Then we see the boys. Four of them, playing in the middle of the street with cans and sticks. They hadn’t been there before, or maybe it is a different street we are on now. The boys look up and I see that their sallow faces are grime-streaked. Their blond hair hangs limply over their foreheads, and their eyes are pale and slippery, like pebbles left underwater for a long time. They may be anywhere from eight to fourteen—I can’t tell their ages as I would with boys back home. They scare me on this deserted street although surely there’s no reason for fear. They’re just boys after all, with thin wrists that stick out from the sleeves of too-small jackets, standing under a tree on which the first leaves of spring are opening a pale and delicate green. I glance at Aunt Pratima for reassurance, but the skin on her face stretches tightly across her sharp, fragile cheekbones.
The boys bend their heads together, consulting, then the tallest one takes a step toward us and says, “Nigger.” He says it softly, his upper hp curling away from his teeth. The word arcs through the empty street like a rock, an impossible word which belongs to another place and time. In the mouth of a red-faced gin-and-tonic drinking British official, perhaps, in his colonial bungalow, or a sneering overseer out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as he plies his whip in the cotton fields. But here is this boy, younger than my cousin Anup, saying it as easily as one might say thank you or please. Or no problem.
Now the others take up the word, chanting it in high singsong voices that have not broken yet, nigger, nigger, until I want to scream, or weep. Or laugh, because can’t they see that I’m not black at all but an Indian girl of good family? When our chauffeur Gurbans Singh drives me down the Calcutta streets in our silver-colored Fiat, people stop to whisper, Isn’t that Jayanti Ganguli, daughter of the Bhavanipur Gangulis?
I don’t see which boy first picks up the fistful of slush, but now they’re all throwing it at us. It splatters on our coats and runs down our saris, leaving long streaks. I take a step toward the boys. I’m not sure what I’ll do when I get to them—shake them? explain the mistake they’ve made? smash their faces into the pavement?—but Aunt holds tight to my arm.
“No, Jayanti, no.”
I try to pull free but she is surprisingly strong, or perhaps I’m not trying hard enough. Perhaps I’m secretly thankful that she’s begging me—Let’s go home, Jayanti—so that I don’t have to confront those boys with more hate in their eyes than boys should ever have. There is slush on Aunt’s face; her trembling lips are ash-colored. She’s sobbing, and when I put out my hand to comfort her I realize that I too am sobbing.
Half running, tripping on the wet saris which slap at our legs, we retreat down the street. The voices follow us for a long time. Nigger, nigger. Slush-voices, trickling into us even when we’ve finally found the right road back to our building, which had been only one street away all the time. Even when in the creaking elevator we tidy each other as best we can, wiping at faces, brushing off coats, holding each other’s shivering hands, looking away from each other’s eyes.
The light has burned out in the passage outside the door. Aunt Pratima fumbles in her purse for the key, saying, “It was here, I am keeping it right here, where can it go?’
In their thin Indian shoes, my feet are colder than I have ever imagined possible. My teeth chatter as I say, “It’s all right, calm down, Auntie, we’ll find it.”
But Aunt’s voice quavers higher and higher, a bucking, runaway voice. She turns her purse upside down and shakes it, coins and wrappers and pens and safety pins tumbling out and skittering to the edges of the passage. Then she gets down on all fours on the mangy brown carpet to grope through them.
That is when Bikram-uncle opens the door. He is still wearing his grease-stained overalls. “What the hell is going on?” he says, looking down at Aunt. Standing across from him, I look down too, and see what he must be seeing, the parting in Aunt Pratima’s tightly pulled-back hair, the stretched line of the scalp pointing grayly at her lowered forehead like an accusation.
“Where the hell have you been?” Bikram-uncle asks, more loudly this time. “Get in here right now.”
I kneel and help Aunt gather up some of her things, leaving the rest behind.
Inside, Bikram-uncle yells, “Haven’t I told you not to walk around this trashy neighborhood? Haven’t I told you it wasn’t safe? Don’t you remember what happened to my shop last year, how they smashed everything? And still you had to go out, had to give them the chance to do this to you.” He draws in a ragged breath, like a sob. “My God, look at you.”
I try not to stare at Aunt’s mud-splotched cheek, her ruined coat, her red-rimmed, pleading glance. But I can’t drag my eyes away. Once when I was little, I’d looked down into an old well behind Grandfather’s house and seen my face, pale and distorted, reflected in the brackish water. I have that same dizzying sensation now. Is this what my life too will be like?
“It was my fault,” I say. “Aunt didn’t want to go.” But no one hears me.
Aunt takes a hesitant, sideways step toward Uncle. It is a small movement, something aft injured animal might make toward its keeper. “They were only children,” she says in a wondering tone.
“Bastards,” cries Uncle, his voice choking, his accent suddenly thick and Indian. “Bloody bastards. I want to kill them, all of them.” His entire face wavers, as though it will collapse in on itself. He raises his arm.
“No,” I shout. I run toward them. But my body moves slowly, as though underwater. Perhaps it cannot believe that he will really do it.
When the back of his hand catches Aunt Pratima across the mouth, I flinch as if his knuckles had made that thwacking bone sound against my own flesh. My mouth fills with an ominous salt taste.
Will I marry a prince from a far-off magic land?
I put out my hand to shield Aunt, but Uncle is quicker. He has her already tight in his grasp. I look about wildly for something—perhaps a chair to bring crashing down on his head. Then I hear him.
“Pratima,” he cries in a broken voice, “Pratima, Pratima.” He touches her face, his fingers groping uncertainly like a blind man’s, his whole body shaking.
“Hush, Ram,” says my aunt. “Hush.” She strokes his hair as though he were a child, and perhaps he is.
“Pratima, how could I….”
“Shhh, I am understanding.”
“Something exploded in my head … it was like that time at the shop … remember … how the fire they started took everything….”
“Don’t be thinking of it now, Ram,” says Aunt Pratima. She pulls his head down to her breast and lays her cheek on his hair. Her fingers caress the scar on his neck. Her face is calm, almost happy. She—they—have forgotten me.
I feel like an intruder, a fool. How little I’ve understood. As I turn to tiptoe away to my room, I hear my uncle say, “I tried so hard, Pratima. I wanted to give you so many things—but even your jewelry is gone.” Grief scrapes at his voice. “This damn country, like a dain, a witch—it pretends to give and then snatches everything back.”
And Aunt’s voice, pure and musical with the lilt of a smile in it, “O Ram, I am having all I need.”
Now it is night but no one has thought to turn on the family-room lights. Bikram-uncle sits in front of the TV, his feet up on the rickety coffee table. He is finishing his third beer. The can gleams faintly as it catches the uneven blue flickers from the tube. I feel I should say something to him, but he is not looking at me, and I don’t know what to say. Aunt Pratima is in the kitchen preparing dinner as though this were an evening like all others. I should go and help her. But I remain in my chair in the corner of the room. I am not sure how to face her either, how to start talking about what has happened. (In my head I am trying to make sense of it still.) Am I to ignore it all (can I?)—the hate-suffused faces of the boys, the swelling spreading its dark blotch across Aunt’s jaw, the memory of Uncle’s head pressed trembling to her breast? Home, I whisper desperately, homehomehome, and suddenly, intensely, I want my r
oom in Calcutta, where things were so much simpler. I want the high mahogany bed in which I’ve slept as long as I can remember, the comforting smell of sun-dried cotton sheets to pull around my head. I want my childhood again. But I am too far away for the spell to work, for the words to take me back, even in my head.
Then out of the corner of my eye I catch a white movement. It is snowing. I step outside onto the balcony, drawing my breath in at the silver marvel of it, the fat flakes cool and wet against my face as in a half-forgotten movie. It is cold, so cold that I can feel the insides of my nostrils stiffening. The air—there is no smell to it at all—carves a freezing path all the way into my chest. But I don’t go back inside. The snow has covered the dirty cement pavements, the sad warped shingles of the rooftops, has softened, forgivingly, the rough noisy edges of things. I hold out my hands to it, palms down, shivering a little.
The snow falls on them, chill, stinging all the way to the bone. But after a while the excruciating pain fades. I am thinking of hands. The pink-tipped blond hand of the air hostess as she offers me a warm towelette that smells like unknown flowers. The boys grimy one pushing back his limp hair, then tightening into a fist to throw a lump of slush. Uncle’s with its black nails, its oddly defenseless scraped knuckles, arcing through the air to knock Aunt’s head sideways. And Aunt’s hand, stroking that angry pink scar. Threading her long elegant fingers (the fingers, still, of a Bengali aristocrat’s daughter) through his graying hair to pull him to her. All these American hands that I know will keep coming back in my dreams.
Will I marry a prince from a far-off magic land
Where the pavements are silver and the roofs all gold?
When I finally look down, I notice that the snow has covered my own hands so they are no longer brown but white, white, white. And now it makes sense that the beauty and the pain should be part of each other. I continue holding them out in front of me, gazing at them, until they’re completely covered. Until they do not hurt at all.
THE WORD LOVE
YOU PRACTICE THEM OUT LOUD FOR DAYS IN FRONT OF the bathroom mirror, the words with which you’ll tell your mother you’re living with a man. Sometimes they are words of confession and repentance. Sometimes they are angry, defiant. Sometimes they melt into a single, sighing sound. Love. You let the water run so he won’t hear you and ask what those foreign phrases you keep saying mean. You don’t want to have to explain, don’t want another argument like last time.
“Why are you doing this to yourself?” he’d asked, throwing his books down on the table when he returned from class to find you curled into a corner of the sagging sofa you’d bought together at a Berkeley garage sale. You’d washed your face but he knew right away that you’d been crying. Around you, wads of paper crumpled tight as stones. (This was when you thought writing would be the best way.) “I hate seeing you like this.” Then he added, his tone darkening, “You’re acting like I was some kind of a criminal.”
You’d watched the upside-down titles of his books splaying across the table. Control Systems Engineering. Boiler Operations Guide. Handbook of Shock and Vibration. Cryptic as tarot cards, they seemed to be telling you something. If only you could decipher it.
“It isn’t you,” you’d said, gathering up the books guiltily, smoothing their covers. Holding them tight against you. “I’d have the same problem no matter who it was.”
You tried to tell him about your mother, how she’d seen her husband’s face for the first time at her wedding. How, when he died (you were two years old then), she had taken off her jewelry and put on widow’s white and dedicated the rest of her life to the business of bringing you up. We only have each other, she often told you.
“So?”
“She lives in a different world. Can’t you see that? She’s never traveled more than a hundred miles from the village where she was born; she’s never touched cigarettes or alcohol; even though she lives in Calcutta, she’s never watched a movie.”
“Are you serious!”
“I love her, Rex.” I will not feel apologetic, you told yourself. You wanted him to know that when you conjured up her face, the stern angles of it softening into a rare smile, the silver at her temples catching the afternoon sun in the backyard under the pomegranate tree, love made you breathless, as though someone had punched a hole through your chest. But he interrupted.
“So don’t tell her,” he said, “that you’re living in sin. With a foreigner, no less. Someone whose favorite food is sacred cow steak and Budweiser. Who pops a pill now and then when he gets depressed. The shock’ll probably do her in.”
You hate it when he talks like that, biting off the ends of words and spitting them out. You try to tell yourself that he wants to hurt you only because he’s hurting, because he’s jealous of how much she means to you. You try to remember the special times. The morning he showed up outside your Shakespeare class with violets the color of his eyes. The evening when the two of you drove up to Grizzly Peak and watched the sunset spreading red over the Bay while he told you of his childhood, years of being shunted between his divorced parents till he was old enough to move out. How you had held him. The night in his apartment (has it only been three months?) when he took your hands in his warm strong ones, asking you to move in with him, please, because he really needed you. You try to shut out the whispery voice that lives behind the ache in your eyes, the one that started when you said yes and he kissed you, hard.
Mistake, says the voice, whispering in your mother’s tones.
Sometimes the voice sounds different, not hers. It is a rushed intake of air, as just before someone asks a question that might change your life. You don’t want to hear the question, which might be how did you get yourself into this mess, or perhaps why, so you leap in with that magic word. Love, you tell yourself, lovelovelove. But you know, deep down, that words solve nothing.
And so you no longer try to explain to him why you must tell your mother. You just stand in the bathroom in front of the crooked mirror with tarnished edges and practice the words. You try not to notice that the eyes in the mirror are so like her eyes, that same vertical line between the brows. The line of your jaw slants up at the same angle as hers when she would lean forward to kiss you goodbye at the door. Outside a wino shouts something. Crash of broken glass and, later, police sirens. But you’re hearing the street vendor call out momphali, momphali, fresh and hot, and she’s smiling, handing you a coin, saying, yes, baby, you can have some. The salty crunch of roasted peanuts fills your mouth, the bathroom water runs and runs, endless as sorrow, the week blurs past, and suddenly it’s Saturday morning, the time of her weekly call.
She tells you how Aunt Arati’s arthritis isn’t getting any better in spite of the turmeric poultices. It’s so cold this year in Calcutta, the shiuli flowers have all died. You listen, holding on to the rounded o’s, the long liquid e’s, the s’s that brush against your face soft as night kisses. She’s trying to arrange a marriage for cousin Leela who’s going to graduate from college next year, remember? She misses you. Do you like your new apartment? How long before you finish the Ph.D. and come home for good? Her voice is small and far, tinny with static. “You’re so quiet…. Are you OK, shona? Is something bothering you?” You want to tell her, but your heart flings itself around in your chest like a netted bird, and the words that you practiced so long are gone.
“I’m fine, Ma,” you say. “Everything’s all right.”
The first thing you did when you moved into his apartment was to put up the batik hanging, deep red flowers winding around a black circle. The late summer sun shone through the open window. Smell of California honeysuckle in the air, a radio next door playing Mozart. He walked in, narrowing his eyes, pausing to watch. You waited, pin in hand, the nubs of the fabric pulsing under your palm, erratic as a heart. “Not bad,” he nodded finally, and you let out your breath in a relieved shiver of a laugh.
“My mother gave it to me,” you said. “A going-away-to-college gift, a talisman?
??.” You started to tell him how she had bought it at the Maidan fair on a day as beautiful as this one, the buds just coming out on the mango trees, the red-breasted bulbuls returning north. But he held up his hand, later. Swung you off the rickety chair and carried you to the bed. Lay on top, pinning you down. His eyes were sapphire stones. His hair caught the light, glinting like warm sandstone. Surge of electric (love or fear?) up your spine, making you shiver, making you forget what you wanted to say.
At night after lovemaking, you lie listening to his sleeping breath. His arm falls across you, warm, protective, you say to yourself. Outside, wind rattles the panes. A dry wind. (There hasn’t been rain for a long time.) I am cherished. But then the memories come.
Once when you were in college you had gone to see a popular Hindi movie with your girlfriends. Secretly, because Mother said movies were frivolous, decadent. But there were no secrets in Calcutta. When you came home from classes the next day, a suitcase full of your clothes was on the doorstep. A note on it, in your mother’s hand. Better no daughter than a disobedient one, a shame to the family. Even now you remember how you felt, the dizzy fear that shriveled the edges of the day, the desperate knocking on the door that left your knuckles raw. You’d sat on the doorstep all afternoon, and passersby had glanced at you curiously. By evening it was cold. The numbness crept up your feet and covered you. When she’d finally opened the door after midnight, for a moment you couldn’t stand. She had pulled you up, and you had fallen into her arms, both of you crying. Later she had soaked your feet in hot water with boric soda. You still remember the softness of the towels with which she wiped them.
Why do you always focus on the sad things, you wonder. Is it some flaw in yourself, some cross-connection in the thin silver filaments of your brain? So many good things happened, too. Her sitting in the front row at your high school graduation, face bright as a dahlia above the white of her sari. The two of you going for a bath in the Ganga, the brown tug of the water on your clothes, the warm sleepy sun as you sat on the bank eating curried potatoes wrapped in hot puris. And further back, her teaching you to write, the soft curve of her hand over yours, helping you hold the chalk, the smell of her newly washed hair curling about your face.