Sugar, Smoke, Song

by Reema Rajbanshi

  “And who,” I say, “did I learn that from?”

  Though Ma is the one who hangs up, I tingle on my floor mattress as if it were as wooden as the floor, as if I were the one who had shut her out first, as if any old house could be called shelter could be called home.

  EVERYTHING IS FUNNY

  Wednesday dinner shifts, the guys stream back to the bistro, giddy with beer and momentary wins. Their bragging fills the brown dining area like a secret music—Ramu detailing how he wrangled five hundred dollars at the tables, the Laotian singing how he played the slot machines for two hundred dollars—all as they slap out fresh tablecloths, set glasses facedown with a swift delicacy. I trail them, framing each plate with silverware, and wonder how much they made once upon another life. Ramu the lawyer in Kathmandu, the Laotian a construction manager in Vientiane, Gerald a businessman even in Bangkok.

  This is the one day of the week Gerald never scolds the guys. He just swims in his pink shirt between the dining area, the narrow kitchen, the well-lit bar, and hums with thumbs in his trouser pockets.

  “You still not going with them?” I say.

  He turns from the wine bottles he’s re-lining on the bar and frowns. “The vegan customers have said you told them to try next door or next year. Is this true?”

  I laugh. “My question first.”

  He sighs over-long, as if I’m a spiritual trial, and muscles open a corked Riesling. “Beggars can’t be gamblers.” He peers over the red wineglass. “But maybe if you went and won, you could afford a new shirt and some food.”

  Ramu waves me over to his vat of eggplant curry and whispers as he stirs. “Don’t mind Gerald. That’s just his talk. You know how long I lived in this country for? Ten years without a proper coat or car.” He scrapes the bubbly stew into a rectangular plastic container. “It was hard, Mali. So many women want to be with me. I’m good-looking, right?” He drops the spoon to pat his thinning waves. “So many beautiful, beautiful women, you don’t know. But,” he claps his chest. “I remember my wife. So see? I can give up women, I can give up smoking. But,” he fishes out a few peppery-scented cubes and ladles them into a Styrofoam cup he passes to me. “I can’t give up chasing the luck.”

  That evening, at Ramu’s place for the anniversary party, I want to ask Tashi if she and Ramu had left Kathmandu because of the Maoists or the money. But the one-bedroom apartment is so jammed with cousins and uncles and kids—drinking on the couches, running down the hall, hand-holding forth stories—that I plop down on the living room sheet. I’m never going to leave. Ramu, full face-flushed, raises his beer can. “Right on Indian Standard Time. One hour late!”

  Tashi glides out the kitchen in a rose silk kurta, looking like she’s known these people, who look nothing like her, since birth. “Mali,” she says, piling a paper plate of pea pullao, saag paneer, and mutton chunks before I can say no, “Come with me.”

  Seven kids crowd Tashi’s computer in the bedroom, looking for fun just as we used to apart from adults, but they click on a martial arts video game with a Lara Croft figure that hadn’t existed then. Ma wouldn’t have let us play anyway, and when Tashi pulls one boy up by his ear from her chair, the other kids shuffle out like a spell, making as little protest as I had in what Henna calls my better days. “It’s for a nursing program here,” Tashi says of the file she opens, her claw gripping the mouse so tightly the skin turns as purple as Ramu’s face. “They won’t accept the India degree.”

  I want to ask if I can do this another day but, perusing the first lines, I sigh: When I was born in Darjeeling, where my parents go because of Chinese, my family has too many girls. I came early and small, so my mother did not think I will live. She leaves me on fireplace in empty room.

  “No problem,” I say and drift the mouse arrow over her script: I was there in cold too many days, so my left side does not develop like right. But Miss Kamala, an older neighbor who never marries, saved my life. She fed me with cow’s milk. She convince my parents I am worth raising. She become like my own sister.

  Tashi sits calmly on the bed, spreading all around her the blood-red wedding invitations for Ramu’s nephew, paper fold-outs hiding Ganesh, his belly and trunk curved with pleasure.

  My parents kept me at home because I work hard, and there was no money for a girl who cannot marry. But I read to myself at night or with Miss Kamala, after taking care of house, in kitchen with candles. When my parents put me in school, everyone made fun, saying I am old, lame, and girl. But I say back, it is exactly because of this I will finish.

  I click-clack away at her grammar, inserting polite notes about place details here and describe schooling there, though the truth I can’t type sensibly is talk about what drove your folks from Tibet, talk about what brought you here.

  When I am in nursing school, I must work twice as hard as men, and even girls move faster than me. They have connections in city. But I won’t quit and go back home after to start nutrition classes. I start reading program so other girls can stay in school. When I go back to city, I take shifts no one wants, and this is how I last longer, how I have more skills. This is why I am strong candidate for your program.

  I swivel in the chair and say, “What’s the difference between arranged marriage and love marriage? You guys obviously aren’t arranged.”

  “That is like asking what is love,” Tashi says, and I don’t tell her what Ma used to say. How she’d met Deeta once the month before their wedding: “Ata let me choose.” I don’t tell Tashi about the mornings Ma dazed through soap operas and uninvited guest-cooking or evenings she meditated, an arm over her eyes, beside windows that faced yards of Dobermans and squash blossoms and someone else’s dark kids. I definitely don’t tell Tashi I don’t want what she’s got, an apartment where things come and go, one day the armory, the next day the clock, or a man so charming night stars drop into my eyes and I can’t navigate that rare country, a love marriage.

  “Actually, it’s like asking for love recipes,” I say.

  Tashi presses herself up and drags over a phone book she casts beside the invites. “Practice for our interviews. America-born legal assistants must also speak perfectly.” So I slip beside the love mounds and fold umpteen invites until Tashi points to an ad for litigation. “Am I saying this right?” She reads the boisterous offer for legal counsel for anyone who’s been framed in a gentle tone, stuttering over the word fraudulent. When I laugh, she looks up. “You would never make a good lawyer. You think everything is funny.”

  We fold a whole other mound of invites when Tashi says, “Ramu used to be part of a group of boys who would follow me from the hospital where I did my nursing work. They used to call me the lame chinku and copy the way I walked, the whole way back. For an hour.”

  My palms freeze above a new mound.

  “A whole hour,” Tashi says, flattening the mound with her claw. “Every evening. I thought, they will get tired, they will get bored, they will not rape me because they hate me.”

  I don’t want to hear the rest.

  “But I learn you can do both. One evening when the other girls weren’t there, when only two of the guys were there, I learn you can do both.”

  I draw my sweaty palms onto my lap.

  “When Ramu heard, he visited me at the hospital. I could see, unlike the others, something touched him. I’m not sure what it was but he started coming every day. We weren’t friends then, just trying to walk past this.” Tashi pulls her own hands onto her lap and stares at them.

  “Tashi.”

  She shakes her head. “Then one day, walking that same road from the hospital, with Ramu next to me, not behind me, I knew.” She presses herself up and smiles at me inexplicably, her peach face flush again. “See? No recipe.”

  I walk to the threshold between the bedroom, the kitchen, and the living room, where the guests are strumming old Bollywood songs on a guitar—I’m rushed back to one of those New Jersey fêtes where some uncle pulled out a harmonium and sang of the hungry rive
r, of disappeared loves, of Assamese freedom—and I wonder which parts of Tashi’s essay, Ma’s biography, or my own memories are true? “Listen long enough to the silences,” the voice teachers used to say, “and the beast will show its face.” Already half the folks sway as they hold each other, the other half clap in beat. I don’t hear Tashi’s bright contralto, her peculiar accent among them, but she’s easy to spot, her unabashed smile up at Ramu, whose own eyes are closed as if traveling somewhere more mountainous and green. The way her claw cups and claims his right shoulder, the way her good hand traces each of his palms, his wrists, inside and out, circle after circle, she might as well be the loudest one in the room.

  SPEED

  “Lipoma,” the X-ray technician had said matter of factly, as I lay quivering in the sonic tunnel. “Seven centimeters and growing.” He pressed a finger to the eggish mass behind my right knee and tapped about, as if looking for a chick within that might respond. Back in the bunker I rent, in a purple hippie house with doors that never close, I google “tumor.” The images, laid out like some grotesque checkerboard, are pink-red-white, though few veined gems are as large as mine. Maybe this is why strangers would pause me on the street, “Do you know you have a lump? You should get it checked.” “There are so many ways to go,” I’d say, “speed is just a detail.” When I call the Bronx, Deeta says, “A lipoma is not a tumor, that is what we had.” I want to scream, “Do you know which house I live in, what has happened in yours?” But I say, “I can barely bend my knee, what if surgery hobbles me?” To which Ma says, “You have to learn to live with this.” Which means I can never ask “How do I cut this out for good” from a woman who’s expelled me more than once from what others call family. I will never hear her say, as she would to Henna, “Come home, we will find a way to heal this.”

  I pick up more work with Ramu instead, a weekend after I learn the name for what I’ve got, this time for his nephew’s reception, a marriage Tashi refuses to label. Ramu’s got his usual dapper on—white shirt, ironed slacks—weaving quickly between the waiters, tired-seeming Mexican Indians, in the long and churning rectangle of the Veteran’s Hall. Still Ramu, who must have come hours before to set up the folding tables, to prep veggies and knives in the kitchen, stops now and then to tease a child in a puffy dress, to confer with one of the waiters, to reheat the samosas or naan. He stands straight, shielding his eyes for Tashi, who watches from a corner table—as if this is the life he’s wanted all along.

  Tashi and I sit by the entrance, which is closer for her to the restrooms and better for introducing me to folks who stream in and speak to us in Nepali. Tashi, eyes crinkled in glee, has to tell them I don’t understand. A drunk old uncle whispers hotly in my ear, “I pretend to be things too.” I flinch, half-expecting The Ass Slap but the bhangra starts playing, he jabs his pointer finger in the air, and limps over to the small circle of dancers forming by our table. Tashi smiles as he swing-taps his left metal calf, jiggles out his skinny arms and un-ringed hands, and says, “He reminds me so much of my father.”

  “The crazy moves?”

  “My dad lost his leg crossing from Tibet to India. His feet turned totally black from the snow. They had no time, you know, when the Chinese came.” She strokes her own left leg. “He never complained, not even when his hip ached. The only thing he said was, even if they took both feet, I would walk back if they let me.”

  I blush, remembering how I’d whined to Kosal that I couldn’t bend my knee, how I’d never again dance carefree. Kosal who had pinched the lump behind my knee, then both my cheeks, had said, I’ll love you no matter what, Nirmali, words I haven’t learned to trust or receive. Instead I draw Tashi’s good hand into mine. “I got the job.”

  Her eyes flutter wide—the hall chandeliers reflected like bright mandalas—and she says wistfully, “good things will happen for you, huh?”

  Because I hear the tart note of Ma and Biju when I relay any hopeful thing, I take her other hand. “I got a tumor diagnosis too. It’s not cancer but I don’t know how I’ll move after surgery.”

  Unexpectedly, Tashi’s eyes fill up, mandalas receding behind rapid blinking, and she says, “Why do the good suffer and the rich get everything?”

  I wish I knew the answer or how to thank her for slipping good next to my name, so I say, “Let’s dance.”

  She shakes her head but I pull her up anyways, over to Uncle, who grasps her arms tightly as he jiggles that metal leg, I stomp my growing one, and Tashi shuts her eyes and sways.

  Later, as the dinner crowd starts thinning, Ramu and I collect stray forks from the tables, rinse emptied trays in the sink. We’re basking in the thrumming quiet, foiling up leftover rice and chicken, when he says, “You know we had a daughter?”

  I stop packing the cauliflower pakoras and turn, but Ramu’s already peering into the fridge, his narrow back bent over the lowest shelf, unreadable. “Once upon a time,” he laughs lightly. “Isn’t that how fairy tales begin?”

  “Ramu.” I step towards him, the dishes in each of my hands dripping onto the floor.

  He turns, his goodtime grin taut over his face, and swipes the plate from my left hand. “You know India. Rickshaw: upside-down”—and drops the plate—SMASH!—smithereens flying to irretrievable ends of the kitchen. “Strangers won’t help. Doctors won’t help. Even God won’t help.” He crouches now to pick up the largest shards around our feet, then thuds them into the trash can by the sink.

  “What was her name?”

  He squeezes drip from a sponge and slowly wipes spirals into the sink.

  “Is that what happened to Tashi’s leg?”

  He bends again—something he never does, he’s told me, because the work will kill your feet and your back—looking so deeply down the drain, his neck bones jut up like a tiny head.

  “Fifteen years,” he says. “My wife still wakes up and says she sees our daughter crushed under her.”

  We foil-wrap the rest of the leftovers—lumpy fritters, eggplant hash, marrow-spilling bones—in silence that throbs, and under the fluorescent lights everything takes on the rumpled skin, the scrambled insides of a dead child. I do not know how Ramu handles these things nightly.

  I imagine asking Ramu for a news brief, but for every tray I slip into the fridge, it’s my own interrogation I draft.

  Where? I will sit up in bed, fortressed under covers, and Google photos of camps. Who got moved to some strange Where—Treblinka, Kinshasa, Dharamsala—the eye will shatter over dots of folks spreading across train, savannah, hill.

  What? I will strain facial muscles like those men’s in World War I hospital wards. Men staring tautly at the camera, their chopped limbs bandaged in gauze, the brightest detail of those black-and-white squares.

  Who? Refugees, exiles, runaways, I will explain. They often look as if they’re teetering between wanting to kill you or themselves, but don’t have the willpower for either mercy.

  When? How will I describe the look on my mother’s face, a heart I have not seen in seven hundred thirty days? In what language will I say I can’t stomach your food, I hate coming home, this time I’m running away for good?

  Why? I will answer promptly: they will say you don’t belong, because here-you-go-you-are-marked, because this land is (suddenly) ours, because we have evolved and therefore we must live, we must stay, we must feast on whatever you leave behind.

  How? I will enumerate: gelatinous orbs and sore pink stubs. Rifles, batons, rods, any recyclable metal thing. Spoonfuls of nerve-shot artery, gut, clit. Dangling gold chains and family amulets. Packets of singed hair, ashes, bones.

  Clutching a sponge that’s dripping from crud I’ve cleared off counter tops, I say, “Some people lose daughters, some mothers, some sisters.”

  “Your only problem is too many rules,” Ramu says. “You need someone quick-quick, a free spirit like me!”

  So I can be as stable as Tashi, I want to ask, but Ramu is already heading where she sits, on a lone fold-out chair, before th
e deejay who coils up the electrical cords. She never looks at us, though our voices must carry, just kneads her hands as if the show were in fact beginning.

  ONE TINY THING

  Henna and I no longer call for birthdays, hers the midnight before October, but I imagine her cradling her own firstborn in the Bronx bedroom where we’d whispered our dreams. Whereas I’m lugging and rocking Nena around the Subrahmanian cage, up, down, room to room, except today Nena whimpers all morning as if for us both. So that by two, Nena crying in fitful spurts, shivering in a sweat I can’t ease with milk or moist washcloths, I dial the mother I trust most.

  Strange sweetness to open the door: Tashi, hair slicked into a bun, cracking her knuckles as if about to break wood. Though she’s sporting new blue slacks, a florid blouse Ramu must’ve bought, she deftly slips off her flats, rolls up her cuffs, and trails me to the kitchen sink. “Take me to your leader.”

  Tashi laughs at Nena burping and splashing like a content frog in the salad bowl. “This is what you’re serving, huh?”

  I imagine Mrs. Subrahmanian’s icy manners disintegrating if I were to place tongs beside Nena during, say, her lunch hour ritual. “Don’t tempt me.”

  “Where’s the medicine cabinet?” Tashi says, wrapping Nena in green dishrags as she whimpers and fist-shivers again. I lead Tashi through the candelabraed dining room, across and up the master bedroom with its red silk curtains, its mahogany bureau of wedding china, silver-framed portraits, and snow globes from London, Sydney, Dubai, all sorts of cities we’ve never been.

  “Wow,” Tashi runs one finger along the deep rose varnish, never looking up at the mirror. She examines her pointer—no dust—I’d made sure of that.

  I take Nena, who’s nodding for the first time all day, and lay her gently on the bed.

  Like a slow top, Tashi is turning, surveying—the wide, tasseled bed, the walk-in closet of shoes and ties, the opened boxes of computer gadgets that will get unabashedly lugged back—“they’re well-off, huh?”