Months later in his apartment when he hears of the acquittal he will scream, a high, moaning, on-and-on animal sound, will bring down the crutches, hard and shattering, on whatever he can reach. Dishes, furniture, the framed wedding photos on the wall. Down and down and down, not hearing Veena begging him to stop, shaking her off. Sweet crash of window glass, the stereo he had saved for so many months to buy caving in easy as a skull under his blows. Until Veena, sobbing, runs to the next apartment to call Ramcharan and his brother. Calm down bhaiya, calm down. But he throws himself at the two men, clawing and screaming in that not-human voice that seems to come from a place up behind his eyes, the left one red-veined and bulging, the right one now a dark, shrunken pit. Until finally they grab him from behind and force him onto the bed and tie him down with a couple of Veena’s saris. He stops shouting then. Doesn’t speak another word. Not then, not in the coming weeks, not in the Air India plane when neighbors finally pool together ticket money to send him and Veena back home, for what else is left for them in this country.
O Mohan broken in body broken in mind by America, I come back from your story in pieces, find myself assembled at last on the chill floor of the shop. My limbs ache as after long illness, my sari is damp with shiver-sweat, and in my heart I cannot tell where your pain ends and mine begins. For your story is the story of all those I have learned to love in this country, and to fear for.
When I can stand again I make my unsteady way to the newspaper bin.
I must know.
Yes, the stories are there. Peeling page off page, going back into the months and years, I discover them slowly. The man who finds his grocery windows smashed by rocks, picks up one to read the hate-note tied around it. Children sobbing outside their safe suburban home over their poisoned dog. Woman with her dupatta torn from her shoulders as she walks a city pavement, the teenagers speeding away in their car hooting laughter. The man who watches his charred motel, life’s earnings gone, the smoke curling in a hieroglyph that reads arson.
I know there are other stories, numerous beyond counting, unreported unwritten, hanging bitter and brown as smog in America’s air.
I will split once again tonight kalo jire seeds for all who have suffered from America. For all of them and especially Haroun, who is a hurting inside me, whose name each time I say it pulls my chest in two. I will lock the door and stay up all night to do it, through dimness the knife rising and falling steady and silver as holy breath. So that when he comes tomorrow evening (for tomorrow is Tuesday) I can hand him the packet and say, “Allah ho Akbar, may you be safe, in this life and always.” As penance while I work I will not think once of Raven, I Tilo who have been so self-indulgent already. All night instead I will whisper into air purifying prayers for the maimed, for each lost limb, each crushed tongue. Each silenced heart.
The day passes so slowly it is like being underwater, every movement a huge effort. The light seems dim and green, filtered. Through it the few customers swim lazily to the shelves, then back to lean languid elbows on the counter. Their questions are tiny bubbles breaking against my ears. My limbs too give in, grow seaweed-slippery, swaying to some submarine adagio only they can hear.
Only my mind beats, more furious more helpless than ever.
So much of a Mistress’s life is waiting, is inaction. Who would have thought it. Not I, who wanted all the answers at once, who wanted domination immediate as a drug shooting up my veins.
Once upon a time the Old One said, “Power is weakness. Think on this, Mistresses.”
She said such things often. “Greatest happiness brings greatest loss.” “Stare at the sun, bring darkness upon your eyes.” Others which I have forgotten. She would give us the morning to ponder them.
My sister Mistresses would climb the granite cliffs to find a quiet place. Some would sit under the banyans or find a cave mouth. Silent, they would turn their attention inward, try to see.
But I uninterested in riddles spent the time playing in the sea, chasing rainbow fish. If for a moment I grew quiet, if I stopped to stare at the shimmery horizon, it was only to look for my serpents, hoping.
In the afternoon the Old One would ask, “Mistresses, have you understood?”
I was always the first to shake my head no.
“Tilo, you did not even try.”
“But Mother,” I would say unabashed, “the others did, and look, they too do not understand.”
“Ah child.”
But too eager to learn the next spice spell, I paid small attention to the disappointment in her voice.
Today, Mother, I am at last beginning to see. Hazily through this air that smells of tar and soot. Power is weakness.
Then Kwesi comes in and I am saved from thought.
It is a pleasure to watch Kwesi shop, I decide.
His movements are precise, not one unneeded gesture. The angle of his arm as it reaches for a packet, a box. The muscles of his back spreading then tightening as he bends to lift a sack. His fingers sifting through lentil grains, knowing what they look for, the bones broken and mended, fused hard and clean.
Not hurrying not wasting time, his body comfortable in its own space.
I can see how he would make a good teacher, having known what it is to be hurt.
Inside me an idea uncurls like a leaf.
Kwesi lays his purchases on the counter. Today he is buying whole mung beans green as moss. A slab of dried tamarind. A coconut which I imagine him breaking in two with the edge of his palm, his hand arcing a brown blur through the air of his kitchen.
“Making coconut-mung dal,” I say. “Getting ambitious, hunh?”
He nods. His smile comes slow, this man who doesn’t smile unless he means it, and then he holds nothing back.
It makes me think of Raven, as every beautiful thing does now. Under the happiness that flashes up in me is a fear, when and whether I will see him again. I am never sure. Anchored to this store, I can only wait and hope.
“For my lady,” says Kwesi. “I like to make something new and uncertain for her once in a while. Do you think it’ll be too difficult?”
“No no,” I say. “Just make sure you soak the mung long enough, and don’t add the tamarind paste till the end.” What a fine idea this is, new and uncertain. I wish to take it for my own life.
As I ring them up I whisper a success word over the beans, tell him not to forget to sprinkle on a little sugar. “So it’ll be sweet and salt, spur and hot, all the tastes of loving in it, no?” His eyes crinkle in laughing agreement.
If only I could make all who come to me so easily happy.
Tilo be honest. He was happy already when he came. The ones who are in true need of happiness, you are not doing too well with them, are you.
I say, “Remember how you wanted to put a poster about your karate school in the store? I’ve been thinking about it.”
“Yes?”
“It’s not a bad idea. You never know who might come in and see, who might want to learn. Do you have one maybe in your car?”
I help him tape it up right by the door, that poster spare and elegant in black and gold so no one coming in can miss it.
There’s a little gray in his hair, like wound-up silver springs.
“Tell them I’m good but tough. No fooling around in Kwesi’s One World Dojo.”
“Tough is what they need,” I say. And here is what I don’t say: But you’re kind also. You’ve known the hard streets, their pull. You too have heard death’s siren song, the one she sings especially for the young. Maybe you will have the power to pull them back from her, to make them see how beautiful is sunshine, the curve of a wing in flight, sprinkle of rain on the hair of the one you love.
As I wave him good-bye I send a calling thought to search the scarred pitted alleys, the abandoned warehouses, the waterfront disco joints already beginning to throb in the flame-colored evening. To search and bring.
But instead it is Geeta’s grandfather who pushes open the door, who sets down on
the counter with defeated hands the pewter-framed photo I had given him.
“Didi.”
“Yes?” Already by his voice I am afraid to ask more.
“I am having no luck with what you said to do. As you said, I am laying the ground carefully, during dinner mentioning how quiet the house is with only us older folks, but Ramu says nothing. Then I tell him maybe we were too hasty, after all she is our only flesh and blood. Still he is silent. Why not you call her just once, I say, or maybe even Sheela can do it. See her number here, I got it from friends. No, he says, his voice like a stone is sitting on his chest. And when I say, Why not, listen, it’s the elder people’s job to forgive the younger, he just pushes back his plate and gets up from the table.”
“Did you tell him she’s staying with her girlfriend and not Juan?”
“I did. Next evening I put the phone number in his hand and said, For my sake Ramu, patch up the fight. The girl has been careful to not do anything immoral, to not hurt you. Why not you tell her to come back home. He gives me a look cold like ice chips. He says, We gave her everything she wanted. This was the one thing we asked her not to do, and still she did it.
“I say, I have been thinking, what if she does marry this Mexican boy, it is not so bad, times are changing, other people’s children have done similar. Look at Jayanta, married that white nurse, look at Mitra’s daughter, what pretty fair-skinned babies she has.
“He says, Baba, what’s this new tune you are singing now when all this time it was sighing and slapping your forehead and Hai she is putting kali on the ancestors’ faces. Who has been giving you bad advice? I tell him, What, you think I cannot reason for myself? The mark of a wise man is that he changes his mind when he sees mistake. But his face is hard like a brick wall. He says, I listened to you enough already. When she walked out of this house slamming the door so proudly behind her, she slammed herself out of my life.
“All night after this talk I cannot sleep. I am seeing it is easy to plant a thorn in the heart, not so easy to pluck it out. I am wishing I never opened my mouth in the business between father and daughter.
“In the midnight I get up and go downstairs. I leave the photo on the side table where every morning time he sits to drink his cha and read the paper. I think maybe if he looks at it when he is sitting all by himself he will remember the time when she was small, maybe he will remember what-all things he did for her. Maybe it will be a little easier to take off his proud man-face and be a father.
“But when I come in later after he has left for work I see the photo frame lying facedown on the tiles. And look.” He points a shaky finger.
Shivering I see a crack, silver-sharp as a launched spear, cutting the picture in two, separating Geeta from her Juan.
I pace the inner room, running my hand along the shelves that hold the spices of power, wanting guidance. But the spices are silent and I have only the turmoil of my woman mind to fall back on.
Tilo, what to do?
The moments pool around my feet, spent and chill. No answers come. Through the walls I can hear Geeta’s grandfather, whom I have left in charge, advising customers. His voice has gathered back a little lost confidence. “I tell you, chana dal will give you gas, better be buying tur instead. What you mean your husband refuses to eat it? Boil it soft and mix in lot of fried onion and dhania leaf, and he is not knowing any better.”
Disguise, I think. Prevarication. Perhaps he is right. Desperate trickery for a desperate situation.
I search the shelves till I find the package tight-wrapped in tree bark, and next to it the silver-tipped pincers. Gingerly I unroll it, taking care not to touch. And watch it bristling to life, kantakari the thorn herb with its hair-thin black needles whose sting can be poison.
With the pincers I break off three hairs and drop them on the grinding stone. I measure out ghee and honey to cut the sting, pound them all together, fill a small bottle with it.
Geeta’s grandfather is standing military-straight at the counter, drumming his fingers on the glass, when I reenter.
“Ah, didi, you are taking a long time. No, no, I am not minding, not impatient slightest even, actually quite the opposite. I am thinking it is a good sign, you are finding something just-right to help us.”
“You said you would do anything for Geeta, to bring her back into the family. Are you sure?”
He nods.
“Here then, mix this into your rice at dinnertime, eat it slowly. It will burn your throat going down, and later it will give you the cramps, maybe for days. But for one hour you will have the golden tongue.”
“What this means?” says Geeta’s grandfather, but already in his eyes, hope and fear mixed, I see he has heard the old stories.
“Whatever you say this hour, people must believe. Whatever you ask, they must obey. Listen now.”
And I tell him what he is to do.
At the door I say, “Use the gift with care. It is yours once only. And remember, the cramps will be bad.”
He squares his shoulders, lifts his head, Geeta’s grandfather, and I see that he is a small man, has always been so behind his bluster-words. But today there is a bigness in his eye.
“The worst cramp I am happy to suffer,” he says very simply and closes the door behind him with gentleness.
I wait until all the customers have left, until moths float around the doorlight and I hear the soft thump of their bodies against the hot domed glass. Until the puppet moon dangles in the center of my window from its invisible string, and rush-hour sounds are swallowed by a terrible night stillness, and it is long past closing time. And then I can no longer hide from it, the fear that has been lying cold and coiled all this time in the center of my chest: Haroun will not come. Not now. Not perhaps ever.
How then to make amends. How help him past the dark which is reaching for him with its hungry hand.
The answer comes so quickly and with such sureness it surprises me, shows me I am no longer the Tilo who left the island.
You must go to him. Yes, out one more time into America. But the Old One?
The voice knows my weak places. Will you sit here, your hands folded in your lap, and let him be destroyed, it says. Is that what the Old One in your place would have done, would have wanted.
I see her face, deep lines creasing the forehead, corner of the mouth, laughter and frowning both. The eyes sometimes dark and still, sometimes sparking irony. At once kind and stern. “Eyes that could in anger scald your skin,” said the older Mistresses when they were story-talking to us.
I cannot tell what she would have wanted, but I know what she would have done. What I too should.
I think for a long moment before I choose the other path, which hurts through my whole body like bones wrenched from sockets.
If you were to ask me why I am doing so, I couldn’t answer. Only this: I who have held Haroun’s hands in mine and felt the hope pulsing wild through them, cannot let night cast her ink-net over him without a fight. Is it rebellion, is it compassion? Perhaps you know better than me, for to me they sit side by side, their edges bleeding into each other till all becomes one color.
But now I am faced with a more immediate problem: I must find Haroun. I have no address, and when I send out a calling thought, it is slammed back into my skull as though I were ringed with a well of impassable stone. My head throbs with the impact of it, with the question that I cannot push away. Tilo are your powers leaving you.
But slowly out of the throbbing comes a word: telephone. An image forms behind my eyelids, and though I have never seen one in real life, I know what it is: a pay phone enclosed in its tiny crystal cubicle, the rectangular box glowing faintly in the fitful streetlight, the steel cord looped and glinting like the thin ridged body of some prehistoric reptile, the hard black bulbous head. Whose memory is this? I have no idea. But I know to pick the correct coins to feed the machine’s slit mouth.
I search out my Sears plastic bag and lift from it a sheet with a number (for I must
call Geeta also). I steel myself for the spices’ stare and lock the door behind me. (But why are there no reproving glances, why does the door not hold itself back stubbornly from my hands?) I am not surprised to find my feet following without falter all the twists and turns of alleyways that will lead me to the phone call.
I make the easy call first. To Geeta, the number she had given me that day hoping, high in her glitter-black tower. And when I get the replica of her voice spooling thin and metallic from the machine, I know what it is. I know to wait for the beep and then to tell her clearly, slowly, to come to the store, alone, day after tomorrow at seven, evening hour when the light of sun and moon fall mixed upon our longings, and all is perhaps possible.
Now it is Haroun’s turn. But I have no number for him, no inkling of where he lives. Once I could have divined it with ease. But today when I start to chant the song of finding I stutter, come to a halt. I Tilo of whom the Old One once said that the parrot, bird of memory, must live in my throat. Too late I begin to see the price I have unknowingly paid for each step I took into America. Inside me a voice cries What else is lost.
No time now to worry this thought, no time now to mourn. I must grope for the fat metal-bound book that hangs from the booth wall and sift its pages, praying.
He is not there.
The booth is full of crumbling desires, the countless desperations of all those who lifted this receiver trying to connect across miles of humming wire. I lean my head into its wall. I would weep if I believed weeping could help.
Tilo weakened in magic through your willfulness, who can you blame but yourself.
No time for blame either. Inside me the minutes are swooping wild, colliding against the walls of my chest, falling back stunned.
You must use what you have, your own frail mortal wits, your imperfect remembering. Your heart’s pain.
I focus back to that first night at the store, Haroun reciting the tales of friends I had helped. I squeeze shut my eyes till I smell it plain, the sandalwood dust in his palm. Feel the press of his just-ripe lips in my hand’s hollow. Ah it hurts to look in his face, to see it blazing with trust, Haroun who stands on a stage built of dreams, under a spotlight about to be extinguished.