Queen of Dreams (31 page)

I appreciate their sentiments, but don’t quite believe them.

This is my fatal flaw, as my mother often informed me: I’m suspicious and pessimistic, quick to think the worst of people. “Not that you have reason to be that way,” she’d say.

I’d bristle every time she said that. I’d remind her that I had a whole list of reasons, headed by Sonny-the-cross-I-have-to-bear. What I didn’t point out was that I hadn’t always been this way. (She should have known it, as my mother. She would have known it if her attention hadn’t always been pointed elsewhere. Until the party, I’d believed the best of everyone, particularly my husband. It was not suspicion but trust that undid me that night.)

But now that she’s gone, I can see things from her perspective, too. When I think of the people she helped, I have to admit that my problems are minor ones. Her journals have given me glimpses: illness, murder, suicidal depression, schizophrenia. Sometimes at night, I worry about her dream people, whether they’ve been able to find a new interpreter. After I send a good thought to Jona, I send them one as well.

Even in death, my mother has proved to be right. Our customers are starting to help us, just as they’d promised. It’s excruciatingly slow—they can come here only in between their other jobs—but it’s costing us much less than I feared. We had to argue with them before they’d even accept any payment. The results are not five-star, but they’re serviceable, and done with affection. As my father reminds me, it’s not as if this was a five-star venue to begin with. Meanwhile, business continues. We’ve lost some of our more finicky customers, but it isn’t enough to put us under.

After the fire, other changes occur. One evening a few people ask if they can put together a small stage for the musicians. It would help some of them if they could sit cross-legged. We’d still keep chairs for the guitarist and the drummers. The stage could be dismantled after the evening’s performance, if we wished.

After a hasty consultation in the back room (with me resisting as usual), we agree to give it a try. Soon two low wooden platforms, draped with a patchwork quilt, are set up in a corner. Bolsters that someone’s wife has covered with silk are arranged on them. (I hadn’t thought of the musicians as having families. They seemed so complete in themselves as they made their music. But recently I’m seeing children running around, teenagers taking over on instruments while their parents break for tea.) Someone puts an enameled box filled with breath-freshening masala on the counter. And as if that’s a sign, people begin to bring in other things—a Tibetan bell, a small Persian rug in jeweled colors, an African mask, a woodcut from Afghanistan, a jade figurine, a beat-up mirror that looks Russian, with carved metal doors you can open and close. I can’t guess the value of these items, but it’s clear that they’re precious to their owners, who carried them all the way to this country from their past lives.

No one ever speaks to me about these objects. I find them in little piles behind the stage when I clean up at closing time. (We’ve stopped dismantling the stage at night. It doesn’t seem worth the effort, especially as it’s become a popular seating area for our daytime customers.) I’m ambivalent about the gifts. At times I’m deeply honored, at others I’m exasperated at having to find space for them in the store. I’m afraid that people will keep bringing in things until the place is crushed under their weight. Already I’ve had to remove several of my own decorations to accommodate the new items—even my painting of bathing elephants (though recently my fondness for it had been somewhat reduced). My Kurma House (but was it ever mine?) is suffering a sea change, growing into something very different from what I had envisioned. I feel as if I’m losing control. But when I calm down, I find that I quite like the creature it has become, this many-chambered nautilus. One day I take my paintbrush and add a word to the window:
International.
Soon after that, by some unspoken consensus, our customers decide that the Kurma House has everything it needs. From that time on, I never find another gift.

^“
I don’t like the way we do business,” my father says, “charging our customers for each little thing they order, keeping track of every paltry pakora and jilebi. Can’t we ask them to pay a minimum amount and eat what they want? Like a buffet?”

I bristle with objections. They’re big men, many of them, with the healthy appetites of men who work with their hands. What if they take “All You Can Eat” as a challenge, a matter of machismo? We could go bankrupt, I fret to Belle.

“I’ll set out the food in warming trays and put a large bowl on the counter for payment,” my father says. “People can pay at the start of the evening and help themselves whenever they want.”

I can feel my frown solidifying into a permanent fixture on my face. “You mean you won’t even check to make sure they’re paying?”

“Honor system,” says my father. “Makes everyone feel trusted, and doesn’t disturb the musicians.”

I frown. “Is this how you did business in the tea shop in India?”

He bursts out laughing. “Are you kidding! Customers there would have robbed us blind.”

“Then how come—?”

He shrugs. “But now we’re in a different country, with different people. We can’t just follow old ways. We’ve got to be flexible, no? This feels right to me.”

It doesn’t feel right to me. I fear that our customers who are immigrants will not understand the honor system. I fear that the others can’t be trusted. But at the end of the first evening, I discover, with some embarrassment, that we’ve collected about as much money as we usually make, and gone through a similar amount of food. In the next few days, I watch carefully and find that if people want several helpings, they put more money than we’d asked for in the bowl. They do it silently, not making a big deal of it.

“But why?” I ask my father one night as we walk to the parking lot.

“It may be that Kurma House International has become more to them than just a place to pick up something to eat. Maybe because they helped rebuild it, they feel it’s theirs. They don’t want to lose it. So they’re doing their bit to ensure we stay in business.”

Was this what my mother had hinted at when she’d spoken of a unique attraction? Had we, willy-nilly, managed to create what she’d wanted?

“I’m so ashamed,” I confess. “I didn’t really trust them at first.”

“You find it hard to trust people, don’t you?” he says.

His tone is uncannily like my mother’s. Startled, I glance at him. But his eyes are his own: kind and happy and a little tired. For a moment I’m tempted to tell him about the party that changed me. But the moment passes.

“The honor system was a good idea, even if I say so myself,” he adds with a chuckle, then gestures toward the darkened windows of Java. “Bet
their
customers don’t feel the same way about them.”

“I guess not,” I reply. I chuckle to keep him company, but there’s a tingle of uneasiness inside me, as though I’m overlooking something important.

32

It is silent in the apartment, and dark. The woman comes from the shower, the ends of her wet, curling hair soaking into the thin material of her robe. She turns on a lamp and sits by the small oval of yellow light with the package on her knee. It is actually a large manila envelope, stained and grimy from the fire, forgotten for all this time. Only today a workman rescued it from the back room, from under a pile of rubble. She does not recognize the smudged handwriting, but the message is clear:
For You.
She tells herself not to hope too much, but she can feel the blood swirling in her head. She has been waiting so long for a sign.

With trembling hands she tears open the envelope, discards the bubbled plastic, the cardboard protector sheets. She is left holding five photographs. She lays them on the coffee table. They are photographs of paintings—all by Indian painters, though she is not sure how she knows this. Neither the subject matter nor the style is Indian in any traditional way, though one of the compositions places words from an Indian script in the midst of geometric shapes. She cannot tell if they are photos of the actual paintings, taken in a studio or a gallery, or images of images taken from books. It doesn’t matter. They are clear enough, and—her throat grows dry with excitement—like nothing she has seen before.

The first is an abstract landscape in flesh-pink and chalky yellow, with startling insertions of blue and red. There is a river, emerald green, flowing by cliffs where flowering shrubs hang. There is a triangular shape that could be a temple or a rock. But what strikes her most is the energy behind the lines, a sense of a hidden presence. She stares awhile, mesmerized, then turns the photograph over, hoping for a further hint: a name, a title. But the back is blank. The backs of all the photos are blank. She is left with only her imagination as guide.

The second painting is a dark submarine blue. A woman’s torso is submerged in this color. Light and shadow play over its curves, its absolute, held stillness. Petals, the waxy white of plumerias, float on a current across it, catching for a moment on the island of the breast, the rounded promontory of the hip. Could the blue represent not ocean but night, the current of dreaming? What kind of expression would the woman’s face hold, if Rakhi could see it?

The third painting has a background of neon yellow. A many-armed purple being with a moonlike face floats above a nest of serpents. Is he (she? it?) a god or a human? Or the representation of an idea? Her breath is caught by the strident juxtaposition of color and shape, the brilliant jewel eyes, the surprise of the composition, like a twist in a complex plot.

The fourth painting pulls her into the dark circle at its center, a black hole, magnetic, inexorable. She saves herself from falling by holding on to the border: squares made up of geometric shapes, richly textured rugs. Crosses, arrowheads, concentricities in earth colors. She did not realize a triangle could fill space so beautifully.

The final painting is made up of two parts, side by side. The left gives her the sensation of bending over and peering into a blue-green well, spheres within spheres, like ripples. At the very center, where one would have expected darkness, a brilliant white light. The image on the right is that of a closed door with an arch above it. (Or is it a sacred shape she cannot fathom, a lingam, a stupa?) Blacks again, blues, pale greens. At the top of the door, that same light. When she closes her eyes, she can see brightness branded into her lids.

She’ll never know who sent her these paintings, but she has no doubts as to why they were sent. They’ve exploded the boundaries she had put around what art must be, and given her possibility. They’re Indian—but in such different ways! All this time she’s been putting boundaries around that word, too, what it can mean. Why, that word encompasses her just the way she is, with all the gaps in her education, all her insufficiencies. She doesn’t have to change to claim her Indianness; she doesn’t have to try to become her mother. Things are breaking down inside of her. She waits to see if she can build new, satisfying shapes from them.

33

FROM THE
DREAM JOURNALS

In the third year of our training, we were put in the care of Elder Jahnavi, a bent-backed woman who could walk only with the help of a staff. We paid her little attention when we first saw her. Among the more flamboyant elders, she appeared as muted as a night-blooming flower in daytime. But when she addressed us, we knew at once that we were in the presence of power.

Jahnavi’s expertise lay in the study of dreams out of history and myth. She would ask us what they meant, and what they revealed about the nature of dreaming and its relationship to our waking lives. We spent many afternoons in the dim sand cave assigned to her, examining dreams that, correctly interpreted and faithfully followed, had transformed lives and nations. Others, ignored, had brought about ruin. The dream of Sage Narad who turns into a monkey, the dream of Markandeya and the flood, the demon king Ravana’s dream of defeat and death, sent to him in warning—they all come back to me, though the years have eroded their details. But I remember the dream of Tunga-dhwaja in the forest as though I saw it yesterday.

Yes, deliberately I say
saw,
for in Jahnavi’s presence we were able to dream these ancient dreams again. We would lie down on the soft floor of her cave and close our eyes, and the dream would appear to each of us, though each saw it differently, based on the level of her understanding, and colored by her desires and fears. One of my sister dreamers had a sweet tooth, and for her, every dream celebration had a golden bowl filled to the brim with kheer. Another feared scorpions. In her dreams disaster took the shape of a scorpion bite. And I—but I will write of my own weaknesses another time.

Here is the story of King Tunga-dhwaja:

The king is a fearsome warrior, a conqueror well aware of his reputation. He is also a lover of the hunt. And on this day, accompanied by his nobles and his huntsmen, he rides into the forest that borders his palace. It is a good place for finding boar and tiger and deer—though Tunga-dhwaja considers deer too easy a target and will go after one only if nothing else is available.

But this day, despite the efforts of his beaters, not a single animal appears. The disappointed king is ready to return to his palace when he sees in the distance a white boar, that rarest of creatures. He rides after it—he cannot resist—entering deeper into the forest’s darkness, leaving his companions behind. Engrossed in pursuit, he does not notice how the forest is changing its nature, how the trees have grown foreign, how the flowers release a heavy, mesmerizing fragrance into the air. Until the boar disappears behind the trunk of a tree, vanished inexplicably, and an exhausted Tunga-dhwaja realizes he is lost. He dismounts. He is not afraid—he has been in worse situations. In the morning his huntsmen will find him. If not, he will retrace his tracks and find his own way back.