Rakhi was so upset she wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t speak to me. She thought I wasn’t teaching her to interpret dreams because I wanted to keep my gift selfishly to myself. (She was more accurate than she guessed. I was selfish, only in a different way.) Even her father, who seldom commented on household matters, asked what was going on. I should have told her right then what I’d surmised from the beginners’ exercises: she had no talent. But it felt too cruel. Blinkered by love, I reasoned that I might be mistaken. To try once more couldn’t hurt. And so that night, against my better judgment, I asked her to sleep with me in the sowing room.
I made Rakhi lie on my pillow so that our heads touched. I told her to close her eyes. This much I remembered from what my aunt had done when she had appeared like lightning in the dreariness of my life. Next, she had reached into me and touched something that lay sleeping. But I didn’t know how to do that. It was something dream tellers learned in the last month of their studies, and I had left before then.
In the slums where I grew up, people had been afraid of me because I seemed to know secrets about them, their hidden thoughts. It afforded me some protection in that place where orphans were used in cruel ways. I was thankful for my ability, but I didn’t give it much attention. Now I realize I must have been reading the dreams of those who lived around me.
When Rakhi was little, I’d play a game with her. Can you guess what I’m thinking of, I’d ask her the morning after I’d had an important dream. I’d place her in my lap, look into her eyes, hold the dream in my mind and will her to tap into it. She’d touch my face, play with my hair. Finally, she’d grow fidgety and slide off my lap, and I’d be left with a mix of disappointment and relief.
I should have heeded those failed attempts. Instead, as we lay on the floor, our hair tangling together, I decided to try harder than ever before to break through the barrier between our minds. I closed my eyes. I was acutely aware of my husband in the next room, brushing his teeth, getting ready for bed. Did he wonder what we were doing? I heard his footsteps moving toward this room and stiffened, but the steps paused and went back as they always did. Rakhi was asleep already, her breathing shallow and effortful, as when someone climbs a steep staircase. Out of habit I probed her mind, but there weren’t any dreams. She hadn’t dreamed since the morning I bought her nightmare from her. I flinched away from that thought, that attempt to cure gone wrong. To be cursed by blankness each night as one slept! But perhaps if I succeeded in this venture, if I could funnel some of my ability into her, she would forgive me.
I shut off all outer sounds. I focused my attention on my awareness, that power that allows me to receive the dreams of others. After some time, it appeared as a speck of light in the center of my chest. I concentrated some more, and felt it begin to move. With effort I directed it to where my forehead touched Rakhi’s. I visualized her awareness as a similar speck and called to it. I had never done anything like this before. At first I could not sense it; then I felt a warmth against my skull. In a while something began seeping into me. I could see it now, skittery and faint, bobbing next to me. I invited it in. The two lights began moving into my chest region. They were floating along a narrow corridor. Was it an artery? But perhaps they’d entered an inner landscape that had nothing to do with my physical body. As they went deeper, scenes flickered on either side of them as on a cinema screen.
Women in ragged saris crowd a footpath. They’re waiting to fill water at the street-side tap. There’s pushing and shoving because soon the water will be shut off. An unfilled pitcher means no water for cooking, nothing for the children to drink. The stronger women push to the front of the line. One roughly elbows a thin girl out of the way. She loses her balance, falls. Her clay pitcher drops to the pavement and smashes to bits. She stares at it, horrified. It will earn her a beating from the family that has kept her, grudgingly, since her mother disappeared. She turns her head and looks directly at me, and the force of her fear and anger strikes me like an explosion . . .
In darkness, an older girl follows a woman dressed in white. Only the stars shed a little light around them. Shadows shaped like animals lurk at the edge of the unfamiliar path. The girl wears a white sari, too—clothing she is not used to. She stumbles sometimes as she hurries to keep up, but she is afraid to ask the woman to slow down. What if the woman changes her mind, tells the girl she made a mistake, tells her to go back? They go on, the night doesn’t end, nor the path. The girl imagines the caves they are making for. Inside her heart, the caves are the color of fog, mysterious and beautiful. A sudden rustling in the undergrowth. She turns a startled head, and I see that it is the same girl. Her face is charged with excitement. But already there are shadows in her eyes, because reality can never match up to the pictures in our heads . . .
Colors and shapes tumble as inside a kaleidoscope. The spot of light next to me flickers like a lamp in the wind. Ahead of us is another scene: a one-room flat, a rickety table with a kerosene stove on top of it crowded against an old settee. There are piles of records, an old turntable. This time, too, it’s night, but an urban night. Light from a streetlamp makes its way through the small barred window. It fades before it can reach the mattress in the corner, where a young woman lies. A man—I see only the back of his head—is kissing her. We move closer. Tiny pearls of sweat stud the curve of his naked back. The woman puts out a hand to stop him, but he whispers something and it falls away. He pulls away her white sari and bends to kiss her breasts. She shuts her eyes in a shocked ecstasy that is not unlike pain. Her emotions crackle through me like an electric charge, and I realize what I chose not to know until now: she is myself. These are moments from my life that I had banished from memory. But like much that is banished, they didn’t leave. They went underground. And now, somehow, my daughter’s dreaming them.
Things I’ve kept so carefully from her all these years. Things she must not know.
I throw myself between her and the scenes that line the corridor, push at her to go back. But something stronger than me sucks us further in. What force has us in its grip? Pictures flash at us, huge and mesmerizing. They mix past and present, history and hope, truth and desire. In the caves I interpret a dream so excellently that the other novices rise to their feet in admiration. I follow the sounds of a flute from an old palace into a garden, and find a man who will change my future. I watch my expression the night I decide to run away from the caves. My face the night I decide to run away, again—this time from . . .
No! She mustn’t see that.
I gather all my powers to push Rakhi back into her own body—but I can’t find the flicker of light that is her awareness. Where has it disappeared? Down which corridor of my subconscious is it roaming? Panic fills me, causing my own light to waver and grow faint. What if I can’t find her and send her back before her body awakens? I imagine her vacuous face, her limp limbs following me through the rest of her life. And I, bearing her within me on and on, a pregnancy without end . . .
But such wild imaginings pave the way to disaster. I force myself to be quiet so I can sense her presence. Heartbeat after heartbeat—the only measure of time in this space—passes. Nothing. Perhaps it is impossible to differentiate oneself from one’s own blood?
How long do I wander down the twists of my inner alley-ways, searching? Do I hear my husband knocking at the door, Are you two all right in there? I have no power to speak, to tell him he must not interfere. Does someone take my head on his knee, run a cool hand over my forehead? But I must focus inside, where the darkness is pulpy like pitch. Finally, when I’ve dropped both movement and hope, I feel the smallest prickle of otherness. I glide after it into an underwater tunnel. The memories are dim here, old as the crumble of pollen from a dying flower. Hands holding a child to a breast, smell of a woman’s perfumed hair, a voice calling her away. Do her feet falter as she turns to look at her baby? Am I that child? Or that woman? The light that is Rakhi weaves drunkenly. I grab her, begin to draw her back. She doesn’t resist. P
erhaps she, who always hungered to know about me, has learned more than she can digest. We rise to the surface, the solidity of bone. With the last of my strength, I push her into her body.
In the morning it will be as though none of this ever occurred. Except that I will rise with a migraine and vomit in the downstairs bathroom all day. My husband will retreat into a bottle. And from time to time, as she goes about her daily business—doing homework, chatting with a friend on the phone—Rakhi will pause and look at me with puzzlement, trying to recall something important, something she has already forgotten.
31
Rakhi
They don’t leave me alone, of course. Belle drives my father to my apartment. They’re waiting at the door by the time I park the car and drag myself up the stairs.
Before I can explode, Belle says, “We won’t do anything you don’t want, Rikki. We won’t even mention the shop. Let’s just relax and have some tea, okay? We’ve all had a hard day.”
“I’ll make some special cha,” my father adds. “You go get the aspirin, take a shower if you want.”
I give them a distrustful glance. They sound like they’ve rehearsed this. They gaze back at me with innocent, sooty faces. I have to admit that the idea of one of my father’s special teas sounds good.
By the time I come back, having washed my hair, the apartment is full of a minty fragrance. My father hands me a cup, and I sip gratefully. It’s an unusual mix of herbs and spices, light yet energizing.
“Kashmiri cha,” my father says. He doesn’t explain where he got it.
I put up my aching feet and drink another cup. Then I notice what he’s wearing.
“Dad! What are you doing in my old robe?”
“Belle found it for me. She’s gone to the basement to put my clothes in the washer. That girl is a gem, I tell you.”
“So you’re going to go through with your crazy plan,” I say.
“It’s not so crazy. I just don’t want to give up so soon. That’s what that manager wants, no?”
I stare at him. Does he, too, think she had something to do with the accident?
Belle comes rushing in. “We’ve only got an hour, Mr. Gupta. Rikki, can I borrow some clothes from you? And can you go downstairs in twenty minutes and put your dad’s clothes in the dryer?” She’s in the shower before I can respond.
“We have nothing to lose,” my father says.
“We ’ll look ridiculous. People will turn around and walk out.”
“I don’t think they will. In any case, I’m willing to look ridiculous. It just may keep us from closing down.”
“I don’t want our customers to stay out of pity for us.”
“Sympathy is not a bad thing. But I’m not going to try to change your mind. You do what you want.”
You do what you want. That’s what my mother used to say when I went to her for advice. She’d tell me what she thought, then she’d add that phrase. That slight pulling back, that indication that ultimately her life was separate from mine. It always made me want to do what she’d suggested, as though by following her advice I’d bind her to me.
Does my father, sly Ananzi, know this?
“Oh very well,” I say grumpily. “I guess I’ll come along and help.” I heave a loud sigh to make sure he realizes what a huge sacrifice I’m making. But inside I feel a stirring of elation. We aren’t giving up, and that itself is a small victory. Who knows, maybe my crazy father is right. Maybe we can navigate around this disaster instead of crashing into it and drowning.
“Thank you, beti,” he says formally. Then he breaks into a triumphant grin. “Better get dressed, we don’t have much time.
I once heard my mother say, Calamity happens so we can understand caring. I refused to believe it. The calamities in my life were caused by the failure of caring, I felt. But after the fire at our store I begin to glimpse, just a little, what she might have meant.
I drag my feet as I follow Belle and my father to the store. Even before we reach it, my elation has faded and my doubts are back full force. It’s useless, all this effort we’re making. It would be smarter to call it quits and start over with something different— preferably in a place far away from Java and its witchy manager. Only my father’s shoulders, sagging under his still damp shirt, keep me from turning around and fleeing.
I grit my teeth as Belle unlocks the door of the shop. It takes all my willpower to step into the smell of smoke and disaster that will not go away no matter how much Summer Rain deodorizer we spray. I start the coffee machine, busy myself with routine activities, stay in the background, where I won’t have to answer questions. Still, I cringe each time a customer comes in and scrunches up his face at the odor, and my father begins another explanation, another apology for the meager snack supply.
I’d expected irritation from the customers, at best a brusque shrug of the shoulders suggesting they’d put up with the inconvenience—but just for today. Some do respond that way—and several people walk out—but more are sympathetic. A few share their disaster stories with us. Bad times are like visits from the in-laws, one man says. They seem like they’ll never leave, but they do—and better times are bound to follow! Someone recites an Urdu ghazal about loss and heartbreak, and how good friends and happy memories can get us through them. Someone else interprets the words for Belle and me. (By now, they’ve gauged the depth of our language deficiencies.) They order lavishly from our depleted menu, so that by the end of the evening we’ve made a decent amount of money.
“But more important,” my father says as we lock up, “we didn’t give up and close down. That’s what most people would have done.”
I give him a sharp look to see if “most people” means who I think it does, but he isn’t making a dig at me. There’s a wide smile on his tired face. I remember how my mother, in her journal, referred to him as a good soul.
In the next few days, our customers help us take stock. What is it we need to fix most urgently? They check among themselves to see if anyone has skills that can help us. It turns out that there are two construction workers in the group. They offer to come in and do the repairs for a minimal charge on their off days. I can do the repainting. Jespal says he’s good with putting up shelves. One of our customers who works at Home Depot says he’ll buy supplies for us at discounted rates. Someone’s cousin owns a home-inspection company. He’ll come in when the repairs are completed to give us an okay.
I’m surprised and pleased, and then dejected. Even if they do all they’re promising, it’ll take us months to fix the problems. Can we limp along for all that time?
Our customers are more optimistic. Don’t worry, they say. (Disaster has made them less hesitant about addressing me.) The shop will be in mint condition before you know it. Meanwhile, we’ll keep coming. Whatever food you can manage to make, we’ll buy. And we’ll sing and play and keep your spirits—and ours—up. We’re all brothers and sisters here, after all, bhai-bahen.
Even those who aren’t Indian nod at this.
I appreciate their sentiments, but don’t quite believe them.
This is my fatal flaw, as my mother often informed me: I’m suspicious and pessimistic, quick to think the worst of people. “Not that you have reason to be that way,” she’d say.
I’d bristle every time she said that. I’d remind her that I had a whole list of reasons, headed by Sonny-the-cross-I-have-to-bear. What I didn’t point out was that I hadn’t always been this way. (She should have known it, as my mother. She would have known it if her attention hadn’t always been pointed elsewhere. Until the party, I’d believed the best of everyone, particularly my husband. It was not suspicion but trust that undid me that night.)
But now that she’s gone, I can see things from her perspective, too. When I think of the people she helped, I have to admit that my problems are minor ones. Her journals have given me glimpses: illness, murder, suicidal depression, schizophrenia. Sometimes at night, I worry about her dream people, whether they’ve been abl
e to find a new interpreter. After I send a good thought to Jona, I send them one as well.
Even in death, my mother has proved to be right. Our customers are starting to help us, just as they’d promised. It’s excruciatingly slow—they can come here only in between their other jobs—but it’s costing us much less than I feared. We had to argue with them before they’d even accept any payment. The results are not five-star, but they’re serviceable, and done with affection. As my father reminds me, it’s not as if this was a five-star venue to begin with. Meanwhile, business continues. We’ve lost some of our more finicky customers, but it isn’t enough to put us under.
After the fire, other changes occur. One evening a few people ask if they can put together a small stage for the musicians. It would help some of them if they could sit cross-legged. We’d still keep chairs for the guitarist and the drummers. The stage could be dismantled after the evening’s performance, if we wished.
After a hasty consultation in the back room (with me resisting as usual), we agree to give it a try. Soon two low wooden platforms, draped with a patchwork quilt, are set up in a corner. Bolsters that someone’s wife has covered with silk are arranged on them. (I hadn’t thought of the musicians as having families. They seemed so complete in themselves as they made their music. But recently I’m seeing children running around, teenagers taking over on instruments while their parents break for tea.) Someone puts an enameled box filled with breath-freshening masala on the counter. And as if that’s a sign, people begin to bring in other things—a Tibetan bell, a small Persian rug in jeweled colors, an African mask, a woodcut from Afghanistan, a jade figurine, a beat-up mirror that looks Russian, with carved metal doors you can open and close. I can’t guess the value of these items, but it’s clear that they’re precious to their owners, who carried them all the way to this country from their past lives.
No one ever speaks to me about these objects. I find them in little piles behind the stage when I clean up at closing time. (We’ve stopped dismantling the stage at night. It doesn’t seem worth the effort, especially as it’s become a popular seating area for our daytime customers.) I’m ambivalent about the gifts. At times I’m deeply honored, at others I’m exasperated at having to find space for them in the store. I’m afraid that people will keep bringing in things until the place is crushed under their weight. Already I’ve had to remove several of my own decorations to accommodate the new items—even my painting of bathing elephants (though recently my fondness for it had been somewhat reduced). My Kurma House (but was it ever mine?) is suffering a sea change, growing into something very different from what I had envisioned. I feel as if I’m losing control. But when I calm down, I find that I quite like the creature it has become, this many-chambered nautilus. One day I take my paintbrush and add a word to the window: International. Soon after that, by some unspoken consensus, our customers decide that the Kurma House has everything it needs. From that time on, I never find another gift.