Sugar, Smoke, Song

by Reema Rajbanshi

  Weeks later, my mother’s vessels dripped into her retinas, so that it wasn’t a choice of not seeing me. So that both of us saw only straight ahead: she to her first job in public housing, me to coaching immigrants who couldn’t speak. But my father, who calls most afternoons, cites every mile, every possibility as crisply as ever. He barks over the train from the burbs, where he reminisces about all things Oxomiya with some uncle over tea. I listen for what he doesn’t name, doctors pumping blood from his legs up to his heart. EECP, meaning this is the best stalling tactic my fading Deeta can afford.

  “I found a voice coach job in New York,” he said the last time. “You don’t have to live in Manhattan. You can live in the Bronx.”

  “I like California,” I said. “It’s peaceful. I have friends here.”

  My father paused, hearing maybe what I wouldn’t admit. How, nightly, I bike by sprinklers in this parched valley, dream of dark, lucid eyes that truly see me, long for his sweetly-tipped lids most of all. How, every morning, I stare at a phantom I can’t reach through glass. My father mumbled then that he and my mother are house-hunting again. They want to live in the borough’s east end, by the boats and bridges and upper middle class folk.

  “The neighborhood’s no good anymore,” he said. “Too many wild elements.”

  “I like that about it,” I said. “I’ll miss it.”

  I will—though I used to pray for the day I’d leave Lydig, used to think, when I landed in Davis, I’d walked clear through the earth. Everywhere, limber palms, broad-armed shrubs, firs that dropped resiny cones, blue wildflowers that looked like they’d come from the mountains. Why, every morning, I’d wake on a lumpy cot in a poorly-plumbed house and know I never wanted to leave. Why, most evenings, I pack dirt around alyssum, thyme, and sage in a rocky plot. Humble plants I chose because they could handle the heat, grew even between rock. But after three years of drought and a green thumb I didn’t inherit, my flowers wither into brown curls.

  Today, I ask my father how he made zucchini vine over the rails, mint shoot up and scent the deck. Every sunset, we knelt together, watering bright tomatoes, spiny cucumbers.

  “The stupid squirrels ate everything,” he says. “The tree blocks all the sun.”

  My father climbed, before his heart surgeries, the old elm to its quivering top. He’d hack off new branches, push out squirrel nests, straddle down with the knife between his teeth. Now, he won’t risk breaking bones for fear he won’t last another operation. But the elm carresses our Lydig windows, squirrels skirmishing along its branches.

  “Ma fried zucchini flowers in besan,” I say, remembering their sweet petals, their bitter innards.

  “Come home,” he says. “You’re missing her cooking.”

  I hope he doesn’t know what else I’ve chosen to miss. Their faces furrowed like plains, bamboo art that whispers off every wall, morning calls in village tones I’ll never get. All of it lodged in a heart I’ve failed to bury. So that even dreamless nights, I see. Faces as dark and brooding as dusk, graffiti art that jumps you from every corner, nightly shouting in a hundred languages I’ll never know. All those rough edges. All that nervy life.

  Indian summer bloodied the parkway and still, I said nothing to my folks about my eyes or to Mrs. Chapman about my folks. My father was tearing up the red carpet for imitation wood while Mrs. Chapman was nailing the “t”s into my prim street lingo. When my mother finally painted the Zerega rooms canary yellow, Mrs. Chapman lent me her owl-frames and marched me before the district judges.

  Always, those grimsters were a fuzz from the podium where, shot with some cocktail of panic-n-pluck, I squeaked high and quick. I survived in this Minnie Mouse way for several rounds, beating out kids who sounded like Darth Vader, who forgot key lines like “once upon a time” and “happily ever after,” who peed right before they cried their way to the end. By the time October stripped the oaks, Mrs. Chapman pumped her fists and announced, I’d made the borough meet; did I want to go? Sure, I said, hugging her wasp waist and this extra secret from my parents, who swept brittle leaves from the Zerega stoop rather than our Lydig one. What did I have to lose?

  For better or worse, I discovered an elevated torture, enacted not in another dark auditorium but in the septic library of P.S. 68. Its full-on lights revealed what I knew too well, those clenched immigrant jaws—Italian, Jamaican, Filipino—my parents’ sandpapered planes suddenly among that wary terrain. What were they doing here, hands folded on laps, eyes fixed on my good denim dress? Had Mrs. Chapman, spry figure wired in the front, said something?

  I gulped—focus, focus—and counted the heads in the line twitching before me. Twelve, then ten, then six . . . Alice by Alice—off with their heads!—felled by fickle adults. Removing my dud glasses, I listened to the still-standing band: brassy notes of a Jamaican boy reading “Anansi the Spider,” nervous piccolo of a Vietnamese girl reading “Three Perfect Peaches,” nasal oboe of a Jewish girl reading “Baba Yaga.” And as I too shuffled before the beige blur, my heart thump-thumped.

  How could it possibly win this rat race? Hell, how’d it even get this far?

  For ten minutes, I read without breath and without flaw. According to rules, anyways, on posture and elocution and all those fancy words Mrs. Chapman had repeated, not a single syllable saying anything about the heat of Mufaro’s land or the salt in his beautiful daughters. I sounded like a misplaced parrot. Why was I talking about spirited Xhosa royals in this faux-British accent to slight wayfarers staked stubbornly in a library? Who was I to tell folks, who’d left jungles of guns and muddy luck, about savannahs of princes and palaces, none of which I’d seen?

  Yet I recited, how Nyasha, the sweet sister, befriended everyone and won the heart of the king, disguised as a garden snake all along. How Manyara, the nasty sister, dismissed every cue the spirits gave her—hungry forest boy, man carrying his head under his arm—and served Nyasha when she turned queen. But my heart whispered to my head: Manyara was gutsy, she was smart. She’d run all night, from the only home she’d known, for love and wealth; she’d clashed with the five-headed snake king, then warned her sister not to risk him. And why wasn’t washing her sister’s feet, that goody two-shoes who never said no, the humblest devotion?

  The judges huddled with other whispers, pronouncing me the girl with the trophy, the girl with the clay heart. So when people clapped, I bowed, and when my father swung me up, I grinned. Until Mrs. Chapman walked up and said, “She gets dizzy.”

  “Thank you,” my mother said, slipping the owl-frames off my sweaty nose, “but she doesn’t need handouts.”

  Mrs. Chapman unbuttoned her blue blouse collar. “Can I offer you a ride?”

  She lingered before the chipped brick of our Lydig front, Queen Anne’s lace spurting from the cracks. My mother, without another thank you, dragged my father up the concrete steps.

  “See you tomorrow?” I said.

  Mrs. Chapman frowned as if unsure whether she taught on a weekday, whether she taught odd-eyeballed kids at all.

  “I’ll hide the glasses,” and I kissed her cheek before scampering to the Lydig door. By then, her blue Camry had turned the corner, so I squinted down the hallway at my parents. Their shadows, murmuring, hunched away, as if I were the stranger.

  I keep my sister a secret in Davis, though everywhere else I’ve run to—Boston, Salvador, Guwahati—I’ve sung odes about her. I would’ve jumped in front of a truck to save her, given her a kidney if she needed it, fist-fought with any man who dared hurt her. That was how I stopped talking to my father for a year, the only family I believe in anymore, the one person I trust truly loves me.

  Who remembers how fights begin? Only indestructible details: my father a bellowing bull at the edge of the living room, my sister pleading and shrinking into a littler girl against the stairs. I strode in from the kitchen and slammed a bowl of yogurt on the couch, splattering the sour white across our feet. “Stop screaming at everyone what to do!” I don’t like to remember
what happened next, so I’ll just say, there was some pounding, some bawling, and my mother and sister watching offside, moving not at all to save me.

  I ran out on the streets for the hundredth time that night, wondering how far I could go without money, what my life would be like without family, if I’d get maimed in a different way out here. Several times, I walked all the way to Co-op City, the borough’s north end, where we’d bus an hour to school. Other times, I walked to Orchard Beach, wishing I could mermaid into Long Island Sound or soar off with the black cormorants, the green herons. The iciest days, I hid among the weeds of our Lydig yard, waiting till the cops came and went, till my sister whispered my name from the deck.

  Always, I walked back into that stone-cold cube. Not because I wanted to but because I didn’t know where I was headed. Because I feared what would burst inside the only family I had in the only hood I knew. Because I wasn’t sure which girl I was, the one whose name meant shame or the one whose name meant mercy. Because I sensed, walking the buoyant crayon streets, I’d find my way to my real home outside: brick buildings rising over chain-link fences, parking lots of maple and Indian grass, brown folks glancing at me with caution and with care. Why now, when square Davis faces raise their careful brows, their light eyes—you poor thing in the dirty, dangerous Bronx—I remember what no one says. How those streets gave me back my soul, kept the parts of my heart that hadn’t been seized, saved the real life I didn’t know I possessed underneath.

  Every time I crawled back into bed, my sister sobbed and hugged me. “Promise,” she’d mutter into my neck, “not to leave.” Or, if she’d done her homework and mine, she’d ask, “Wanna play Snakes and Ladders? Wanna watch an Indian movie?” What she was doing in her downtime—in the bathroom, carving her wrists, the insides of her thighs, in the bedroom bartering with a God she didn’t think was there, to save me before her—I glimpsed twice. When I spat at my mother—“You have no idea what’s going on with Henna”—my mother widened her glassy eyes but kept them fixed on the VCR she was untangling.

  These days, my sister calls me twice a year, never when I need her most, something more mysterious than a continent between us. She runs tests in a Chicago lab late into her weekend nights. “Humans have almond clusters in their brains,” she says, “where they store emotion and memory.” People store a lot of things, I want to say, in the body. And though I don’t say what, we pause, reviewing the data the laboratory of our life handed us: what bruises chair legs leave when sisters ram them into each other, the way a father looks strangling a mother on a newly upholstered couch, the dramatic relief of sirens in your driveway, the rising tension as cop boots plod through your kitchen and out of your house.

  The gift I got Christmas morning, in my Lydig bed, was two busted eyes (and a sparrow in a blurry tree). Rooftops and roads beyond, which I’d known like the cut of my palms, had become one reckless smudge against a gray sky. Signs and strays, scattered in every grassy lot, had morphed into blots and dashes I couldn’t name. I stretched, claws out. I was one more cat who’d have to hone her other senses to survive. My paws creaked the twelve steps to my mother’s pithas, where I discovered my mouth. My tail peeled the banister to the car, where I jolted with every stop my father nearly missed.

  Yet even in Zerega, lights strung around white dolls so it looked like a holy nursery, I didn’t meow. My parents were trying to pitch the house. But when the Puerto Rican hairdresser, who wanted to set up shop in the basement, called it musty, I heard the split! splat! of the rusting pipes. When the Guyanese family complained the concrete yard was too small for their barbeque, I scraped my limbs dervishing into the rosebush. Only the African American grandmother with the clouded eyes traced the slits between the mirror walls, the thorns leading to the roses, the gravel that ended at the lone tree. There I perched, nibbling a fig, but she caught my big toe with her fingers. “Does this cutie pie come with the place?”

  For an incredible moment, I thought my parents might say, “Yes, ma’am! And we’ll throw in a solid oak armory!” I imagined them investing the blood money in a rundown house they’d reshingle and replumb, where they’d live far more happily ever after without me. But when I said, “I wanna play,” and pounced at her feet, the grandmother crinkled her eyes and laughed.

  Still, I listened from the dank basement as my parents bartered with this pleasant voice that guarded one figure all afternoon. I listened harder when, after conceding to her price, my parents pulled my report card from the bill pile. A silence as round as those Cs filled the newly sold house. Where would Mystery Girl Losing Sight of Things go from here?

  To the Parent-Teacher lounge the next evening, where Mrs. Chapman flitted her hummingbird hands in explanation.

  “Nirmali can’t see the board. But I don’t think that’s the only reason she’s daydreaming. I was hoping you folks could tell me what’s going on.”

  My father frowned at my mother, who muttered, “Why don’t you ask her?”

  I wandered to the windowsill, where I heard girls pattering double Dutch in the playground. They’d shifted my TV box to this window, and I peered in at the quails warbling on their molted fluff. For the past week, the chicks had been flapping their stiff new wings, so I’d taped wire gauze over the top. Still I wondered, every night in bed, which baby at rosy dawn would peck through the cardboard and run out? Which baby would I find tomorrow, broken and mute, roasted in the radiator or decapitated in a pencil sharpener?

  “She’s like this at home,” my father said.

  “Sometimes,” Mrs. Chapman said, “the smart ones get bored or the sensitive ones withdraw. But I don’t think that’s Nirmali’s problem. Aside from storytelling, she won’t talk.”

  “But she excels at storytelling,” my mother said.

  “You folks don’t get it,” Mrs. Chapman said. “She can’t even see her story anymore. You should’ve gotten her checked a long time ago. But that wouldn’t have been efficient, would it?”

  My parents cowered, glaring at Mrs. Chapman with the angry eyes of thieves. I wanted to wind past the desks and cry, They’re good people! Don’t talk like that to them! But I sank beside that cardboard box, and heard the girls chanting to their snapping ropes. And in some new corridor of my throat, my high heart palpitated: your avenger has come.

  I still dream of endings that could be mine. Outcast girls who lose their way and die, wives stolen when tempted beyond the magic circle, daughters chopped and reborn in no man’s garden. Though I’ve returned my mother’s books—Hans Christian Andersen, the Ramayana, Burhi Aair Sadhu—I’ve carried those endings like chips in my side. From semi-detached Lydig to Tudor-faced Zerega, through rickety brick bargains to this Davis back alley.

  You mean the chip on your shoulder, boyfriends will say, their fingers hesitating at ridges on my neck, wrists, thighs. My side, I’ll say, pulling their fingers to smiles in the curve of my waist. My rich white boyfriend pulled away, as if I were deformed, as if scars were contagious. My African gambler boyfriend rolled right over, mimicking me and calling me a spoiled American. My North Indian boyfriend, who’d joked Assamese people were half-elf, half-hobbit, I didn’t tell at all. Only my Cambodian refugee boyfriend kissed my scar and, for that alone, I miss him.

  I told him half-stories both of us could bear. That I couldn’t remember why my sister was cursing, if I had struck my mother first, if my sister threw that plate to defend her. I swore to him I wasn’t sure what else I’d done wrong, confessed that maybe we all deserved it, that perhaps some families are meant, like sleepwalkers, to crash through things. What I did remember—more clearly than the slash of their eyes, the pale of their faces, the afternoon light boxing the floor, the pink button-down I was wearing—was the way we stood. A faux chandelier split us into camps, my mother and sister tensed forward in the hall, my back rigid against the front door. What I could name—more fluently than KochKalitaKamrupi—were the words we slung at each other. Uncivilized, bitch, dummy, we shouted in English. Mok mari p
elai diya, we wept in Assamese.

  “Is that how come you hate pink?” he’d asked.

  Who knows why people hate anything? What I do know is the plate shattered into tiny pieces. Slivers the length of my pinky nail pierced my side, and feeling an itch, I rubbed the pieces in, grazed them under and up my skin, smeared blood I couldn’t at first see. I was busy stumbling back, daring my mother, my sister to throw something else at me. They did—a cup that broke its handle against my rib, a fork that speared my nipple, a spatula that branded my calf—and I wept my way to the dining room radiator, where I crouched between the rubber plant and the lucky bamboo. I wept for a half-hour before my mother, coming over to say shut up, saw my newly red shirt, tried hugging me, dragging me by my arm to the tub.

  My last boyfriend never asked why the way the others did. Never said a word when I said, “Because I’m my father’s daughter. Dark, wild, mad.” “That’s crazy, you aren’t,” the other boys said, spitting out the diamond-hard truth. Love leaves marks, crazy is relative, some people come to prefer the bang-up job, especially if it’s the closest thing they know. My last boyfriend simply gathered me to his own dark chest the long, warm night.

  Now, my Cambodian gone, my father talks about my sister’s wedding. “To a nice Indian boy, an engineer too, a good family.” He’s building the mandap where they will sit, two couples beside the sacred fire.

  “Will you be there?” he says, and I wonder if this is his voice or my mother’s.

  “How can you ask that?” I say, and remember Henna and I bride-grooming in the vast Zerega house. Rooms of sawdust and staples became banquet halls of champagne and guests. There we wrapped moldy curtains about ourselves into saris and tuxes. We snipped marigolds from our father’s garden for our true love bouquets. We played old Hindi tapes on the boom box for our wedding marches.