Some days now, Bela can barely recall what Leena was like. Did she have one braid, or two? What was her favorite game? Her favorite movie? Did she like ice cream better, or sandesh? She doesn’t reveal this slippage to Bijan. She senses that it would distress him almost as much as it distresses her. But she knows this much: Leena’s magician (whom she cannot remember at all) could not have been anything like hers.
Bela has decided that she hates school. She has kept this fact carefully to herself, because she doesn’t want to add to her parents’ troubles. It has been a difficult move for them all. They had to give up their charming high-rise flat near Deshapriya Park, with a courtyard filled with tamarind trees in whose shade Bela played hopscotch with her friends after school; Sabitri’s elegant dinners, where Bela was allowed to stay up and watch guests whispering in their glittery saris and imported suits; Bijan’s air-conditioned office on the top floor of the company headquarters, from which Bela could see the Victoria Memorial, tiny as a toy palace.
But inside loss there can be gain, too, like the small silver spider Bela had discovered one dewy morning, curled asleep at the center of a rose. Their evenings, on the nights when Sabitri and Bijan stay home, are wondrously uneventful. Bijan leafs through the local newspaper, reading aloud tidbits that amuse or exasperate him. Sabitri labors over a gray sweater that Bela cannot imagine it will ever get cold enough here to wear. Deposited on a quilt on the floor, the baby contemplates his plump, kicking legs. All of a sudden he turns over and looks astonished. At such times, Bela feels for him a piercing love, though she continues with her homework, saying nothing. Once in a while—but less each day—she finds herself holding her breath. She is waiting for the old noises: the crash of items hitting the floor, glasses or furniture or bodies; the sour smell of vomit next morning in the upholstery. And that lightning glance from her mother’s eyes, as though somehow it was Bela’s fault.
How, into this precarious peace, can she inject her petty problems? She is friendless among the local schoolgirls, children of oil-field employees who look upon her with nervous suspicion as the daughter of the man who controls their fathers’ destinies. Heads bent together, they whisper in Assamese when she approaches. If she happens to answer a question in class (but nowadays she has stopped doing this), they snicker at what they term her fancy city accent. Even the teachers, with their heavy Assamese-tinged English, narrow their eyes at her. Her handwriting, hampered by the fountain pen they insist she use instead of the smooth ballpoints she is used to, has been judged woefully inadequate. And tomorrow she will have to recite Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” in its entirety in elocution class for Miss Dhekial, who is known to rap knuckles with her ruler. Bela’s knuckles ache already in anticipation, for though she has been practicing the poem all week, under the critical gaze of the class she continues to blank out, sometimes as early as stanza two.
Bela is sitting in the Sunday garden under the mango tree, thinking all this instead of doing her homework, when the magician suddenly appears. Startled, she drops her fountain pen, which makes a spidery black splotch in the middle of her arithmetic assignment. Then it rolls down her lap onto the lawn, leaving a dark, accusing trail on her uniform.
“So sorry,” the magician says, bending his long, elegant back. “Please allow me.” He removes his hands from the folds of his shawl and a glowing falls from them onto the notebook, on the smudge, which disappears. Lightly, lightly, he runs his fingertips over the stains on Bela’s uniform, and that, too, is clean again. Then he seats himself, cross-legged, at her feet. Bela looks around wildly for someone who can confirm that this is really happening, but they are alone in the garden. Under her uniform, her knee tingles where the magician had placed his fingers.
The magician’s eyes flit from side to side as though he were reading something very rapidly. Their whites are a pale yellow, the color of drowned sand at the bottom of a river.
“It’s called learning by heart, you know,” he says. “You can remember anything if you use your heart.” He taps his chest as he says this. Something seems to shift in her chest—her own heart, perhaps, sluggish, muscle-bound, finally coming to life. She feels the same tingle there as she did on her leg.
“Anything?” she whispers, thinking of entire worlds lost within her.
“I can help,” he says. He opens his fist and shows her a small globule the size of a pea, the color of his tamarind face.
This is exactly the kind of thing that Sabitri and Bijan have warned her of. She begins to shake her head. Then the magician says, “It will teach you not to care what people think about you.”
The tingling starts on her tongue but then travels all over: fingers, face, the curved backs of her calves. Her throat is a tunnel lined with red silk. Words pour out from it. “Good girl,” says the magician. He is small now and hazy; his face shimmers like dragonfly wings on a lake. She tries to tell him this, but she can’t get through that waterfall of words. Sorrow rakes her as she watches him become tiny, then tinier, until he spins away like a spore on the wind.
The tingly sensation is leaving her now. She feels drained and disoriented and a little sick, like the time when she rode too long on the Ferris wheel at the Kolkata Maidan with Leena. Leena had thrown up afterward. Bela remembers how red her nose had been, and her eyes, embarrassed behind her glasses. She remembers how she had rubbed Leena’s back and said it was okay. She remembers!
“That’s wonderful, baby.”
Bela whirls to find Sabitri standing behind her chair, wearing a flowery salwar kameez that makes her look too pretty. She’s suddenly angry, because Sabitri seems untouched by this move which has torn Bela into pieces and then reassembled her haphazardly, and Sabitri doesn’t even realize it. She’s angry, too, because Sabitri has had something to do with her father’s drinking, though if anyone asked Bela what, she wouldn’t be able to explain. A memory stirs inside her, something that happened in a car and changed everything, something terrifying that ended with a slap that flung Bela against the car door—that’s all Bela can recall. Perhaps if her magician comes back, he will help her salvage more.
Thinking of him makes her angry all over again because Sabitri might have seen him. Bela’s magician. Bela’s secret.
“How long have you been standing here?” she asks with a hard scowl.
Sabitri’s mouth falls open like a scolded child’s. “Only a few minutes,” she says, apologetic. “I came to ask if you want fresh sugarcane. Ayah brought some from her village. I remembered how much you liked it last time. I didn’t want to disturb you, though. It sounded so lovely.”
“What did?”
Through the pounding of her newborn heart she hears Sabitri say, “The poem you were reciting. Is it something for one of your classes? There she weaves by night and day / A magic web with colors gay. / She has heard a whisper say, / A curse is on her if she stray.”
“It’s stay, not stray,” she whispers, but Sabitri continues, oblivious.
“I loved the way your voice rose and fell in all the right places. Better than anything I’ve heard you recite before. And the emotion—almost made me cry. It was as though someone had trained you—”
Chewing on the hard sweet sticks of sugarcane that leave fibers between her teeth, Bela asks Sabitri, “Do you believe in magicians?”
“Like in Sleeping Beauty?” Sabitri says as she spoons mashed banana into the baby’s mouth. “But no, that was a wicked fairy—and a good one, wasn’t it, that kept the princess safe? I want to believe. It would be lovely if a good fairy was watching over us here. We could do with some extra protection.” She looks into the distance, where a tiny train puffs soundlessly across the rice fields. She watches it for such a long time that Bela thinks that she has been forgotten.
Then Sabitri swivels toward Bela with a mother-glint in her eyes. “Why do you ask?”
Bela wishes she could press her head into her mother’s chest, the way she did when she was little, and tell her everything. But she n
o longer trusts her mother that way anymore. Besides, if she talks about him, the magician will never return. She is certain of this. It’s a calamity she can’t bear on top of all her other losses.
“Just a book I read,” she says, nonchalant. As Sabitri busies herself with the baby again, Bela presses her tongue against the ridges of her palate, trying to find the exact spot where the globe melted into her, trying to recapture the taste.
“I did well in school today,” Bela tells Ayah, who carries into her room a tray with her afternoon snack of milk and biscuits. “In elocution, I recited my poem without a single mistake. Miss Dhekial was surprised.”
“Why surprised? You smart missy.”
“Not here in Assam. Here I feel stupid. I was terrified that I’d forget my lines and everyone would laugh. But it was perfect—like magic.” She isn’t sure Ayah, who has never attended school, can gauge the height of her achievement, but the woman nods solemnly.
“Like magic,” she says.
“Do you believe in magicians?” Bela asks, her breath quickening.
Ayah looks at Bela speculatively. Then she settles herself on Bela’s bed, on the peacock-colored bedspread, though as a servant she’s only supposed to sit on the floor. She picks up one of Bela’s biscuits and bites into it. Bela knows she should chastise her, but she doesn’t.
“In my village,” Ayah says in a hushed tone as she munches, “is big magician. Very strong. Very danger.” She proceeds to describe to Bela how he once battled an evil lake-spirit by burning mustard seeds and chanting a powerful spell until the spirit was forced to flee, bleeding from its eyes and mouth and anus. Now it wanders around looking for unwary individuals that it can drag to a watery death. Bela listens in horrified fascination even though she knows she will wake at night with the worst nightmare.
Bela is on the old swing at the far edge of the lawn, urging it higher than the branch it hangs from—something she has been expressly instructed not to do. She has been out here under the hot sun for a while. That, too, she has been told not to do, but no one at home seems to have noticed. She is waiting for her magician, but with each moment her hopes wilt further. When he does appear, perched on a nearby branch, she is so startled that she forgets to push into the arc of the swing, which plummets downward. The rope makes a terrible snapping sound. She feels herself sliding off the seat. But the magician catches her before she hits the ground. Then he cocks his head, birdlike, and looks at her sadly.
“I have come to say goodbye.”
“No!” Bela cries. “Don’t go.” There is so much she wants to tell. The admiration on the faces of her classmates in elocution, and how in the afternoon they let her join their games. The bitter sweetness of remembering Leena. The nightmare that terrified her and the way she handled it. The gauzy, stippled dragonflies she keeps seeing everywhere, which remind her of him. There’s so much she wants to ask him, too. What happened in the car. What happened to her father afterward.
“You can come with me,” the magician says, spreading his arms like wings. His robe falls open and his body gleams like polished metal. Something dark and tidal rises inside Bela. But then she remembers Sabitri and Bijan, their faces bending to kiss her good night. She begins to back up toward the house, its solid, square predictability. The magician makes no move to stop her.
“Is that what you really want?” he asks in his kind, reasonable voice. “They have the baby. They will not miss you much. They might even be happier with you gone. After all, you ruined everything for them.”
His voice echoes in her head, and her eyes fill with blinding spots as though she has gazed too long at something bright and burning. “No,” she whispers, but she is not sure which part of his statement she is refuting. When his fingers part her lips, she holds her mouth open for the globules he is placing on her tongue. One, two, three . . . A tingling opens up the top of her skull.
The magician shakes out his headband and brings it to her face. “It is forbidden to see the way,” he tells her. Obediently she begins to close her eyes. Then she remembers. Last night, when she woke from the nightmare with her heart smashing against her ribs, she went to the baby’s crib and lifted him out, grabbing him awkwardly around the middle like a package. He didn’t even awaken. She brought him to her bed and lay down and held him. His head fit perfectly under her chin. Harsha, she whispered, saying his name for the first time. Harsha. She fell asleep listening to his breath—he snored a little, he had a cold—and the dream did not return.
“No,” she cries, but already the ground is tilting up to meet her.
The room is full of papery whispers, and there are more floating around outside the door. Snippets of moments flash by Bela. She was in an ambulance, strapped onto a stretcher, escorted by sirens. They carried her to this room, this bed. Fingers examined her, pulling back the lids of her closed eyes. Heatstroke, someone said. Dehydration. IV. Someone else pushed a needle into the hollow of her elbow, not caring that it hurt.
“I think she’s waking up!” Bela hears Sabitri exclaim. Her mother’s face looms large over the bed, alarming as an out-of-orbit moon, fading in and out of focus. In a hushed, sickroom voice, she adds, “Bela, sweetie? Can you see me? Do you know who I am?”
Beyond Sabitri, servants crowd the room, muttering among themselves. At the foot of the bed, a white-coated man stands, garlanded by a stethoscope. It takes Bela a few moments to recognize him as the company doctor who treated her when she had the fever. Beyond him, by the hospital window, stands her father, tieless and crumpled, gesturing at a man in a police uniform.
“Talk to me, baby!” Sabitri’s voice cracks. “Can you talk?”
Bela wants to reassure her, but her head hurts. It’s too much of an effort to speak, and even to keep her eyes open. The light from the window burns them. On the other side of her closed lids, she hears her mother begin to weep.
“Madam, please calm down,” the doctor says in his slow country voice. “Your daughter is conscious, and that is a good sign. We should clear the room. I need to check her again to make sure she does not have a concussion.” He holds Bela’s wrist between cool fingers. “Her pulse has normalized, though I suspect her reflexes are still slow. Clearly, she needs to rest.”
“But what about the man she was rambling about? Do you think he could have given her drugs? She said something— Do you think he harmed—?” Sabitri’s cut-off words waver in the air.
The doctor gives an embarrassed cough. “No, madam, there are no signs of . . . that. In fact, I am not sure there was a man at all. Your daughter may have just fallen from the swing and hit her head—she does have a bump. Also, she may have been out in the sun too long. Such things can disorient anyone.”
No, Bela wants to cry. There was a man. There was. A special man, sparkly as a gold tooth, opening up locked doors inside her mind. Making meaning out of the Morse code of fluttering dragonfly wings. She couldn’t have mistaken something so important.
“I don’t think she’s disoriented,” Bijan interjects, suddenly, hoarsely. Bela hears him striding to the bed, her champion. She waits for him to throw his arms around her, but he isn’t paying attention. “There definitely was someone. Someone who intended to harm Bela. I want you to test her blood for drugs. Last week, I had a big argument with the workers’ union about overtime pay—I bet they had something to do with this.”
Are his words slurred? Is an old odor rising from him, raw and pungent? Bela’s eyes fly open in alarm.
“The bastard—and anyone else who was involved—they’re going to be sorry they messed with my daughter.” Bijan leans over the bed. Like cracks in porcelain, lines run from his nose to the corners of his mouth. He grabs the doctor by his white sleeve. Bela can taste his anger. It’s bitter and desperate, like the dregs left at the bottoms of whiskey glasses, the ones she sometimes sipped from in the morning in Kolkata before her parents awoke.
“Sir, please don’t jump to conclusions,” the policeman says. He is a burly man, and Bela n
otices dark blotches of sweat under the armpits of his khaki uniform. “We will definitely be on the lookout for a stranger—in case there was one. As soon as the doctor allows, I will get a detailed description from your daughter. I would like to question the maidservant, too, since she was the one who found the girl at the edge of your property.”
Bela’s eyes skid across the watching faces until she finds Ayah’s. She tries to read what Ayah might have seen. A dragonfly that hovered for a moment before the wind snatched it away? The wooden seat of the swing thwacking the back of a head? A man with a polished metal body wrapped in a robe of fire? But Ayah’s eyes are black stones. She stares at the IV machine with its endless silver dripping as though it were a holy mystery.
“Question the union leaders,” her father says. “Find out what kinds of alibis their henchmen have.”
“The union is very strong—better not to accuse them unless we have proof,” the policeman says. Bela hears the warning in his voice.
And where is Harsha? Why is he not in this room with Ayah? Who is watching him? Is he alone at home? Someone needs to go and get Harsha right now. Bela tries to tell Sabitri that it isn’t safe to leave Harsha alone, nothing is safe here, doesn’t she know that? But her mouth is gummy and her lips will not open.
Hands fisted, Bijan rises to face the policeman. “I’m going to get to the bottom of this, if it’s the last thing I do. I’m not afraid of any damned union.”
“Bijan, please.” Sabitri puts a hand on his arm.
“Don’t touch me! None of this would be happening if it wasn’t for you!” He pushes her away so hard that Sabitri’s shoulder hits the wall. The doctor has to grab her to keep her from falling.
“And if I don’t get the necessary cooperation from you,” Bijan says to the policeman, his voice rising, “I won’t hesitate to complain to your superiors.”
Before We Visit the Goddess Page 5
