Before We Visit the Goddess (9 page)

“In my village,” Ayah says in a hushed tone as she munches, “is big magician. Very strong. Very danger.” She proceeds to describe to Bela how he once battled an evil lake-spirit by burning mustard seeds and chanting a powerful spell until the spirit was forced to flee, bleeding from its eyes and mouth and anus. Now it wanders around looking for unwary individuals that it can drag to a watery death. Bela listens in horrified fascination even though she knows she will wake at night with the worst nightmare.

Bela is on the old swing at the far edge of the lawn, urging it higher than the branch it hangs from—something she has been expressly instructed not to do. She has been out here under the hot sun for a while. That, too, she has been told not to do, but no one at home seems to have noticed. She is waiting for her magician, but with each moment her hopes wilt further. When he does appear, perched on a nearby branch, she is so startled that she forgets to push into the arc of the swing, which plummets downward. The rope makes a terrible snapping sound. She feels herself sliding off the seat. But the magician catches her before she hits the ground. Then he cocks his head, birdlike, and looks at her sadly.

“I have come to say goodbye.”

“No!” Bela cries. “Don't go.” There is so much she wants to tell. The admiration on the faces of her classmates in elocution, and how in the afternoon they let her join their games. The bitter sweetness of remembering Leena. The nightmare that terrified her and the way she handled it. The gauzy, stippled dragonflies she keeps seeing everywhere, which remind her of him. There's so much she wants to ask him, too. What happened in the car. What happened to her father afterward.

“You can come with me,” the magician says, spreading his arms like wings. His robe falls open and his body gleams like polished metal. Something dark and tidal rises inside Bela. But then she remembers Sabitri and Bijan, their faces bending to kiss her good night. She begins to back up toward the house, its solid, square predictability. The magician makes no move to stop her.

“Is that what you really want?” he asks in his kind, reasonable voice. “They have the baby. They will not miss you much. They might even be happier with you gone. After all, you ruined everything for them.”

His voice echoes in her head, and her eyes fill with blinding spots as though she has gazed too long at something bright and burning. “No,” she whispers, but she is not sure which part of his statement she is refuting. When his fingers part her lips, she holds her mouth open for the globules he is placing on her tongue. One, two, three . . . A tingling opens up the top of her skull.

The magician shakes out his headband and brings it to her face. “It is forbidden to see the way,” he tells her. Obediently she begins to close her eyes. Then she remembers. Last night, when she woke from the nightmare with her heart smashing against her ribs, she went to the baby's crib and lifted him out, grabbing him awkwardly around the middle like a package. He didn't even awaken. She brought him to her bed and lay down and held him. His head fit perfectly under her chin. Harsha, she whispered, saying his name for the first time. Harsha. She fell asleep listening to his breath—he snored a little, he had a cold—and the dream did not return.

“No,” she cries, but already the ground is tilting up to meet her.

The room is full of papery whispers, and there are more floating around outside the door. Snippets of moments flash by Bela. She was in an ambulance, strapped onto a stretcher, escorted by sirens. They carried her to this room, this bed. Fingers examined her, pulling back the lids of her closed eyes. Heatstroke, someone said. Dehydration. IV. Someone else pushed a needle into the hollow of her elbow, not caring that it hurt.

“I think she's waking up!” Bela hears Sabitri exclaim. Her mother's face looms large over the bed, alarming as an out-of-orbit moon, fading in and out of focus. In a hushed, sickroom voice, she adds, “Bela, sweetie? Can you see me? Do you know who I am?”

Beyond Sabitri, servants crowd the room, muttering among themselves. At the foot of the bed, a white-coated man stands, garlanded by a stethoscope. It takes Bela a few moments to recognize him as the company doctor who treated her when she had the fever. Beyond him, by the hospital window, stands her father, tieless and crumpled, gesturing at a man in a police uniform.

“Talk to me, baby!” Sabitri's voice cracks. “Can you talk?”

Bela wants to reassure her, but her head hurts. It's too much of an effort to speak, and even to keep her eyes open. The light from the window burns them. On the other side of her closed lids, she hears her mother begin to weep.

“Madam, please calm down,” the doctor says in his slow country voice. “Your daughter is conscious, and that is a good sign. We should clear the room. I need to check her again to make sure she does not have a concussion.” He holds Bela's wrist between cool fingers. “Her pulse has normalized, though I suspect her reflexes are still slow. Clearly, she needs to rest.”

“But what about the man she was rambling about? Do you think he could have given her drugs? She said something— Do you think he harmed—?” Sabitri's cut-off words waver in the air.

The doctor gives an embarrassed cough. “No, madam, there are no signs of . . .
that
. In fact, I am not sure there was a man at all. Your daughter may have just fallen from the swing and hit her head—she does have a bump. Also, she may have been out in the sun too long. Such things can disorient anyone.”

No
, Bela wants to cry.
There was a man. There was
. A special man, sparkly as a gold tooth, opening up locked doors inside her mind. Making meaning out of the Morse code of fluttering dragonfly wings. She couldn't have mistaken something so important.

“I don't think she's disoriented,” Bijan interjects, suddenly, hoarsely. Bela hears him striding to the bed, her champion. She waits for him to throw his arms around her, but he isn't paying attention. “There definitely was someone. Someone who intended to harm Bela. I want you to test her blood for drugs. Last week, I had a big argument with the workers' union about overtime pay—I bet they had something to do with this.”

Are his words slurred? Is an old odor rising from him, raw and pungent? Bela's eyes fly open in alarm.

“The bastard—and anyone else who was involved—they're going to be sorry they messed with my daughter.” Bijan leans over the bed. Like cracks in porcelain, lines run from his nose to the corners of his mouth. He grabs the doctor by his white sleeve. Bela can taste his anger. It's bitter and desperate, like the dregs left at the bottoms of whiskey glasses, the ones she sometimes sipped from in the morning in Kolkata before her parents awoke.

“Sir, please don't jump to conclusions,” the policeman says. He is a burly man, and Bela notices dark blotches of sweat under the armpits of his khaki uniform. “We will definitely be on the lookout for a stranger—in case there was one. As soon as the doctor allows, I will get a detailed description from your daughter. I would like to question the maidservant, too, since she was the one who found the girl at the edge of your property.”

Bela's eyes skid across the watching faces until she finds Ayah's. She tries to read what Ayah might have seen. A dragonfly that hovered for a moment before the wind snatched it away? The wooden seat of the swing thwacking the back of a head? A man with a polished metal body wrapped in a robe of fire? But Ayah's eyes are black stones. She stares at the IV machine with its endless silver dripping as though it were a holy mystery.

“Question the union leaders,” her father says. “Find out what kinds of alibis their henchmen have.”

“The union is very strong—better not to accuse them unless we have proof,” the policeman says. Bela hears the warning in his voice.

And where is Harsha? Why is he not in this room with Ayah? Who is watching him? Is he alone at home? Someone needs to go and get Harsha right now. Bela tries to tell Sabitri that it isn't safe to leave Harsha alone, nothing is safe here, doesn't she know that? But her mouth is gummy and her lips will not open.

Hands fisted, Bijan rises to face the policeman. “I'm going to get to the bottom of this, if it's the last thing I do. I'm not afraid of any damned union.”

“Bijan, please.” Sabitri puts a hand on his arm.

“Don't touch me! None of this would be happening if it wasn't for you!” He pushes her away so hard that Sabitri's shoulder hits the wall. The doctor has to grab her to keep her from falling.

“And if I don't get the necessary cooperation from you,” Bijan says to the policeman, his voice rising, “I won't hesitate to complain to your superiors.”

The policeman's eyes narrow. He lowers his forehead like a bull about to charge. And Bijan faces him, standing tall, glowing with exhilaration, because isn't this what he's been missing ever since he got here, an opportunity for battle? For destruction?

But Bela does not see any more because she has squeezed shut her eyes. She is crying so hard that her body shudders and her indrawn breath rasps her throat, until finally the doctor has to give her a shot. Even then sobs burst out of her, intermittent, effortful, as though through viscous mud. Her heart is changing from iridescence back to a flesh-bound lump that thuds uncertainly in her chest. She has lost something, but what? An opportunity to remember? To understand a mystery? To make amends? She knows this much, though: More losses are on their way. She feels a shift in the air, an imminent storm. And no one in this room knows how to stop it.

B
lanca bursts into the utility area in the back of Nearly New Necessities as I'm dumping the latest batch of donated clothing in the washer.

“Hola, girlfriend!” She sets her grocery bag on top of the dryer and frowns. “How come you're banished back here? Aren't you supposed to be working the cash register? What did you do to piss off Mr. Lawry?”

I execute an elegant shrug. “Do I have to do anything?”

“Well, there was that time when you told a customer that the pants she tried on made her look like a fuchsia hippo.”

“She asked me. I was trying to be truthful and expressive.”

“There are times when it's good to be that. This wasn't one.” She narrows her eyes. “Tell me, Tara!”

“This man—he was about to buy a stereo system. I pointed out that the speakers didn't work.”

“I bet Mr. Lawry didn't take kindly to that. Let me guess: he said,
We never told him that the speakers were working. If he didn't check them out, whose fault is it?
”

“Something like that.”

“You're going to get yourself fired one of these days, Tara.”

“It isn't right to cheat people.”

Blanca sighs, then changes the subject. “Look what I got us from Jehangir's Take Out.”

She rummages in the bag and holds up a greasy brown-paper package.

“Can't eat pakoras. I'm on a diet.”

“Why? Did El Roberto say you're too fat?”

“I don't need a man to tell me what I am.”

Blanca cocks her head. “Had your first fight, did you? I was wondering how long it would take—”

She sees my expression and stops, then brightens again. “Picked this up, too.” She hands me a crumpled copy of the
Indo-Houston Mirror
. “You need to be in touch with your people.”

It's a sore point between us, what Blanca sees as my abandonment of the Indian community and I consider self-preservation.

Mr. Lawry's voice, mournful as a turtledove's, floats into the utility room. “Girls, girls, why is it I get the feeling that someone back there is wasting their time and my money?” His tone turns snap-crackly. “Get your butts up here. Now.”