A House Is a Body

by Shruti Swamy

  “Manisha too,” I said. Geenie was a year older, then: Manisha had skipped a grade. She had been a misfit before the change, and she was a misfit now, because of her age, and, I suspected, her solitariness, which came off as cool pride. “Manisha, do you want to show Geenie your room?”

  Manisha looked at me, not a little warily. The mention of school had shaken her out of something, the thick dreaminess I had seen on her at breakfast.

  “You can show her all your books,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. I could see her eying Geenie, her pretty clothes, the little ribboned clips in her hair. Their feet were quiet on the stairs, carpeted to cushion a child’s fall, dark to hide stains. I shifted the baby in my arms. He was sucking his heel, then his fist.

  “Can I hold the baby?” Camille whispered to her mother.

  “Babies aren’t dolls, Cami, they’re not toys.”

  “I know,” she said. Her eyes were caught on my son’s. Hers were pale blue, like her mother’s dress. “Can I?”

  It was all addressed to her mother, but I said, “Go wash your hands, the bathroom is just right over there. Then you can hold him.”

  We watched her pad out of the room.

  “You have a beautiful house,” said Luisa. The sink turned on. Camille was on her tiptoes, we could see her through the open door.

  “Same as yours,” I said.

  “No, I mean, the way you’ve arranged it. The furniture is so beautiful. It’s very bright and friendly. You have a good eye for things—you and your husband, I should say.”

  Of course, it had all been me, and I smiled with pleasure. It wasn’t often I had guests, though I did my best to keep the house clean. “Come, let’s have some of these cookies.”

  “No, no. I’ve had enough already,” she said. “You have them later.”

  “Where did you move from?”

  “Colorado—Denver. Richard had a job there.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s in sales. And I’m an artist.”

  “An artist?”

  “Yes. I paint. Mostly watercolor.”

  “What do you paint?”

  “Oh, lots of things, really. I paint those two a lot, if they sit still. We lived in Arizona before Denver, and I liked living in the desert. I liked painting how dry and red everything was out there, especially in the evenings. Richard calls it my Georgia O’Keeffe period, of course.”

  “How do you have the time for it?”

  “It’s just a matter of practice.” She had slipped her legs beside her on the couch. There was something avian about her, the elegance and ease of her pose. Yet I felt something unsettled in her too.

  “But the space I mean.”

  “The space?” she said. “Usually we make some space in the garage.”

  “Not that kind of space,” I said, but I didn’t know how to say what I meant, and let it drop. A small silence followed.

  “And you, what do you do?”

  “When I was young I wanted to be a pilot,” I said.

  The sink switched off. Camille’s little hands were red.

  “Come here,” I said. She sat next to me on the love seat. She smelled of my soap—sandalwood— and kid’s sweat, and thinly, the floral scent of her mother. Sitting with her back against the back of the love seat, her feet just reached the end of the cushion. “If he cries you mustn’t be upset, okay? He’s shy, just like you.”

  I eased Manoj into her arms. “Keep the head up, like this.”

  I could see the storm gathering in his face. I held his hand, and sang to him the Indian anthem, which always soothed him. He began to laugh.

  Late at night, I was awoken by the sound of glass breaking, or glass broke in my dream, and I awoke. I was flung awake. My husband lay on his back, sleeping, and the baby was asleep too, in his crib, which we kept in our room. Father and son slept dead like each other, bodies gone thick and heavy and soft, slept without moving, barely breathing until they woke. My son’s sleep was particularly disconcerting, because he slept with his eyes half open, and during the weeks after he was born I had often held a mirror under his nose, to see if it fogged up with his breath. I went to my daughter’s room, and stood in the doorway, casting my shadow over the floor. The room had filled up with her breathing, warm and not wholly pleasant. She curled on her bed with all the blankets flung off dramatically. Her window looked onto the street, from the vantage of the second story. I stood there in my nightgown. The lawn below me was nearly blue in moonlight and streetlight. There was someone in the street. I saw him, his shoulders, his hot blonde hair, then lifted my gaze, to where all the lights were on in the house down the street. I must have stood there for a long time. I felt my own mind, tingling like a limb come awake. The street was empty, then the light went off in the house, still I stood, remembering a night long ago, when I stood at a window in another country. It wasn’t nostalgia. My life was crowded then with family, and I worked hard. Yet this space was there. I thought about it for a long time. I couldn’t say whether I was happy, or sad, or sorry for myself.

  Then my daughter cried out in her sleep, and just like that, the space closed. My mind and body turned to her. She blinked up at me, like she had as a baby, with her black eyes. “Mom?”

  Was she awake or dreaming? I felt irritation and tenderness in equal parts. “Go back to sleep,” I said.

  “I was being eaten, someone was eating me,” she said.

  “Just a dream,” I said. She was scared, shaking and I held her, she allowed me.

  “You don’t want me anymore,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You don’t want me anymore.”

  “You’re dreaming,” I said. “You’ll feel embarrassed about this in the morning.”

  Every morning, I combed my daughter’s hair before I fed both the children breakfast. It was a challenge, because the baby was always clingy right after he woke up and my daughter had trouble sitting still for more than a few minutes at a time. If I put the baby down, he would begin to cry, and Manisha would use the distraction to run off. Then I would have to start the whole process over.

  “You said Manisha means mind. You said that the mind is the most important. That’s what you said.”

  “Mind is important, hair is important. Already you run around the neighborhood like a wild thing.”

  “So my hair is as important as my mind?”

  “No.” I had put the baby in a sling against my chest, so my hands were free. The sling reminded me of the peasant women in the fields, who worked for hours with their babies tied to their bodies in old saris. But mine I bought at Target. “It is important to look nice for people.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know why. I don’t know why you are so difficult, why you don’t just listen to me.”

  “Because you don’t make sense!”

  July mornings were cool and felt strange on the skin after waking; afterward the days became brutally hot. The baby was still small enough to bathe in the sink, and I bathed him often and massaged his body with oil. Manisha came in only when she got hungry, and I cleaned the house and made sure the dishes were out of the dishwasher, made lists of things I needed to get from the store, paid all the bills and called the health insurance company about a birth-related expense they had not yet reimbursed. I was in the process of applying for citizenship, which also produced a large amount of paperwork. I fed the baby, changed the baby, put the baby to sleep and picked him back up when he woke, sang to the baby, talked to the baby, read to him.

  Manisha came in and reported that Luisa was letting her kids run through the sprinklers. “Geenie has a bikini!”

  “You don’t want a bikini.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  I sighed. “Wasn’t it you who was only caring about the mind this morning?”

  She shrugged.

  “Do you want to go and run out in the sprinklers with them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We co
uld put the sprinklers on here.”

  “Then we’ll be copying them.”

  “Fine.”

  Luisa was stretched out on a plastic lawn chair in shorts and a tank top and a hat that covered her face. She was reading a gigantic magazine. She waved when she saw us approaching.

  “Glad you’re back, Manisha. Brought your suit?”

  Manisha pulled up her T-shirt, showing the swimsuit underneath.

  “Go on then.”

  Manisha hesitated. Geenie and Camille had not taken any notice of her. They looked half-wild on the lawn. They would grow up to be beautiful, like their mother, with their small faces, Geenie’s heart-shaped, and Camille’s oval, their wide eyes and little noses and soft, elegant mouths. Their beauty was startling because they were so unaware of it; it was strange to see them act with such abandon, like children, with those faces. Like two princesses from a storybook I read Manisha, one dark, one fair, the water glittering on their skin. As the sprinkler changed direction, it fanned into a rainbow. Manisha took off her shirt and shorts and stood barefoot in her yellow bathing suit. Her belly puffed out, and the way she stood with her feet turned outward made her look like a duck.

  “Girls, Manisha’s here,” said Luisa. The girls looked up from their play. Camille’s knees were stained with mud. Her little pink tongue came out of her mouth and licked her cheek. “We’re playing cats.”

  “No we’re not,” said Geenie. She was, as reported, wearing a ruffled pink two-piece, the top of which lay flat against her chest. She cast a scornful look at her sister. “Cats hate water.”

  “Not all do,” said Camille.

  “Yeah, all do. They’re from the desert.”

  “I like cats,” I heard Manisha say. She was allergic, and had an instinctual fear reaction to most animals, throwing her hands up to protect her face when they came near.

  “We’re going to get one, Mom says,” offered Camille.

  “We’ll see,” said Luisa.

  The baby and I were both sweating, but I was glad at least that I wasn’t pregnant in this heat. “It’s hard enough being responsible for the two of you. Though at this point maybe a third life wouldn’t make any difference.” She had put down her magazine, and she took her hat off to fan herself. On the underside of her arm there was a constellation of yellow marks. “Tell me, how long have you lived in the neighborhood?”

  “Well, let’s see. Manisha was four and a half when we moved. So I would say about three and a half years.”

  “I hope we stay here that long.”

  “How long were you in Denver?”

  “Only a few months. Richard’s job. Three schools in two years.”

  “That must be hard on them.”

  “But you know, I moved around a lot as a kid, my dad was in the army—so I think of myself as sort of a gypsy now. Richard says I romanticize my childhood, but he wasn’t there, was he? I like change, moving around.”

  The baby sneezed. It was a tiny noise, but it rocked him. He looked up at me, bewildered, and I stroked his cheek so he would feel reassured. Ever so slightly, I shifted him in my arms, so that the bruises at my throat would be visible between my dupatta and the neck of my blouse. I looked to see if Luisa noticed; if she had her face didn’t register it.

  “Moving around so much—it must be nice, in some ways.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “To feel . . . how does it feel?”

  “Just about how you’d expect, I think. Sometimes it’s hard, you get so attached to a place. There are so many places to miss. And you just have to pack everything up, your clothes and pots and things, you start to hate your stuff. You want to throw it all away and start over on the other end.”

  I remembered how I felt when I was young, slight as a plastic bag, caught on nothing, riding the wind. But I had been caught. Again, I shifted the baby in my arms, more clumsily, less carefully, to show her where, three days ago, hands had squeezed my neck as though pulping a fruit. I stood there with her in an expectant silence, feeling the start of a sweeping relief, like a person in a wreck who sees through the windshield the Jaws of Life. I had, until this moment, never said it to anyone, not even to myself. Instead I had extinguished each event at the root of the candle, before it had time in my mind to burn. Then I looked at her and realized she was refusing. Not only to say it, but to see, just to see it, to see me. Her eyes were hard and faraway, the eyes of a stranger—which, of course, she was. With haste I covered the spots on my neck and looked away.

  There was a cry from the girls, and I turned around to see Manisha tripped or fallen in the grass. She was wet now, and lay for a minute stunned on the ground, facedown. Geenie and Camille stood still, grazed every now and then by the edge of the sprinkler, Geenie’s face proud, Camille’s full of the innocence I hoped she would always have, would never leave her.

  “She tripped,” said Geenie.

  “Are you okay, Manisha?” said Luisa. She rose from her lawn chair but didn’t approach my daughter. Manisha lifted her wet face. There was grass stuck in her hair. For a moment I could not bear to look at her face, full of humiliated anger. She looked too much like me.

  “Manisha?” I said.

  She would not cry. She came to her hands and knees, then picked herself up gingerly, and, as though her legs were untrustworthy, treaded carefully over the wet lawn. When she had reached the sidewalk, she began to run.

  “Manisha!” I called. She didn’t turn around. I watched the black soles of my daughter’s feet slapping the pavement.

  A Simple Composition

  When I was sixteen my parents decided I should take up the sitar, and I began to receive lessons from a great musician who had fallen on lean times. I had little talent, and he was a strict teacher. He often yelled me to tears. “These are the fingers of a princess,” he would say, examining my hand for calluses and dropping it with scorn. My palm felt hot as I brought it back into my lap. “Again,” and as I began to play he would take up his instrument in a fit of irritated passion and override me with his music. “Like this.” He had thick brows and a fat, jolly nose that seemed out of character with the rest of his features; he always appeared to be scowling. As he played the sitar his face became no more beautiful, but it was touched by the grace of the music. His sharp eyes closed and his fingers moved with a subtlety I could never hope for. A simple composition, like the one he chose for me, became something else in the belly of his sitar, something distilled to its essence. It was longing for god, or the longing for perfection. The longing for childhood or mother, the longing for lost days, or for a lover. His notes were never singular; he bent them into each other, playing just as time passes, one moment blending into the next. When he finished I could see tears in his eyes.

  After a while I started to practice for hours in the evenings, and my fingertips toughened. I began to love the sitar like I would a living thing, feeling tenderness as she lay in my arms, with my fingers moving up and down her slender neck. But I could feel my lack of talent as my skill grew. Even to my own ears the music I produced sounded flat and rigid. I could bend the notes and quiver them, but the animating spirit that was supposed to be there underneath never appeared; it was like manipulating a puppet. But I felt it, that ache. Perhaps this is why I fell in love.

  The lessons took place in the sitting room of my house, where my mother sewed clothes for the poor while my teacher scolded me. It was dark in the sitting room—the curtains were always drawn to protect the furniture—and stuffy, with just the overhead ceiling fan that turned too slowly to do more than stir the hot air and often went off altogether with the power cuts. I had been left alone with my teacher only three times: when the cook had needed special instruction on the night’s meal, when the leather-sole repairman returned with our shoes, and when my youngest brother had fallen from his bicycle and came crying home with a scraped knee. During the first two instances I was tense, but my sitar teacher hardly seemed to notice any change. During the third, he told me, “Yo
u’re improving.”

  “Not much.”

  “True. I can still see the work in your fingers.”

  “You have a gift so you can’t imagine what it’s like not to.”

  He looked at me sharply. He was not a young man. And I knew almost nothing about him, where he lived, if he was married. Yet in that look, some knowledge passed to me, innocent as I was, about how he was thinking of me. He was considering me the way men consider women, with a grudging appreciation, even deference to their beauty. I could feel myself grow hot, not just my face but my entire body, alone in that close room with him.

  “You give yourself an excuse that way. You’re too easily distracted.”

  I can remember being sixteen and feeling that love heavy in my chest. I was shy, and had a quiet face and neat black hair, and I was so dark that my marriage prospects would have been grim had my parents not been well-off. At school the girls thought I was dull and ignored me. At home, I had three brothers, all younger, who filled the house with noise, while I, even with my music, occupied the rooms very quietly, taking up very little space and demanding no attention. But attention mattered little to me, and less now that my desire for it was concentrated to a single source.

  When the afternoons became hotter my mother dozed in her chair during my lessons. There was a growing awareness between us, my sitar teacher and I. He began to scold me even more fiercely for my ineptitude. But I started to realize that his sharp words were a substitute for something else, and I did not cry. In fact, it was all I could do to keep from smiling. One day, he asked if I could meet him at a park that evening. Not so much asked as told me, quietly but with no sense of wrongdoing as my mother slept. The park was on the other side of the city, one I had not been to before. I didn’t think my mother would let me go, and in the intervening hours I became more and more agitated trying to think of an excuse. Ultimately, it was simple: I told her I was meeting a schoolmate to study. Since the days were long in summer I would likely be home before dark. She took no notice of the wild look my eyes had. I bathed and put flowers in my hair and wrapped myself carefully in a fresh milk-blue sari. My hands were shaking from excitement as I paid the rickshaw wallah.