They say the love of her life was a married boxer who, after instant-dying in a car crash, knocked her heart out so thoroughly she had to stuff the hole with morphine, with drink. They say the Church wouldn’t dignify her with a funeral mass, though her dead voice called forth 100,000 onto Paris streets. They say the long echo of her was her drama, on and off the stage, so operatic of course she wielded a voice that, her father the circus man said, “could drown out the lions.”
SUGAR
In the beginning, Yusuf would tell me stories of the back-ruining work digging trenches, quenching fires that had sprung up all over the county in a deepening drought. He would set me on his lap and say calmly, those chapped hands turning my face this way and that in the sun, “Where else would someone like you have met someone like me, Nirmali, except at a party?”
“We’re not that different.”
“Never forget, you are not black.”
“You know what was the first word that came to me when I saw you? Unhinged.”
He shooed me off his leg and said scornfully as he yanked open the back screen door, “You’re beautiful, Nirmali, but you’re weird.”
“I could say the same of you,” I shouted but he would have closed the glass door, so that I’d have to walk round and ring my own front bell.
In the first month, I learned Yusuf knew a million things about the Shoah, about the poetry and protest after Nakba, though we’d argue about whether Indians were Arab or Asian. “I’ve seen the Middle East,” he said one night, before a daylong TV series on Bob Marley’s live concerts. “They have your color, your features, your food.”
“The rest of my family gets mistaken for Korean or Filipino or Mexican,” I said, thinking back to guessing games in the Bronx, over some grocery register or before a subway map placard. “It’s not that simple for us.” But he’d turned away, clicking up the volume on the remote. “Whatever you do, don’t make me eat any more couscous or watch any more genocide documentaries. I’m done.”
When mid-summer heat gave way to late summer fires, I learned Yusuf could only talk about love in code. There was the night he came bearing Robin Williams’ What Dreams May Come, a movie even sappier than a Bollywood flick. He lounged on the futon, holding me so tightly I couldn’t breathe, while he paused on every painting-heaven scene.
“Can you believe this kind of love?”
No, I can’t.
There was the night he came with Coming to America, Yusuf rewind-replaying the moment Eddie Murphy, discovering his chosen bride is, in fact, his American love, beams, his whole suited self glowing with this new meaning to marriage. “Isn’t it funny?” Yusuf said. “Like he’s gotten a Christmas present.”
Then there was the night he brought V for Vendetta and said, slipping the disc into my laptop, “It’s a smarty-pants movie.” He warned me he might fall asleep halfway through, and when I said what’s the point of watching alone, he said he wasn’t going anywhere, and curled against me as he snored.
Then there was the night he came fragrant with beer, jittery in his buttercream leather jacket. “You’re late,” I said, rubbing my hand along the arms and tiptoeing for his lush lips. “I love this jacket.”
“It’s from Tariq.” He walked off to my bedroom. “That guy loves me like a brother.”
He lay halfway on the bed, an open Corona bottle in hand, his legs planted on the gray carpet. I sat near him, my hands rising-falling on his chest, and he said he’s been to see his folks. “My brother said, ‘Yo Yusuf, what’s going on, you still seeing that nice Indian girl?’”
“They don’t remember my name?”
“I’m almost thirty. I’m a grown man with no time to waste. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“You’ve told me this.”
“I spent two years with a woman who hid me from her folks, who was going on blind dates while we were still living together.”
I lay my hands on my lap and wondered what burned more: Yusuf hung up on Zuleikha, Yusuf withstanding more for her than he would for me, myself the one nursing his wounds.
“I welcome you into my home. I’m still waiting for you to get checked. I’ve told my folks about you”—I didn’t mention Yusuf sweating beside me that afternoon—“how many of these have you done?”
“Okay, okay,” he said, sandwiching my hands between his. “I’m just talking aloud is all.”
Which sounds untrue, I wanted to shout, to someone who teaches singing and reading, but I fibbed too. “Whatever. It’s up to you.”
Still holding my hands, he looked away, said nothing at all.
Years later, when I’m counting the red flags on the one Indian man I’ve ever dated, a toothy journalist who approached by asking why everyone knew about Syria but not about Kashmir, who it turned out was still pining over his Ethiopian ex on the nights he stewed red lentils alone, I’ll wonder about triangles. How old they are, what they leave out, why two sides always, even minutely, overshadow the third.
It’s no different on my August visit home, hoping to trade a blistering sky for a little childhood rain. Ma and Deeta shuffle in their kitchen like worn mahouts offering pithas, tangy fish, curry goat to a mad elephant. This no-sound ritual, even with Uncle and Auntie there, means licking my knuckles and listening to love tonics from Assam, Mumbai, the Islands.
“Zuleikha tried to seduce Yusuf,” Auntie says, “though she was married to another man.”
“Christians cheat too,” Deeta says but Auntie doesn’t flinch.
“When Yusuf scorned her, she had him jailed,” she says. “Later, Yusuf, free and rich, finds Zuleikha, an old widow, on the street, and because she still loves him, he marries her.”
“Romantic,” Uncle says. “But a bit fairy-taleish, no?”
“A fantasy,” Ma laughs. “Men want dogs.”
“So do women,” Auntie says. “That’s why I tell our girls: friendship first.”
What do I listen to but Yusuf’s pause when I tell him I miss him, right at midnight, car alarms blaring down empty streets, teens jeering bittersweet nothings from stoops.
“Nirmali, you can’t buy family in the store.” I start to snort why but he ends, “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He doesn’t and I’m left stringing words for ten nights like nonsense ads on train rides to and from the city: Dios Cristo, seduce scorn. Only when free and rich. Knuckle loved, cheat married, fairy-tale darkly. Bendiga salva! Tomorrow luv. Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow.
But tomorrow flies me to September nights so smoky I can barely breathe and to Yusuf, who tosses about in my bed, never his. He will sweat over some painting he hasn’t made, for a man he hasn’t seen since thirteen and, covering his eyes with an elbow, will say, “I’m going to start a fraternity. Boys without fathers not allowed.”
“Plenty of great guys don’t have dads.”
“My sister mailed me his stopwatch. I take it out of the drawer to hold, but I can’t wear it.”
“At least your sister mails you,” I will say but Yusuf will move on to Zuleikha. How she dated Arab men while they lay like man and wife. How she muffled his mouth when her mother called, and evicted him when her father visited.
When I yank the cover over my head and mutter “lovesickness,” Yusuf will move on to his Eritrean girl. How she lied about sleeping with a friend of a friend. How he’d dumped her, this girl he should’ve married. How he couldn’t, when she fled to San Jose, track her down.
When I jab on the desklight, Yusuf will roll away, bare back an impossible wall.
“You’re Lear and I’m Cordelia,” I will say, hugging my knees.
“Once again no one knows what you’re talking about.”
“Before Lear divides his kingdom, he asks which daughter loves him the most. The first two compare him to the sun and moon, even to their husbands, but the last says he’s salt. Furious, Lear casts Cordelia out, though she’s the one who takes him back when he’s lost everything.”
I will sink my fingers into Yusuf�
��s hair but his temples will rise and fall in dreams we do and do not share, of families we may never find again: without you, love, nothing tastes the same.
SMOKE
The mid-year evaluations come in spurts. Some pairs have hit the ground running, others have hit sudden bumps, and still others have not once touched base. Catalogs of life, I think, as I make the drive down the light-blanketed county road to the Woodland office.
Beulah, my Woodland boss, insists, each time my car or bike has broken down on this or that road, “You have to show up.” She is a pinched-looking blonde with frog eyes made more amphibian by her glasses, and every mini-crisis in the Literacy calendar makes her twirl-tug her curls so tightly it seems she might tweeze herself bald. But if there’s anything I‘ve learned from her antsy rules, her antsy reviews, it’s show up and you will be surprised.
Today, she spreads out the reports like a puzzle between us, the top three files the learners whose paths have taken the most surprising turn: Srey, Tim, and José. Srey, the one with the older white husband, has disappeared altogether; Tim and his volunteer were racing along but have hit some scheduling snags; and José, who for so long would sometimes show, sometimes not, is on the verge of taking his citizenship test.
“I don’t understand what happened,” she says, almost cheerily, as if this were the find of the week. “I really thought Srey’s husband was going to keep her on track. And look—our dark horse wins the race.”
I stare at the files, trying not to make some feather-ruffling joke about how people of color are not animals to be gambled on. So I put my left hand on Srey’s top paper, only half checkmarked, and say, “I think her husband couldn’t drive her around anymore because of work. He didn’t want her taking the bus by herself.”
“Ah, so protective,” Beulah smiles. “Young love!”
Rather than point out Srey’s husband is at least twice her age, I put my right hand on Tim’s last written report, where he spoke about wanting to write a memoir about the Rwandan genocide, and say, “Mrs. Janowski dropped out. She says she loved working with Tim but just can’t commit the time anymore.”
Beulah purses her lips and frowns at me. “None of us can expect too much from the seniors. Besides, her son and grandkids are visiting and she never gets to see them!”
Perhaps I deserve the schoolmarm scolding because I’m thinking, Well, half Tim’s family was wiped out, so he doesn’t have a choice. But I can’t help liking Mrs. Janowski, who cheered on Tim for every book finished, who wrote pages and pages of how much she’d herself learned, who is one of the few folks around here about to vote for Obama rather than McCain.
The afternoon light is pouring in through the upper windows of the back room, where the library also holds Anonymous meetings, services for prisoners, potlucks for young moms and their kiddos. Everything inside the room seems afire: racks of books to be shelved in the corner, stuffed bears lined along the radiator under the windows, walls of posters citing meeting dates, Lord let me know what I can change.
I pick up José’s application with his initial goals sheet in both hands, and Beulah softens before me. “He did it,” she says. “Make sure you send him a rulebook right away of the citizenship test.”
“He’s been through three different volunteers,” I say, tracing with a finger the timeline of his stops and starts a year ago, when I started the job. “He didn’t give up.”
Beulah snaps back to cheery mode. “Better late than never!”
Which is the point that haunts me a month later, when she and another white lady take me into a room without windows, explaining that I am to be let go because I’m late too often, I’m hostile, I’m timid, I’m unprofessional, I’m not adjusted to the local demographic. Neither brings up the previous week, when I’d called Beulah out for leaving the Storytime kids unsupervised with a volunteer who had a record, a blonde lady who came up later to say, “That was when I was young and dumb,” and I told Beulah, “The rules are the same for everyone.” For an hour, I will struggle to breathe lower and speak louder: I had been late because of transportation issues, my time wasn’t free yet I’d been asked to pick up work after hours, one can’t be timid and hostile at once, unprofessional means this interrogation, the targets of war are a demographic too.
But her words will outweigh mine, so that my girls will again ring me. Jas will say, What else is new, sweetie? Women tearing each other apart? And you know, you do take your time. Anita will say, You’re overqualified anyway, Mali. It’s fine to do public service but what about your voice work? You wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with them. Rosie will say, You made those white girls look bad and then you got uppity about it. Those hicks went easy firing you rather than shooting you. Yusuf will be long gone by then but I imagine him repeating what he’d said when he’d picked me up once from the branch. “For someone so smart,” he said, shaking his head, “you can be so naïve.”
SONG
They say The Nightingale of Bollywood, Lata Mangeshkar, lost her father young, a tragedy that pushed her, the oldest, to singing for studios, to growing into Lata of the sari-bindhi, Lata of the aye mere watan ki logon, Lata of more songs than any recorded artist in history—excerpt perhaps her sister.
LataLataLata, who crossed genres the way desis crossed oceans, bidden and everywhere, her tones warming our workdays, our family functions, our outsider nights. Ajeeb dastan hein yeh / This is an unusual tale: a nurse in her white, widow-like sari serenades her doctor love, as he glooms beside his swanky wife beside the improbable palms. Yara seeli seeli / Friend, slowly slowly: a ghost haunts the shorn-tree sands and her skeptic friend, Samir, born again to fulfill his promise to jailbreak her from a king’s lust. Pyar kiya toh darna kya / When one has loved, what’s to fear: a slave girl declares her love for another Samir, spinning before his furious father, King Akbar, who, it’s said, had also romanced her, who, it’s shown, would entomb her alive.
What I want to know is, how do you sing in words you can’t speak, feelings you may not know? After India lost to China in ’62, after Nehru forsook the Assamese to the Chinese, was she crooning loss and blood for him, for mainlanders, or for us? When you have felt words in ways you’re warned you can’t say, how do you guard any sweetness of heart, any saltiness of voice, from sisters-haters-businessmen-ideologues that want to eat you, then spit you back out?
SUGAR
Like another Halloween ghoul, Yusuf begins wandering in midnights, no sex between us, just the smell of beer he’s drunk with friends I’ve never met, and tales I wish I couldn’t read. How he went to some strip club with his boys, how he danced with some girls at a bar, how he fought with Zuleikha again for an hour. Love, love, love, he’s taunting me, don’t you wish you had some of mine?
“I don’t care if you dance with other girls. You know why? Because I choose to trust you. Why don’t you just go back to Zuleikha?”
“I don’t know if I can handle you,” he says, looking weirdly pleased. “Why do you stay with me?”
I frame his long face between my hands. “You remind me of home.”
Thing is, even at red lights, when Yusuf brakes my car, when white girls roll down their windows and holler, Yusuf looks steadfastly at the road, though I can see his back, always tight and forward, as if protecting himself. They are tall blondes like Zuleikha, which makes me nervous and touched, and I find myself leaning out my own window, like a startled bird ready to flee.
My girls offer different reads that say more about them than Yusuf or me. Jas says over rum and coke, “So has his hose put out your fires yet?” Her hair is newly streaked blue and green and all the white rocker boys in their ripped jeans are eyeing her zaftig orbs, but she chuckles. “Why’re you holding back? If you don’t want him, give him to me! I’ll wear him out!”
Anita, whose cousins sell cosmetics in East Africa, says, “There are two things you have to understand, Mali. He’s like a traditional Indian man, which is why he looks at you confused. Also, colonialism wrecked Afri
ca, down to their family structure. He’s one of hundreds of lost boys, so don’t take what he’s doing as a reflection on you.”
Rosie, the African American tutor I met through one of the learners, says after the Woodland fight, “How interesting. He talks to you like you’re a black girl.” She’s been debating whether she wants to have babies with her husband, a good Philly Muslim who’d like to raise kids in the faith. “I’m not gonna raise them with two stigmas!” She presses a warm finger between my eyebrows. “Loving one of us, Nirmali, is no joke. Black men might be the most insecure in the world but there’s also no love like ours.”
By November, Yusuf has committed to school full-time, and when he comes, he is too worn for talk though not for sex. Nights together are getting briefer, rougher, so that one night, as Yusuf is going at it, I tell myself, maybe this will get less painful, maybe it’s a matter of time, maybe like Yusuf’s mantra about trust it’s like learning a fine wine. But the night Yusuf enters in the wrong place, though I’ve asked him not to, I finally speak. I shake him up at 3:00 a.m., when I’m sleepless again, and he rises startled, as if I’m the ghost.
“I don’t want to do that anymore,” I say. “You hurt me. Last time, I bled from the back for days.”
“Nirmali,” he says, rubbing his forehead. “Maybe we aren’t sexually compatible. Maybe we should just end things here.”
“What are you talking about?” I say. “Just because I’m telling you one thing I don’t like doesn’t mean you throw the whole thing away!”
He sits on the edge of my bed, his back turned to me. “You don’t want me here. You’re going to tell people I pushed you.”
I place both palms on his back, as if they are heart clamps that might resuscitate this. “I never said those things. I’m saying, this needs to feel good for me too. But I’m in pain. Are you listening to me at all?”
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