Sugar, Smoke, Song

by Reema Rajbanshi

Jumi, we raised this place from the dead, plank by plank, right after the laundry burned down. The streets were still are you Catholic or Jew, but Indians were washing up all over the city, carrying stone-hard suitcases, debating dollars versus rupees, dreaming of dove-skinned women in houses far from the stink of oil and curry. Soon as I found Dorji, I knew he was hungry: slitted coals for eyes, stocky mountain legs on which he strode round and round the luggage belt. Both of us had landed engineers’ offices forever below the bosses, some Tom-Dick-or-Harry always slapping our backs. “You boys can really crunch numbers.” “You people are just too polite.” “You really need to speak up.” “Boob.” “Door.”

  “The name is,” we’d begin, but we heard what they meant, through the memos, the Colgate smiles, the promotions that never came. Asian Invasion Alert! Hang back, Hindoo. Keep kowtowing, coolie.

  Four years before we could pool the money, before we had the nerve to tell the boys who’d schooled with us. “Beta,” they shook their heads, “a bird in the hand is all you can expect.” Our mothers wept over the phone. “Did we suffer so much to die without grandchildren?” But months of munching curry chicken alone in the cafeteria while the others chomped burgers and bragged about banging Molly-Lucy-Jen, and Dorji and I were itching for a sign. So when we heard fire had ashed Jackson Heights, had turned its sky vermilion-red, we stamped our cigarettes and went.

  You can’t imagine how it was: an L-shaped plot covered with what seemed the burnt-up bits of another man’s dream. Night after night, over chai and biryani, we sketched and crossed out and counted, till a house of cards teetered up. Then we hammered up walls, we twisted in the pipes, we wired lights to blaze out the place, we stapled down plush carpet to go under wood chairs with fat cushions, wood tables with slender legs, we nailed to the ceiling loom weavings by Bodo girls, Naga, Mising, and over all the walls, we hung our cloth-wrapped things: purple-and-red thangkas, figurines of the gods, japis like large starred flowers, and the bamboo tools used by men who’d climbed Dorji’s mountains, who’d fished Pita’s lake. And along each wall, we hung the Bollywood women. Why the customers called us not by the black-and-white sign, Himalayan Bistro, but Bollywood House.

  On the back left wall, by the bathroom: Meena Kumari. That sad moon face so subtle, so drunk. Dancing as the abandoned whore of Pakeezah, on shattered glass.

  On the middle left, by the brass elephants: Madhubala. Ringlets around her hopelessly hopeful face. Dancing as Anarkali, the courtesan who, for stealing the heart of the prince, was buried alive.

  On the front left, by the register: the folded crane limbs of Nutan. Singing to the moon that has come but why not her love? Sweet, sweet Nutan of Milan, who taught her servant lover to read.

  On the back right wall, by the kitchen: Smita Patil. Slinky in that white sari in that rain, moving shyly with Amitabh. Smita who too left a baby at thirty.

  On the middle right wall, by the biggest japi: Madhuri. Dancing in disguise, always barefoot, always lush, among jolly thugs. In fields or temples or bars, her bosom pulsing with pleasure.

  In that front right wall, by the darkest corner: the happily twisted faces of Sridevi. Parodying fast-talking Southies, cold-shouldered Northies, the bubble-thin dreams of round-eyed girls. Sridevi, so alive with her serpent rage, her wicked grin that knows too much.

  Then in the lobby: Tara. No script for the steppes of that face, her nose soft on my palm, eyes tipped like her mother’s and yours. Just this photo garlanded with dried roses, set over a glass bowl of anise, smoked every morning by rosewood incense. A stranger had taken that photo, when Tara and I had climbed halfway up the dim stairwell to Lady Liberty’s navel. We’d paused panting, and I’d said, “I too will feed the masses.” She laughed, “We can’t even make it halfway up.” Some American, crossing us, stretched a hand. “Would you like a snap of the pretty lady inside the pretty lady?”

  There is no space, Jumi, for another picture. Unless it is my picture, and then you must place it by Tara’s. You must walk into Bollywood House, naming for customers every star. You must stay, remembering all this is yours. We cannot take our wealth with us, wherever we go. It is here, it is here, to share. This is my recipe under every recipe, the only truth a father tells a child he has reaped. The tartest kordoi of all.

  Kordoi Khar

  1ripe papaya

  2kordoi

  2clove of garlic

  1green chili

  1tablespoon khar (“baking soda” made from banana peel ash)

  sugar and salt to taste

  1–2 tablespoons mustard oil

  1.Heat oil in pressure cooker.

  2.Add crushed garlic and chili.

  3.Dice and add papaya and kordoi.

  4.Add kola khar and mix “black” base thoroughly.

  5.Add sugar and salt to taste.

  6.Add 2–3 cups water and let simmer until two or three whistles.

  7.Normally served at the start of a course, khar may be eaten for an upset stomach.

  JUMI

  Back in the Bronx! Spring too, so dogwoods on our parkway sprout gold. Heat in the air, black boys loping in loose jeans, Boricua girls strolling in bright tanks, the long-ing-ting of bachata. Baba sings over Bhupen Hazarika the whole way till we pull into the driveway, buku hum hum kore . . . my heart quivers . . . he always has this sweetly scratchy sound.

  He slams the car door and kneels by a bulbous orange flower. Gently, he pinches it off and tucks it behind my ear. “Go get a bowl. We’ll pick some for the puja tonight.”

  I sit on a white bedsheet on the living room floor as the House comes. Dorji Uncle hands out saa in Styrofoam cups, which steam the room, while Vikas sets the Geeta on Ma’s old xorai. Imraan Da lays bananas across that brass stand, places its cone top by the taals. They ruffle my hair and promise to play when I’m better

  The other uncles come, from Manhattan, Queens, New Jersey. Most are slight, hard-jawed Assamese, some North Indians with elegant noses, South Indians with inky eyes, a few of different nations entirely. But all conjured at 7:00 p.m. from the train, the bus, their rental vans straight from work. They sit cross-legged, in white shirts and dark trousers, on this white sheet on the living room. They sip this tea from cups and wave me into their circle.

  One by one, they lean over and pat my back, stroke my cheek, sweep down my braid. One by one, they set down their cups, rub their palms, begin clapping.

  They hum.

  In the circle’s corner, my father settles near me and lifts his brass taals into the air. Slowly, he scrapes each large cymbal against the other.

  Shh-ha-shh.

  Then faster.

  Krung-brr-krung.

  Scrunching his slanted eyes, my father sings. Worn face lifted, voice reedy. Plaintive.

  The men sing with him, roaring into chorus, clapping with those clanging brass taals.

  One sad, steady tune after another, Sankar Dev prayers where everyone rocks back and forth around me.

  My father stands and circles me, beating those taals, singing faster.

  One by one, the men rise, trailing in a line behind him, the circle widening, singing louder.

  In the center, I shiver, while the men step side-side-forward around me.

  Slow twisting circle.

  Under me, the floor shakes warm with their stomping.

  Side-side-forward. Vibrating circle. Closing in on me.

  My father crouches and rises, crouches and stays, cymbals clanging-scratching-breathing right at me.

  Still, they sing.

  All the while, I look not up at them but down. At the men’s shadows bent, black, converging on me. My father’s fiercest, quickest of all, hands nicked by other people’s appetites, grinding the taals. My father, whose raw-boned face is the home I know, shuts his eyes. My father, my father, who has called up the men, can you call up the women? Can you call up the stars?

  The Carnival

  Brazil, Brazil. The ooo-le-le of samba, ah-vaya of white sand beach, biddibiddiboom of rus
set hips. My nineteen-year-old self saw right through this postcard shit yet two years later, here I am! Back! I’m lurching in the rear of a garbage truck, between barrels of sour apple mush, pink houses with dogs, green humps that drift through fog. And I’m whistling an old Assamese tune about a tree, like half our folk songs are, watching for the old woman Anju. Yet again.

  Nineteen when my Brazilian stepmother first sent me, Miss Bad Attitude from The Bronx. This was a ploy I called The Cheap Immigrant’s Correctional: a chicken farm. This was also two months after the sangría fest she and Dad called a wedding, where they foxtrotted like hot-and-knowing lovers, while I sat drinking White Russians like they were just milk. That was six months after Ma faded out, a human battery hooked and wired, corroded by a tumor those fat cat doctors couldn’t find. “You’ll love Brazil,” my stepmother said my first summer night in from gray Boston U. “You’ll never want to leave.”

  “Of course I won’t,” I said. “I’d have to see you again.” That made Dad turn, shaking red. “Shut up and go.”

  Twenty-two now, and it’s not like I know much more about where I’m headed. I do know why—always have—but does self-knowledge really matter? The truck whistles—halt—nourishment in another town whose name only the towners know.

  A carnival’s here.

  We spill out, grandmothers, honey farmers, blond-dreaded hippies, Indian girl me, into the balloon-and-light-speckled plaza. Men call out chicken roasted on sticks, grannies suck cobs on church steps, teens scurry past curtains of big-bottomed pretties, pot-bellied couples watch white-headed street kids leap from one grassy square to square. Spinning to see it all, I stumble on a step of kerchiefed ladies, who push gooey chunks of chocolate my way.

  “You shouldn’t eat so fast,” a gray-eyed mister says, watching my mouth like he’d lick the cake right out of it. Maybe he knows I’m looking too, at his bulbous nose, his storkish bend beside me. “I’m Galego.”

  “Kabita,” I say, and because his eyes creep up my jeans, I add, “I’m American.”

  “Então,” he says, taking my plate from me, “we must see the play.”

  I pull my wrist from his grasp—can’t! Anju!—when what do I hear but her snappy pace on nights I wouldn’t join her for bar dances. “Get out, moça. Live.”

  We walk past the chicken vendors to a dusty rotunda, where parents jostle to seat their kids on the rough brick edge. Saudade, saudade the actors sing, reaching with lean limbs and bronzed faces for a time they’ve never known, but the stamp of it there! Chirping Indians, they hop in file; swaggering Portuguese, they point their swords at limp Africans dragged in with ropes; then the pounding, of drums, against sprawled Indian legs, buckled African backs; and over a chorus of groans, the lyric call of babies.

  “Look,” a child whispers beside me to his mother. “Você.”

  Galego presses my shoulder, but frowns at the coconuts flaking paint, papayas raining glitter, the oil-spilled waves on which the goddess Iemanja rides tilting like a Domino tile. Which is how I spot that bastard, cross-legged like a swami under the sharpest wave: Tonho of the piano teeth and piccolo heart.

  Harh-harh, he laughs to the samba, clapping the cymbal hands he used to rap on Anju’s gate for nothing good. Same old idiot, I bet, who’d woo a woman ninety pounds smaller, twenty years older with wildflowers and cheap chocolates, then yell at her for burnt feijão, thwack her into the cracker bin. The sort who’d toss moto-cyclist cash on cards, then come stumbling in for midnight mommy love. All those nights I scrubbed his beer and pee from the glistening floor while Anju pleaded and groaned behind the blue bedroom door! I repeated in my sleeping bag what I’d murmured on the Bronx couch, nights Mom wept on the iced stoop while Dad snored. Maybe this is how love sounds for them. And I knew, no one would risk his hide in these backways for an old woman and a foreign girl.

  Dawn, after Tonho had vroomed off on his moto-taxi, I’d wander onto the porch to find Anju smoking corn husks from her stool. She’d shut her slanted eyes and suck that roll, so the pansies bloomed blue along her arm and neck. Then without a word, she’d bring wild tea out in a basin and wash the scalp I monkey-itched. This was the long black hair Ma had combed daily, which had, in her hospital days, tangled and thinned. More than Anju’s hands plucking out my lice, I loved palm-oiling her fuzz, corn-rowing it into uneven furrows—though mornings after Tonho, she cringed with every tug. When I finally said Tonho had a temper, she sloshed the tea-water away. “If I want your opinion,” she called from the kitchen, “I’ll ask.”

  What I wanted was a clear number: for the value of a sixty-two-year-old chicken-raising Baiana’s love, for the trade a forty-two-year-old Assamese woman keeping a Bronx house had made, laughter for life. I wanted one of them to tell me what price a nineteen-year-old Assamese American should pay—if love was ever worth it. But Ma’s long gone, Zombie Dad’s bewitched by StepBitch, and I’ve only got Anju’s Broke Bad Boy, who might not tell me anything at all.

  Tonho’s staring at me—spooky eyes, no smile at all—but I step behind Galego. “Let’s go!”

  Galego widens his eyes, then clasps my hand down a dirt road, away from the plaza toward the parlors. All around us, trees darken into night, tents light up, and Galego rubs his thumb in circles on my palm. He doesn’t blink at the signs glowing behind the chiffon—Dança Exotica, Dança da Noite, Dança do Desejo—doesn’t even glance at the girls feathered and jeweled inside like Vegas birds. But I can’t miss the wood shacks, cowering like dogs between the parlors, windows black and boarded. The girls who stroll there, winking and whispering at men, look so young—as if they should be in class with me—and so Indian—slender, dark-eyed daughters of Amazonians forced to move out here, somehow make it.

  Rub-press-rub goes Galego’s thumb, except he sings too, a buoyant Chico Cesar song about a man waiting for a love letter. Why don’t you snatch your hand up, I wonder. Run off like a frightened bunny? ’Cause, I think as our road winds toward lights spinning up, you’re a curious cat. And I go on, painting a life for this man whose name is the single thing I know, and even that, so uncertain. I paint for him a city wife, with jet-black hair and scarlet nails, who’s left him for an agua de coco man on their street. I paint a seventeen-year-old daughter, caramel limbs camel-loping from bar stools to dance with strangers. I’d even paint a lover, a magic mountain woman maybe, but our road hits a carnival of fire.

  All about a grassy clearing, costumed folk mill before tents strung with towels and shirts, behind fire-eaters, who toss up burning pins, spin lit hoops with swift hips. We know, they beckon with bony hands, you wanna play.

  “You’ll like my family,” Galego says, stroking my left eyebrow, then my right. Dammit, I shiver—as kids dart from plastic-bound balls to the center fire, where two men cradle a drum, a guitar—he’s right. The old man settles into a wheelbarrow, plucking a tinfooted melody, while the thumbless one presses his ear to skin, rippling nine fingers for a beat.

  Flush-faced women swish out the shed, snapping fingers over their heads, prancing on quick feet to the fire. The one in purple draws near a man with the gold eyes and velvet skin of a Halloween cat, and when they hug their hips, Black Cat splays his gecko fingers on her smooth back, his braid beads clicking against her round cheeks. A brassy-chested redhead bounces before the musicmen, slapping her thighs, yelling at them to make it real, make her go. Men swarm about her, trying to cut in, match her pace, make her stick to them alone. But the old woman’s the best, circling the fire like an epileptic, one palm waving, shoulders jiggling, a true magic mountain woman.

  When I giggle, a blond boy holding a plate of clementines says, “That’s my mother. Mamae!”

  The old woman stumbles over, grasps the skinny shoulders of the boy, whose sudden grin warms the night. “Who is this street kid, José?”

  I answer, “I’m looking for my Palmeiras friend. Anju da Silva.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” Galego says. “The road to Palmeiras is ruined from this year’s rain
s. You won’t find her on your own.”

  “I did before,” I say, and thank my stepmother for her lucky mistake. She’d given Anju the wrong date, so I landed in the Salvador station early, waited all night for someone to come. Dawn, I rode the first bus to Palmeiras, hitchhiked to the only chicken farm towners knew was owned by a five-foot woman. There on the porch she crouched, tapping her cane at the chickens. “So you’re the baggage.”

  “This wasn’t my idea,” I’d snapped, and she’d led me through a woodstove kitchen, past shelves of permaculture books, into a cool earth room with only a hammock and a cot. “Looks like you don’t sleep in America,” she said, pointing at the fresh sheets. I awoke sore, in an instant it seemed, Anju studying me from her hammock, by a window of corn.

  “It’s dark,” Galego says, as if I were blind. “Stay the night and I’ll help you find her tomorrow.”

  Magic Mountain Woman smiles. “Is this baby going to sleep with you, Galego?”

  “She doesn’t know anyone here!” Galego says.

  Redhead strides over. “Are you two arguing over a woman again? Come! Let me decide!”

  “Stay out of this!” Galego says. Sure enough, children scamper over, the musicmen amble up, plucking cheerful tunes.

  “Gente,” Redhead says. “Our troupe leader wants to sleep with a little girl. Why don’t you hire a whore, Galego? Or do you want to save money tonight?”

  Galego jumps for her, but José hugs his waist. “Right here,” Redhead thumps her chest. “Come get it!”

  Lord—I clap my palms over my eyes—I’ll never find Anju with these crazies. I see Ma instead, bloodless face turned away that last week. Still, I had whispered to her not to leave me in the house alone, and held her hands that did not press back. Until she’d turned to sigh. “Now you will know how it feels.”

  One sunburst week later, Assamese folk streamed into the hall Dad rented, and I clapped my mother’s soul up to a heaven I didn’t believe in, repeated the prayers of a man I could’ve chopped and strewn in the toilet. But he sat, a pretend lama, circled by grave faces recounting a mother I hadn’t known: joking, bustling, unlined. Not one of those good citizens mentioning the last years, when she’d called them sobbing, when she’d cowered at parties, sensing the whispers.