Sugar, Smoke, Song

by Reema Rajbanshi

  Too late, too late, the bulbul sings. Everywhere, contented men shift beside careful women, so I turn into the jewelry aisle. But here, it is all mothers and daughters, a skinny salesgirl clucking about them like a hyper chicken. Oh but this blue suits her skin; oh but gold is good luck; oh but you can’t have too many bangles. No one glances at me, a short man in a loose coat, loafers scruffed up. No one bothers to ask, sir, for whom are you shopping? No one circles-and-checks as I finger this set of pink glass bangles, that row of long brass jhumkas, or drop extra goodies into an extra bag. Hadn’t Jumi wept before such trinkets? Hadn’t Walt played with them and her? No one notices as I lift my trinket bag alone, leaving the vegetables in the bangle bin. Even I don’t quite notice as I wander to the exit with my trinkets . . . beep-beep . . . mothers and daughters, men and wives turn to me with their questioning frowns. Beep-beep. Not for you! And I freeze, breath caught between the fake jewels in my plastic purse and the electrodes jammed inside my leaky heart. And the women smoke about me in a chattering, hand-wringing haze. And I sink, trinkets cascading out in a rainbow on the tiled floor. And I lie atop the gray linoleum crinkling up into tiny hills, arms knotted, legs jerking. Till only dark lips and ringed claws peck at my cheeks, my chest sinking beneath the snow: ospreys and larks and chickadees. But where oh where is my tongue?

  Atop a mound of slippery fat, blackening peel, marrow-red bone, I hold my daughter. Twelve still, just before she’d slink off into a mumbling adolescence I couldn’t translate, she flutters her eyes wide and grabs my chin. “You have to speak! Say something, other than we’re not good enough!” But the vinegar of the mound, of the moaning around us, from mummies lashed to branches with rope, rushes into my nostrils, my throat. And when I grunt up on my elbows, my knees—to point and say, we’re so close, ma—Jumi rolls away as if in a playground game—pffishhwhoo—bumpily down the mound. I dive in, swimming deep through the thicket of other people’s fruit rinds and crumbling crusts, till—dhum!

  I wake on a stretcher in the back of a van, two boys pressing this glass tourniquet and pumping that rubber dial over my tingling arms, my fast chest. And it is not Jumi but Dorji at my feet, stubble shadowing his slow smile.

  “How’re you feeling, Mr. S?” the darker boy says, his hands deftly checking the circles pasted just under my collarbone.

  Pani is all I can breathe out but who understands here?

  “Arein,” Dorji says, slipping a plastic cup of water to my mouth. “What is this fainting drama in public? You too are forgetting to eat now?”

  “I was shopping,” I say but, voice whistling, it comes more like I was stopping.

  “Do you have arrhythmia?” the bulkier boy says, rolling up his sleeves to forearms tattooed with faces, pressing two fingers to my neck, my wrists, the sore between my ribs. “Your friend here connected us with your doctor who said you were due for an EKG.” He steps back, eyebrows raised and stethoscope paused in his left hand, as if expecting an apology.

  Dorji pats my hands and shakes his head. “It’s a family syndrome, this fasting protest. His daughter is also stubborn.”

  The thinner boy raises me up slowly to a sit-up on the stretcher. “You’re better to her alive than dead. Am I right, Mr. S?”

  They slip then, these strapping kids with smooth faces closeting their own reels, into snappy Spanish as they riffle through yellow pages on clipboards. Dorji laces my loafers and says, “yaar, we aren’t immortal anymore. We’ve become . . . what they call it here? Endangered species?”

  Which makes no sense, I want to scold him as he signs yellow papers and thanks the boys, who watch curiously as Dorji lifts my left leg, then my right over the back rim of the van.

  It is all I can do to stand swaying against the brisk rush of wind. To hobble after Dorji between the van and his Corolla as he zooms. To breathe one-in-two-out over the hilly highway, past the jagged smoke stacks, the cluster of pink houses, round the forested side lane that opens up to manicured lawns.

  Except the lurid lights of a cop car swirl in Jumi’s lot, by the corner of pink begonias, the snow-spotted sign “Peace Terrace.” Pinkie Ba, whose pink sweater is gone yet dabs at sweat from the sides of her neck, turns from the two cops standing wide-stanced before their car. “Bhupen?” she says, spinning, then waggles and arm-pumps to Dorji and me.

  “I called you so many times!”

  “Where is she?” I say.

  Ba blinks rapidly and looks not at me but behind to Dorji. “Bhupen, my daughter called,” she says rapidly. “The babysitter had cancelled, I was gone for just a moment . . . .”

  I don’t wait for an ending—I skip-step after Dorji—to the rumpled mound of sheets. Kordoi uncut and untouched on the plate, so that there are no clues. Not one.

  STAR THREE

  Jumi, we’d gather kordoi from the jungle, wrenching their pliant bodies from wild soil, matting their trunks upon our backs, whistling lokogeets all the way to our crosshatched gates. Hole by hole, we dug with our hands, we lined their bodies and foretold, farm kids, our losses: which would not outlast the rains, which would not unfurl past a few years. Still, we squatted, stuffing cauliflower, eggplant, cabbage about crunchy roots. When we sat back, slim trunks rose before us, sentinels ready to drop their luscious grenades.

  Nothing like the soldiers who camped near downtown, for this ULFA skirmish or that tribal gondogol, dark Indians who scanned us with radar eyes over hawk noses. As if we were the aliens. Sometimes, when they tired of the store dal-bhat, they rapped on our doors, and Mai would simmer maas-mangxo over the fire, would grumble how we had barely enough for eight. But the soldiers, lounging on bamboo muras on the porch, simply watched us kids scamper round the courtyard, chant in a tag game. Kabaddi-kabadi-kabadi! They watched us as if they themselves might knock us, rifles perched on their knees, fingers tweedling in pockets over the sweetest girls. Girls whom Ma wouldn’t name but who neighbors reported as loigoise. Taken. Though by whom and for what, no one said. I pieced together the shards, saw ourselves refracted stretched-out ways. I saw the twelve-year-old skinnies who slunk in corners, went straight from house to well to outhouse, nowhere beyond. I saw the newspapers spread on teachers’ desks, brown bodies laid out across the front page, faces bagged so you couldn’t name whose son it had been, whose brother you had jostled with, which uncle you had followed on a hunt, a swim.

  Once, while netting fish, I’d even seen a Bodo boy from the next village. He’d left a year before—NDFB, folks said—the way so many Dadas had, slipping out kitchen doors. Slipping back in with money, a uniform, a claim. I was wading in with a net when my feet bumped a seeming log that had drifted up. He must’ve been carried underwater for several days, his limbs puffed and bluish, his face a fraying mask. Half his right jaw had been scooped away, either by the teeth of an animal, a stone, or a man’s knife. I knelt in the water, so no tiger or soldier would think I was prey, and touched the stringy tendons of his cheek, the plush ridges of his hacked tongue. The cut was too clean for an accident or animal, so that, as I stroked the even leather of that pink hill, I wondered: what had he said to warrant this? Where had the cut end gone? Maybe it had melted into the river that, yearly, nearly drowned us all; or crumbled into this dense soil, to be sucked up by some sapling, transfigured into a kordoi I’d slice off for my own eager tongue.

  I stepped forward to turn him upright, drag him up, but stumbled on loose pebbles—splash!—we sank under together. I gulped, half-startled, half-choking from the marsh muck and water that swelled over us. The boy’s body fell heavily on me, rolling us down, down into the dank pit of the lake, his arms and legs tangled with mine, his face blooming whoosh like the lake-bottom plants. It was a scape of pink muscle and white bone and gelatin eye, the torn fibers waving toward me, the sides bursting open to blank lenses that mirrored my own dark, pocked, strained face. His jaw dropped fully from the fragile strings, as if about to snap, float away, leaving only that shredded tongue that licked at my nose, my eyes. As if he were kissin
g me to swim and stay in his gentle embrace, the river’s rocking, that private, salty moment. I’d known such a lull as a fishing kid, plunging into cold water, into morose green depth, air rich in my lungs, floating free of all land things. How, for a few moments, you wonder if you could live down here, leaving men to dream among the darting fish. But then plain human need daggers your lungs and you wriggle up for breath. Like that, with his tongue wooing mine, his hug brothering me, my brain pounded-pulsed. And I shoved his face, so that it cracked in a sharp left drop onto his shoulders, and kicked his knees in so that I shot—out! up!—to the gauzy light.

  Jumi, I know what lurks underneath. What you too maybe found, your year dancing on those banks, the dead I never named. How you must have sunk, when you returned to a boy who would not embrace you. Who said you were too Indian when you didn’t feel Indian enough. Who said the most beautiful thing about you was your undertow, your giving in. Who said your dark, unsure look was too much like his. Full of bloody currents, scooped out cheek, a tongue-ing lost somewhere loamy—unsavory clues others might call garbage but that I patiently read.

  Kordoi Tenga

  5unripe carambola

  1lime

  1dried red chili

  1tablespoon mustard seeds

  1teaspoon flour and 1 cup water

  1teaspoon sugar

  1teaspoon salt

  2tablespoons oil

  1.Heat oil and mustard seeds in vat till they sound.

  2.Choose green carambola for sourness. Chop into cubes and add to vat.

  3.Break up chili by hand and add shreds to vat.

  4.Stir-fry mix for several minutes on medium heat until carambola chop tenderizes.

  5.Add flour and water mix to vat. Cook for several more minutes to light boil.

  6.Add lime juice, sugar, and salt, and lower heat. Cook for last several minutes, adding any of the last three ingredients for desired blend of sweet and sour taste, though sour should dominate.

  BHUPEN

  Useless police. They swirl their lights, poke about Jumi’s studio, misspell Partana for Prarthana, 100 lbs. for 80. A no-neck cop lingers last, yanking open drawers of knives, the fridge putrid with foiled food, while Dorji brews a saucepan of tea. A slow rite: pouring water and milk in equal inches, heating the liquid to foam, grating in ginger, sifting in sugar, plopping cinnamon sticks last. A caramel disc, the tea fumes from a cup I cradle as No-Neck thuds about the bathroom, bangs the toilet seat, rattles the curtain rings, and says, “The paint’s worn off the sink.”

  “Stomach acid,” I say. “She isn’t good at cleaning.”

  No-Neck stalks to our table and rubs his throat, as if it were he who had thrown up.

  Dorji lifts a cup. “Would you like some?”

  No-Neck gazes out the window, at daffodils crystallized in frost. “It’s a hard job.”

  “She couldn’t have gone far, no?” Dorji says.

  “It’s a hard job,” No-Neck says, patting wisps across his pate. “Being a father.”

  We sip a cup to the fridge hum, and No-Neck promises his partner in the morning. When his blue-striped car growls round the corner onto the freeway, Dorji rests his hand on my knee. “You tell me where we should go.”

  It’s like the old days, when Dorji and I would drive our latest wheels through blurred city lanes. We’d roll down the glass and lean our faces out to catch the salty rush. Now Dorji steers his Corolla along spotless roads and we tighten our windows against the chill. Bank after mall, grass without geese, houses even and pink. Must feel like heaven, Ba had said, but the town feels locked. In dimmed houses, engineers and doctors I once knew sleep beside fat, fussy wives. Tara would have stayed slim, would have braided her cloud, would have known where a sad woman goes.

  Dorji steers—I squint—circling, circling.

  Dorji mutters about Americanized kids as he turns into a gleaming black lot of cafés and clothing stores, an IMAX theater at its far end by the shrub row. How many times had I found Jumi sitting under the blazing red letters of the latest titles? Dorji pauses before the glass doors and it is ourselves we see: sharp-boned faces floating between posters of golden-haired ladies in red dresses, Rambo types shouldering guns, impossible sands of blue-and-white resorts.

  Dorji shakes his head. “Jumi shouldn’t have come here. We wouldn’t be here.”

  “So many times,” I say, “she said the same thing about us.”

  Dorji loops away to Oaktree, blaring up the AM weather report. “Clear skies,” the voice repeats, “a mild forecast.” But once we step into the blackwashed lot, the silence rushes back on us, the night having erased the clang of Indians. Us crazy Indians with our crazy gods and our crazy prophecies of our crazy, fatter futures.

  “She couldn’t have gotten this far,” Dorji says.

  “She’s not a little girl anymore.”

  “We must map the points she visited most. We must be systematic.”

  “You know as well as I do, systems fail. It is people who are not supposed to fail.”

  “Bhupen, you were always a better engineer than me. A better man. At least you are here.”

  “A widower with no answers?”

  Dorji bows his head and marches past the shuttered fronts of stores. He limps these days, favoring his right leg, after a kitchen explosion five years ago. The vindaloo had burnt the skin all the way up his thigh, and he’d reeked of vinegar and metal for weeks. Go home, I’d said, wanting to protect him from customers’ stares, but he’d just grimaced and marched on with that right leg.

  At the fourth walk-around, Dorji puts one hand over his chest, another over mine, and spits a line of phlegm. “Tonight is a lost cause. We need to rest.”

  I push his hands off. “We will look when there is light. Meanwhile, we will make that map.”

  Dorji and the radio are mute back to Jumi’s lot, where he dawdles, checking under his hood, avoiding my moist eyes and chapped face, so I plod away and up to Jumi’s studio. Lights off—to her unmade bed, uneaten kordoi, DVDs scattered before the TV—titles I can recite from memory. I sit on her cot and hold my head the way I had when I’d first come home without Tara. We had rented the second floor of a Guyanese home and I’d lain on the bed, listening to Jumi wail from the crib. All night, I didn’t move, until the Guyanese grandmother knocked on the door, offered her used teat to the frantic mouth, sat by me with sweetened milk in a glass. Only then, as now, could I un-hunch my chest into long, throaty breaths.

  That first year, I left Jumi with the other wives, their faces like calm ponds. But then, as Jumi grew enough to crawl about the restaurants, the women faded back to their ranches of rose-and-spruce. I recorded her then—long feet, wild hair, a tot’s stumble through the new Bronx house—as if Tara might show up at that door, with her square jaw set and thrumming fingers on the knob, and ask, What scenes did I miss? She had loved the Indian serials, camera lingering on each face, music rising through the scene, cut-off just before the resolution. She would have plopped down at the kitchen table, popped pani puri into her mouth, and asked between munches, What does Jumi want? Who is her foe? Are you helping her fight? Back then, I would’ve had a number for everything: She is twelve and reads one fantasy book a week. She is fourteen and complains about boys who say she’s too skinny. She’s seventeen and has chopped off your beautiful hair. Maybe Tara would have slapped her hand on the table and laughed; maybe she would have shoved aside the plate and jabbed her finger in my forehead. Can’t you imagine, silly man, where your own child would hide?

  But in the gloom of her room, my breath fogs the outline of empty chairs, of uncut fruit, of dead Bollywood queens.

  Just as I pull off my socks, Dorji bounds up the stairs. He clutches the railing, gasping, “car . . . outside . . . sleep . . . .” And I bolt, knowing and not knowing, slipping down the carpeted steps, half-scurrying-slipping across the parking lot. There is the blue Corolla again—there is the garbage bin—there, there, inside, Jumi. I press my palms to the rear window.
She sleeps curled in the backseat, fists rammed into cheeks.

  Dorji fiddles a key into the driver’s door, and the blast of air shivers Jumi awake. I grab her bare feet, her tight shoulders, while Dorji tucks a blanket about her. Like this, we carry her—shuffle-crunch over the the thinly iced walkway—through the rosy chill of dawn. Up the stairs to the cot, where we rub-squeeze—Dorji left side, me right—her toes, palms, limbs. Jumi, Jumi—like the light creeping into every corner of her studio—loosens, breathes.

  Press, rub, count—Dorji runs hot water in the bath—and I am a young father, Jumi a baby. Except Dorji had not said then, “I’ll pack her things,” had not carried a duffel bag of clothes down to a car, had not left me cradling this languid body into a bathtub half-filled with soapwater. Jumi sinks like a sack, only her face above the suds—a copper replica of faces I have seen a hundred times: Pita’s, Tara’s, the Bodo boy’s, every girl corner-slinking, every boy crouching in the bush. Jumi’s face twitches, lips moving with words so hoarse I can barely hear, much less speak back.

  But when have I known the right words? Even when Jumi was a little frog, it was Ba who instructed me. “Support the neck, sponge the bum, don’t turn away your eyes.” Even when I’d done it right, my tot rose and splashed down in her seater, then giggled, and I wouldn’t know whether to scold or smile. I’d simply wiped the suds from her lips—those days when I had to stop her from eating everything.

  Water laps now her hollowed frame, and as I sponge this strange land, I think, This is not a father’s job. But life never asked, Bhupen, would you like to be top engineer or top chef? Bhupen, can you carry three half-hearts instead of a whole? So I ask Dorji, as I towel Jumi down, slip her into jeans, pull a kurta over her head. “Can you close shop? Can you call the others? Can you drive us home?”

  STAR FOUR