The speaker is asking us to find our tables and the room swirls with bodies rushing past the wall-high windows, the crystal-laden tables and I am herded to the backmost corner, seated next to skeptical Lion Lady. She ignores me through the samosa and momo appetizers, closing her eyes to listen to the opening act, a Tibetan classical singer. I keep my back to the stage, chewing the chicken filling and trying to hold his high, crystalline voice. But when the refrain blossoms into a careening-off-course woman’s keening, I turn. An exquisite young guy with long, loose hair, elegant bones and hound eyes stalks about the stage, enacting a story I can’t make out exactly, carving away at a small violin-or-guitar-like-thing.
Skeptical Lion Lady taps me. “How you like?”
“I wish I knew what he was saying.”
She nods sagely—“snow lions”—and closes her eyes again.
Though this is not the creature or place she or he means, I’m back in the Bronx, knee-deep in snow. I’ve got a shovel in my hands, which I can barely feel like my lump, but like my lump, I know is there. I know I’ve got to make something of this. I’ve got to dig us out. And I’m digging around our car, Ma on the other side, both of us bundled like Inuits in black bubble coats, in black Timberlands, in scarves that Ma must have knitted the days she was home but that are soaked through. And the snow is spearing slanted at us so hard, that these hours of scooping up the snow seems futile, and I want to cry over to Ma, who is rubbing her shoulders (they are coming out her sockets), go home, go inside, go where it’s warm. Deeta and Henna are inside the house of course, just a couple yards away, but minutes and hours in this snow and they don’t ever peek out the window. Instead the snow carries off my unsaid words too. The snow thumps down in lumps now, so that the largest, iciest hail I’ve ever seen barrage us, like celestial bullets, and still, we cannot stop our work. We cannot escape the cold. We must dig out the car, else how will we ever move? So I drop the shovel and lift my face, my wet gloves to the hail, and the throbbing warms up my blue-sore body, gives a crescendo to the heart behind my knee that stabs and dips like the last notes of an outlawed opera.
It is the school kids, who’d sung upon the San Francisco hilltops, who follow the Tibetan man and his snow lions. All through their skits, their dances, the emcee interrupts to define again and again the word thanks. She is a sprightly lady with pixie hair who talks about generosity, about occupation, about welcome. As she talks, on and on to this room of mostly Tibetans, some Americans, white and black, and a handful of Indians, I wonder what Tashi is trying to say. She talks about how the happy man is the grateful man, how to be wealthy is to give away in this room of very moneyed folks—and Tibetans are turning to their dinner guests, draping white silk scarves around their necks. I sit for a cold moment, guessing I will be passed over, but Skeptical Lion Lady faces me. “Thank you,” she says, bowing without smiling, stroking each line of the scarf down my ribs, my knees. “Thank you for your friendship in this place.”
Biographical Note
Reema Rajbanshi is a creative and critical writer born in Miami and raised in the Bronx. Her short stories have been published in print and online journals such as Chicago Quarterly Review and Blackbird and explore the nonlinear lines of girlhood, violence, and migration. As a graduate of the UC Davis writing program, she plays with semi-experimental forms and crafts narratives of the body. As a graduate of UC San Diego in literature, her research work on global indigeneities, Brazil, and Northeast India also appear across her creative fiction and nonfiction. Among her awards and fellowships are travel grants from her alma mater, Harvard University, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. She currently teaches at Haverford College and lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Sugar, Smoke, Song is her first book.
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