And the World Changed (9 page)

       
Defend yourself against me

       
against my father and the father of my father

       
still living in me

       
Against my force and shouting in schools and cathedrals

       
Against my camera, against my pencil

       
against my TV-spots.

       
Defend yourself against me,

       
please, woman,

       
defend yourself!

EXISTING AT THE CENTER, WATCHING FROM THE EDGES: MANDALAS

Roshni Rustomji

Born in Bombay (now Mumbai), Roshni Rustomji (1938– ) grew up in Karachi and was educated there at the Mama Parsi High School and the College of Home Economics. She graduated from the American University at Beirut and earned further degrees at Duke University, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Rustomji lives between the United States and Mexico and is a professor emerita from Sonoma State
University, where she taught from 1973 to 1993. She has been an adjunct faculty member at the New College of California, San Francisco, since 1997 and was a visiting scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University from 1997 to 2005.

She has coedited the anthologies
Blood into Ink: South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write War
(Westview, 1994),
Living in America: Fiction and Poetry by South Asian American Writers
(Westview, 1995), and (with Elenita Mandoza Strobel and Rajini Srikanth)
Encounters: People of Asian Descent in the Americas
(Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). She has also written a novel,
The Braided Tongue
(TSAR, 2003).

“Existing at the Center, Watching from the Edges: Mandalas” knits together the many cultures and countries in which Rustomji has lived to describe the war, prejudice, and violence that she has experienced across half a century. The memoir begins in Mexico, framed by the image of
la llorona
, the timeless weeping woman of Mexican lore and Rustomji's own tears at the news of Benazir Bhutto's assassination in Pakistan. Rustomji sets two of her entries against the horror of the twenty-first century's savage new weapon—the suicide bomber. Other entries include Rustomji's childhood memory of Partition in Karachi 1947, which becomes a metaphor for the conflicts that Rustomji has experienced during her many migrations. She cleverly interweaves the images of the anti-Vietnam protests and popular culture of that era with references to the battles of ancient Greece and India—and of the great discourses of Hindu philosophy in the sacred text and epic, the
Mahabharata
, between the God Krishna and the warrior Arjun, who reluctantly fights his kinsmen on the field of Kurukshetra. “Mandalas,” the word of Sanskrit origin in the title signifies both the universe and the quest for unity, while Rustomji's friend, Mama Glafira, is an important maternal figure in Oaxaca, who embodies humanity and compassion. Rustomji says, “Mama Glafira is a very real person and this is the title that I and many others use for her. She is also known as
madrina
[Godmother] or Doña. She is a woman held in great respect and affection by many people in Oaxaca because of the care and support she gives to nearly everyone she knows.”

The USIS is the United States Information Service, the overseas version of the United States Information Agency that
fostered cultural activities and cultural exchange, and was once very active in Karachi.

• • •

For the last fifteen years I have been writing down notes and sketches of some of the wars I have lived through and yes, often with a survivor's guilt. Notes on the back of receipts, scraps of paper, note cards, letters, books, bookmarks, whatever has been at hand. I find it difficult to put them together in any formal, traditional format as I attempt to make some kind of sense of the unending wars I have watched and lived through. Wars that have taken the shape of an adult's slap on a child's face, of the red, orange, green, blue, and yellow flames engulfing the body of a monk or the body of a woman, of the stooped shoulders and traumatized eyes of a man or woman whose dignity has been broken through conquest and poverty, and of the corpses, the obscene slaughter of human beings and the earth in the name of God, truth, revenge, and justice. Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching war, sometimes from the very center and sometimes from the sidelines, that leads to a pattern of war existence that seems terrifyingly close to that of walking within a mandala. It continues to be a journey without any detachment or insight that might lead to any kind of understanding, wisdom, and action against the very nature of war and toward the essence of peace. Wars remind me of age-old hauntings begging to be exorcized from the body of our planet.

OCTOBER 31, 2001

EL DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS
. THE DAY OF THE DEAD

The two little girls sat beside me, laughing, as we made silly sentences out of words. They in English and I in Spanish. When we came to the words, ghosts and
fantasmas
, they became very serious. They asked me, “
Tía
, why does that ghost woman make awful noises and carry away children so that we can never see our families again?” One of their teachers had gone in for a
multicultural Halloween. She had turned off the lights and told them the story of
la llorona
—the weeping woman who haunts so much of Mexico and the southwest of the United States, which was of course taken by force from Mexico, which was of course taken by force by the European conquistadors, which was of course taken by force by—and so on and so forth.

According to the accepted legend,
la llorona
wails as she wanders all over the countryside and through desolate places in towns, searching for naughty children she can take away. She cries and looks for children because she has, through pride and insanity, killed her own. I have heard men talk about how they, too, have encountered
la llorona
when staggering home from an evening of drinking. Some survived, others never reached home again. One of the men who had seen her told me, “
Una guerra. Una mujer contra todos los hombres
.” Why, I asked, was it a war? Why did he say that she was a woman against all men? Because, he said, one man dishonored a woman and made her so
loca
, so insane, that she killed the children she had had by him.

The summer after the Zapatista uprising, a Zapoteca selling shawls across from my
mamacita's
house in Oaxaca stopped me. She asked me if I had heard the cry of
la llorona
the evening before. I told her that I had heard the woman who sold tamales crying out her wares late into the night throughout Colonia Jalatlaco, the
colonia
where the house is located. Her cry, “tamaaaaleees, tamaaalees” was so
triste
, full of sorrow and anxiety, that it reminded me of the laments of women all over the world as they try to sell what little they have, what little they can make in order to feed their children. The woman selling shawls told me her version of the
la llorona
legend. It is a version I have not yet encountered in any book.

According to the woman, it was the rich and powerful European lover of the beautiful Indian woman, she who was later called
la llorona
, who killed the two children she had borne him. He had done it to prove his love to his European
novia
. To prove that the two children and “that” woman were of no
importance to him. As far as the storyteller was concerned,
la llorona
had never raised her hand against her children. When I asked her about the version where
la llorona
killed her children rather than see them slowly starve to death, the woman shrugged and said, “It may have been a blessing. Have you ever seen a child slowly die of hunger?”

I tried to tell my two little companions this version of the story. They were still afraid. It did not matter who killed the children, the children were still dead. And
la llorona
was still searching for children to carry away to the land of ghosts, never to see their families again. One of the girls remembered a priest telling her about the children's crusade, “many hundreds of years ago” and how brave those children were. The other little girl described the children soldiers she had seen on TV, “nearly as old as we are.” Before we continued to create more sentences, the two girls decided that no one had killed
la llorona's
children. They had just run away and hidden so that they wouldn't have to go and live in a war. “In wars,” said the older girl, “people are hungry. They die. By bombs, by being hungry.”

1947

I was moving toward my ninth year. One evening, the bells of the Hanuman Temple—at the end of the road, across the
maidaan
where the dust rose and blew toward all our houses in summer—stopped. Just like that. They stopped and I haven't heard them since. A silence without a past, present, or future.

The next morning, the past and the future became the now. The “there” of the rumors of a savage war became the “here” of refugees. People, strangers, suddenly appeared, flooding the streets of Karachi. My mother said, “To count them as if they are numbers is wrong. Each one is a single person. Think, Roshni, think what each person must be feeling!” I saw tears in my beloved grandmother's eyes as she spoke of orphans, children
born of rape, women who would die of rape or be forced to live with the memory of violence and the reality of abandonment. I tried very hard to understand. Looking back after nearly fifty odd years, I don't know what I understood. I did realize that now we were independent. The land had been divided and there was bloodshed.

My friend Asha told me about how her favorite aunt had wept as the red
tilak
on her forehead and the red
sindhur
in the parting of her hair were rubbed off when she was widowed. All that red of marriage and of families joining together turned to blood across the land. One morning, Asha didn't come to school. I asked when she would come back. Was she ill? Had she gone to visit her grandparents in Lahore? The teacher just shook her head. Asha disappeared from my life. I learned about a new flag, and we were given sweets in school for our newly won independence and the birth of a new country.

A week later, about lunchtime, my grandmother and mother spread their much-cherished white damask tablecloth, elegant with its finely darned patches, across our big dining table. A few years ago, I went to Karachi to empty out the old house because the landlord had sold it to be demolished for a parking garage. I refused to watch as the dining table was taken away. I remembered the day my grandmother and mother spread that tablecloth and asked me to sit at the table on a chair that could be seen from the front door. My grandmother sat at the head of the table and could also be seen from the front door. We were to carry on conversations with imaginary people on the table. I already had a reputation for holding long conversations with myself and with people no one else could see. My mother and father went to the front of the house and spoke to the crowd that had gathered there. “No, she isn't here,” they said. “She didn't come to work today. She spoke about leaving for India. We can't help you.”

I felt someone's head against my legs and my grandmother warned me with her eyes not to raise the tablecloth. I reached down and felt the head and face of Dossa, one of my favorite,
most-loved older persons. She had come to our house every morning to sweep the floors, and she and my grandmother were the only people in the house I wasn't allowed to question, answer back, or tease. A few days earlier, she had arrived at our door with two policemen. Karachi was under curfew from night to dawn. When the policemen tried to stop her from coming to the house early in the morning, she wouldn't stop walking. When one of the policemen tried to explain “curfew” to her, she beat him up with her broom and lectured him on the sanctity of work. They accompanied her to the door to protect her from any harm. And now she was hiding, her face pressed against my legs, trembling as her pathetic, alcoholic son led a group of men to our door demanding that we give him his mother so that she, too, could be converted and not have to leave their land. After all, he said, God was God no matter what He was called.