The house was emptied of her Indian bracelets, her rose water and oils, her hidden notes. Our Lady of Mercy. November 5, 1985. Ten pounds, four ounces. Midnight, stained underwear in bathroom. June 2, 1997. Thirteen years old. I hummed through it all—the neighbors who wouldn’t look directly at me, the club clothes and car I wrecked, my As that bloated into Cs and Ds—as if song would chase anything away.
“I have traveled far!” a voice rasps. I drop my palms to Galego and Redhead staring at Magic Mountain Woman, who addresses the moon. The moon doesn’t answer, so she spreads her arms to the huddled children, kneeling couples. “I am sixty-seven. Sixty-seven, gente, and I have never seen actors like you!”
She marches to the fire, talks to it instead. “We have talent. We have potential. We are doing the work given only to the inspired. And what,” she whispers, “have we lowered ourselves to? Discord? The commonplace squabbles of artisans? Are we artisans?”
The audience nods.
“We are not!” Magic Mountain Woman says. “We must rise above these vulgarities! These distractions!”
She coughs and presses her chest. “Please, people. Don’t upset me. You,” she reaches out a hand, and when I move in, she slings an arm about my neck. She’s more brittle than I imagined, like a sparrow that’s flown into my sphere rather than the other way around. “I want this Indian girl to help me home.”
Everyone’s mum—except Galego, who kisses my forehead. “Take care,” he says, as if forgiving me. Redhead scrapes her chair away, but Magic Mountain Woman could care less, limping out the clearing with the dignity of a queen, her Indian in tow. Only José trails us, like a yellow lizard scampering back to the loins of this earthy woman.
The road ahead winds to a cube as green and lit as Magic Mountain Woman herself. With every step, she hums a song I can’t make out, and pinches my arm on beat. As if she were destiny reminding me: You will borrow these women for restless nights. You will not keep a single one.
I wake like I never do, to a house flush with sun. All bone and gray hair beside me is Magic Mountain Woman, breath like a baby’s, opal hand warm against my chest. All night, she’d pressed her hand there, as if to heat up my heart, ground me in that solid bed. The precious thing about the old is their skin feels the way butterflies look. As I rub her loose skin over all her tiny joints, I feel like I’m lying under my mother’s hand. Or Anju’s.
But I’m a mover rather than a keeper, so I slip my feet to the cool earth floor. As I cross the threshold, I know I’m a lucky girl to be befriended by strangers.
Yesterday’s road pierces the hill like a lifeline headed somewhere, so I trek the way I came, whistling all my mother left me, tunes Anju had muted herself to hear. Assamese la-las about Old Man River, the first blossoming tree, a daughter returning home. No one sings back—not a peep even from the camp, bundles asleep by the smoking pyres. Except for Galego, who’s rocking and groaning under a blanket with Redhead. Good for her—and me, I guess.
I corkscrew downhill so robustly, even if it ends in a nothing-town, where folks set off for money-making vistas. Lonely cities of noise, sertões of thirsty poets, even jungles of Indians who may not look like me. I cross drying streams, I trespass rickety-gated farms, I backpack along a pink trail I hardly remember . . . this angle over the carnival plaza . . . that view of peito da moça . . . to the lowest slope of slippery terrace steps.
“Kabita!” someone says. Sneakers skid the last steps, then the grin from last night’s coffee, then a blond ponytail. José: all of him and him alone.
He pants. “Mamae said you’d either burn down the hill or yourself.”
“Fire wants water,” I say. I lift the flask strung around his neck, and he slips pão com queijo out his pocket. Plopping in mud under ten o’clock sun, we crunch and suck crumbs off finger after finger.
José rests back on his elbows. “The rains ruined the crop. Most folks left for the city.”
“She raised chickens,” I say.
He turns onto his stomach and squints at me. “Even so.”
I heave myself up into heat buzzing with birds, bees, and God knows what else. “I have to try.”
“Then why,” José says, re-climbing the terrace steps, “are you going the wrong way?”
We walk again up the hill, on the terraced pink path that seems worn now and watchful. Flanked by Bible boulders, the tiniest birds zipping between bushes, how old is this road really?
The first time I’d spotted a hummingbird, I could’ve touched the fleshed jewel, darting about a red hibiscus by my ear.
“Beija-flor,” Anju said. “Our most precious thing.”
This was the first real sentence she’d spoken, and I stood mute till the kiss-flower flashed away.
We’d hiked on, four hours for a waterfall she said she could feel. What waterfall, where waterfall, you broke hag? I thought whenever she paused to tap her cane about. But we found water under a low cliff, a gurgling column hidden by crooked trees. Like a grinning imp, Anju stripped and sidled into the water, while I clutched a pineapple for dear life.
“You waiting for the bus, menina?” she yelled. “This is good for your spirit.”
One spirit conjures another, for who whistles toward us but Tonho, fedora cocked on his stupid head, a starved dog dragging over gravel behind him.
“I thought I saw you,” he says.
“You know why I’m here,” I say.
“Are you with her?” he asks José, who’s frowning at the metal chain wound thrice around the dog’s neck.
Dear José puffs out his chest. “Our whole troupe is looking for her friend.”
Tonho assesses my reddened face, my caked jeans, maybe even the ending to my trip. I want to throttle him: What’s the big fucking deal? I’ll pay you if you want. I’ll even apologize for nothing. Just hand her over! But I eye him back, not a muscle twitching. I know how to play this game.
Tonho turns, yanks the dog back up the terraced road. “I don’t know where she is. A lot of folks ditched Palmeiras after the rain destroyed their homes. Some things were left in the church.”
Another half-hour, we hit the next leveled cliff, where a colonial with white adobe walls moons over a speckled oval. The town—and beyond it, brown fields I’d blurred, except in stabbing moments, about as well as Ma’s face. What the tourist books called dryland and Anju a minha poema do sertão.
“Don’t just stand there,” Tonho says, rattling the blackened door.
José holds my hand past wood pews, over a floor swirling with circles, as if someone were welcoming us. But it’s the ceiling holes, plugged with broken bottle bottoms, that greet us while candles flicker by photos, all along the sides. Photos and ribbons and notes.
I turn—surprise, surprise—Tonho’s gone, as suddenly as that last week, when I’d crept over to Anju huddled in bed. Everyone, she’d said when I kissed her wet cheek, leaves.
“Kabita,” José says as he sifts through burlap bags lined before a gold-gilded altar. As if the people had hoarded their faith in that altar, and those bags, from which José pulls leather sandals, silver bangles, cracked photos of stiff families. Then I pause his hand—“Her crystals!”—a blue kerchief knotted around small stones.
I unwrap the silk, spilling pink-white jags onto my palms, which I lift to his bright blue eyes. “My first day here, the kids took me to a hill where they collected these. I told them they were just rocks but they said, ‘No. These are real and precious.’ They gave me everything they found. My last week, I took Anju to that hill, told her we’d look together.”
“Did she believe you?” José says.
“It hadn’t rained that summer so the hills were dark.” I point to the holes in the stained glass behind the altar, brown grass peeking through. “She said she was glad we’d come. That I’d see how green the land could be after the rain.”
José ties one sack after another, and only after the last burlap’s lined up does he say, “It’s half a day’s ride from here.”<
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I don’t know if he means we should or shouldn’t go, so I say, “I can’t.”
“Where else have you got to go, princesa?”
I’m on the town road one last time, José muttering how the troupe will flog him if he returns empty-handed. But even with José whistling to birds he names, or naming hills cleared of fog, the roads seems rockier, winding to the same ol’ hub of strangers. No friend there.
Dusk, we’re rattling on a bus past the deep green mounds, toward a planet of brown stalks, burnt stumps. We can’t help staring out the window at the dusty road, haunted by dark figures who don’t glance back. “Poxa!” José says, and I remember when I too marched in blistery sandals. How I’d thumbed for a carrona and muttered to Anju about hell. How she’d shuffled on, as if already dead.
My midday bread burns my chest, and when I turn gulping, José puts a warm finger to my throat and grins. Those buck teeth—I roll back to the window and shut my eyes to all that tan, tan, tan . . . and dream of concrete sidewalks Ma and I wandered, hand-in-hand. Long hair wound into a moon the men watched, she speaks Assamese only we know. “Kabita, your name means poem; Kabita, what do you want to eat?; Kabita, we’ll walk around once, before your father gets back.” The bus jolts—para! folks yell—José brushes a strand from my eye. “Ten minutes.”
The caatinga’s nothing if not a spread of cautious hearts, thorn trees twisting up dry bark, pale green cacti throwing long shadows. But the rain that’s razed Palmeiras has woken this thistle-patch, and these wry citizens show their treasures. Feathery stars splash earth, still butterflies swell cacti branches. Gold wildflowers bloom between white rock, and spattered all over the moist soil, a hundred deep prints. Deer, lizard, bird.
“Try this,” José says, carving with a pocketknife sap that must’ve leaked and dried onto a knobby tree.
As I chew the rubbery knot, I remember my last night, Anju’s friends gathered in the caatinga to bid me safe goodbye. Earlier that evening, she’d slung a bloody plastic bag on her wood stove, and smiled. “The heart of your friend.” My first day, I’d told her good Hindu girls didn’t eat beef, but learned over the weeks, sertanejos saved every scrap. Especially, the tough, tender coração. “I’ll watch you all,” I joked back.
How the crackling heart shot sparks that night, as Anju’s friends talked land.
“MST’s no better than the government,” Old Man Fiel said. “I’ll believe them when they give me more than dirt I can hold in my hand.”
“Should we give up?” Anju said. “This could be our chance.”
Ines, nursing her dark shiny baby, shifted it left. “You have your plot, Anju. Most of us can’t sit on the roadside for land we deserve but won’t get.”
“What does our American think?” Fiel said.
Silly that I was, I’d been watching the heart drip juice into the fire, sizzling spice up. “Huh?”
“What would an American think?” Anju said.
I wanted to jump atop my stool, speechify for every American immigrant.
I’d clear my throat: everyday, my father walked barefoot from his village to school, after waking at dawn to till the rice fields.
I’d shout: my mother mopped and vacuumed the same brick house for eighteen years, on Bronx blocks where no one spoke her language.
I’d pump my fist: my parents gave up new coats and socks to pay for college. Other than India, they’d never even left the Bronx.
But Anju’s strained face, all those wizened faces made my story hollow. These folks didn’t want to leave the hills. Most days, they wore no shoes at all.
Brilliantly, I answered, “I don’t have American opinions!”
The circle blinked while Anju turned the spit. “It’s ready.”
Murmuring broke the chilly air, blankets rustled, forks clinked out—and Anju passed maroon slices out on plates that, when I shook my head, kept going round. But as Anju licked the tip of her meat, as everyone sucked oily fingers and sighed, I thought, I’d like a piece of the heart too.
José rests a hand on my shoulder. “Everyone’s expecting us.”
I walk away, old Abraham in desert, Rama exiled for who he was, until I reach a stout tree with a hole the size of my head. Stuffing the crystals into the hole, I think, Here is one of the loveliest places no one knows to die. My mother burned far from the betelnut village she knew, in a Bronx funeral home; Anju’s gone who-knows-where, only stones left to her caatinga; while I’m too lost a thing to know how my fate will end.
“Stay with us,” José says, slashing through a tangle of vines. “At least for a while.” He leans against the tree, blocking the hole. “Some troupe job will keep you.”
Which would only prove my folks right: stubborn freak, wayward girl, good riddance. But if I’m never right, I may as well feast my own heart out.
“Let’s see,” I say, and turn to the bus roaring for the others. Strangers who’ve come from unknown towns for their own strange reasons. Wanderers who climb slowly on board, to return to carnival that’s throbbed up once more. The tents, the fires, the dancing folks. We will pass from this living land to the next, and without words, with eyes open, we will wish. To go further, to rest a bit, then press on.
Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughter
The year my father built his Zerega house—a two-story ramshackle with mirrors for walls and fake marble chips in the rose beds—was the year I joined my storytelling contest. It was my mother, really, who pushed me that way, but it was my fifth-grade teacher who was right. Your destiny was laid out for you, if only you chose to read the signs.
My father, plunging the toilet, complained early on that she had picked “Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters” because she was black. My mother, wiping the tile sludge around him, declared, “You sound like an Indian girl telling a Xhosa story in a Bronx accent.” But in her sun-washed classroom every afternoon, Mrs. Chapman wound her hair into a bun and reassured me it didn’t matter what I read, so long as I told it right.
So every night, as my father hammered those mirrors into walls, I orated to sea critters I imagined in the basement; and all weekend, as my mother held a flashlight over him, I thumbed through fairytale books for girls like me. Storytelling Scheherazade, lost li’l Thumbelina, and the surprise Princess and her surprise Pea. Even my parents, who could recite Wordsworth poems and name forty Ahom kings, batted the Funny Mystery of Me over the marigolds they were digging.
“The teacher,” my mother muttered, “called Nirmali shy in class, wild at recess.”
My father tapped his forehead. “The daughter of Buddha will do great things in the world.”
“The hospital,” my mother declared, “gave us a demon child.”
My father glared at her. “Our last name means ‘dynasty of king.’”
“Sure,” my mother said, handing me a trowel, “we’re royalty.”
What were we doing, living on a Lydig block of old Jews, midway between the white Italian mafia houses and the highrise clotheslines that fluttered panties and Puerto Rican flags? Why were we fixing a dirty brick house we weren’t going to keep, that we meant to sell to the only sort of people who’d move to Zerega, black and brown? My why-bother-to-reply parents fretted over the three hallway arches instead—turtling one week per arch—giving up when the wood cost more than they expected. It’s okay, they told each other about that last unframed arch. Buyers would remember what they saw first. But I thought, no, even with my crooked eyes, I’d notice the plain arch, the way the fancy front made the naked back look bad.
My father pointed me to the mirrors and grunted, “Go watch yourself talk.” He never noticed how I tripped over the toolbox, how I pressed against the glass to focus the tears zigzagging down my cheeks, how I heard my girlfriends’ dirty chanting over my humdrum words. Aboard the public school bus, they had drawn stick figures undressing and doggie humping. The fact that two people would go through all that trouble only to regret me meant I was out-of-this-world.
Dragging my books b
ack into the mirror-doubled dark didn’t help, and I was left tracing irrelevant details: colored pencil drawings of brown bodies and birds, pages that went from gardens to thatched huts to carved chambers, the brash laugh when Mrs. Chapman had glimpsed my storytelling face.
“Quit squinting,” she’d said. “You look like a gnome.”
“How can I tell who I’m talking to?” I’d asked.
“You should be listening to yourself,” she’d replied. “Tell your parents to drop by.”
When I stumbled to the porch with this news, I tipped my father’s cinnamon-steeped tea off the rail. Zinnias sizzling, my father cursed me off and my mother dragged me to the mirrors. There—sturdy jungle heathen beside her trim ivory form—I wondered who I belonged to. Until my mother wryly noted, “Your father also knocks things around.” Then I saw myself shudder, I heard myself laugh.
My mother doesn’t call anymore and, these four years, neither have I. Every day, nine to five, I teach clients how to speak from their gut rather than their throat, but I clench my own voice in fists behind my back. When my clients wisecrack that they barely hear me, I remember my mother screaming the last time we talked.
“I never wanted children! Look how you’ve turned out! I have nothing to say to people when they ask!”
Like so many times, a steak knife lay on the table between us. Sobbing, I clutched the steel and crawled on all fours into the corner. I sliced apart my shirt, my breasts falling out like spheres with plum centers. “Stop!” I said. “Please stop!”
My mother rose and rinsed the dishes. I crawled again and lay my head on her warmed seat. “Look at me,” I said. “Is this what you want?”
“I don’t want anything,” she said, thumping off the tap.
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