Sugar, Smoke, Song

by Reema Rajbanshi

  ’Cause when Buddha closed his eyes, he began to see the whole lotus-mud thing was true. You couldn’t have those living at the top without feeding off the bottom, and the bottom was really the source of all that is, untouchable though it might seem. Fragrant, full-petaled, an endless fire like the sun’s.

  DANCE ACT IX

  Cast the trembling carcass shadow of a banyan across the stage, the walls, even the audience.

  You, Biju and Maina, must saunter in like royalty—robed in silk and costume jewelry—but halfway to the stage, you must face each other. As if enacting two mirrors, remove your pink and gold studs and pearls, then your silk robes, till you are wearing only your cotton kurtas.

  In slow, sweeping three-steps together, heel-step-cross to the stage front. Half-squat and open your palms as if reading a book. Leave one palm leaf up to receive. Lift one hand in the pointer-to-thumb mudra to the heart to give.

  STOP 10

  Open sesame: train doors part. A newborn day, and the dividers lining the platform are signed. Tags and tags of name-loves-name, crack-is-wack-name, stay-in-school-name, name-was-here. They’ve signed the station, they’ve claimed the street, they’ve written we are the BX, remember this.

  Climb the green stairs and sing that Oxomiya spiritual your grandma sang: gase gase pate dheele / phulo re xorai / he ramoram / phulo re xorai / phulo re xorai. Round the curve of quiet houses and sing to the willows hunched over the buckled intersection: gase gase pate dheele / tree by tree you pick. Sing to the sunflowers someone has planted, by whim, in the rectangle across their fenced front: phulo re xorai he ramoram / blooms to adorn this xorai, Lord. Sing across the dank subway pass, where the pigeons nest, warble, and die: phulo re xorai / a xorai of blooms. Sing to the concrete squares between the bodega and the synagogue, between childhood and survivalhood, to the faces you will always see and never know: phulo re xorai / a xorai of blooms.

  You will rub a washcloth down your mannequin’s arm of gold. You will let others write themselves on its spare earthen face. You will invite all your ghosts to circle your body displayed. Home? Not yet, Ma, but you’ve pressed your talon to the station wall for some other city kid to read: my heart got danced out here.

  Ode on an Asian Dog

  PLANETS

  Walt’s eyes were luminous planets behind his glasses. They shone as he walked Jumi to dance rehearsals, carrying her saris and bells. They swirled as he drove her to shops where he bought the jeans and thongs that made him whistle. They glistened as he laid her bare on Martha Stewart blankets in sandy coves. When his teeth clenched those enormous nipples he said were made for breastfeeding, we cities hummed like church organs.

  “Come home with me,” he said that August, so she wore her red silk dress. Not knowing his town would shimmer up golf courses and country clubs. That his Chinese mother would dash out a split-level Victorian like paparazzi. Jumi emerging from the car! Jumi hunched in the living room! Jumi sidling out the bathroom! Jumi drooling in her sleep! Our dazed subject ran into the side garden of nodding sunflowers, poofy hydrangeas.

  There Walt’s father pressed a finger to his lips shh and rearranged ceramic gnomes. He was relieved, he whispered, to meet a humble girl, asked why she looked Thai, said he’d forgotten his Hindi. Jumi settled on a vinca bed and began the well-worn lecture: “We’re Indo-Burmese. We have indigenous traits. Assam was the last part the British added to the Raj.” Mr. Singh gave the well-worn response: Disney bug eyes, mid-air freeze. Later at the kitchen counter, he rambled on about growing up with Andaman tribals. “A people,” he shook a forkful of pork, “nearly extinct.” Walt laughed and thumped his chest to “Witch Doctor,” as if he were one himself.

  I AM READY

  Who knew they’d meet at the Harvard Welcome Table? That she’d wave to him over the spoilt milk and he’d point to his nametag and grin. “I’m half ’n half, Indian-Chinese.” That he’d walk her to Au Bon Pain for fresh squeezed orange juice and she’d freeze. “I don’t got money to pay you back.” He’d stroll off to The Yard, hands in pockets. “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you around.”

  Three summers later, she ran after him. Walter Singh: safe enough to lose your virginity to, staid enough to dump scot-free. She invited him to troll Manhattan readings, skinny-dip on Orchard Beach, trail her at the Puerto Rican Day parade. He stuttered questions to authors, flung sand at her till she barked quit it, blinked at salseras through Harry Potter glasses.

  When she visited his Chinatown digs, he played India Arie. “Ready for Love” wafted through his boat-strewn room. Planets pooling, pooling. She straddled his lap, nibbled his ear, and begged, “Give it to me, give it to me.”

  “Jumi,” he whispered into her black tangles, “please don’t get bored with me.”

  HOMIES FOREVER

  Mira, her Puerto Rican roomie would say. I saw the signs. Vero heard how Walt and three friends had trudged from the Bronx Zoo to Jumi’s house with that deer-in-the-headlights look. (Black people! Single moms! FOBs!) Her father met them on the cherry-lined street, wearing his Harvard Dad T-shirt and best dentures. He waved them though the two-story brick to its warm kitchen, where he’d fried pakora and masor koni, brewed Darjeeling with cinammon. Walt & Co. sidled about corners as if walls might crash down, headlines flashing across their faces: Harvard kids buried in Bronx apocalypse. Mr. Saikia recited his favorite Tales from the Crypt: who got robbed at gunpoint, who got shoved onto the tracks, who got raped in the park. Jumi, trying not to giggle, snorted tea in and out her nose.

  Months later, Jumi gulped. A black-and-white photo hung over Walt’s dorm entrance. Walt & Co. mugging before a studio brick wall graffitied Homies Forever. Jumi stared at the mock pouts, crossed arms, and turned to the bedroom doors. Each one locked, kids hunched over moral imperative, supply and demand, identity politics. Jumi walked out to the elevator and jammed the button. “Did you take that photo when you visited me?” Walt strolled barefoot behind her. “Probably. Why?” She placed her hand on his thumping chest. “I need to think.” “Please,” he said, his lower lip trembling, “don’t think.” The parting doors halved their image to zip.

  “So now you know,” Vero said when Jumi slumped onto their papasan. “Get used to it or get out.” A Santurce doctor’s daughter, Vero had started seeing a Colombian lifeguard. Every evening Camus pressed their elevator button, dorm proctors asked for his ID. Vero repeated what he’d said when she’d shrugged. How would you like it? How would you feel? But when Jumi rang Walt—what if her homegirls had snapped themselves in polo shirts before his golf course?—Walt stammered words that hadn’t shown up on her SAT. “It wasn’t my prerogative. I merely acquiesced.” Jumi asked for her keys. Walt shuffled over. Heads downcast on the church steps.

  Jumi whirled about the stage for ten days, knocking over larger girls, the rickety set. When she trudged home from Auburn Street, she found his phone messages like campaign slogans. We can make it through this! I believe in our future! Give change a chance! The afternoon she threw up green water in the dressing room, the other Indian girls squealed and pinched their noses. Jumi bolted to Walt’s suite—his crushing hug, soapy scent, crowing laugh. When she rolled over, there was the photo, adorning the door.

  All year, he bussed to her room instead.

  DEEWANA

  But my summer nights! Walt slipped from midtown bars and read Styron on the Uptown 5. In a studio that overlooked swaying maples, Jumi YouTubed dance clips till Walt stumbled in. All beer-and-soapy sweetness.

  His favorite treat? Her striptease, when she slipped off the backwagon of her jeans and swiveled to some hip-hop top forty. Play, repeat. Her favorite style? Doggy style, when he grabbed every supple orb and growled mine. They did the deed atop her quilted radiator, her one dollar chair, the cot under her dead mother’s shawl. The cot-the shawl-cot-shawl-cotshawlcotshawlcotshawl. He grew into a mangy wolf, licking at her to get up, get down, to stand and walk on him. Acrobatics that turned her into a tightroping swan.

  When th
ey stood newborn before the mirror, she said, “We look different.” His swimmer’s body, all shoulder and leg, had the Nordic height of Punjab, the lithe lines of Chinese script. Her gymnast’s body, called childlike, had the sturdy look she’d found in books like “The Tribal People of India.” When she tried turning to the cot, he caught her waist. We’re flawless.

  The last evening rain broke the summer heat, he drew her close in the cot. “What would you say if I said”—the maples swished—”I couldn’t imagine my life without you?” She pushed him to the wall. “I love you but I’m not in love with you.” He pulled her in again. “Give me time. How come,” and he lifted the covers into a tent, “this feels so natural?” “Because,” she said to the moon gleaming through the sheet, “all lovers live in caves.”

  By day, they roamed biryani joints in Jackson Heights, El Rey eats in the North Bronx. Though after molé at Grand Concourse, he slumped onto a bench, gazed about the glassy lots, the singed brick. “I can’t kiss you here. I’ve never seen so much poverty.” Though after samosa chaat on Roosevelt Avenue, she let go of his hand. Stragglers sang Bollywood tunes she, if not he, understood: I saw you and I knew, beloved, love is crazy, beloved.

  The crowd crushed them onto trains to his brother’s pad. Their fists shifted up and down a metal pole that reflected their bashful glances, while a raven-haired woman watched with knowing eyes. From the Times Square penthouse, Jumi peered at the sparkle of cabs, tourists, billboards, then turned to the spotless coterie of lawyers-bankers-politicians. Pretty money, she thought sourly while downing cups of pink champagne. Until Walt led her to a hookah room of pale, shirtless boys, and placed her hand in the slack hand of his brother. Chris sucked at the hookah pipe. “Jumi is Assamese,” Walt said, pulling the corners of his eyes out. “Where,” Chris puffed in. “Is,” he puffed out. “That?”

  THE FALL

  Cambridge rang—bells under church spires, girls clopping in boots—of crisp, crisp money. Walt and Jumi held hands and cowered under the Harvard Yard arch. Real ivy on old brick! That tiled path that made a suggestive ring! Clean-cut students lugged suitcases in and out dorms, and Jumi stiffened. “I don’t know if I’mma make it through this.” Walt scanned the tweeds and convertibles of Massachusetts Avenue. “We won’t let this tear us apart.” After dragging boxes to opposite ends of campus, they made frantic love on her cot.

  The news shot through the halls: Walt and Jumi sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g . . . . Girls who’d never seen Jumi, who wore Dolce and Prada to class, who rated boys on their Earning Potential, stopped by her room. My mother would shower me with diamonds. Boys who’d scoped Jumi out as pretty but unfriendly, who bristled at her scornful laugh, who edged near her at parties, picked up her books. Walt’s the nicest guy at school. Rani, a Bengali sylph whose waterfall hair snared as many Indian boys as med school did, shouted over her vacuum cleaner. “If this ends, everyone will blame you!” Bruce, a Chinese Renaissance man whose killer cheekbones sent the Asian girls swooning, announced on a jog, “Dude, it’s Pride and Prejudice meets Love Story.” Vero, who’d warned that the prepsters wanted to “pluck a wildflower,” “tame a colt,” folded towels gently. “Walt this, Walt that. You know you’re allowed to see other boys, right? But por el amor de Dios, stop flirting with the ladies.” Rajiv, a BJP economist who’d grown a mustache that made him look like Mussolini, noted in section, “Brother, we thought she was half-Latin. Not only does she live with negroes, she flirts with ladies.”

  Walt tried to slip them to the ducks and trees of the Commons, but Boston drizzled into gloom. To his house for Mom and pork fried rice, but Jumi slunk about the Russian dolls. The easiest days were nights, when he slung his bookbag over her chair, and she dreamt them back to the Cape. He had pulled over by the dunes, seagrass curtaining the whales, and had thrown their coats over the windows, her orange bikini swinging from the dashboard. They fucked against stenched leather seats, the glass fogging, fogging against creamy birches which shivered as if, any second, a cop might jolt out.

  THE STRANGER

  Veronica María Alejandra Sánchez had hoofed to Annenberg as a Victoria’s Secret Angel: black lace lingerie under red chemise, crepe wings wired to bra latch. The hall teemed with ghouls and devils drinking beer and brandy under stained glass scholars and poets. Vero had been twirling her hands in the air to “Thriller” when someone tapped her shoulder. A Guy-Fawkes-masked man in a Dracula cape looked her up and down, offered his bejeweled gloved hand. Pero sí tu eres la angel más bonita aquí. She stumbled home at dawn, holding the 609 digits of Alberto Camus.

  Jumi looked askance when Camus plopped on their papasan, but had to admit that those hazel eyes, close-cropped kinks, and that roguish laugh that made him tramp to Vero’s princess. Jumi hadn’t expected Vero’s taste, but then, Vero didn’t know why Jumi stuck it out with Type As. Camus, finding himself in The Towers, worked the crowd. He parodied bowtied Harvard boys, sang Knight Rider bhangra by heart, replaced Jumi’s tangled bike chain. Each time he brought Vero burritos, he left chocolates on Jumi’s cot. The Sunday my girls hauled laundry to the basement, Jumi said, “He’s smart. He knows the way to a woman’s yoni is through her friends.”

  LIFE OF SIN

  I’d say, Thanksgiving night, his uncles ushered Walt into the study and asked when he was going to marry Jumi. His brother, scanning her wild curls over the disemboweled turkey, said Walt would raise pygmies. His parents, setting out plates of pumpkin pie, asked for a number, but when Jumi said kids would end her career, Walt raised three cream-topped fingers. Yet who could say nay in that holly-hung house, by photo-framed fireplaces? Jumi, pooped from class-dance-scholarship chores, crashed and snored like a motorcycle in a room strewn with toy boats, postered with exquisite maps. Walt shuffled over with dewy eyes, then lay rubbing his paunch, crooning “Bonnie and Clyde,” till intoning over her lips, my girlfriend.

  Boston would say, but the girl considered other men. Not white boys who hooted Jumi from the block, but dusky boys who rambled shyly about Marx over dining hall soup. “You don’t always gotta bring up Walt,” she told one brother, who watched the bangles clink on her wrists. She even listened to pudgy aunties who tackled her in the wings, asked her age-caste-major, named which so good-looking son would be starting vaat six-figure salary. Right in front of Walt, who said nothing.

  We’d both say, Vero tossed and turned across the hall. Camus’s hazel eyes turned out to be magnets for any kind of pretty. After choir one evening, Vero collapsed on the papasan and talked a mile a minute about which guy had catcalled or winked at her. Jumi stopped typing. “Why are you dressed like you are going to a funeral? You know you like color.” Vero flung her peacoat off and a tear eeled down her cheek. “Alberto hooked up with his ex.” Jumi gasped and knelt by Vero. “Lose the mofo. He knows he’s not in your league.” Vero gazed at the ceiling. “I’m not upset. He’s ending things with her.” Jumi slid back. “Veronica, do you believe him?” Vero gave a tight smile. “Chica, I wish we all had the same luck. Pero así es la vida.”

  OUR FUTURE

  At P.F. Chang’s, Vero folded and refolded her napkin as Walt and Jumi hissed. The baby-faced waitress hovered close, then drew back. Was Eminem famous because he was pink? Was Monica Belucci the most beautiful woman because she was white? What sort of Desi called England the Mother Country?

  “You’re colonized,” Jumi cried over spring rolls. “A banana, a coconut, a twinkie, a-a-a . . .”

  “Stop being so pedantic,” Walt snapped. “You’re boring everyone.”

  The genteel old couple next to them, who had not paid for this Christmas entertainment, drank their soups worriedly. Slurp, slurp. This is our future. Slurp, slurp. Each couple looked forlornly at the other.

  Yet New Year’s Eve, Walt held Jumi’s hand down the glowing corridor of Faneuil Hall. He pointed out gleaming stalls of lobster and sushi, creamy barrels of chowder and gelato. Snow melted off Jumi’s dark coat. They strolled until they reached the rotunda, where
Vero and Camus giggled and chewed corn cobs on a bench. Walt and Jumi unclasped hands.

  “That’s weird,” Jumi said. “I told her we were coming here for our six-month anniversary.”

  “Great,” Walt said. “An evening with Dopey.”

  The four kids made small talk in the spotlight of the rotunda: Fuckin’ ey! What the—? Tan loco! Camus, who’d heard of this Other Boyfriend for months, challenged Walt to an eating contest. Walt wrinkled his nose and looked off at the newsstand, but Camus tucked in his Che T-shirt and zipped through ten cobs. He pumped his fists—the girls laughed—Walt plucked his molar with a toothpick. On the Hall’s marble steps, kids sliding down the slopes on boards, Camus pelted Walt with snowballs. The girls turned away to cheer on the snowboarders while Walt darted and dodged from Camus. “Here, pussy-pussy-pussy,” Camus cried. Walt glowered behind a garbage can.

  Later, Jumi toweled Walt down in her bathroom. “That’s just his way,” she said. Walt punched the shower door. “I’m not hanging out with them again.” Jumi yanked the towel away. “I hang out with your friend who calls turban-wearers ‘towelheads.’” Walt pulled on his boxers and marched out the door. “So don’t. But at least I don’t alienate the Indians here.” Jumi followed his wet footprints to her room. “Are you serious? You’re taking cover behind those kiss-asses?”

  Cartoons of Apu, quotes by Gandhi had floated, a year after 9/11, like flags across stately buildings. Get to know your friendly neighborhood Indian, the fliers read. Free samosas. Indian couples in black peacoats walked gingerly about The Yard, faces clouded with the gloom wafting over the country. On the SAA LISTSERV, folks spelled out Dotbusters, shootings in Texas, clubbings in New York, and said, We may need to go to war. Jumi half-joked back, Do we really want to play good Indian, bad Indian, and the LISTSERV had shot back, high horse, traitor, leftie!