Sugar, Smoke, Song

by Reema Rajbanshi

  You’d run backward from the Assamese barbeque, calling “Maina, come faster,” so that you’d be sure I was following you to the sandbox of American kids. Plop! your beaming moon face creased into fault lines of terror—back you fell into a mudhole.

  “How did this happen?” You wept as you rose, arms like broken wings. “Ma will be so mad.” You pointed to the leopard print jumper she’d stitched for us.

  Back at the barbeque pit, where chuckling men sipped saa and pointed, Ma slapped your tush. Yanked the comb through your muddy curls. Tugged on a younger kid’s green shorts and shirt. You sobbed, not wanting to be a brown boy. “That’s what you get,” Ma said, “for going too far.”

  Even now, when your trussed-up self won’t glance this way, I cannot laugh.

  BAMUNA

  God becomes a dwarf to reclaim the three worlds from an over-powerful king. You wouldn’t think revolutions work this way, would you, but in the Age of the Truth, they did. So he walked up, under his monk’s umbrella, to the throne circled by guards, vixens, leashed tigers. And because it was the day of alms-giving, Bali the king agreed to give whatever Bamuna’s little heart desired. Three plots of land, Bamuna said quietly, as large as my footsteps. Bali laughed—austerity had clearly driven the midget mad—and said, against his counselor’s whispers, so be it.

  And the dwarf grew—as large as the king—and grew—as large as the banyan—and grew—as large as the kingdom—and grew—till his first step covered the whole earth—boom—till his second step covered the heavens—whoosh—till, with his third and last step, he gently toe-pressed the ant-like king all the way down to hell.

  DANCE ACT IV

  Stage glows gold but, as Bamuna grows and steps one-two-three, glows red. Show an arrogant man seated on the back screen.

  Walk in on your knees, taking tiny steps, gripping an imaginary handle with the left hand, forming an umbrella cover with the right hand. Standing head-bent before the audience, sweep your arms in a circle and rise, first your right leg, then your left leg. Fisting your hips, lunge forth with power: right-one! Left-two! But on the third step, lift your right leg with the toes pointed straight down, and slowly drop your leg till the big toe touches the stage. Keep your head up, for this finale moment is an act of mercy.

  STOP 5

  The site of crime, the point of brilliance. You found gold carnage on the pavement, necklaces and bracelets and rings leading like Dorothy’s road around the block. Fake stuff, you figured, so you grabbed what you could from looters, and melted enough for one gold arm. Your mannequin’s moneymaker, holding a trowel the way you do when you’re cementing one gold tile, then another.

  The thing about gold tiling is, each tile shines a different spot of light, so the arm ripples to muscle when you walk around. The Byzantines did this, used walls of gold to background dark-eyed men, to make them come alive. They knew the luster of yellow, why art should say decadent things even when it was holy.

  Fifteen centuries between those walls and you, but right away those images are your own: solemn Jewish faces, formal stances of Russian and Indian immigrants, the gold and the darkness that are Bronx summer nights. The dead speak, though apparently not everyone listens.

  A night like this, you found a loose train label, the number two in a big green circle. You pasted it on your mannequin’s chest, for half the beats lost underground. The next night, you found a photo, you and your parents at a street fair, days before they crashed. Another two goes up beside the first. Suddenly, you can’t stop, scavenging the city for what it’s done. A silver scrap from the car wreck off the Major Deegan; fish scales from the Fulton Market walk; green streamers from the St. Patty’s Day parade.

  You paste them all, square by square, a city map exploding on your junkheap find.

  NARAXINGHA

  The only other avatar who could give Naraxingha a run for his money is Kalki, the avatar yet to come, brandishing a thunder sword and riding on a white horse, in the Kalya Yuga or Dark Age to save the people from themselves. Kalki, who might as well come now.

  But what we’ve got is Naraxingha, who outwitted power that looks as maniacal as it does now, a Nietzschean king who thought he could out-God God. He commanded the people to worship him alone and when his son, a pure-hearted thing, refused, the king prepared to kill his own blood. And because the gods/powers-that-be had blessed this king with impunity—he couldn’t be killed by man or animal, day or night, on land or sea—God came at dusk, spanked that king on his human lap, and tore him open with his lion claws.

  And the little brown boy, who had been put in the juvie of his age, sprang out. Vindicated, mischievous, free.

  DANCE ACT V

  The stage glows red. Cast a fire on the back screen.

  Slide in sweeping arcs of the legs to the center. Pounce into wide stance, as if in a Maori haka. Raise your arms like a body shield, fingers curved into claws. Your face must go into Kali-Durga-all-the-warrior-goddesses-ever mode: eyes wide, nostrils flaring, tongue out. Breathe fire.

  As you and Biju stand one-legged, do not totter, do not laugh. The audience might. This is one gesture of fear. They may even fall asleep. This is another.

  STOP 6

  A pink-shirted, moth-lashed Puerto Rican man lay his head by your lap once while you pretended to read. “Hola guapa,” he said. “What big eyes you have, what a straight nose, such a pretty little pout.” Great, you thought—the words blurring before you—Little Indian Riding Hood and the Big Puerto Rican Wolf. Please dear gods, let him get off or let me.

  The last car was no better, with a roly-poly black man sitting alone, pushing up his taped glasses. Rub-a-dub went his hand over his gray pants, his mouth open as if he couldn’t breathe. Neither could you, your heart zooming with the tracks till the doors jerked wide.

  You ran past the cops, their puggish Irish faces, their useless swagger round the token booth. “Whatcha readin’, sweetheart?” the blonde one said. You lifted up your book, Dada in New York, and walked the steps backward, away from the city’s most dangerous men.

  “Smart and pretty,” the broad-shouldered one said. You slid like a criminal for the exit. “Cat got your tongue?” the blond one said. “No habla inglés?”

  Oh, you speak Englishes.

  You speak Subway Ride: East Tremont, meaning Montefiore, the hospital where your father’s wilted like a loose balloon. Not like your mother, who lay gutted in the car, the ramp pinning her to the chair.

  You speak Paramedic: your mother died on impact, your father’s suffered multiple fractures and laceration of the coronary artery.

  You speak Statistics: while the odds aren’t high that your father will pull through, there’s a chance, and we’ll do our best to grab it.

  You speak Blog: Mom, 9:36 a.m. Dad, 1:43 p.m. It doesn’t feel real, doesn’t seem fair, but it’s official. I’m on my own. Another city waif.

  PARAXURAMA

  Paraxurama was the original lumberjack, the son of a sage who’d been gifted an axe by Shiva, the Trinity’s god of Destruction. Imagine this: also bearded but wearing only animal skins, holy beads, and that scintillating, bloody blade. Imagine this: his father and mother cry out that the simple things they’ve generously shared have been stolen by kings, after the people weep that their lives, their dignity are being looted by rich warriors—so Paraxurama rumbles out the hut with that blade.

  He rampages the subcontinent, hewing down the greedy kings, the guilty Kshatriyas with that Blade of Cold Mercy. Like they, not his parents or the people, are so much grass. And when his rage has consumed the one percent, he walks to the pinprick ribbons of the Brahmaputra, strips to his musty skin, washes each side of his blade a hundred times, then crouches like a child and weeps.

  DANCE ACT VI

  Stage glows orange-and-fire, as if this were hell. Silhouettes of charging horses, of warriors clanging swords, sweep the screen.

  Both of you, Biju and Maina, get to be horse and rider and God. You get to bend your arms into an L�
�left palm under right elbow—and chop that axe. Right arm back—drop left. Right arm back—drop right. Chop with every four-step, charging forward through the hot air of greed to the cool, watching people. At the front of the stage, you turn to mirror each other, spinning on your left foot.

  Lift that right knee, raise back that axe, and shake your mane, widen your eyes. Crash down that foot, smash down that axe, till your forearms cross, bruising your twin’s stiff hand, red to blue.

  STOP 7

  On to stop seven now, the homestretch before the home parkway. You step between the cars yourself and watch your life unfurl before you: the PS 87 playground where you first chased boys . . . the 99 cent store where you bought your underwear . . . the halal grocery where you rented your Bollywood fix.

  Breakneck—it hurtles away—dark cubes shrinking behind you.

  You rush on to the one green stretch of your life, the Bronx Zoo, where on fee-free Wednesdays you studied another kind of wild. Bony cheetahs sprinted like Park Avenue divas chasing a cab. An alpha bear splashed among his fur-lined ladies like some shoulder-wiggling rapper. Groundhogs, like all the immigrants you’ve ever known, peeped in and out of tunneled dens for any shadow that might swoop down and eat them.

  Except the groundhogs you grew up with are gone. Your parents sleep with the fishes, the house they plastered sold to Chinese brothers whose Hummer bumper sticker reads, Free Tibet. Mr. Gianni, the painter neighbor, vanished, his body smelled rotting by the cops, under a carpet of newspaper that detailed every life but his. The kids you learned the alphabet and algebra with—Nathan Bello, Clarice Williams, Leila Lopez—are laughing, baby-raising, hustling on some Bronx block.

  Who between us, Biju, has strayed furthest from the fold? Whoring for art, who has worn pearls bought by those spared life’s saltwater, had caviar with veal-eaters who pleasure themselves like swine? Who has dared to be God, turning herself into the token posh folk use when they want a purgatory tour of the Bronx? Which of us, Biju, will call this free trade and which will ask how if this was our life, our body, our line?

  RAMA

  They say Rama was the perfect husband, friend, king. They say power politics cast him from Ayodhya, his kingdom by birth, into the jungle, where he lived for fourteen years as an ascetic. They say it was a darkening time—Treta Yuga, when the world was only three-fourths truthful—when another king, Ravana of Lanka, would steal his wife, Sita. This is how the saga of the Ramayana with its demons and gods and their spinning discs and magic came to be: the subcontinental war over Helen of the East.

  Except Sita and Ravana never slept together—something Dravidian Pride points out—and of course, Rama won. Only with the help of monkey-men and Hanuman (my favorite, he of the endless jokes, he who did not know his own strength till push came to shove) and his true-blue bro, Lakshman, Rama killed Ravana, freed Sita, and returned to Ayodhya where the people lamp-lit the kingdom in the first Diwali.

  But I’d add, Rama made Sita take a purity test. He didn’t believe she, who’d been abducted by a strange man to another country, could be blameless. He shamed her, she who’d had his twin boys by then, who’d been careful all along. So once she proved herself to his suspicious ass, she pulled a Medea and asked the earth to swallow her and her children whole. The earth, remembering all things, opened her bosom and took the outcasts in.

  DANCE ACT VII

  Stage glows green, to indicate you have entered a forest. Cast the repeated silhouettes of birds and deer scattering across the screen. You are Rama the exile, Rama the hunter, Rama who has lost everything, including his queen.

  So you must patter up fast—no easy walk here—to the front-right of the stage, and place your right hand to your forehead, to indicate you are looking. Place your left hand to your ear to indicate you are listening. Shimmy your neck. Then patter back diagonally to your starting point. Bend to one knee, directly facing the audience. Stretch out your left hand as if you were gripping a bow. Reach back to your right shoulder with your right hand, as if drawing an arrow from a quiver. Set your arrow for one beat. Draw your arrow back for three, arms taut. Let the arrow fly, opening your hands to sudden starfish, lifting your chin to the undoubted victory of good.

  STOP 8

  Sudden halt, when you first fell in love, with a stranger ten years older than your sixteen.

  The city’s like that: seducing you in the seconds it takes to walk from that subway car to this one. A stroll, really, the way he eased into the rattling dark between cars, watching the city pass him by. A slump, into the seat across you, thumbing through the ghetto murders and penthouse divorces of the Daily News, biceps shivering like tawny faces. Spelled right over the right orb, in green curling script that read like Assamese, was a Bengali woman’s name. Petite, sweet: Meena.

  The next thirty minutes, you imagined her drawing those strange lines for him before he etched them on himself, them walking, skinny arm in sturdy arm, to the neighborhood parlor, themselves the exhibit, his wearing that wifebeater to display her claim to the world.

  “You an artist?” he asked, nodding at your open book. Indian Art From the Mughals On.

  With one finger, he paused your turning, and traced the dome of the Taj Mahal. “You know a couple’s buried there? The world’s greatest love souvenir is a tomb.”

  You didn’t know that, or know what to say, so you read aloud, “Legend has it the emperor cut off the architect’s hands. The masterpiece couldn’t be repeated.”

  “Says a lot about power,” the stranger said. “Be careful no one does that to you.”

  “Yeah, right,” you said, and watched that arm swing into night, some Indian woman’s name inscribed on it.

  The city’s like that: in one night, you fall for someone else’s man, you admire a dead woman’s shrine, you memorize all the ways love makes art around you. Ay que linda, you used to hear folks say about things you never saw until now.

  KRISHNA

  Krishna was loverboy-playaman-magician number one. First, there was the trick of his birth: he avoided getting killed by a king who’d locked his mother, the king’s own sister, in jail. (The gods had known and told the king that his nephew would one day kill and conquer him.)

  In the village where he’d been whisked away to, he played so many tricks on the people for the people—saving them from demons even as he stole everyone’s backyard cream—that he came to be called the child of Leela, a magic that exceeds words.

  As a young man so dark and beautiful, he is always painted blue, playing the flute. A peacock’s feather in his long hair, he stole every milkmaid’s skirt and heart. You see why anyone grown up praying to him would have a playa pattern? Why the real saving isn’t how he did kill the king and free his mother, or abduct Rukmini an Assamese princess but not Radha his married love, or counsel Arjuna through war against his own brothers in The Mahabharata? These were heroics less than the leela of love, when he set up mirrors at midnight in the village fields, so that he might be everywhere at once, so that every milkmaid would think she was his, but all the while, he was with RadhaRadhaRadha, the beloved he abandoned but whom the people remember for the people as his greatest love of all.

  DANCE ACT VIII

  Stage shimmers red and blue, as if this were the gasping whirlpool of a heart. But rising along the back screen are silhouettes of trees, women, and those terribly vain, cruel, mesmerizing peacocks.

  You, Biju, are the heartbreaker god, with his flowering hands, his one leg suggestively crossed over his delicate ankle, that single blue-and-green eye of a feather locked in his hair.

  You, Maina, are Radha, dervishing about him, head cast up in ecstasy, pausing now and then by his side to clasp your palms to your heart, to blossom them in a whorl into a flute by your lips. The song you cannot help singing, you poor, wild, un/lucky thing.

  STOP 9

  1:00 a.m. and fifteen hours till the wedding. Till you find a face for your mannequin.

  You and Biju, trained to scout for knives and ki
sses in a three-mile radius, know: faces are stories, petals hiding their seeds, the masks we wear that we become. But your face, Maina, neither east nor west, neither street nor fine, leads where?

  Once upon a time, Biju would’ve known, but roots hacked, you’re half a tree. When you tramp up icy subway steps without her skipping gait, you’re half a leg. When you skate over black-iced pavement with snow mounds you’d traversed hands-held, you’re half an arm. When you run your numb fingers over bare brick and hedges, their sparkly Braille edges read there is no good gift anymore.

  Still, you nurse your four-limbed doll in this penultimate moment. You think of slapping a glass oval on the face, something like: dear viewer, see thyself in me. Then you think, your patrons may be unknowing, but they’re not stupid. You think of filigreeing glass in the space between the tiles, but your patrons are paying to see the work done on you, not them.

  You cradle your mannequin alone in the emptied-out car, your hands throbbing as if you’ve got no choice but to find someone to pass on the brush, let another you finish your baby’s face, sign the cheekbones in broad-tipped black marker, I was here.

  BUDDHA

  They say Buddha was a tubby peacemaker, sitting free of suffering under a wide-armed Bodhi tree. Out here, far from the tree, they forget: he was a prince with no need whatsoever to look out the window, much less see the princeless begging there. Yet he looked, he saw, he left.

  After wandering and wisening up at thirty-five years, he founded a new fucking religion, but the real catch was this. Not the freedom from suffering stuff but, one of the roots of it, freedom from that dirtiest of words: caste.