Before We Visit the Goddess (8 page)

“Do you believe in magicians?” Bela asks Bijan on the way to school. Immediately she regrets the question. She treasures this time, her only chance to be alone with her father. It is so peaceful in the back of the Ambassador, so silent. Also, he might respond with his own question:
Have you made any friends at school?
And then what would she say?

The morning breeze, still cool, sifts through Bijan's hair so that for a moment he looks glamorous, one of those fathers who appear in advertisements for Cinthol soap, or Horlicks steaming in oversized glasses. Bela scoots closer until she can lay her head against the sleeve of his starched blue shirt. He smells of English Leather, wholesome and clean and reassuring, and as she breathes in the scent, she can almost believe that this is how he has always smelled.

Bijan smiles. “You mean the kind that draws rabbits out of hats? Like the one that came to Leena's birthday last year? There's nothing to believe. It's all tricks, sleight of hand. But it was fun to watch, wasn't it?”

Leena used to be Bela's best friend in Kolkata; they had known each other since class one. After Bela left for Assam, Leena had written twice to her. Bela tried to write back, but she was struck by a strange paralysis. How to describe the riot around her: the night-blooming flowers with their intoxicating odor, the safeda tree with its hairy brown fruit, the oleanders with their poisonous red hearts? She wanted to tell Leena how much she missed her. At times her heart felt like one of the towels Ayah wrung out before she hung it up to dry. She wanted Leena to be here, to run hand in hand with her across a lawn so large it was like a green ocean. But what was the point of wanting the impossible? She never answered the letters.

Some days now, Bela can barely recall what Leena was like. Did she have one braid, or two? What was her favorite game? Her favorite movie? Did she like ice cream better, or sandesh? She doesn't reveal this slippage to Bijan. She senses that it would distress him almost as much as it distresses her. But she knows this much: Leena's magician (whom she cannot remember at all) could not have been anything like hers.

Bela has decided that she hates school. She has kept this fact carefully to herself, because she doesn't want to add to her parents' troubles. It has been a difficult move for them all. They had to give up their charming high-rise flat near Deshapriya Park, with a courtyard filled with tamarind trees in whose shade Bela played hopscotch with her friends after school; Sabitri's elegant dinners, where Bela was allowed to stay up and watch guests whispering in their glittery saris and imported suits; Bijan's air-conditioned office on the top floor of the company headquarters, from which Bela could see the Victoria Memorial, tiny as a toy palace.

But inside loss there can be gain, too, like the small silver spider Bela had discovered one dewy morning, curled asleep at the center of a rose. Their evenings, on the nights when Sabitri and Bijan stay home, are wondrously uneventful. Bijan leafs through the local newspaper, reading aloud tidbits that amuse or exasperate him. Sabitri labors over a gray sweater that Bela cannot imagine it will ever get cold enough here to wear. Deposited on a quilt on the floor, the baby contemplates his plump, kicking legs. All of a sudden he turns over and looks astonished. At such times, Bela feels for him a piercing love, though she continues with her homework, saying nothing. Once in a while—but less each day—she finds herself holding her breath. She is waiting for the old noises: the crash of items hitting the floor, glasses or furniture or bodies; the sour smell of vomit next morning in the upholstery. And that lightning glance from her mother's eyes, as though somehow it was Bela's fault.

How, into this precarious peace, can she inject her petty problems? She is friendless among the local schoolgirls, children of oil-field employees who look upon her with nervous suspicion as the daughter of the man who controls their fathers' destinies. Heads bent together, they whisper in Assamese when she approaches. If she happens to answer a question in class (but nowadays she has stopped doing this), they snicker at what they term her fancy city accent. Even the teachers, with their heavy Assamese-tinged English, narrow their eyes at her. Her handwriting, hampered by the fountain pen they insist she use instead of the smooth ballpoints she is used to, has been judged woefully inadequate. And tomorrow she will have to recite Tennyson's “The Lady of Shalott,” in its entirety in elocution class for Miss Dhekial, who is known to rap knuckles with her ruler. Bela's knuckles ache already in anticipation, for though she has been practicing the poem all week, under the critical gaze of the class she continues to blank out, sometimes as early as stanza two.

Bela is sitting in the Sunday garden under the mango tree, thinking all this instead of doing her homework, when the magician suddenly appears. Startled, she drops her fountain pen, which makes a spidery black splotch in the middle of her arithmetic assignment. Then it rolls down her lap onto the lawn, leaving a dark, accusing trail on her uniform.

“So sorry,” the magician says, bending his long, elegant back. “Please allow me.” He removes his hands from the folds of his shawl and a glowing falls from them onto the notebook, on the smudge, which disappears. Lightly, lightly, he runs his fingertips over the stains on Bela's uniform, and that, too, is clean again. Then he seats himself, cross-legged, at her feet. Bela looks around wildly for someone who can confirm that this is really happening, but they are alone in the garden. Under her uniform, her knee tingles where the magician had placed his fingers.

The magician's eyes flit from side to side as though he were reading something very rapidly. Their whites are a pale yellow, the color of drowned sand at the bottom of a river.

“It's called learning by heart, you know,” he says. “You can remember anything if you use your heart.” He taps his chest as he says this. Something seems to shift in her chest—her own heart, perhaps, sluggish, muscle-bound, finally coming to life. She feels the same tingle there as she did on her leg.

“Anything?” she whispers, thinking of entire worlds lost within her.

“I can help,” he says. He opens his fist and shows her a small globule the size of a pea, the color of his tamarind face.

This is exactly the kind of thing that Sabitri and Bijan have warned her of. She begins to shake her head. Then the magician says, “It will teach you not to care what people think about you.”

The tingling starts on her tongue but then travels all over: fingers, face, the curved backs of her calves. Her throat is a tunnel lined with red silk. Words pour out from it. “Good girl,” says the magician. He is small now and hazy; his face shimmers like dragonfly wings on a lake. She tries to tell him this, but she can't get through that waterfall of words. Sorrow rakes her as she watches him become tiny, then tinier, until he spins away like a spore on the wind.

The tingly sensation is leaving her now. She feels drained and disoriented and a little sick, like the time when she rode too long on the Ferris wheel at the Kolkata Maidan with Leena. Leena had thrown up afterward. Bela remembers how red her nose had been, and her eyes, embarrassed behind her glasses. She remembers how she had rubbed Leena's back and said it was okay. She remembers!

“That's wonderful, baby.”

Bela whirls to find Sabitri standing behind her chair, wearing a flowery salwar kameez that makes her look too pretty. She's suddenly angry, because Sabitri seems untouched by this move which has torn Bela into pieces and then reassembled her haphazardly, and Sabitri doesn't even realize it. She's angry, too, because Sabitri has had something to do with her father's drinking, though if anyone asked Bela what, she wouldn't be able to explain. A memory stirs inside her, something that happened in a car and changed everything, something terrifying that ended with a slap that flung Bela against the car door—that's all Bela can recall. Perhaps if her magician comes back, he will help her salvage more.

Thinking of him makes her angry all over again because Sabitri might have seen him. Bela's magician. Bela's secret.

“How long have you been standing here?” she asks with a hard scowl.

Sabitri's mouth falls open like a scolded child's. “Only a few minutes,” she says, apologetic. “I came to ask if you want fresh sugarcane. Ayah brought some from her village. I remembered how much you liked it last time. I didn't want to disturb you, though. It sounded so lovely.”

“What did?”

Through the pounding of her newborn heart she hears Sabitri say, “The poem you were reciting. Is it something for one of your classes?
There she weaves by night and day / A magic web with colors gay. / She has heard a whisper say, / A curse is on her if she stray.
”

“It's
stay
, not
stray
,” she whispers, but Sabitri continues, oblivious.

“I loved the way your voice rose and fell in all the right places. Better than anything I've heard you recite before. And the emotion—almost made me cry. It was as though someone had trained you—”

Chewing on the hard sweet sticks of sugarcane that leave fibers between her teeth, Bela asks Sabitri, “Do you believe in magicians?”

“Like in
Sleeping Beauty
?” Sabitri says as she spoons mashed banana into the baby's mouth. “But no, that was a wicked fairy—and a good one, wasn't it, that kept the princess safe? I want to believe. It would be lovely if a good fairy was watching over us here. We could do with some extra protection.” She looks into the distance, where a tiny train puffs soundlessly across the rice fields. She watches it for such a long time that Bela thinks that she has been forgotten.

Then Sabitri swivels toward Bela with a mother-glint in her eyes. “Why do you ask?”

Bela wishes she could press her head into her mother's chest, the way she did when she was little, and tell her everything. But she no longer trusts her mother that way anymore. Besides, if she talks about him, the magician will never return. She is certain of this. It's a calamity she can't bear on top of all her other losses.

“Just a book I read,” she says, nonchalant. As Sabitri busies herself with the baby again, Bela presses her tongue against the ridges of her palate, trying to find the exact spot where the globe melted into her, trying to recapture the taste.

“I did well in school today,” Bela tells Ayah, who carries into her room a tray with her afternoon snack of milk and biscuits. “In elocution, I recited my poem without a single mistake. Miss Dhekial was surprised.”

“Why surprised? You smart missy.”

“Not here in Assam. Here I feel stupid. I was terrified that I'd forget my lines and everyone would laugh. But it was perfect—like magic.” She isn't sure Ayah, who has never attended school, can gauge the height of her achievement, but the woman nods solemnly.

“Like magic,” she says.

“Do you believe in magicians?” Bela asks, her breath quickening.

Ayah looks at Bela speculatively. Then she settles herself on Bela's bed, on the peacock-colored bedspread, though as a servant she's only supposed to sit on the floor. She picks up one of Bela's biscuits and bites into it. Bela knows she should chastise her, but she doesn't.