Sugar, Smoke, Song

by Reema Rajbanshi

  “Let’s go to the restaurant,” I say. “Make a list of things you want.”

  She names simple things—movies, bangles, chaat—that bring us back. To streets and streets bustling with skinny boys in button-down shirts, with grizzled sardars passing Blowout! fliers before bhangra-thumping shops, with high-cheeked Nepalis cabbing narrow passes, with curl-tongued Southies ladling up dosas and uttapam, with women . . . so many women! . . . in chiffon saris and sequined salwars, jhumkas twitching from earlobes, diamonds glittering on beaks, whispering of this one’s no-good husband, that one’s American-style son, with munchkins whose black eyes and lush hair shine over stained tees while blowing bubbles at stalled cars, with hip-haired gazelles loping arm-in-arm past jittery-eyed cubs loitering by hydrants, past old-timers in kaftans brooding over plaques of Mecca and pot-bellied Bengali script, past hole-in-the-walls curtained and placarded Patel Grocery, Raj Sweets, Singh Electronics, past the brick rises and the postered theater and the dingy subway stairs teeming with beige-and-gold waves of like-and-unlike faces. To the splattered concrete corner of Thirty-Seventh and Roosevelt. Between the saffron walls, the Christmas lights, the bamboo innards of Bollywood House.

  The men are crowded round the carom board when Jumi and I step into the dim hall. Arein! they cry and buzz toward her, swarming us under the tasseled thangka. Like the day I brought Jumi in my stiff arms, a mewling bundle they passed around with comic coos till she smiled. “Jumi,” they say, “why you don’t come no more?” Except they step back now at her shorn hair, loose hoodie, baggy cords that make her seem a twelve-year-old dressed in men’s things. She stares back—at our cratered eyes, cheekbones jutting from oil-splotched skin—and says, “I work now too.” No one asks if she dances still. Only Latha echoes from the radio in the closet and Jumi, as if directed, walks to the carom board and traces a line through the boric powder. “Can I play?”

  For an hour, in the shadow of a Ganesh murti, under the halo of flickering lamps, it’s us five again. Dorji and Jumi stacking the black, white, and red chips into a kolgos column, the boys waving me over and clanging spoons, sizzling up pots in the kitchen. “Bhupen,” they say, “worrying so much won’t help. You must tell her what we know about love.”

  We practice first, Dorji thwacking! the yellow striker so the tree of chips topples and ping! a ten-point blue zooms into a corner hole. “I’m back!” he says, rubbing his palms as if to spark fire. Jumi stays a zombie beside his gleeful cackles, his rising chips, so Vikas sits beside her and pours her a cup. “Can’t let the old ones win, yeah? Watch how you do it.”

  Chips realigned into a many-pointed star, the game begins.

  Vikas’s Cheshire smile spreads over his chocolate planes—that face that launches a hundred women’s cravings—before he whfft! whfft! bags two white pieces. Like the pasty girls you’ve been juggling since you left your greencard wife, I want to say. I never liked Beatrice, a blimp with an angry face drawn on, but never disliked her either, especially when she advised Jumi about boys.

  “Fluke,” Dorji says, but Vikas furrows his brows over the fifty-point queen. He flicks his middle finger and pfft! the striker slides into the hole instead, so that he has to slam a white piece back onto the board.

  “He gambles like this too,” Imran tells Jumi. “That’s why he still works here.”

  The men laugh, tapping their chips on the board’s thick sides. Vikas slaps Imran’s head and says, “At least I have an excuse. What’s yours?”

  Imran taps one forefinger on his long Persian nose and perches the other over the striker, setting up an impossible diagonal cut at the red queen. “Jumi, I met Aisha when I was younger than you. She worked at her father’s store. Always talking about how they made this chair, that table. Always wearing these funny glasses.” He loops his fingers round his eyes in o’s. “She was going to start her own furniture business when she got out of school.” He flicks the striker—a quick line—it barely misses the queen.

  “Did she?” Jumi says, the first question outside herself in months.

  “This striker is no good,” he says. “Her last letter, they moved her home from the hospital. Once she’s better, she’ll start looking.”

  For what? More immigration dreams that will never happen, not for a Muslim girl with HIV? The last letter had a photo: Aisha skinny as an Indian cow, ribs showing under her sari, eyes like a fortune-teller’s globe.

  Dorji slides the striker left-right along the striking alley, as if aiming for the cheap blues clustered there. One eye shut, fft! he sends the queen plop! into the farthest hole.

  “Security! Security!” the men roar. Dorji sideswipes a blue into the closest hole and fox-grins at Jumi. “See if they can beat that!” The blood up in his scarred fingers, he straight-hits blues into hole after hole. Aiming for the fourth blue, he says, “Jumi, I am only half a man. You know why?”

  Her lips twitch. “Because you’re short?”

  “Because half of me is in Nepal with my son. Every time I phone my wife there, she says, ‘He asks about you. When are you coming back?’ Then my wife here says, ‘Your body is here but your heart is there.’”

  “You married Moni?” Jumi says, meaning the shapely sphinx who waits in the hall every midnight closing.

  Dorji pauses, scouting for a white. “What could I do? When I was there and Moni told me she was going to America, I thought I would die.”

  We freeze, only Dorji not hearing his own import, until a white piece thuds off—up!—over the side.

  Vikas grabs the striker away. “Don’t be greedy, sahib.”

  “Finish the board,” I say and start stacking the teacups. In fifteen minutes, the other servers will rush in with stained shirts, customers will tinkle open the door, the restaurant will heat up with nerves and supper stories. But with only three whites left, Vikas positions the striker to ricochet a nearby white, and says, “Maybe in India, it’s find a wife, settle down, have kids. But here?” He bangs two into the hole and assuredly sets up another ricochet, a slimmer-angled one. “There’s a million girls waiting to give it up. White, black, Spanish. American girls,” he pauses to point at Jumi, “are the problem for girls like you.”

  Jumi hunches, slipping back into her smashed shell.

  “Enough,” I say, clamping my hand over the last piece, so the striker rams off my pinky. “Go clean up.”

  Vikas throws up his hands but Imran yanks him up, shoves him toward the back tables. “You would’ve lost anyway.”

  An hour in, as Vikas and Imran hustle the floor, as Dorji and I sizzle up kebabs, curries, momos in the back wing, Jumi stands like an apparition by the door. She holds menus to her heart as if she can’t bear handing them over, glares at hand-holding couples as if she’d rather shoot than serve them. Vikas and Imran push her now and then to some fork-waving customer, some beer-drunk Punjabi, but she cannot pour the lassi without splotching the tablemats, cannot stop her tie from falling into soups. The customers blink and cut the tip—but who hasn’t seen boys shuffling in, shoveling up a two-person course while skimming a book? Or mummy-wrapped girls shuffling in before the Friday rush, to pick at a samosa and sip cheap wine? Who hasn’t tasted lovesickness in the darkest corner of their own house?

  That’s what I ask myself tonight when I find Jumi not outside but in the bathroom again, sprawled in vomit. The starfruit I bought and sliced today are dumped in the bathroom bin. The vomit pool is pulpy green-gold, like the rotten fruit I’d dredged up in my net from the home pond. She stirs on an elbow, moaning, as I press her wrists for her pulse.

  “We shouldn’t have given you all that food,” I say as I lift her torso. “Your system still can’t tolerate it.”

  Her teeth chatter, her limbs quiver as I lift her to stand. “What’s the point, Baba? Just leave me here.”

  “How can you be so dramatic?” I drag her to the cot, tuck blankets about her, and cannot tell if the quaking of the fuzzy fabric is her back or mine. “Have you thought about me? You are all that
keeps me here!”

  She rolls away to the wall, weeping in such muffled bursts that I barely make out her words. How he’s moved on, how he prefers white girls to her, how everyone said he was too good for trash like her. “Am I trash?” she says. “Am I never gonna be good enough?”

  “How can you listen to him?” I say, though I am well-acquainted with the verse. How many times had the village kids said, “Bhupen, you won’t get out”; the college boys said, “Look at the midget hick”; the Indians said, “I smell a fish-eating tribal”; the Americans said, “Go back to where you came from, Injun.” So I smooth her hair, wipe her moist face. “If I listened to people, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “What did we gain?” she says, turning to me, her eyes narrowed and cheeks flushed. “I saw what’s happened there. No one wants us to make it anywhere.”

  A fact for which I have counters, but who will tip a glass to moisten my lips as I do to hers, who will slide a thermometer along my cheek as I do along hers? It reads a number her weight should be—104 while the morning scale pointed to 97—and when I rummage through the latest journal to record this, I find other numbers I’ve begun tracking. Numbers that have started to run past Jumi’s column, double digits clogging my vessels, triple beats throbbing against my veins. It’s then, my pen poised to add Jumi’s number on the left that I remember my stress test for this coming morning. “The necessary next step,” the doctors had said, but how can I leave my child now?

  I call the women: wives of engineers I’d once known, before I’d fallen through the cracks with a baby. “Ki hoise?” the first one says over the phone, just as dawn breaks through the window, lighting Jumi’s form on fire.

  STAR TWO

  Jumi, I found your mother on the street, both of us brandishing burning sticks and shouting. Oxom dekhor oxomiya bhakha! I marched with the Science boys, Tara with the History girls, but even across the street, she seemed an unearthly crane. Wispy mane, kohled eyes, creamy skin, why I watched her as we tramped over Guwahati’s red gutters, through its marigold mazes, along the river that swelled as if it would join us. I must have seemed a monkey beside her stick, which looked hand-carved by some servant. I’d filched mine from Pita’s grove. He hadn’t wanted me to meet the state but he’d taught us boys too well. A hundred afternoons, we’d climbed his trees thick with green-gold fruit, swung from branch to branch, before perching on the highest, the lithest. Up there, mooning over the purple buffalo treading veins into the mossy earth, we’d plucked as many stars as we wished. We’d salted their crunchy points. We’d feasted like kings.

  Until we spotted white men circling our fields in helicopters. They lay, along the village road, a pipe that pulled oil from Assam and funneled it to Bihar. At first, people whispered of smooth roads that would take us straight to Delhi, of jobs that would house and school us all. But the elders had seen Nehru leave us to the Chinese and shook their heads. In the end, their bitter words were all we got. Every morning, every afternoon, we walked by that steel snake on our way to class and listened to our own dark gold rushing by us. Evenings, we lingered in cotton jumpers by the main road as older students trampled the rock-strewn roads. Tel xarodaghar amak lagibo! The flames they held up merged into a seething beast and we sensed, as it wound toward the dust fuming from the plains, we were headed the same way.

  No wonder, Jumi, I spoke to your mother in a cell. We were crammed in, hundreds of students, into damp cubes stinking of pee and sweat. A single window, dim as a star by the blood-splotched ceiling, cast our bulks into sweltering shadows, our voices into breathy cursing. At our luck, the cops who were our own, the Brits who’d noosed Bengali on us. Kismet or qayamat—you tell me, Jumi—but Tara’s back happened to press mine. “You sound,” she said, “like a broken harmonium.” I hadn’t realized I was humming—the quick beats of Junglee, how I didn’t care if anyone thought I was wild—but when she sang, a wistful, raspy alto, I had to turn. Her spine vibrated like a snake’s, the cell swelled with music as shadow after shadow sang with her: lokogeets, borgeets, Bollywood tunes. So that up-close, in the spray of light, she was even more startling: the high bones of our people, that ancient woolly hair, those delicate limbs crossed over her cotton sari.

  I would’ve spoken, Jumi, but I forgot words outside the chorus. We’d all forgotten: that we didn’t know what the cops would do in the morning, that most of our parents couldn’t buy our way out, that students had been beaten for demanding Assamese in our schools, that we were thirsty because we wouldn’t say the Bengali word jol. Song to song, we glided, reeling a new phrase off the closing one, as if we were kids playing Antakshari. Ey! The guards banged batons on the bars but what could they accuse us of? Their own scuff-holed shoes tapped along.

  I didn’t touch Tara again till the biya, when I unwrapped her gold-silk-shyness, then stood gaping. I hadn’t imagined the crane would land on my bed, press its palms to my chest, say “Your heart’s beating so fast.” I didn’t realize I was happy for happiness is a dream, as is grief. She withered when we moved here. From the river and Oxomiya of Guwahati to the snow and Spanish of the Bronx. Believe me, I’d tried to design a life, taken one hydraulics gig after another, roamed from Guwahati to Shillong to Dibrugarh to Tawang. But no one would keep an honest man, and a poor man cannot keep a wife. So we came back, Jumi, and it was in this time that I built Bollywood House, that your mother locked herself in the apartment, watching Bollywood movies. Always some plodding thing in which lovers marry or die because of money or history. She came, after all, from theatrical folk, who had ridden in from Burma on elephants, enacted our lore in courtyards with cock-and-bull sparring. Yet she’d rouse me at night, not to talk Bollywood House or re-watch movies, but to curl into my chest. Weeping “Ghuri jao, Bhupen, please.” “What’s left for us?” I’d ask. “At least,” she’d say, “the past comes calling.”

  I heard her only months later, when she fell silent on a hospital bed, her legs spread and bloody. One minute, she’d been moaning a new mother’s aches; the next, not even breathing. Just the widening star between her thighs, the baby slipping out like a squalling lamb. Then the clutter and clang of green folks, who pumped and pronged Tara, who scurried from room to monitor to computer screen, so that I barely saw her disappearing. The whole time, Jumi, you screamed from a stranger’s arms.

  So you see, what I know about love is this: the heart stops in many ways, often without reason. Blood stains without warning—soil, ceiling, hospital gown. From your own fruit gutted and smashed on you by a heckling universe, doomed poison bursting from within.

  Kordoi Tarkari

  5 carambola

  1 green chili

  1tablespoon mustard seeds

  1teaspoon turmeric

  2tablespoons oil

  salt

  1.Chop carambola into strips. Mince green chili.

  2.Mix gold and green chop and coat with turmeric.

  3.In a vat, heat oil and fry mustard seeds until they pop.

  4.Add carambola strips and chili. Be sure mustard seeds are spread throughout.

  5.Add salt to taste. Serve hot.

  BHUPEN

  One by one, this over-sunny morning, the women come. Perching on the edge of Jumi’s cot, twisting a rag in water, mopping her warm face. And gazing at this hideout of brass jars filled with spears, fraying tapestries of Buddhas, toppled Bollywood DVDs. But ladies that they are, they munch on nimkis and ask the usuals about Bollywood House. After my switch with Dorji, I’d fallen into a crevice from which I’d spy their parties. Which lady wore the most trussed-up mekhla, whose daughter had turned to drink, whose son had landed which Wall Street job. My own news—my own heart—they will spill to their men while folding silk pajamas, oiling their husbands’ backs. Saikiar obosta, they’ll say in hushed tones that mean, don’t let this happen to us.

  Pinkie Ba, the oldest of the ladies, drives over late afternoon. She marches up the steps with her bulldog face, square tribal bones set in a villager’s solid build, a Cor
ning dish of chicken soup in her hands. Like a Kamrupi, she peers right into my face. “Who was the lora?” I walk to the living room window, its deluge of white light and empty cars, as I mumble his parting words, and she shakes her head. “How do their brains work? Must be what these Americans say. Money doesn’t buy manners.” I turn to Ba and, fists trembling, want to confess: I’ve dreamt of snapping every bone in his buttered body, stewing his entrails in a curry I’d serve his fancy friends. But it is Ba who turns away, kneeling in her bulky pink sweater by the DVDs strewn before the TV. “You look like a ghost, Bhupen. Go take a walk.”

  I almost ask if she can stay the night. So I can muster the put-off drive for my EKG? So I can slow into this thing called sleep? But I kneel to alphabetize the familiar faces—Meena, Nutan, Vyjantimala—and say, “Baidew? What will I do if something happens?”

  Ba brushes away my hand. “With manu coming in and out? You worry too much. Jowa.”

  So I make a list of things—egg, bread, xaak—I will eat if Jumi won’t, and scarf my head into the iced streets. Oaktree Road mills with families, about sari shops, dosa joints, the fragrant grocery. I wheel my cart among them—straight-backed Punjabis, lotus-eyed Southies, the ceaseless chirp of Bengalis—and hear the oddest heartbeats. Gagone. Ta-rara. Ju-mima. I wheel about with the cart, its stiff wheel squeaking, the sole man one-one-one, listening-looking at this small aisle on this small road where I’ve landed. Plain green gourds that, hacked, would stink with orange sweetmeat. Fuzzy fingers that, boiled, would melt into peppered okra soup. I wheel up and down aisle one—selecting samosas, a coriander bunch, tamarind pods—along frayed linoleum aisles Tara never visited. Her perimeter had been our Castle Hill Avenue block, which she circled endlessly before collapsing on the sofa before re-watching a Bollywood film.