She remembered an eggplant recipe that had turned out tremendously well. It was some Indian thing. She had been cooking Indian dishes more and more lately, having been unable to discover what was Californian in California cuisine. She was sure she still had all the ingredients to flavor the dish. She imagined Arjuna as an extended eggplant, stretched out long and thin on a vegetable torture rack. Her mouth watered at the prospect. Arjuna would be her savior.
First she had to bake him until the skin turned to a golden crispness, like leaves on a warm autumn day. She placed the snake, coiled peacefully into a spiral, on the largest oven tray she could find. Even then she had to cut off his extremities, which she did with the slow precision of a young woman combing her beloved’s hair. When baked, she pulled him out and ran her fingers along the now hot, frangible body. Her nails caught in the brittle scales, which broke off readily like dead bark chipping away from an old tree.
She skinned him next. This proved more difficult than she had expected, as if her longtime-companion was being deliberately recalcitrant. The scales came away easily enough, but much of the skin remained intact, or pulled large portions of the snake’s pulpy white meat away with it. She scraped the meat free from these sections and out onto the tiled countertop, poking gingerly from time to time at the small masses of doughy flesh. She half expected them to react, unsure whether some remnant of the life force that had inhabited Arjuna still didn’t exist. However, the meat remained motionless and numb to her prodding.
With the skin off, she began to prepare the dish in earnest. Arjuna’s insides would be suspended in a thick cream, forming the textured heart of the dish. The dish included fried onions and green chillies, finely chopped garlic, ginger, turmeric and fenugreek seeds, some amchur and a handful of salt.
It seemed perfect. She had not thought about it until now, but having Arjuna for dinner seemed a proper consummation of her own life. She would, in a sense, be returning India to herself. She smiled at this idea. She was not pleased about going back to the real India, but the essence of it she could take. If she could eat it, eat her past in a sense, then perhaps she might start over again, she might be able to become an Indian. It seemed suddenly ludicrous. She becoming an Indian. She laughed out loud. She kissed the decapitated head of Arjuna. Everything smelled so lovely.
Parvati pulled the top from the pan, her face arched high above it so that she would get the full cloud of steam as it rose flavorfully from the cooking. The dish was simmering. It was a striking orange color, like emergency road signs, she thought.
She couldn’t resist. She plunged a finger into the almost blisteringly hot, bubbling mass and pulled it out, flinching from the heat, with a sense of—she wasn’t sure what—of victory, of having won a battle? But when she licked her finger, she almost retched and was filled from head to toe with a terrible sense of disappointment. It tasted horribly bitter, Arjuna’s stale meat having corrupted the dish, not made it.
She stepped back, staring at the simmering, orange mess. Everything was a mistake. She couldn’t remember why exactly she had wanted to cook Arjuna. He had looked so peaceful, dead. She felt tired, exhausted. Her mind felt tired. It was the same way she had felt when Krishna told her they were returning to India, and this morning, when he informed her of the round of upcoming dinners. No difference. It was a stupid idea, she thought. She should have known.
On the table, beside Arjuna’s decapitated head, sat the now empty box, and she remembered all the kimonos thrown haphazardly on the floor of the upstairs hall. She had no idea what she would do with them in India. Perhaps she might wear one. There could be no difference, she thought, between herself in Japan and herself in India. In fact, she would wear one that night! Immediately, all the weight of disappointment vanished and she forgot Arjuna and finding him dead and cooking him and how it all turned into a beastly mistake. She would call the caterers right now, she would order platter upon platter of sushi, and she would descend the staircase when the guests arrived, dressed in a kimono. Yes, she determined fiercely, tonight she would be Japanese.
Bodies Motion Sound
I
THE MORNINGS FOUND DAD BALANCED IN A KNOT, breathing in through one nostril and out through the other, sometimes upside down or his feet where his ears should be, and his ears, well, only he knew that. He would walk downstairs stripped to the waist, wearing baggy grey pajamas pulled tight with a cord so that his stomach, when gravity allowed it, swelled like a sack of water over his groin.
He had started yoga when he began peeing in the bed. This was soon after Mom and Dad were married. He assured her the peeing was nothing, that with their first child all would be well, and if not with the child, then with yoga for sure. His pissing was the result of the family curse, a legacy of uncontrollable bodily emissions, and one he schemed to cripple through this effort of mind on body and thought on matter. He had warned her when they married, said sooner or later it would begin; his own dad had been a sweater, his body a great cloth of endless perspiration, even in winter his pores would open up, spilling out his essences making his body a mutineer against the season, against the spin of the earth around the sun, against the very nature of bodies and heat and sweat; his grandmother, Mumtaz, was a renowned shitter: her shits could last for hours and on such days her groans traveled all over the house and far down the street; her braying would be incorporated into the games of children, the rhythm of nearby musicians, and the bawdy humor of the young men who lay in wait in the tight alleys of Kampala so they might synchronize their punchline with her outbursts; a great great (and maybe a third great) uncle, Ali, was an endless weeper whose almost ceaseless blubbering started up at the slightest invitation: encountering a sad face, a cloud in the sky, announcements of a wedding or a baby born or dead, a buoyant tune (because it was sure to end), a mournful tune (there, you see), news of deaths in other towns, the first buds of spring: everything elicited for him, if not the immediacy of its sadness or failure, then the promise of such, the knowledge that happiness lay contingent on the dolorous face of daily woe. And there were others: vomiters (like myself), more pissers like Dad, men who ejaculated or women who orgasmed at the slightest provocation, several who lost their hair, grew it back, lost it again, and so on and on; and others: endless spitters and those whose menstrual fluids filled oil drums every month, others whose ear wax erupted in thick strands to be collected in the morning to shape candles; and one, the great and ancient matriarch of this line of shitters and pissers and spewers, evacuators extraordinaire, Razia, whose snot one bright morning, fanciful family stories told, was found perched at the end of her nose like a massive and growing fruit, each day enlarging, developing, gaining character and weight, until she could no longer hold her head up and sat with this rock of hardened mucus in her lap until finally it released itself, rolled off her thigh and along and down the hall, rattling doors and windows, scaring animals, scuttling the servants from its path, crashing out through the doors of her zenana and into the world. Reports quickly spread through the town: Razia’s elephantine snot had escaped from purdah. Astrologers gathered around it to examine the surface, feel the bumps, smell it, taste it, consider the color and hardness, and all agreed: the family line was cursed, the snot a wandering snot and the family thus a family of wanderers and disgorgers. Every corner of the world would know them before a child came who, like Razia, produced a globe of snot and, pointing with a finger at a particular indentation, bump or ridge would announce, this is where the family would be allowed to settle in peace.
In the mornings I sat where I could watch Dad from the kitchen table. When his pants slowly darkened at the groin and urine ran down his legs or spilled over his stomach, cutting slim and transitory rivulets among his whitening chest hairs, I would tighten a fist under the table until my sharp nails pressed into the skin of my palm and turn my head away in disgust. I knew what his face would show: anger and fear. I knew he would untangle himself with an embarrassed awkwardness and stand nervously. Under
his breath he would curse Idi Amin and walk to the bathroom and wash himself. Releasing my fist, I hoped my nails had cut new lines; that the past as well as the future might be changed. I was ashamed of him and hoped that in a new geography of my palm a new family might be written, a new history or a new future. But the skin always flooded with blood and the slight curves where my nails had pressed at the palm faded back into an indifferent brown.
For Dad, it was never the curse of Razia’s snot that was the source of our troubles but Idi Amin, the Great Bastard as he called him. Amin threw all the Asians out of Uganda, my family with them. We lost everything and came to California and lived at first on the charity of distant relations. Mom says I was born two weeks premature on a plane, flying from where to where she no longer remembers. I don’t believe her. I think she made it up, a way of justifying to herself my rootlessness, the way I skip between fads and fashions, the way I have become so un-Indian.
The Great Bastard menaced my childhood. Dad told me tales of the tortures and humiliations he performed on his subjects, the endless killings and expulsions, and the man himself; no, more than a man, almost an evil god; and the presence of this evil god filled my room at night, enlarging, gorging on the dark, a mammoth and devouring presence that terrified me into performing acts of numb violence on myself: sticking pins into my hand, burning my fingernails with matches, clamping my young nipples in small woodworking vices, allowing young boys to introduce their fingers or their fists into my tender vulva.
Mom and Dad would sit together at night and pray that I would be the kid who would one day grow that ball of snot; that it would be I who released the family from the curse. They were certain it would be me. Mom says she would shake me angrily, warning me what would happen if I didn’t produce that great predestined snot. But I became a vomiter, disappointing their most cherished hopes for my future. I would spew anywhere and everywhere: in the car, at the mall, in the doctor’s lap, at school and during phys ed, at birthday parties, when playing with friends or sitting for family portraits. It seemed to stop when I became a teenager, or at least lessen, and my episodes of retching became shorter and less frequent. Dad put it on the yoga. I said never, never. I hated Dad’s yoga: having to watch him every morning became only a reminder of his incontinence, a shame I felt far greater than my own. I hated Dad for being descended from Razia, for having me, for the ways our bodies were linked, not only by blood, but by this common stigmata, the way our bodies battled against us and nature.
II
I was nineteen when Mom asked me to teach her to drive. I had just learned I was pregnant and didn’t know how to tell her. Didn’t know who the father was either, didn’t want to know. I laughed at her when she asked me—I was giddy and afraid—and felt again that old urge, to vomit there and then, to disgorge myself onto the kitchen table like I had done so many times before. “You drive a car,” I said with a patronizing and questioning inflection drifting into another laugh. I had never thought much of her motor abilities: she was a careless cook, never figured out a remote control, and for minutes after entering a room always cast about, unsure of herself, where to sit, fussing where she might settle her bones with the least fuss.
She stood at the stove making a pot of tea. She frowned at my laugh and confided that she’d already taken lessons with a private company.
I pictured her sitting next to some driver’s ed guy, gold chains dangling from his neck. “You took lessons?” I asked. “On your own?” and instinctively: “Does Dad know?”
“Don’t tell him,” she said, raising a finger to her lips. “You know what he will do——fuss fuss about this, that, the insurance, this cost, that cost.”
“Will he let you?” I studied her face closely.
She said nothing. She waited a whole minute, her eyes fixed on the simmering milky tea, and finally offered, “I don’t care what your father says. He can do his silly yoga or whatever, all he wants. You know he never did anything like that in Uganda. He was always saying how silly those holy men in India are. What idiots, he said, and look at him now. Pissing everywhere.” She shook her head feverishly and clamped her lips tight together with an air of disapproval of Dad I had never seen so openly in her.
“Next time you see him,” she said, “you call him some silly sanyasi and see what he says.”
“I’ll call him a fuck if he doesn’t.”
She raised a hand ready to slap me but then dropped it, her eyes violent, muttering something in that other language.
I walked out, calling back, “Whenever you want.”
Our car was a Nissan, smooth and black, and it suited my mood that morning. I was in black: black, leg-hugging jeans, a black tank top and a black leather jacket which I threw casually across the length of the back seat; I had ringed my eyes with black eyeliner, and even my fingernails were painted black; my eyes were hidden behind a pair of black-rimmed Wayfarers. The dash was immaculate, and I threw my small purse with its black eye shadow and nail polish onto it.
Mom nervously jerked the car out of the driveway, her hands tight around the wheel, eyes darting between lanes, right foot pressing the gas. I detected a fragility to her. An arm might crack at any moment, splintering like a dry twig, her leg might come disjointed at the thigh and she would walk always with the strange gait of one whose body no longer suits or fits. I thought of the secret inside me, as if I were possessed of an alchemical mystery, and understood my power. It was a formula that would make her old, make her into a grandmother. The wrinkles on her face multiplied, the bags under her eyes dragged down, and I watched how she labored slowly with her arms, the sharp jabs of pain from a worsening arthritis, her legs heavy, as though weighted down.
That day in the car it was hot; no clouds in the sky. One of those days when suburbs melt into a bland greyness of concrete and roadway and when you see fat old women by the side of the road, panting, waiting for a bus.
We were on the highway heading west. I remember the way she looked, wearing large gold hoop earrings glinting in the sunlight, a green Marines T-shirt, I don’t know why, and blue polyester pants, and plain sandals with worn tan straps that she insisted were the most comfortable shoes she’d ever worn. It was the first time she’d ever driven on the freeway, and I could see how excited she was. We were in the right lane, and the speedometer wavered between fifty and sixty-five. One of her tapes played in the stereo: Hindi or Urdu or one of those; the soprano wailed like a dying cat.
“Try the next exit,” I suggested. She ignored me.
“Do you see that woman doing her make-up in that car?” Her tongue clicked in judgment. She pointed with a vague gesture but I could see no one. The engine revved faster and the speedometer began arcing toward seventy. It was a busy morning and the freeway, though moving, felt clogged with cars and trucks, as though we were pressing into the diminishing lanes of a country highway.
“What would you do if I was caught shoplifting?”
She laughed. “I hope you would steal something attractive, not like what you wear.”
“What if I was a heroin dealer?”
“Your cousin was arrested for that,” she said without drama. “He smuggled heroin and gold.” The freeway opened up ahead of us, and for some distance there were few cars on the road. She slowed down, and I was angry at her for what I guessed was fear of this sudden freedom.
“Who? I didn’t know.” Cars began passing us on all sides.
“No one you know. This was when you were a baby.”
“What happened to him?”
“Oh, they hung him, I think. We never found out. He was in Kenya. He was a shitter.”
It was the tone of voice that decided me; the way she said shitter. She said the word with a deliberate hardness, and it was this hardness that I reacted to. There was no rationality in telling her then, no guile on my part, no hope that in a car she wouldn’t kill me; there was only myself battering at what I believed was a hardness in her voice, scratching at it, trying to chisel my
self into it.
I pulled off the sunglasses and dropped them onto the dash. The thin tube of eyeliner rolled up against them. The sun was now high and the blacktop of the freeway reminded me of the charred underbrush of a field after a wildfire has devoured the surface.
Ahead, a truck labored up a shallow grade. On its shimmering and silver back doors oversized letters extolled: “Start the Week out Right. Go to Church on Sunday.” Diesel fumes skated at us over the flat top of the trailer. “Pass this truck,” I told her. Mom signaled and pulled around on the left. “Don’t brake when you change lanes,” I insisted. She frowned. I was feeling pretty bad. My stomach pushed at my mouth; it wanted to get out right there. The lines of the freeway began to twist and waver. I was no longer sure which lane we were in, or which was the car in front of us.
When I said it, I simply threw it out at her, the way I used to tell her Dad had pissed again or I had lost it on her favorite sari: with short, precise sentences and words, not apologizing or demanding, simply stating. We were back in the right lane, some way ahead of the truck. I closed my eyes and waited. Colors spun around me. I was frightened. I thought she would strike me, throw me out of the car. I could feel the blows already.
After a minute of silence, I felt the car meander briefly, but nothing else, no words or shouts or slaps. The silence was worse, being full of all the blows I was certain were coming.
The car began to slow down. I opened my eyes. Her foot was firmly on the brake. “What’re you doing?” I spat out. She said nothing. Behind us, a truck horn sliced through the air. We were on a downhill grade and the truck had gathered speed, coming down on top of us.
“Mom!” I shouted. “We’ll have an accident.” But she didn’t move her foot. The car stopped with a sudden lurching motion. I heard the sound of air escaping the pressurized brakes of the truck. Its shadow smothered our car, and I thought of the baby inside me and thought I could smell the trucker’s breath, stale, stinking of anger.
Good Indian Girls: Stories Page 13
