Queen of Dreams (25 page)

My father, too, is looking concerned. He says he needs some fresh air and pulls a chair outside the door. When I leave to get the car and pick Jona up from school, I hear him singing under his breath as he massages the arm that had been broken. The words are not familiar, but the current of melancholy resonates inside me even after I can’t hear him anymore.

At the intersection, I glance back and am surprised to see that he’s talking to a man I don’t know. The stranger is about as old as my father and, like him, Indian. I know this last fact not from his face (his back is to me), nor from his clothes (he is wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt), but by his gestures. My father, too, uses the same curving, insistent arm movements, the same dramatic bobs of the head. They are not gestures that Belle or I—or even Jespal, in spite of his zealous turban wearing—use. The rhythms of the body—how they separate people from each other!

The light turns green, the crowd surges forward and I follow, all of us with our identical, hurried, American gait.

I arrive at the school to find Jona in tears. She can’t find her lunch box. It’s a new one, she tells me, red and black, with a dragon stitched on top. It’s special. We search her classroom and then the grounds, but there’s no sign of it.

Finally, we give up and get in the car. I’m tired and frustrated, and Jona’s still crying. I should have been back at the store an hour ago to relieve my father so that he could go into the back room and lie down for a while.

“We should have looked some more,” Jona says. “Now my dragon will fly away and never return.”

I don’t mean to snap at her, we’ve spent so little time together lately, but the words come out before I realize what I’m about to say. “Don’t be silly. That’s not a real dragon. But you should have been more careful with the box.”

“You’re always scolding me,” she says. “I wish Sonny was picking me up instead of you.
He
would have looked some more.
He
wouldn’t have said I was silly.”

I tighten my fingers on the wheel to stop myself from turning around and smacking her. How do children know the exact procedure by which a gentle, considerate parent can be transformed into a raging maniac?

I take deep breaths until I can control my voice. Then I say, “I wish your dad wouldn’t buy you all these fancy things that tempt other people to steal them.”

“You don’t know that someone stole it,” Jona says. “You shouldn’t blame people until you have proof.”

Where do they learn to talk like this?

“It could be under one of the maple trees in the other corner of the playground,” she adds. “You didn’t let me go there. And besides, Sonny didn’t buy me the lunch box.”

“Who did, then?”

“Eliana.”

I swing the car over to the curb and turn off the engine. I turn around and look at Jona. The tears have left dirt streaks on her face, and for a moment I’m tempted to drop the matter. But no, this has gone too far. I can’t let her confuse reality and fantasy anymore.

“Jonaki,” I say firmly. “There is no Eliana. I want you to tell me who really gave you that lunch box. Or”—my voice shakes now, and not just with anger—“did we just spend an hour and a half looking for a lunch box that doesn’t even exist?”

She stares out of the window.

“Jonaki, I’m speaking to you!” I’m shocked at this hard, loud voice that comes out of my mouth. I’ve never spoken to my daughter like this. But I can’t seem to stop myself. “Answer me! Right now!”

Jona cringes back against the seat. “It’s just like Eliana said,” she whispers. “She told me not to talk about her to you. She said you wouldn’t believe me, and that you’d be mad.”

Her whispering voice, with a little break in it, goes through me like a knife. I close my eyes tightly. What in hell am I doing?

When I open my eyes, I see Jona looking at me from behind a lattice of fingers, her eyes large with fear.

“I’m sorry, baby,” I tell her. “I really am. Things have been tough at the store today, but that’s no reason to take it out on you. I’ll buy you another lunch box if we don’t find this one.” I’ll have to wait on the questions that fly around me like mosquitoes, waiting for the chance to bite. Such as, When and where did Eliana (if there is an Eliana) give Jona the lunch box? And if not, what is going on inside my daughter’s head?

Perhaps Sonny has some of the answers. I’ll have to catch him by himself, so I can ask him.

“Forgive me?” I say to Jona, smiling as best as I can. She nods, but she doesn’t take the hand I offer, and when I drop her at the Kurma House before parking the car, she runs in without a backward glance.

T he man walks into the store just as dusk is falling, and after a moment of confusion I see that he’s the stranger my father was talking to earlier in the day.

We’re getting ready to close up. A few people trickled in through the afternoon, but not enough, and enormous quantities of food sit inside the display counter, awaiting disposal. Belle’s lipstick is chewed off, her hair stringy with defeat. My father’s shoulders slump, and before he disappears into the back room I notice him limping, as he did in the first days after the accident. As for me, I’m mostly numb. I feed Jona and help her with her homework (I have plenty of time, after all), and she helps me clean the plate glass on which I’d written our new name barely twenty-four hours ago. I see the sweets—so caringly prepared, so carefully stacked—reflected in it and feel like crying.

The man asks for my father and, when he emerges from the back, talks to him in a rapid Indian language I don’t know. My father answers him, though more haltingly. Both of them punctuate their speech with those emphatic, coded hand movements I’d noticed earlier. The language isn’t Bengali, I can tell that much. I look inquiringly at Belle, but she shakes her head. Her parents insisted that she speak Hindi and Punjabi while she was growing up, but after leaving home, she made a concerted and mostly successful attempt to forget them both.

When the men finish their conversation, the stranger gives my father an unexpectedly graceful salaam and leaves. My father stares after him.

“What is it, Grandpa?” Jona asks. “What did he want?”

“It’s the darnedest thing,” he says. “He heard me singing this afternoon—humming, really—and stopped to listen. He asked me if I knew any other Hindi songs. I told him that I knew quite a few. He didn’t say anything at that time, but now he came to ask if I’d be willing to sing for his friends if they came to the store. They all love songs from the movies, especially the old ones, and there’s no place where they can hear them sung live. I said I’d be happy to. He said he’d go and get them. So, ladies—can we stay open a little longer?”

We agree. What have we to lose, at this point? An hour passes. Jona dozes off. I’m beginning to suspect that my father misunderstood the man. Then there’s a noise at the door, and a group of people around my father’s age come in. Some wear Western clothes, and some are in kurta-pajamas, but what I notice most are their faces. Lined, unabashedly showing their age, they hint at eventful pasts lived in places very different from this one, difficulties and triumphs I can’t quite imagine. The word
foreign
comes to me again, though I know it’s ironic. They’re my countrymen. We share the same skin color. I look from them back to my father’s face. Does it hold the same expression? But I’m too close to him to tell.

The men order modestly: tea and jilebis. They take a few sips, a nibble or two. With awkward politeness—perhaps they’re not used to talking to women they don’t know—they tell Belle and me that everything is bahut achha. But their attention is not on the food. As soon as my father pulls up a chair, they begin to question him. Does he know the songs from
Anand
? From
Guide
? Could he sing “Gaata Rahe Mera Dil”?

And my father, who has sung only for himself until now (we had merely been backdrops for his vocalization) launches into the melody, his voice made truer by the hopes of strangers. The men nod their heads to the beat—clearly, they know the words, too, but they defer to my father’s talent. After a few minutes, one of them takes a mouth organ out of a pocket, while another lifts a small, two-ended drum out of a bag I hadn’t noticed. When my father starts on another song (“Sing us a gana from
Sholay,
Bhaisaheb!”), they accompany him, filling our shop with gaiety, causing Jona to sit up with a sleepy smile. They’ve forgotten our presence—even my father. The music continues for the next couple of hours, song after song, without break. When the tune is particularly catchy, two or three of the men get up and dance, their steps unhurried, unself-conscious, the bright handkerchiefs that materialize in their hands like magician’s scarves rising and falling in slow motion.

When my father finally stops, out of breath, the men don’t applaud. For them, what happened in this shop isn’t a performance but a ceremony, something they were part of. Belle and Jona and I applaud, though. The sound of our clapping fills the room, echoing from behind us, and when I turn, I see other people. Did they notice the music makers and come in to see what was happening? Sonny’s here, too, come to take Jona home. He gives a piercing whistle and calls out something that I don’t understand. The men break into smiles.

“Last call for food,” Sonny yells as the crowd begins to disperse. “Here’s your chance to try Bengali snacks freshly made by one of Calcutta’s greatest chefs!” I don’t think it’ll work, but a number of people wander over to the glass cases. We end up selling more than we’d expected. We still have to give away food to Marco, but when we lock up it’s with a curious sense of accomplishment.

“Well, Dad,” Sonny says as he follows us out of the store, carrying Jona, “maybe you’re on to something.”

My dad gives a cautious shrug, but he’s smiling.

Every evening the men come back to make music. If my father doesn’t know the song they ask for, they good-naturedly request a different one. (But my father’s learning, too. Sonny has brought him more tapes, and even a karaoke machine so he can practice at home.) Word of our soirees must have traveled, for one day an African American comes in with a tall, carved drum, and a flute player who looks like he’s from South America. A week later there’s a hippie with a braid and a tambourine. The men eye the African American’s shaved, gleaming head with curiosity. Some stare at the mermaid tattoo on the hippie’s bicep. But they shift around and make room for them, and nod approvingly when they hear how the new instruments add timbre to the songs. A small but regular audience gathers to hear them. They’re music lovers, not big eaters, but our business starts to pick up.

“I’d never have imagined people would be interested in listening to old-time Indian songs,” Belle tells me. “Why, most of them don’t understand a word they’re hearing.”

She’s right. There are a few South Asians here, but our audience is mostly a mix of various races.

“I guess good music crosses all boundaries, like good food,” I say.

But I suspect that the listeners keep coming back because they’re drawn, like me, to the old men. There’s an enigma about them—where they’ve come from, why they left those distant places. What they’ve had to give up in order to survive in America. Watching them pulls us out of the cramped familiarity of our own lives into a larger possibility,
once upon a time, in a land far, far
away.
It’s what I’d wrestled my mother for, even as she’d insisted that the only magic lay in
now.

But what comes across most powerfully as they make music is their joy at discovering, like an unexpected oasis tucked into an arid stretch of dunes, something they thought they’d never find here in America. It’s a pleasure to watch their pleasure.

With business stabilizing, we rehire Ping to handle the easier morning shift. My father, buoyed by his dual success as chef and singing star, starts driving himself to the store. I return to my apartment. Jona goes back to time-sharing her parents.

I’d expected to be delighted to be back home, but I’m surprised to find that I’m lonely. For all my irritation with him, I miss my father and our brief nighttime exchanges. He’s been too busy to progress further on the journals, and this, too, fills me with impatience. And though I’m delighted to have Jona with me, I guiltily admit that I’ve grown unused to shaping my day around the demands of a child’s presence. Being with her makes me restless. I miss my mother more when she’s around. When she throws a tantrum or stares at me with new pigheadedness, I want to call my mother for advice. A grudging respect for Sonny stirs in me, for all those days he took care of Jona without boast or complaint.

My painting has reached a standstill. Even Jona with her fiery scenes is doing better than I am. Two more paintings have sold at the Atelier, but I don’t feel the surge of excitement I thought I’d experience. I feel detached from the work I did before—as if it were painted by someone else, and not someone I particularly admire. There’s a static feel, particularly, to my paintings about India. As my mother would say, they’re not authentic.

I want to create something new, something different and magical, only I’m not sure what it will be. I can’t replicate the treescape with the man in white, I know that much. Some things you achieve in art are a one-time deal.

Give yourself some time, Belle says. You’ve been through so much recently.

How can I explain to her that each day that passes without painting has a hollowness to it, a sense of waste?