Out of the pain a name comes finally: Najib Mokhtar. I hold on to it as though it is a raft in drowning water, or perhaps it is a blade of grass only. I hope I have not conjured it out of my desperate wanting.
But see, here it is in the phone book, the letters small and black as the skeletons of ants pressed into the page, but plain enough. I swallow down the questions crowding my mouth, What if it’s the wrong Najib what if he doesn’t know where Haroun lives what if he won’t tell, what if what if what if, and punch in the numbers.
Ringing, ringing, ripples of rings echoing out with me at the center, and when I’ve almost given up hope, a woman’s voice.
“Hello.” Pronounced the Indian way, the word hangs in the air, hesitant, questioning.
“I’m looking for Haroun. Do you know where I can find him.”
As soon as I say the sentences I know their wrongness. I feel her suspicion course like electricity through the wires. Her fear. Immigration? creditors? old-country enemies following his ocean trail? Her fingers tighten around the receiver, ready to slam it down. “I’m a friend,” I say quickly.
She is unconvinced, I hear it in her cut-short sentences. “I am not knowing any Haroun-maroun. No one of that name living here.”
“Wait, don’t hang up. I’m from the Indian grocery, you know, the Spice Bazaar, next to the burned-down hotel on Esperanza Street. I helped your husband one time long ago.”
Only the sound of her listening, her held-in, half-believing breath.
“Now you must help me. I have something I must give Haroun, something to protect him from—” I search for a phrase out of her understanding, a story she would have been told as a girl “—the jinn’s breath.”
“The jinn’s breath,” she whispers. She knows it, black ice which can suck away your name your life.
“Yes. That’s why you must tell me where he is.”
She considers. In her head I hear her husband warn, “Woman, open your mouth and let out one word of this even, and I’ll make you sorry you were born.”
“Please. No harm will ever come to him from me.”
We both wait. Between us the moment stretches taut as steel.
Then she says, “I will tell you. He has no phone, but I will tell you how to get to his house and when to find him there.”
She gives me names of streets and parks which I jot down on the back of the small square sheet stamped with Geeta’s employer’s name. Neighborhood schools, gas stations, Quik-Stops, police headquarters. Take this bus and then this one, turn right here, then left twice, pass the massage parlor and the lot full of junk cars, climb up the rickety steps to the topmost apartment. Go early, eight A.M. latest. He leaves home right after morning namaaz and comes home only ten minutes at sundown for it again. Then back to his taxi, sometimes all night because that’s when the best tips are.
“Shukriyah,” I say, “heartfelt gratitude. I will go tomorrow morning itself early-early before the store opens.”
Walking home through the smoky air I dodge shadows and worse than shadows and keep my eyes on the moon, white as a polished jawbone. I rehearse all I will say to Haroun, apology and affection and warning of the nightmare which is the back-side of his immigrant dream. Ah, we will argue, I know it. He will stomp up and down and wave his hands in angry spirals, but at the end he will say, “Okay Ladyjaan, just to make you happy I am doing as you say.”
I am smiling with the thought of it already as I lean to unlock the shop door.
Then I see it, a small rectangle white as the sari of a widow or an ascetic, caught in the crack as though someone closed the door too quickly.
My throat so tight I cannot breathe. First Mother? I start to cry out.
Then I see it is a note only.
I open it and when my hands have stopped shaking I read the large, looping letters.
I came hoping to see you, but you were gone. I didn’t know you ever left the store, but knowing it I feel better asking this. Will you come with me tomorrow to the City, to share with me the places I love? I’ll come by early to take you, and bring you back by night.
Please say yes.
My Raven, I think, and like any woman in love I lay my cheek where his hand rested on the paper. “Yes,” I whisper, “yes. Tomorrow will be our pleasure day.” Already I can smell the bracing salt air of the City, long-imagined, feel under my feet the roll of its hills.
But then the thoughts come. What of the censuring curious eyes, when they see my handsome American with this sag-skinned brown woman?
And (O foolish woman-thought) I have nothing to wear.
What of Haroun says the thorn-voice.
I put the directions for safekeeping into a small leather bag which I borrow from the gift cabinet. “I will not neglect him,” I reply. If doubts lurk somewhere within, I choose not to pamper them with attention. “Do I not know my duty as well as I do my pleasure? First thing tomorrow I will ask Raven to take me to him.”
All evening I cannot sit still. I must pace the shop, front and back, front and back, thinking What can make me look better. Not beautiful, I do not expect that, but perhaps younger just a little, so the stares will not be so bad.
Tilo since when do you care what people whisper.
Not for me. But him I would protect from the world’s ridicule.
In a bowl I mix boiled milk and powder made of the neem leaf which kills disease. Smooth the paste over neck and cheekbone, the hollow under the eye. Into my hair I rub soaked ritha pulp, pile the gray into a mass on my head. I scrub my one American outfit in the sink with a bar of chemical-smelling Sunlight soap. Night passes, each minute dripping like wash water from the hung-up clothes. Neem dust dries and pulls at my skin. My scalp itches. Spikes of ritha hair poke at my face.
Yet when I have bathed and dried myself, I feel on my face the same crumpled skin, around my shoulders the same locks, coarse and gray as the shon jute women weave into sacking.
O Mistress what did you think. The voice of the spices is like skipping water, cool laughter that dances over my chagrin. If you want true change you must use us differently, must call on our powers. You know the words.
Spices, what are you saying. My spells were not given for myself to use.
For you, for him, where do you separate the desires. Their voice is a shrug as though this were a little thing.
I who know it is not, think in startlement, Why do they say this, they who know right and wrong better far than I.
The singing rises now from the inner room. Come Tilo use us, we give ourselves gladly to you who have tended us so faithfully. Lotus root and abhrak, amlaki and most of all makaradwaj Kingspice, we are yours to command. Use us for love for beauty for your joy, because that is why we were made.
The song is like little hooks in my flesh, pulling. Come Tilo come. My head fills with pictures, the Tilo I could be, Raven’s face when he sees. Our bodies together, supple and twined in ecstasy.
I begin the walk to the inner room. The song is husky, syllables that enter my body itching.
My hand on the door now, throb of my palm on wood that feels soft as water. All the molecules of the universe dissolving and gathering into new shapes.
Then sudden as lightning I see it, how they are luring me. To break the most sacred promise, to doom myself beyond recall.
O spices who have these many years been my one reason to live, do not punish me with temptation. I Tilo who still hold you high in my heart. Do not battle me, push me down where later I will hate us both.
Silence.
Then: So be it for now. We are patient. We know you will come to us soon. Once you have heard our song, have paced the rhythms of desire whose seat is deep in the body’s core, you cannot resist.
O spices, I say as I lower my stiff body onto the hard floor where I will toss unsleeping all this night. My voice is tired with persuading, tinged with doubt. Can I not love you and him both. Why must I choose.
The spices do not answer.
At the wi
ndow the morning is like an orange split open, soft and juice-sweet. But on my skin it etches the lines deeper, highlights the cording veins. I stand in my brown outfit, sad as old leaves, and almost wish for Raven not to come.
But then he is here, and again that pleased glance in his eyes as if he has lifted off the coat of my skin and is seeing beneath. He takes my hand in his, and against my surprised cheek his lips are at once hard and soft.
“You’ll come? I wasn’t sure. I stayed awake most of the night wondering.”
“I too,” I smile. My heart has taken over my body till it is one beat of joy. Raven who does not know, whom I want never to know, how much I will have to pay for this excursion, how gladly I will count the cost.
Is this what love is.
“Look.” He is opening a package. “I brought you something.”
It spills across the counter, gossamer and spiderweb, spangled like dew. When I lift it up it is long and loose to my feet and white as the first dawn. The loveliest dress I have seen.
I lay it down.
First Mother who warned us, who watched sorrow-eyed as our bodies twisted into age in Shampati’s flames, did you foresee this moment. This regret raking me inside and out.
“I can’t wear it,” I say.
“Why not?”
“It’s too fancy. A young-woman dress.”
“No,” he says. “A beautiful-woman dress. And you are that woman.” He runs a wingtip finger over my cheekbone.
The spices are watching intently, their thoughts veiled. Tuned to my every, trembling breath.
“How can you say that, Raven.” My voice comes out tears. I brush the anger from my eyes, pull him to the window to the cruel light.
Inside me a voice implores Let it fee.
No. If I am to lose him, let it be now. Before the insidious splinter of love has worked a deeper way into my heart.
“Can’t you see,” I cry. “I’m ugly. Ugly and old. That dress on me would be mockery. And you and I together, that too is mockery.”
“Hush,” he says. “Hush.” Then his arms are around me, his lips like reassurance in my hair. My face presses into his chest, into the softness of a white shirt that smells clean as wind. Through it his skin is warm like polished silkwood.
How can I tell you how it feels, you around whom so many men have set their casual arms that you cannot even remember where it began.
But I who have never been held. Not by father or mother. Not by my sister Mistresses. Not even by the Old One, not like this, heart to thudding heart. I Tilo, the child who could never cry, the woman who never would. I smile through wet lashes as the smell of his skin fills me, the warm riffle of his breath on my lashes. My bones are melting in this desire to be always so held, I who never thought I would want a man’s arms to protect me.
His thumbs rub gently at the ridges of my shoulderbones. ‘Tilo. Dear Tilo.”
Even my name takes on new texture in his mouth, the vowels shorter and sharper, the consonants more defined. My American, in all ways you are reshaping me.
“Put on the dress,” he says. Puts a gentle hand over my mouth to stop my protesting. “This body, I know it’s not the real you.”
My lips want to rest quiet against the firm curves of his fingers, the cool platinum band of a ring, the palm lines which tell his future and mine, if only I could read them.
But I pull back. I must ask.
“How do you know? You, the one who earlier said it’s not easy to know the real self one is.”
He smiles. “Perhaps we can see each other better than we can ourselves.” He lays the dress in my arms, nudges me toward the inner room.
“But—”
“Dear suspicious stubborn one. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything today. But I must do it in the right place, where mist and air blend into ocean. Where it is easier to confess, and easier perhaps to forgive. Where we’ll go as soon as you’re ready.”
My American drives a car that is long and low and colored like rubies, its skin so sparkly-smooth that even the wind cannot hold it back. Inside, it smells like gardenia and jasmine, expensive and seductive and all woman, making me jealously wonder, Who. The seat fits around my body soft as a cupped palm (how many other women has it held like this) and when I lean back I see, floating above the glass roof, clouds shaped like pitying smiles.
Tilo have you forgotten that you have no right to this man, his past or his present.
But I cannot hold on to any of it, doubt or anger or sorrow. My dress has settled around me like the petals of a white lotus, and through the window the sun’s hand slides warm as permission over my face. The car moves sleek as any jungle beast, that same silence and speed. The clock face on the bank tower says seven-thirty. We are in good time to reach Haroun.
“Okay,” he says. “Where’s this place you want to drop by first?”
Most of the street names I remember, and I tell them to him from my head. Ellis and Ventura and one called Malcolm X Lane. The car glides through alleyways where garbage spills onto pavement and mat-haired men and women stare at us from doorways where they’ve spent the night. Lined up around their feet, like protection, are plastic bags with their lives stuffed into them.
“You sure this is the right place?”
“Yes.” Then suddenly I’m doubtful. “Wait,” I say. “I have the directions right here in my bag.”
But the piece of paper on which I wrote it all is gone. I take out the packet of kalo jire, shake the bag upside down. Only a lone fluff of lint floats out like a taunt.
“I know I kept it here.” The words fall from my mouth in cracked chunks.
“Look again. Where can it go.”
A thought jabs at me syringe-sharp so I must bend and press my hands over my eyes.
Spices did you somehow—
“Maybe you left it at the store,” says Raven. “Want to go back and look?”
I shake my head. Trickster spices, is this why you acted so kindly, to lower my guard and then punish me so, where least I expected it.
“Hey, you’re really upset. Is it that important?”
“It’s a man’s life,” I say, “that I took in trust.”
“Let me look.” He stops the car, leans over my feet, lifts up the mat. Looks around carefully. A long time seems to pass. Too long. I want to tell him it’s no use, but I have no heart to speak.
“Wait, is this it?”
My sheet, scrunched into a wad with jagged edges. But still readable.
Spices what cruel game is this you are playing with me, cat and mouse.
“I wonder how it got under there,” says Raven.
I keep my knowing to myself and read him where to go. I press with my fingertips against the dashboard as if it could make the car go faster.
Raven glances at me, then floors the accelerator in one liquid movement. The car leaps into the alley, takes the corners with a smooth low roar as if it too can feel the hurry pulsing in my hands and feet. We are there sooner than I dared to hope. I jump out, the door left swinging behind me, and climb the dark, stained stairs to the top. I knock on the apartment door, calling his name, knock and knock until my palms are sore, my voice raw and trembling, even my bones.
A sound behind me. I whirl so fast my head spins. A crack in the door of the apartment opposite, two eyes like black candles, a woman’s soft accented voice. “Woh admi—he left five-six minutes already.”
Tilo, if only you hadn’t wasted time talking, putting on this foolish dress.
I sink onto the gouged top step, grip the banister for strength.
The woman comes forward, concerned. “Are you all right? You want water?”
“Please go, I just need a few minutes sitting alone,” I say, turning from her to the blood that chants its regret-song against my eardrum, my closed lids. Ah Haroun Haroun Haroun.
Time drags its slow length over me. I sit there—I do not know how long. Then his hands are on mine, pulling me up.
“Tilo, there’s
nothing you can do now. Listen, we’ll stop here again on our way back, whatever time you want.”
I look into his face. He has a small, earnest crease between his brows. His eyes seem darker, as though they are learning what he’d shied away from all this while: how to feel another’s pain, how to desire for one breath-space (ah, but that is enough to change us forever) with every muscle, every bone, every pulse of the beating brain, only to take this pain away.
It is a face, I decide, that can be trusted.
Still, I must ask. “Before sundown?”
“I promise. Now will you do something for me?”
My yes comes out reflexively, I Tilo so trained to granting wishes. Then with new caution I add, “If I can.”
“Be happy, okay? At least until we come back.”
I say nothing. I look at Haroun’s door, I remember the look I saw last on his shut face.
“Please, I need for you to be happy,” says Raven, tightening his hands on mine.
Ah American, you know well how to play the strings of my mind. You know that I will give to you what I feel guilty to give myself. Are all women like this.
“Okay,” I tell him and feel it lift, the heaviness I was holding inside.
We walk down the stairs. Behind us on the dim landing, my heart’s weight hovers (but I will not think of it now) for evening, for me to return.
He pours a glassful, palest yellow like the sky above, holds it out to me. For a moment I am content only to watch. How is it that some people have about them an elegance in their simplest, most unthinking actions. It is a wonder to me, I who was never elegant, even in my young-bodied days.
When I drink (another Mistress rule I am breaking) the wine travels through me, cold and then hot, points of light that collect in the small space behind my lids, begin to flicker. He takes the glass, turns it and drinks so his lips press where mine were a moment ago. He watches my eyes. My mouth fills with tart sweetness, fear and expectation. I am lightheaded, unmoored. Is it the wine, or him?