Sugar, Smoke, Song

by Reema Rajbanshi

  He turns his face to me, a strangely guarded look hooding his eyes. “This is getting too hard. I’m waiting and waiting for you to open up, to give yourself to me. I’m not going to waste another two years!”

  “Everything takes time,” I say, clasping his palms between mine in prayer pose. “Please. We’ll talk about this in the morning, when you’re not tired.”

  He sighs and rolls away to the wall, and we never speak of it again.

  After Yusuf and I stop sleeping together, my girls write their own conclusions. Jas cries, tears on my neck as she hugs me. “It’s okay, Mali. Just call it what it was. Use the word.” Anita scrunches her face and hugs herself, as if she cannot believe this had happened in the house where we’d welcomed him. “Unbelievable! So selfish! Just like an Indian man!” Rosie, for this reason or another more important to her, stops returning my calls at all.

  Just like that, as if the fires had sapped any energy left, lights go out all over town. I flick on every switch in the house, the hallway—no—the kitchen—no—my bedroom—no—then sit on the couch, feeling the shadows of every object about me. Anita will not be back from the lab till night, lost these days in a little molecule called nitric oxide, “so diminutive but needed for life,” she says. “Without it,” she grins while spearing a sausage, “we die.” But I cannot even call Anita, and when I scrape up a lighter flame and hold it to my busted phone bottom, where the batteries crowd, the bottom begins to melt, like the black ice seeping from my chest to fingers and toes: the ice of disappeared boyfriends, the ice of my once-upon-a-time sister, the ice of friends and family tightroping their own darkness.

  I drive from memory to Yusuf’s place, where I’ve dropped him when his car’s been stopped up. (A car, he likes to remind me, his Palestinian girl got for him.) But his block is also blacked out, only a few stragglers looking curiously at me as I walk up to the gate, peer through its bars at the row houses.

  “Are you looking for someone?” a Spanish-sounding man says, stepping back from unlocking his door.

  I wonder if this man, peering back at me half-puzzled, half-wryly, knows more of the story than I do. Yo hombre, he’ll say, your side chick came checking in on you. “Thought I had a friend who used to live here,” I say, walking backward across the street.

  The highway out of Sacramento, past creviced fields that, by day, look like golden vaults flooded with water, is an ominous ribbon of shawled land. So I find myself driving by memory into Davis, to where the Krishnans live, in a small apartment by the co-op at the edge of town.

  Mrs. Krishnan’s face twists into surprised amusement as she opens the door, perhaps upon seeing my distressed face, my intertwined hands. “Nirmali,” she laughs, and her husband, her doe-eyed seven-year-old, her gentle-faced brother-in-law and his Rapunzel-haired singer wife crowd the door. Mrs. Krishnan has candles lit all over the ground floor of the apartment, dark red and orange-yellow candles that cast swimming flecks of boxes and ovals on everything. We sit at their long table, where I’ve had tea several times with Anita for her Malayali dance practices and maybe I’m really waiting for her to return, because I’m tensing myself through dinner platitudes. The Indian husbands with their lashed looks of concern are telling me to never tell my Indian husband, when I find a good one, that I’ve had other boyfriends; to tell him he is my very, very first. They look happy, I think of each couple, the little girl, in frills and pigtails, as elated as a ripe balloon between them. I want this circle, I want this yogurt with chili seeds crushed in it, I want this high-ceilinged house of candles even in the city-wide dark. But, I think half-spooning rice and dal into my mouth, I’ve never been good at lying, even if it could’ve saved my ass.

  Anita raps on the window, then sighs heavily at the door, as if she’d been looking all over town for a naughty cat. “I thought I’d find you here,” she smirks, as if really, were it not for my silliness, we would’ve been chugging a beer in our dark house. The talk resumes its easy rhythm, though faster now, slipping into Malayali I can’t follow, but I guess at the same thread when Anita’s face takes on that odd, hardened look.

  “Forget all this,” she tells me in the car, the town lighting awake house by house, the bikers circling bravely with their lone red lamps. “They’re old school.”

  “Maybe I am too.”

  “Nirmali, whatever you do, don’t write him. He’s gone.”

  SMOKE

  Tim, the learner who is also my landlady’s gardener, comes around like clockwork, twice a week, before either Anita or I rise. More and more since his tutor has left, he lingers by the sliding glass, to see who it is I am, behind what I do. He is tall but hunched, as if permanently lost in thought, those lustrous eyes always streaked red. Like so many of the Africans I’ve met in Davis, he extends his hands in greeting, in reassurance. Today, he brushes the dirt off and clasps my hand while I perch uncertainly on the threshold of the garden. He wants to know what Yusuf used to try to figure out: where is my family, what is my background, what am I, a twenty-nine-year-old woman, planning to do here?

  “Other than work, you mean?” I say.

  “Work is not life. Wish I could do something other than this,” he says. “How do you like our landlady?”

  “She’s difficult but fair.”

  “Yes, yes, exactly. I work with her now sixteen years.” He taps his head. “A little crazy. After her father died, she went crazy. It’s hard, you know, to lose your whole family.”

  He steps closer and peers behind me, as if to see if anyone’s listening.

  “Anyone, especially for boy, losing family, losing father . . . cannot be sane.” I don’t think he means just the landlady, and he takes my hand again. “Such a pretty, nice woman. We should talk somewhere else. Maybe over coffee.”

  I am tired suddenly—I woke too early—but say “Sometime. I’m so busy these days.”

  I don’t see Tim again until The Learners’ Celebration two weeks later, when I’ve lost so much weight from stress, he walks by me. Despite the dismissal, I am slated for two more weeks of wrapping up projects, having to smile for the patrons, having to stretch dollars till I can pick up sub work at the other branches. But handing out certificates in the back verandah of the Sacramento Capitol, all marble and windows, is not the best part; or Beulah’s scowl when the learners seem more eager to thank me than her; or meeting writers face-to-face whom I’ve known only in reports, like Anand from Fiji or Martin from Winters. It’s listening to them read their essays aloud, while I sit behind a bouquet-laden table of pink-and-purple carnations.

  How I Crossed a Desert, José reads to the hall of made-up families sitting tentatively at far-spaced tables. My Second Life, Martin reads as afternoon sun cascades to the hall’s ends, Minerva plaques guarding every other door. Words I’ve Lost, Anand reads as folks scrape back chairs, plod to a center table of sandwiches, stubborn jaws relaxing. I crouch in my corner, listening to faltering tones not at all like the voice work I trained for, goosebumpy from these backshelf stories I’ve helped spill.

  But when I fly to the Bronx Thanksgiving weekend, I have no story I want to admit. Ma and Deeta have been waiting an hour in the La Guardia arrivals terminal, and though they say little, their faces flush with a kid’s joy and they play Bhupen Hazarika on the ride home. O moina ketiya ahili toi, o little girl, when did you come?

  Each visit, Deeta gets skinnier, Ma heavier, so they walk this evening and every other through the Mideast sections of the Bronx. Deeta marches like a one-armed soldier, left side swinging-chopping, while Ma trips after him, trying to narrate a story to its punch line, joking to me that Deeta sometimes leaves her completely behind. I don’t know why our file drives me crazy but I stop in the middle of Gunhill Road.

  “If you’re not gonna care whether we’re behind you or not, then what’s the point?”

  “What’s the point of what?” Deeta says.

  “Exactly,” I say, my voice rising so that the Salvadoreans kicking a soccer ball on the parkway
pause to stare. I can feel myself morphing into sixteen-year-old Mali again. Fists clenched on these streets, stalking-stalking through sweat or snow.

  Deeta slumps, looking smaller than I’d imagined he could, halfway between the boulders and the bodegas and the pine tree-shaded houses. “Please. Let’s walk together. As a family.”

  Ma doesn’t say anything, just looks off at the projects where she works, as if she might see someone she knows. All I can see is how we’re hovering apart like tilted dominoes, never coming together like on those boards the old island men slap together Sundays at the park.

  “I can’t keep up with you two. I’ll wait at home. You enjoy yourselves.”

  My last midnight home, Ma shuffles from the kitchen to the sofa, where I’m chewing turkey strands before Criminal Minds, and munches a long while on a saltine. “Twenty years,” she says finally as the black cop captures the one white psychopath, a victory not at all like life outside the house. “Twenty years at home without money is not a small thing, Mali-ma.” She untangles my back hair nest, and I hear her telling me, it’s not shameful to say no, maybe it’s okay to come home, that my body is her body is our body that, no matter where I run, will always equal one.

  SONG

  They say Philomela wove a tapestry to tell her sister how Tereus, her sister’s husband, had raped her. Tereus the royal—which equaled, even then, undue admiration and impunity—had seen something he liked and grabbed it. Who cared about ancient laws or one woman’s insistent please, nos? Turns out, Tereus cared after Philomela wove her truth-telling tapestry, and outed his selfish jerk, rich boy ass to the public. He cared after Procne, his wife, fed him his son in stewed cutlets, and voila! when it was boykind, he saw the blood on his hands. But because some corner of him needed affirmation he wasn’t a monster—and because blame, like energy, must go somewhere after the event—Tereus cut off Philomela’s tongue.

  The goddesses of girls took pity on Philomela crawling, Philomela bleeding, Philomela slurring. They hovered in a circle about girlkind’s first whistleblower, and said, for the price you have paid for your tapestry-truth, we transform you. Philomela’s long limbs thinned and sprouted into feathered wings, her aching bones and sluicing organs became a bird’s reedy innards, and up-fzzz she whirred, to the steady hand of a pine. A nightingale, her classical trills and plaintive power a warning to girls in their most incorrigible parts.

  (Correction: in real life, the female cannot sing.)

  SUGAR, SMOKE, SONG

  My last Yusuf sighting, I’m riding the midday bus for a last-minute shift at the Woodland library. Two–three months after his New Year’s text, after he’s left me with credit card charges, after he’s stopped responding to questions at all. Two–three days after my car engine has smoked up again on the freeway, so that I sit on one of two lone buses bumping past razed fields, my sunglasses on against the sun. Yusuf appears as suddenly as he had at Anita’s party: hair grown back, twisties up in that mane I’d asked him to keep, and I can’t help wondering, for whom has he resurrected the Firefighter Lost Boy?

  I hear myself dialing Ma, mumbling in Assamese as Yusuf slumps across me, staring at my knees as if they’re a still life Cézanne, looking thinner, wearier than I’ve ever seen him. We face off like that, me not remembering what I say to Ma, who asks again and again if I’m busy, Yusuf’s gaze boring through my shades, that dusty aisle between us and all the empty seats.

  When the bus pulls up into the Woodland Mall parking lot, I curl in my corner till even the driver shuffles off. It hits me then—lingering behind the seniors at the connecting stand, the seniors boarding the 1:00 p.m. bus for the casino—where Yusuf’s going. He won’t let me see the proof however, and walks away from the casino bus, head up, shoulders squared, into the vast lot. I tense, sweaty-palmed on the bench, with clarity—knowing neither he nor I have any business lingering in this town.

  No way I could have predicted this detour at Christmas, when Yusuf had taken me to a friend’s wedding. The air around us flammable, my greetings salty from a visit home, and still Yusuf decided to introduce me to his family. Though he neglected to say so until I sat paralyzed before his three brothers and two sisters at an Oakland wedding table. “Why’re you so quiet?” they asked before rising. They paraded through the piano hall like they were the real music—women in embroidered white linen, men in pressed blue suits—and I was the dissonant note, shuffling in a gold sari Yusuf suggested I wear.

  “Don’t abandon me,” I whispered and Yusuf steered me to the dance circle, where he nestled me between his sisters, then disappeared. The girls were kinder than I expected, the freckled one nudging my shoulders into an Arab shake, the rosewood beauty holding my ashol gently, but I strained for Yusuf’s roar. When I caught it through the window, I stumbled with my Johnnie Walker into the dark, where Yusuf and his brothers puffed their stories at the sky.

  “They shot that n—— right in front of the house,” the youngest said, measuring my face. “I thought about calling, but who gives a fuck about a black man in Oakland?”

  “Did he die?” Yusuf asked.

  “Hell yeah,” his brother said.

  I didn’t say what I was thinking—strange decision—just nodded. “The price of a black man’s life.”

  “So you an artist too,” the skeptical-faced one said.

  “Art-lover,” I said. “I’d like to teach voice but I’m working in literacy right now.”

  He looked at Yusuf like told you so rolled into the cig he dragged, but said, “Good for you. I’m Tariq. Maybe Yusuf told you, we grew up together.”

  Inexplicably, Yusuf shaded his eyes and mine, then yanked us inside, where a singing crowd bobbed up on two chairs the slender Ethiopian groom and his muscled blonde wife. May your love last as long as Abraham and Rebekah’s, the hoarse voices cheered. The hall vibrated with their chorus—jubilee I thought—but when I said, “I trust you now,” Yusuf turned to the men sliding from hall-end to end. They were clapping long sticks and shoulder-shaking one another on, and when Yusuf, anchored to my hand, leaned in with his own stick, the old ladies fixed their dewy eyes on me. The way they’d cradled his cheeks when he’d made the rounds earlier, he had a hundred mothers for the one vigil-ing by his dad. But like a boy who wants something so badly he doesn’t care how, Yusuf let the stick clatter on a table to finger my bangled wrists, my stray curls. And just that brashly, we spun each other in the hall until the music rolled us, drunk on tej, out onto the speckled streets and sky, and just that smoothly, Tariq drove us, blasting Tupac and JLo over my fretful nap, to that Davis house one last time. It’s only then, by my bed, Yusuf unwinding my sari, that I blurted, “Those ladies . . . “ but he cut in, “Tomorrow, they’ll all be talking.”

  New Year’s Eve, when I finally show Ma the wedding pics, she snorts. Me and Yusuf at the dinner table, me and Yusuf in a group photo, me and Yusuf alone by Tariq’s car. I thought he’d looked handsome in his deep blue shirt and say so, but Ma frowns. “Why do you always have a drink before you?” She is upping her insulin dose, injecting herself in the darkest corner of her bedroom, by the altar of gods. Where once she’d been an abalone-shelled pixie, her stomach has swollen into a bruised pouch. She eats the one roti, the turmeric cabbage, with her head bowed, as if a continent only she knows of is growing in her belly, draining her.

  When Ma accuses me again of being the reason Deeta is sick, and Deeta takes me sobbing to Orchard Beach so we can talk about Yusuf, I tell him, “He’s the closest thing I’ve got to you.” When Deeta tells Ma, “We didn’t raise them to think like this, not here,” Ma says to me on a more bodhisattva day, “Who are we to judge who you pick, Mali, but they have to be at your level, they have to understand who you are.” When Yusuf says, in response to a photo of Deeta paying bills under the fake chandelier the previous owners, Holocaust survivors, put in, “high rollers, huh,” and I tell him my father didn’t grow up famous like his or protected like him, he rolls onto that splintered back. “Mali, you
know what it’s like to come from a place like that? Forget about me. You’ve got to get out of here and do something with yourself for him.”

  The 1:30 p.m. bus is nowhere to be seen and Yusuf’s figure has almost smoked out into the wavy heat, going to or from the casinos I’ll never know. But from his turn away, after each of us have side-eyed the other, I hear what we’ve been trying to say: how all blues, whether his or mine or some long-gone woman’s, are not at all the same.

  One Tiny Thing

  ROSES

  Ramu’s grace saved my ass that summer. I was standing in a Davis lavender patch when Ramu pulled his Corolla up to the corner: “Nepali? Name? Job?” Two months after my voice coaching degree and still nothing: “Assamese, Nirmali, wanted.” When Tashi stuck her peach face out the window, I clasped her good hand and added, “Sure, why not.” How could I know I’d be biking for months between a restaurant and a mansion, their family and the Subrahmanians? All I knew was you couldn’t go home again.

  Every evening, Ramu overgrinned at Gerald that I “outworked the guys”: the Nepali best-bud chefs who had been lawyers in Kathmandu, the Laotian bodybuilder who pointed out his Hanuman necklace as he dreamily washed each plate, the Oaxacan servers who smiled muy bonita for every question but who seemed skittish in their own skin. I stayed pissed—pouring red wine for white, letting my tie dip into curries I set before customers—and couldn’t understand how Gerald sat meditatively morning and evening by the bamboo vats, eating bowls of strawberry ice cream.

  “Mali, how many plates you broke today? I may have to fine you.”

  “Good luck finding another Indian to work here. Indians can tell when you don’t like their food, you know.”

  He licked his spoon carefully. “What do you mean? Do you know how many people want your job?”