A Thousand Beginnings and Endings

by Ellen Oh

  We don’t wait to see if he walks away.

  We sit in silence for a few minutes in my car, the heat blasting, the same haunting song from earlier playing on Leela’s phone. “Will you turn that off?” I say, a little too harshly.

  “Who is he?” she asks.

  I shrug. “He kept calling me Soni. He thought I was someone else.” And for moment, I wish I was, too.

  Leela and I decide to drop into Chaska for a snack before we head home. It’s packed, of course, because the new Shah Rukh Khan film just let out. And that’s what brown people—well, in Little India smack-dab in the middle of Jersey anyway—do on a Saturday night. “How was it?” Leela asks our usual waiter, Shankar, who already knows to bring us two plates of chole bhature, extra pickled onions on the side. “He’s getting too old to carry this shit.”

  “No yaar, he’s looking good,” says Shankar, who definitely has a finer appreciation of Shah Rukh. “He’s back to that Om Shanti Om body, because Ranbir is on his tail? I wouldn’t mind being on his tail, too, nah?” Leela and I dissolve into laughter as Shankar sets up our order. We dip hot, crispy-soft pieces of fried dough into the saucy curried chickpeas, and I pile some of the onions high onto the little scoop I’ve made with the bread. Then another group shuffles into the already crammed space, and I can feel him before I see him. The guy from the club.

  “Hey, Nick,” Shankar says, clearly pleased to see the guy. “Chole bhature, ek plate?”

  “Hey, Shankar,” the guy says, slapping him on the back playfully. “Tight in here tonight, huh?” He pulls at the spare chair at our table, looking down at me intently. “Mind if I join you for a minute?”

  Leela stands. “Yeah, we do, actually.” She’s about to wave Nick back when I grab her hand.

  “It’s not a big deal,” I say. He sits, that crinkly-eyed grin taking over his face again.

  She stands. “Well, I’ll go get the check, then.” She storms off toward the cashier, and I glare after her.

  “She doesn’t like me much, does she?” Nick says, a smirk playing on his lips. Shankar brings another steaming plate of chole bhature to the table, and the bread is so blisteringly hot, so round and inviting, that I can’t help but tear into it, even though it’s not mine. “You’ve still got it, don’t you?”

  “What?” I say, my mouth full of spicy, chut-putty channa.

  “That appetite. I always used to say, ‘Tid eh ki towa?’”

  I startle for a second. “What does that mean?”

  “‘Do you have a stomach or a well?’” he says, his hands reaching for the bread just as mine do. He dips and scoops, adding extra onions, just like I did. “Maybe it loses something in the translation.”

  I watch him eat for a second—big, messy bites, like a farmer’s kid from Punjab. “My mom used to say that to me sometimes, too, though. When I was little.”

  “Tid eh ki towa?” He laughs. “I’m not surprised.”

  Shankar shows up then with a wary look and a bag of grease. “Leela’s waiting for you in the car—she said to tell you,” he says seriously.

  Nick grins at me again, but takes the hint. “Okay, well, guess that means you should go.” He dips more bread into the chole again. “Or you could stay.”

  Annoyance flickers. Why does she want to ruin this for me? But I stand anyway.

  “No, I should go,” I say, taking the bag from Shankar.

  But as I walk away, I kind of wish I hadn’t.

  The Sunday bustle has trickled by the time the lunch rush ends. I’m starving, and I’ve got reams of research to do for my science paper, but I promised Ma I’d stay till four. I hum along to the Bollywood song playing on my phone—it’s the same plaintive song I’ve had on repeat since that night a week ago. I can’t get it out of my head.

  I tear open a pack of chana chor garam and nibble some of the spicy, crunchy bites. They’re salty and sour and make my tongue tingle. I carefully dust the counter so there’s no trace of my snack.

  Ma hates when I eat in the store. Everything here is pristine: gleaming glass cases filled with the most elegant—and expensive—jewels in Little India. All handmade, crafted by artisans at our sister store in Rajouri Garden in Delhi. Papa flies back and forth every month to take care of the shipments, and Ma manages things—a bit obsessively, if you ask me—here in Jersey, under the watchful eyes of my uncles, Kamal and Sunil, her brothers who founded the store nearly twenty years ago. They’re mostly hands-off these days, counting cash in the back while Ma wheels and deals in the front. She’s got this grace about her, quietly directing you to just the right choice with a sleight of hand so swift that it doesn’t even feel like she’s selling you something. It’s the light in the eyes and the curve of her mouth when she smiles just so, the dimples in her cheek and chin so distinctly desi, they’re smitten and pulling out their wallets.

  I gaze in the mirror on the counter, holding a small pearl-work choker to my throat, and stare at my own face, which echoes hers, except the umber eyes. Mine are a more standard hazel, so they only go to umber in a certain light, like now. But the mischief in them is missing, drilled away by rules and restrictions and the idea that I must always do the right thing. It makes me want to do exactly the wrong thing. My mind goes back to him, the boy from the other night, and I wonder if I was too cautious, too careful. Why I didn’t let my heart race a little, just for once?

  “Again this song!” Ma says as she shuffles in from the back. Startled, I drop the necklace, and it clatters on the glass case. She wiggles her long, lean fingers at me. “Turn it up.”

  My uncles have threatened to banish me from the shop because of it, but Ma says this particular song touches her soul every time she hears it.

  “That poor girl,” Ma says, humming the words here and there, her hips swaying without permission. “Married off to a stranger and mourning her long-lost love. They always thought she was the villain, that Sahiba.”

  “Wasn’t she?” I ask. I mean, she betrayed her one true love.

  “She was torn,” Ma says. She’s looking in the mirror, but it’s my reflection that she sees there, the fine lines smoothed, the years slipping away like a misplaced payal. “She had to decide between Mirza and her family, and in those days, it’s not like it is now, where you just go running off at the first blink of love-wove pyar-shar. In those days, if you left your family, you left everyone—the whole world as you know it.”

  “Yeah,” I say with a smile. “But that was the kind of love that meant you’d be immortalized forever.”

  “A love very few people truly know.” There’s something in the way she says it, so quiet, so faraway, like she’s speaking to herself and not to me. Like she knows what that love, that loss, might feel like.

  “Then it must have been one worth fighting for, right?”

  “You don’t know, Bebo, what you’ll do,” my mother says, a sudden anger simmering under her words. “You don’t know how to choose until you’re right there, on the precipice, giving away your everything for something that may be real or may be a shadow, a ghost you’re chasing.”

  But what I wouldn’t give to find out. This song is just one of hundreds that tell the story of the lovelorn Sahiba, who betrayed her lover, Mirza, to preserve her family’s honor—but when it was already far too late. While the others are all remembered for their boundless love, their soul connections, she’s reviled as a traitor to both sides. “Sahiba had something most people only ever dream of, Ma,” I say, putting more bangles onto their racks. “She gave it up. It’s her own fault. But I don’t quite buy it anyway. It’s just a folktale, right?”

  “How can you say that, Taara? That kind of love is something to aspire to—something very few people get to experience.” Her voice goes faraway again when she says, “And maybe truly something worth risking everything for.” Her eyes brighten and she laughs. “But so few would, hena? Anyway, these days, you kids don’t know anything about love.” She pushes another stack of velvet boxes toward me. “All
this swipe right, swipe left. True love is in the eyes, in the reuniting of two souls.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say, and begin unpacking the boxes she’s placed on the counter.

  “How was the dance, Bebo?” she asks me suddenly, a curious smirk traveling all the way to her eyes. She pokes my cheek. “Oh, you think I don’t know where you go? You think I haven’t done everything you’ve done, first and better?” She laughs. “Anything interesting?”

  “Ma!”

  “Well, you’ve been listening to this song with no end. Must be something.” Her eyes shine, newly polished stones, and I wonder if she really believes those words: the reuniting of two souls. “This is the time, Bebo. Have your fun—but keep it clean, and let no one be the wiser.”

  “Sure, Ma,” I say, laughing. “As if.”

  “Kya as if?” she says, incredulous. “You really think I didn’t have any fun when I was your age?”

  “Yeah, Ma, I’m sure you did.” But my grin betrays me. I can see an endless row of dewanae falling for those eyes, but the amazing Amrita? She could never have loved them back. Right?

  “You think you know,” she says. “But I have my secrets.”

  “What secrets?” I’m curious now, and my mind keeps flashing back to Nick, to the familiarity of his touch, the spark of his skin. Maybe it was nothing. But maybe it was something.

  “Before your papa, there was another boy. Sunder Singh. He’d just come from India—and Patiala at that!—and used to work at the chole-bhature shop across the street from the jewelers. Yes, Mahi’s. But back then, it was called Sabrawal’s. In those days, there weren’t so many of us, and everybody knew everybody. I’d go in with some of the girls, and he’d always pile my plate the highest with greasy, puffy bhature. Then, when I ate them all up, he’d laugh and say, ‘Tid eh ki towa?’”

  When I look at her, startled, she explains. “‘Do you have a stomach or a well?’ Just like I used to say to you,” she says, frowning. “Anyway, it all happened very fast, from laughing over chole bhature to . . .”

  “Where’d he go?” I ask. “Sunder Singh?”

  “He was killed. A gash to the head. My brothers . . .” She trails off then, lost someplace I can’t quite reach. “I tried, but it was too late. I still can’t believe he’s gone.”

  “Wait, what?” I say, the necklace I’m arranging clattering on the glass case. “He was killed. Killed?”

  “They were never charged. . . .” Her voice trails again. “It was ruled an accident. Then his family packed up and moved back to Ludhiana.”

  “Mom!”

  She’s there, but already gone, humming the words to the song again, about a love long lost and the pain she’ll always carry.

  “Ma,” I say, touching her hand.

  She pulls it away, surprised. “Acche, tho, you finish up, teek hai, Bebo? Then Sunil Mamu will drop you off; I know, science paper.” She bustles out the back in a hurry, a palm pressed to her cheek, as if remembering a familiar touch.

  I turn back to the counter, the stack of jewel boxes laid out in front of me. In them sit another dozen gold sets, soldered and shaped with all the beauty of an India I’ve never seen—more peacocks dancing, lions roaring, the sinister slither of the nagin, with ruby eyes beckoning. The last bin is filled with the heavy jingle of payal, the anklets all tangled in a mess, every pair wrought in gleaming silver. Not a golden one in sight. I think about asking her then, but something stops me. Instead I just unwind pair after pair, lining them up on the velvet spread below, thinking about moments missed.

  I’m polishing some of the new sets—wrought gold bangles painted the deep blues and greens of the peacock—when the door buzzes. I press Open without thinking, the way I always do, even though Ma is forever telling me to look first. The chimes tinkle as the door opens, and my heart drops when I see him. Nick.

  I don’t know how he found me, and I half thought I’d never see him again, though I sort of wished I would.

  But there he is, grinning that doofy grin, his pristine black wool coat buttoned up, a Burberry plaid scarf laid against it, a few scattered drops of March rain making his hair slick. His hands are in his pockets, affable and unintimidating. Except totally not. “I knew I’d find you,” he says, and in that moment I want to run to him and run away, all at once.

  “How did you find me?”

  “You’re exactly where I knew you’d be.” He walks up to the counter and pulls one hand from his pocket. “I knew this was yours, and I wanted you to have it.” He lays the gold payal carefully across the silken ruby velvet of one of the cases, and it feels alive, like a snake, reluctant but seduced to dance to the charmer’s tune. “It needs to be with you.”

  “It’s not mine,” I say.

  “Oh, but it is.” His smile is lopsided, optimistic. There’s a small scar across his forehead, just above his right eyebrow, that I didn’t see in the flash of the holi party; thin and barely noticeable. The only flaw on his face. Before I can stop myself, I’m reaching toward it. A gash to the head. Just like my mother said.

  “Soni,” he says, taking my hand. His touch is cold. “I know it’s you. But I’ll give you all the time you need.”

  With that, he turns, and walks out the door.

  It’s only when he’s gone that I realize he’s left the payal behind. That’s when Ma comes bustling back in, no doubt eager to beguile another customer.

  “Khon tha?” Ma says, looking at the empty space in front of the counter. “They’ve gone already?” She’s disappointed for a second—I’ll never be her star salesgirl—but holds out her hand, her fist practically bursting with a secret. “I have to show you,” she says breathlessly. “Remember I was saying, about Sunder. You didn’t believe me. But this, he made for me.” She opens her palm and reveals a gleaming serpent of a thing, a charmed talisman, one that makes my blood run cold. A golden payal, intricately wrought, a perfect match for the one that Nick left behind.

  Mirza and Sahiba

  A Punjabi Folktale

  The inspiration for this story was the star-crossed tale of a grieving Sahiba, and the fate she wrought for herself. In ancient Indian folktale and legend, the pairing of Mirza and Sahiba is frequently remembered in the same breath as other immortalized lovers, like Layla-Majnun, Heer-Ranjha and Sohni-Mahiwal. While the others are held up as shining examples of One True Pairings, Mirza and Sahiba’s romance is a warning, a lost-in-love couple immortalized in an elegy of lust, familial drama, betrayal, and murder. In the story, Sahiba is the villain at the heart of a story, a fickle seductress who lured the worthy warrior Mirza with longing and promises, only to betray him when the fate of her brothers is in her hands.

  According to the old stories, the most beautiful girl in the Punjabi village of Kheewa, young Sahiba, finds love in the arms of the famed archer, Mirza, the son of a friend-turned-foe, but the families of the pair forbid their entanglement. On the night she is arranged to wed a stranger, she runs off with Mirza, and they are to live happily ever after. But the girl’s brothers get word of their escape, and set off to capture the two and bring them back, to separate them once and for all. Sahiba, aware of the chase and fearful for the safety of her brothers—who would surely lose this fight to the skilled Mirza—empties the quiver and shatters her lover’s arrows as he sleeps in the winding embrace of a banyan tree. When they are found by the townsfolk, Mirza awakes to an arrow in his throat.

  I wondered what might happen if the traitorous Sahiba and her long-lost love Mirza were reunited in another life—one in which Sahiba had to live with the consequences of her actions. One in which a shadow of the girl she used to be existed as a near mirror to the past—in the form of our decidedly confused protagonist—and one in which the reincarnated Mirza might be a bit stalkerish as the history of his former love and fate played out in his head. What a delicious triangle that could be.

  —Sona Charaipotra

  The Counting of Vermillion Beads

  Aliet Te De Bodard

  See
n from afar, the wall fills up Cam and Tam’s world like skin over a healed wound.

  It starts as roughly hewn stones, almost ordinary save for their white, translucent color; and then, as it sweeps upward in a slow unfurling, it grows and stretches into a dome, and a pattern of dark blue lines spreads across what should be the surface of the sky—like the ribs of a leaf, or the veins of a corpse.

  As they walk closer—and its shadow darkens, swallowing their own—even sunny, optimistic Tam falls silent.

  “We can go back, Big’sis,” Cam says. “It was just a dream.”

  She expects Tam to grow angry—to argue and yell, frustration barely contained; to accuse her again of lacking respect, pretending she can put restrictions on her elder sister’s life—to condemn her for not being Mother. But instead Tam is silent, watching the wall.

  There are no birds, not this close to the wall. But a tall, slender coconut tree arches from the grass to the white, translucent area above the stones of the palace’s roof, where the sky would be, if there was a sky within the Palace of the Everlasting Emperor.

  “Here,” Tam says. “Just like Mother said.”

  It was a dream, Cam wants to say. Mother is dead; not only that, but her tomb is outside the wall, in the dusty little village where Cam and Tam grew up before the Emperor’s envoys took them and brought them to the palace to check the census; before their lives shrank to the company of the other girls, the abacuses, the reams of reports to be checked.

  None of the census girls will ever be allowed out, beyond the skin of the wall, beyond the confines of the palace. The only way out is deeper in, through the Inner Vermillion Chambers—to become a high-rank official charged with doing the Emperor’s will, traveling the land to bear edicts and memorials. But Tam has that look again: those haunted eyes like when she was a child and she dropped her stone elephant in the village well, that stubborn cast to her face, and, really, when was the last time Cam didn’t follow where Tam led?