were for much older women, widows.

  I could not admit that I had accustomed myself to American clothes. American clothes disguised my widowhood. In a T-shirt and cords, I was taken for a student. In this apartment of artificially maintained Indianness, I wanted to distance myself from everything Indian, everything Jyoti-like. To them, I was a widow who should show a proper modesty of appearance and attitude. If not, it appeared I was competing with Nirmala.

  Flushing, with all its immigrant services at hand, frightened me. I, who had every reason to fear America, was intrigued by the city and the land beyond the rivers. The Vadheras, who would soon have saved enough to buy a small apartment building in Astoria, had retired behind ghetto walls.

  To date in her year in America, Nirmala had exhausted the available stock of Hindi films on tape and was now renting Urdu films from a Pakistani store. She faced a grim future of unintelligible Bengali and Karnataka films. Everyone in Flushing seemed to know her craving. Visitors from India left tapes of popular Indian television series, and friends from Flushing were known to drive as far as New Jersey to check out the film holdings in the vast India emporia. They had a bookcase without books, stacked with television shows.

  Professorji and Nirmala did not go out at night. “Why waste the money when we have everything here?” And truly they did. They had Indian-food stores in the block, Punjabi newspapers and Hindi film magazines at the corner newsstand, and a movie every night without having to dress up for it. They had a grateful servant who took her pay in food and saris. The parents were long asleep, no need to indulge ritual pleasantries. In the morning, the s
ame film had to be shown again to the parents. Then I walked the rewound cassette back to the rental store.

  Professorji’s parents, both in their eighties and rather adventurous for their age, demanded constant care. There were thirty-two Indian families in our building of fifty apartments, so specialized as to language, religion, caste, and profession that we did not need to fraternize with anyone but other educated Punjabi-speaking Hindu Jats. There were six families more or less like Professorji’s (plus Punjabi-speaking Sikh families who seemed friendly in the elevator and politically tame, though we didn’t mingle), and three of the families also had aged parents living in. Every morning, then, it was a matter of escorting the senior Vadheras to other apartments, or else serving tea and fried snacks to elderly visitors.

  Sundays the Vadheras allowed themselves free time. We squeezed onto the sofa in the living room and watched videos of Sanjeev Kumar movies or of Amitabh. Or we went to visit with other Punjabi families in sparsely furnished, crowded apartments in the same building and watched their videos. Sundays were our days to eat too much and give in to nostalgia, to take the carom board out of the coat closet, to sit cross-legged on dhurries and matchmake marriages for adolescent cousins or younger siblings. Of course, as a widow, I did not participate. Remarriage was out of the question within the normal community. There were always much older widowers with children to look after who might consider me, and this, I know, was secretly discussed, but my married life and chance at motherhood were safely over.

  Professorji’s father always lost a little money at poker. Professorji always got a little drunk. When he got drunk he complained that America was killing him. “You want stress,” he asked anyone who would listen, “or you want big bank balance?”

  The old folks’ complaints were familiar ones. In India the groom’s mother was absolute tyrant of the household. The young bride would quiver under her commands. But in New York, with a working wife, the mother-in-law was denied her venomous authority. The bent old lady who required my arm to make her way from the television to the bathroom had been harboring hatred and resentment of her mother-in-law for sixty-five years. Now that she finally had the occasion to vent it, Nirmala wasn’t around to receive it. This was the tenor of all the old people’s complaints—we have followed our children to America, and look what happens to us! Our sons are selfish. Our daughters want to work and stay thin. All the time, this rush-rush. What to do? There are no grandchildren for us to play with. This country has drained my son of his dum. This country has turned my daughter-in-law into a barren field. If we are doomed to die here, at least let us enjoy the good things of America: friends from our village, plentiful food, VCRs, air conditioning.