Sugar, Smoke, Song

by Reema Rajbanshi

Back in her kitchen, Ma had refused to let me cook—you don’t need to be like me—but in Delhi Delight, I rinse blades, turn up the stove fire, listen with shut eyes to Tashi gliding about the kitchen. She’s got a shuffle steadier than mine, and I imagine her in nurse days, scouring germs from sick rooms, sliding along halls unseen, a face not quite Indian enough. Like and unlike Ma, who swished through our house a hell-bent hawk for twenty years, collecting lucky pennies off the street. Every afternoon, Ma made me and Henna puddle our school clothes at the door, before we ate pithas and apples at the kitchen table, jubilantly comparing our crystalline slices in the streaming light.

  When I tell Tashi I barely speak to Ma and Henna, that Mrs. Subrahmanian treats me like the village idiot, Tashi smiles as if, really, I’m a stand-up comedian. “Not loving like you, huh?” She unclenches my fists, slips the bone and fork from them onto my plate, and lines our seven plates along her arms. She walks, amid the bustle of men in aprons, backward to the kitchen sink, her left foot dragging a route through the linoleum suds. She can’t ever escape, I think. All her friends, all her enemies would find her.

  I scrub vats beside her, the tap spray soothing my aching wrists, while the men stack cup and napkin pyramids and Gerald thumb-licks tips behind the register.

  “Aren’t you going to the casino with the guys?” I say.

  “Listen, young lady.” He presses a finger to my forehead. “Gambling is for poor and rich men. Do I look like poor and rich men to you?”

  I think of Kosal who, in the first days, brought me bowls of ramen he’d saved from Sushi Express stints, designer-name jackets he’d bartered for weed and whatnot, then tucked about my chin. Kosal of the fantasy eyes and promises who, in the last days, stalked me on grocery errands, on café dates, before disappearing on dirt bike trails, on all-boy-benders for weeks.

  “Lots of people spend money they don’t have,” I say and Gerald turns his vested back on me.

  After the restaurant closes, I help Tashi shake out a pink cotton sheet, dotted with elephants, on her living room carpet, and when she insists on carrying the plates of beef momos, the ginger tea alone, I wait between the lumpy sofas, before a TV with the kind of old-school dial Ma had kept working with a folded paper wedge. Each upper wall is rimmed with a gold-tasseled tapestry of round-bellied gods and an altar of dried roses and singing bowls sits crammed between the TV and a photo column of the Dalai Lama, glasses on, glasses off, grin forever on. That’s the only fancy, not like the Subrahmanians’ mansion in the gated part of town, where I’d been given a tour of their wood slat contraption with its front plot of long-stemmed, plump reds. “Our roses,” the little girl had said as I’d unlocked my bike from a pipe, “raise the property value.”

  “The woman is a crappy mom,” I say as Tashi rotates her steaming teacup. “She shows up at twelve on the dot, sits at the kitchen table eating her sandwich, and the baby goes crawling to her from the living room.”

  Tashi presses her claw to her chest.

  “Then she tells me to go play with her and the toys. A baby doesn’t want toys! She wants her mommy!”

  “What does on the dot mean?”

  “Oh, it means exactly on time. You’re never a minute early or late.”

  Tashi forks a momo in half, and its blood rushes out: cilantro, pepper, meat tendrils. “Have to strike while it’s hot, Tara!”

  Which is Ramu’s line, before he jets for the casino on Wednesdays, though that’s not why I tense forward. “Who?”

  Tashi lifts her claw to her lips, as if they’re burning. “Mali,” she says, clinking her tea cup with mine. “Happy New Year.”

  M IS FOR

  Kosal would call one minute after noon, himself on lunch break at Golden Bear Bikes, and name a hundred reasons to get on social media. “It’s hard for all of us right now,” he’d say. “At least you know how to hustle, at least you got your degrees.” “But where’s that getting any of us,” I’d say, chewing the PBJ and slurping the Sprite I’d bagged. “And you know these liberals can be racist as fuck.” Kosal would pause then, neither of us bringing up my voice peers who won’t acknowledge him at parties or his hipster friends who sing about revolution but talk over me at concerts, before saying, “Listen, I got to run, there’s a customer.”

  A month later, Kosal gone again, I will still be feather-dusting chairs in the Subrahmanian mansion, still be lifting Nena up by her armpits, still be caught breathless on rare evenings I call and Ma snorts, “A maid is what you are.” Not for long, I want to say, along with a number for every window ad, every Craigslist link to which I’d sent my resume and got crickets back. “I’m trying,” I say instead, not disclosing details like the time the light-skinned Latina in the one ethnic kitsch store saw my brown face, widened her eyes, and swiped the applications off the counter: “Sorry, we’re all out.” “You never did that stuff at home,” Ma says, meaning she had, from the day she landed as a no-English bride to the day she shouldered our suitcases into college dorms, before finally slapping a blue-apron magnet on our humming fridge: M is for mom, not maid.

  At every afternoon’s end, I arrange the magnets and Post-its on Mrs. Subrahmanian’s fridge with care—so that she cannot say I stole this or that thing as she has said of teabags she initially offered—a fridge as steely as her unblinking stare from evening one. She’d corralled her clan, one of Davis’s IT Indians, to the back table by the restaurant bathroom, away from the snotty undergrads—Look! All hands! Like a savage!—and the trashed men with cut-eye girlfriends, both of whom studied my chest. An hour into their plates of salmon and biryani, Mrs. Subrahmanian hailed me over to examine the water, which she held up, a glowing yellow under the hanging lamp. “Do you see what I see?” Her stern moon face reminded me of my mother’s, except she sounded hopeful, like I might have a good explanation.

  “Do you see what I see?” the curly-haired girl beside her sang, flashing me a gap-toothed grin. Mrs. Subrahmanian watched the baby, who’d stopped thumping her high chair to stare at me. “She likes you.”

  Her husband sipped the yellow water. “You look patient. We’re looking for a nanny.”

  “I have zero experience.”

  “Experience no bar,” she said.

  “Unless,” Gerald said, carrying over glasses of clear water, “it’s my bar.”

  Which is how I end up dangling Nena at arm’s length every 8:00 a.m., crinkling my nose at her durian-stink diapers, before glass doors the expanse of their kitchen wall. What if I’d spoken up that evening: I hate babies, never had ’em, never was one? Maybe I wouldn’t be starting my day running down tasks Mrs. Subrahmanian has posted on the fridge, organizing a living room quadruple the size of mine when I was Megan’s age. Two white leather sofas; a wall-sized TV and remote control stereo system; another wall of stuffed zebras, Tahitian Barbies, and enough Legos to build a mini-Cadillac, toys Nena picks through before hurling them, with banshee whoops, into the middle of the room. Whereas we’d had a yellow-and-purple rug-like thing atop whatever shaggy carpet in whichever mixed-income neighborhood in the central Bronx, the Subrahmanians have carpeted all four bedrooms in ivory white, which, by lunch, I’m vacuuming against the AC so as to fly under the local noise ordinance. And whereas Deeta had placed two king-sized mattresses by each other, Henna punching me in her sleep as I shivered for the covers, and Ma had stocked the other bedroom with English novels and Assamese buranjis, the Subrahmanians have in their guest bedroom one bookshelf thinly stocked with computer programming manuals, Jhumpa Lahiri stories, and a Hawaii travel guide. I leave the adjacent spare room for afternoon’s end when, as I once did, Megan spills a hundred crayons on a mahogany table, except hers come from a wooden box with a silver clasp and she draws pages and pages of her, Nena, and her father. Mrs. Subrahmanian is nowhere to be found in Megan’s paper imagination, just as she’s absent on the payday I wait in the kitchen, pouring cups of hot water for her forlorn trio.

  A computer engineer like his wife, Mr. Subrahmanian is one of tho
se laidback, dusky nerds who’s chosen a light-skinned socialite that’s dreamt of America as much as a husband. He stands formally behind the chair as I set a plate of powdery tea cookies. “Do you like it here? What did you study?”

  “Teaching jobs for voice and speech are hard to come by.”

  “My wife is married to her work. Sit.”

  Megan clambers onto my lap and stuffs a cookie into her mouth, and Mr. Subrahmanian eases into the opposite chair. “You must miss home.”

  “The program gave me a full ride. So I came.”

  “There were a lot of Assamese in Bangalore. They work hard.”

  “Contrary to popular opinion,” I say but he doesn’t laugh.

  “They aren’t always treated well.” He raises Nena from her high chair, where she has been staring at me again, and says, “Don’t stay long. You should find suitable work, suitable home.” He doesn’t say suitable husband like Ramu, who jokes that I need a mountain man but will end up with a clueless American, asking instead, “does anyone visit?”

  Because the names before Kosal’s—overconfident white boys with geisha fever and liberal arts degrees, chip-shouldered black boys with lightskin fever and hardknock knowledges—can’t be pronounced here, I shrug. “I go when I can.”

  Mr. Subrahmanian peers into his tea, his girls draping themselves over his shoulders with a possessiveness I’ll never know again, and says, “What are your family’s names?”

  Gulapi, Hollong, Henna. I haven’t recited these names since leaving New York, but just as I’m about to say Rose, Tree, Crushed Leaf, Mrs. Subrahmanian strolls in and, without glancing at me, touches Mr. Subrahmanian’s dark pate. “I’ve been waiting extra,” I say and, when she finally blinks, I murmur, “Mali is short for Nirmali, an offering to appease the gods.”

  CARELESS

  As I biked between my apartment in the old-pipes part of town and the Subrahmanians’ chateau in the gated part, I’d pass cop cars circling campus. Kids I’d once taught held signs up that read stop privatization, no more tuition hikes, take back our UC, along the oblong quad that had once seemed forever coniferous and sedate. I pumped past chanting crowds on one side of the green, somber trapezoid buildings on the other, glad I’d gotten out the year before but not sure we hadn’t all been caught in a dream gone wrong.

  This afternoon, instead of sampling tater tots I’ve plated, Megan climbs onto the marble sink counter and hollers about rifles and yellow men from “Born in the U.S.A.”

  “Megan, please,” I say as she rocks side-to-side like a tow boat. “Megan, there are knives to your left and to your right. If you slip, you could fall into the sink, onto a knife, or on the floor.”

  Megan yanks down her jeans, swing it around her head like a lasso, then hops from one foot to another as she sings a few bars of welcome from “Hotel California.” Nena crawls before the sink, and sits clapping and cooing.

  I catch Megan’s flailing arms and pull her down, then, squatting, arrange Nena on one hip and yank floor-magnet Megan, singing even louder of prisoners in “Hotel California.” Through the dining room, down the long hall, up the stairs, into the bath—Megan shadow-boxing my words as we race.

  “Why’re you acting so crazy?”

  “Say something that makes sense!”

  “This is no time for games—grow up!”

  As the tub fills with foaming water, Megan faces the wall, bends over, and slaps her bum. “Big butt darkie!” She flaps her elbows like chicken wings.

  “Megan.” I snap off the water and pull her by the elbow to face me. “Is someone saying these things to you?”

  Megan has a grin so tightly stretched over her face, it’s almost a prize sticker someone’s given her. She scrunches her eyes and takes a soldier stance, saluting some invisible flag, and sings bigbuttdarkie, bigbuttdarkie, bigbuttdarkie . . .

  I wrap her in the shell towel, so that the sound is muffled, but she snatches at my boobs.

  “Listen to me, devil-child. You’re beautiful but you’re bad.”

  She doesn’t respond, not like my child self, who’d run weeping into closets if I suspected Deeta had taken Henna out without me. One sister the display color of cream, the other the shameful color of earth; one more reason I conjecture Ma prefers Henna who looks like her to me who, she once told Deeta, was her father’s daughter. I wipe Megan’s unblemished skin and think of the crescent scar marking my left hip crease, where Ma and Henna had thrown that plate at me, a calendar they can’t erase since they can no longer touch me.

  The other devil-child flings her rubber duck at my back and Megan throws her arms about my neck, laughing. “You hear that, baby? D-e-v . . .”

  Though I’m the one who confesses our names, months later on a pine-rimmed lawn, carved pumpkins dotted about like crushed heads. Megan, Nena, and I slump on a wooden bench under a willow, before Megan’s sprawling stone elementary school, Institute for The Gifted. Mrs. Subrahmanian always pronounced it syllabically, her voice pitching up rather than trailing off. Institute for The Gilded, I’d told Ma the first night back, and she’d snorted. “Well, they can afford it. But no one can buy actual brains or manners.”

  Watching the other kids whisked away, for an hour by drivers and nannies, I wasn’t so sure. They’d flown across the grass in spotless sneakers and Burberry pea coats, into BMWs and Mercedes the lustrous hues of blood and pearls. I’d hoisted up Nena and hand-dragged Megan to the jungle gym behind the school, and thought, as I plopped Nena on the wood chips, a proper childhood means getting dirty. It means, I thought as I lifted Megan onto the monkey bars, learning to play alone.

  A svelte Davis type strolls up with her blonde Cabbage Patch baby as I stand one leg in each sand box, between Nena the high horn and Megan the trapeze artist. “Are they yours?”

  Nena is digging a hole in the wood chips, perhaps also hoping to cross to a better side of the planet. “I’m the nanny,” I say and Megan presses her hands in namaste to her heart. “Nearly live-in . . .” Megan lets go one leg and swings her other limbs like a godforsaken spider. “She’s babysitter number four!”

  The woman laughs. “Is that who you are!”

  I clear my throat for my elevator pitch on voice coaching, but Megan resumes humming—about impossible escape from “Hotel California”—and Ms. Fancy Detective strain-smiles and strollers her baby, who’s reaching fists out to Megan, away from the sandboxes to the curb, where a gaggle of moms in glossy spandex compare sneaker soles.

  An hour later, curb and lot swept of Davis housewives and piled with dried leaves, Mrs. Subrahmanian pulls up—I step out relieved from behind the willow, Nena asleep on the picnic table to its left, Megan sprawled in a Ralph Lauren romper on the muddy grass—and squints exponentially smaller as she saunters, then strides over. She barely responds to my wave, just curls her upper lip and slaps chips off both girls’ frocks. When her hands touch dog poop, I can’t help giggling at the tremors that seize her suited frame.

  “How could you let them get so dirty? Do you know what these Americans say about Indian people?”

  “We waited two hours,” I say.

  She starts, then turns toward the school doors, every overhead letter of its title promise glistening in late sun. “We waited two hours and they wouldn’t eat what I brought and Megan has no friends.” She drags Megan away from me—that Thai girl she calls me publicly, that crazy girl she probably calls me privately—I stomp after her holding Nena who, for once, stays asleep.

  As I rev up the car, I say, “Of course I know what Americans say. I grew up here, remember?”

  Mrs. Subrahmanian chooses not to reply, just dials an IT friend on the phone, and streams forth in Telegu with English flags of “Nanny, uncontrollable, overwhelmed.” I careen the car down the road—swerving right here—“Girls!”—swerving left there—“Nirmali!”—with a roaring pedal that makes us seem trapped inside an engine.

  Nena wakes up and screams.

  I swerve left again, across an oncoming van that ju
st misses our tail—Mrs. Subrahmanian drops the phone and grabs the wheel, my right arm. “Are you trying to kill us all?”

  Just you, I want to say but she bends under the dashboard, as if hiding from snipers, and exclaims into the phone, “What did I tell you!”

  “Okay, breathe,” she mutters. “Calm, calm.”

  When I pull into the Subrahmanians’ driveway, right against those sumptuous roses, she slams the car door and marches with the girls into the stately wood-arched door of that wood-slatted house. For several minutes, we’re at crosswinds, my lugging duffel bags and baby seaters onto the porch while she pretends to inspect both bumpers, the taillights, the driver’s seat until standing cross-armed on the steps. I’m back in my parents’ car, some dark Honda model with door scratches, in yet another run-in. Sometimes, it would be a car Deeta had tail-sped into, sometimes a head-on Ma had left-turned across. Mostly, it was their front seat arguing that spilled out at a gas station or roadside curb: “Stupid! Irresponsible! Don’t tell me what to do!” Henna and I cowered in the back seat, me holding her on rides she sobbed, neither of us sure the most common refrain wasn’t also meant for us: “How could you be so careless?” We’d look around at an unsigned highway, a dandelioned field, unsure if we wanted the police to familiarize this country too.

  Today, however, it is Mrs. Subrahmanian who walks over as I unlock my bike from her Davis gas pipe.

  “I wrote a little extra for all the waiting,” she says, handing me the week’s check with a doubled amount. “I hope that is fair.”

  “Thank you,” I whisper.

  “You know,” she says evenly as I straddle the bike seat, “no one can love the way a mother loves.” I turn away from this lie I never learned, staring straight at the roses, hoping she will tell me to never, ever come near her babies. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning?” she says.

  I drag the bike back step by step and say, “Yes, of course, I’ll be there.”

  Later that night, Ma says, “you still can’t say no, can you?”