16
“Hi,” said Jason from the door, no hint of wanting to get much closer, but coming anyway. He looked nice. Shaved and tidy, with a shirt I gave him on his birthday. Jason is cute. Good-hearted and soft but, at the same time, brave. A man who avoids conflicts for himself but goes to war zones to treat refugees. Who cooks for his girlfriend after hours at work even if they both know the food doesn’t taste that great, but it’s romantic anyway. A ground fighter who refused to fight or see me fighting because for all the appreciation he has for the art, he also dislikes the violence behind it. A Buddhist doctor whose only aggressive impulse is air guitaring death metal while he meditates on complicated cases he needs to solve.
While me, I am this mess. A bloodthirsty mess raised in the soft cradle of Tai Chi.
Oh, the irresistible magnetism of opposites aching to balance themselves out, just so they can throw themselves in bed again…
Seeing my man of yin makes my qi melt.
“Are you Ok?” He asks, rubbing his fingers on the faint yellow bruise marks on my face, reminders of the fight that sent me to the hospital and triggered our original argument. At his touch, my skin tingles, my chest crackles and sparks. A full year of laughter and tenderness comes flashing. Our picnics at China Camp, when we ate cold dumplings next to ancient Chinese fishing boats, pretending we were in another age and time. Our dinners at breakfast, after he was back from the night shift. The nights we spent spooning and nothing else, hoping work would not call us again…I want to throw myself in his arms, but when he moves my hair away from my eyes, just like he did on our first date, I get transported somewhere far. Not a flash, this time. A memory of a Wudang legend, one Shifu told me so many times, that washed over me all at once.
For forty-two years, Zhen Wu had been waiting for the moment he would ascend to the Dao. One day, he dreamt he should go to the edge of a cliff where he sat in meditation and was visited by a beautiful woman. “I am being chased by tigers,” she said, and offered to comb his hair. Zhen Wu allowed this, and the moment she touched him, Zhen Wu realized he had lost his path to the Dao. He knew that at the gates of Heaven, one’s desires would be presented to him, and was so disappointed with himself for falling for such a rudimentary trap, that he took his sword, thrust it through her heart and mauled himself before he jumped off the side of the cliff. Through the clouds he fell, arms stretched and crying his misery to the skies so loudly that, before he hit the ground, five dragons came flying from the fog underneath and rescued Zhen Wu from the crash. That day, he became immortal and joined the Dao in its glorious oneness.
Is that what he is? My last test?
“I have a mission, Jason,” I say.
He bites his lips, breathes hard from the nose and walks the other way. I ask him to please let me finish. “I promised Shifu, my mother, and the gods of Wudang. I have a responsibility to women.”
It takes a second for him to let my words sink in. He does that himself, goes to distant parts of the world to answer his calling. He must get what I mean.
“Are there any other options that don’t include beating your brain into mush?” He asks.
There aren’t. But I don’t want to have to thrust my sword into his heart. Not yet, with him so vulnerable. I let him talk. He asks me to wait, makes a phone call, says he would rather have someone else show me. I kiss him.
Jason takes me to a little house in Berkeley. A porch hidden by trees made bald by fall, a door in the brightest color, framed by a construction as ordinary as everything around it. We thought about moving to that area once. Almost did, but the money wasn’t there yet. I didn’t have enough students, his residency wasn’t over, my fights were still not paying well. I squeeze my hands hard, force a grin concealing my foolish reveries, and Jason rings the bell.
First, came the smell—incense. Then the big eyes of a skinny woman with radiant skin and the widest of all smiles. She gives my boyfriend a slow-motion hug. Dr. Mehta, he introduces her; or Anjali, as she insists. A surgeon, Jason’s senior at the hospital, he says. She invites us in.
Inside, her house is so full of colors and textures I can’t decide where to look. There are vases and pots, pillows and throws and sofas, stripes and intricate patterns of radiant colors and different shades of metal, ceramic and textiles. She serves tea. It smells good, tastes even better. “So, you are Dr. Sonderup’s feminist girlfriend. Nice to meet a sister.” She’s so…so…calm, composed, luminous. Her voice, deep and soothing, gives me spinning chills. Her head sits tall on top of her mile-long neck, her eyes are a yellow that makes you stare in a trance. As if the tigress…was her. I can see why Jason seems awed in her presence. But I hate the way he ogles her. And, I think, the way she beckons back with her half-raised eyelids, blinking so slow they hypnotize. Did he bring me here to tell me he has another woman? Or just to make me so jealous I drop fighting against other men to fight for him? Bad move, Mr. Doctor. Bad move.
She gives me some time to breathe, pacing slowly to the back of the room. No—floating. That woman floats. The bookshelf. I’ve never seen so many books in one place. Her gaze goes straight to her left, about the height of her waist, and without any hesitation, picks one. Then another, large and thick, one of those photo books rich people like to display on their coffee tables.
“He asked me to tell you about this woman,” she says, “Phoolan Devi, the greatest fighter in the history of my country.” She points at the cover of the smaller volume. “Have you ever heard of her?”
I shake my head, now anxious to hear her story. Maybe I underestimated Jason.
“The Bandit Queen, we call her in India,” she proceeds, “because she was once the leader of bandits who tortured and killed a rival group near where my parents lived. A woman, leading a pack of violent criminals.”
Oh…are they comparing my fighting to being a murderous criminal? Because if….
She may have read my mind, or chosen those words for another reason, for the next words out of her mouth were about that. Before becoming the Bandit Queen, she told me, Phoolan Devi was given in marriage to an older guy so her parents could have something to eat. She was barely twelve. This guy abused her for years, until she ran away with a lowly member of a local gang. One day, that gang was attacked by their rival and Phoolan, who was with her boyfriend when it happened, was captured and taken as a trophy. She was gang-raped for days. Weeks. “When they finally let her go,” Dr. Mehta told, “Phoolan rebuilt her boyfriend’s gang and led their quest for revenge. She killed her rapists, then went back and mauled her abusive husband. In the years that followed, she and her men took money from the rich and distributed it to the poor. Real story.”
A badass, I think. But where are they trying to get to, here? It’s a trap, my instincts scream. Like one of those moves on Tai Chi that parries a strike while stepping back just to make the opponent walk straight into your punch. Tread lightly, Yinyin.
She places the large book on her lap. The one with bright photos and big letters saying Gods of India. She looks like a goddess too, with her body thinly covered in glistening layers of color, her posture so perfect and effortless. She must do yoga. Is that racist of me? Am I stereotyping? Like when people assume I’m good at math? Am I becoming a trashy, jealous white girl? With the tip of her fingers she flips the cover. Beneath the longest eyelashes I’ve ever seen, her big eyes gaze at the words on the page, and her long fingers slide through the book. I imagine her touch—light as a feather, I bet, and I have goosebumps. She turns it toward me, the book. A statue of a woman with multiple arms, each one carrying a different weapon. She rides a tiger.
Yes, a tiger.
My breath gets stuck in my chest.
“People say Phoolan was a reincarnation of Durga,” Anjali notes. Jason stares at me, as if he knows where this is going and is just waiting for my reaction. The hidden punch I am walking into—here it comes. She points at the prayer printed next to the drawing. To her it’s upside down, but she has no problem reciting it nonetheless:
Sing of my deeds
Tell of my combats
How I fought the treacherous demons
Forgive my failings
And bestow on me peace
A tiger-riding goddess of justice and women. The images and words burn into my retinas such that I will never forget them. They echo through my mouth in the form of a whisper, and I wonder if Jason realizes the mistake he’s made. All that visit has done is make me even surer of what I have to do. Unless…Forgive my failings? Is he actually trying to say he is finally Ok with my…Is that what this whole thing is? He understands me now? I feel the tears rising in my eyes and sniff the few escaping through my nose. Our sights meet again, Jason’s and mine, and I’m holding his hands. Oh, Jason!
Dr. Mehta tucks her silky hair behind her ear and continues. It feels like a ceremony of some sort now. The music, the scents, the words, her bearing. From a distance, somewhere in a land of dreams, she tells us about Phoolan’s glorious years running from authorities, “like pirates from old Hollywood movies, until one day…”
She finally found love?
“Until Phoolan finally negotiated her surrender,” she responds, with the sharpness of an arrow. “In exchange for a mild sentence for her people and a piece of land for her father.” What? Ok, lady, I do want to know more, I think, but later. Now can you just skip to the end, when Jason tells me we’re good again and we can be happy together and be real to who we are?
“It was in prison that she met him,” the breezy voice continues. Jason kneels beside me and grabs my hand. My body trembles. I have flashes of rich white girls giggling and squawking and I’m afraid I feel just like them.
“Buddha,” she says.
Buddha?
“And that’s how she put end to her history of violence,” Anjali says. “Like you and I, she understood her fight against the system had to continue. Patriarchy, castes…they were the problem. But it was only through peace and detachment that those problems could be fixed.”
No, that wasn’t happening. Jason, he was going to propose.
“As a result,” Anjali continued, “she ran for parliament, and with a promise of peace and solidarity for the poor, she was elected.”
The hidden punch, after all. They watch me in silence now. Two tigers enjoying the ambush they’ve set. I slowly pull my hand back to myself and guard them against my chest. Everything’s upside down to me, like the photo of Durga is to her. Anjali places the small book on top of the image of the demon-killing goddess. “A gift. In these very strange times, maybe her story will help you find your way too,” she says, and Jason stands up, bows with his hands palmed in a prayer pose, and walks to the door. Her face, I can tell, is a self-congratulatory monument to victory and I know any negative reaction I dare to show will mean I lost.
So I thank her for the hospitality instead, and let her close the door behind us.
For a second, or maybe a minute, I blank. Think of my own gods and Zhen Wu’s fall down the cliff. So innocent and desperate at once. Did I just do that? Let myself fall into the abyss? Let my insecurities and bodily needs tarnish my judgment and will?
Then, it comes to me.
I knock on the door again. Fast, before Jason can stop me: “What happened to her?” I ask. “Is she still in parliament?” The doctor’s luscious eyes fade a little. “Two years after her election, she was assassinated.”
My own journey comes in more flashes. From holy temples in Wudang, to the secret labs in California. The victories, defeats and dates; the knockouts I fed and ate, the nights Jason spent teaching and patching me. The training, so strenuous, the sex, so tender. The pleasure of taking blood out of men who think they can beat me just because they have a ball sack, and the sweetness of arriving at home to see a giant bowl of ice cream just because he wanted to see me smile. I could see my strengths, my shortcomings, my attachments, and they didn’t matter. Right here, I have a chance to hold on to the past or leave it all behind to focus on what I ought to become.
No, bitch. It’s not me who is falling into the abyss. It’s you. In my fantasy, I take a step back and punch her into the thick fog of Wudang. As if she can see it too, Anjali excuses herself, and we hear the door click for a second time. On the top of the cliff, I remain. A goddess with six arms, each holding a different weapon. I win.
“Please, babe. There are other ways.” Jason says.
I tell him I know there are. “But those are your ways, not mine. I am a fighter.”
“No, you’re not!” He says, “You are an enlightened person, I can see it in you. A kind, and gentle, and funny, and spiritual Tai Chi teacher who…”
“Sorry. I’m not. I am a beast. And I don’t want to be anything else.”
He shakes his head in disbelief. “Even if that means…”
At the gates of Heaven, we will all be tested. Mine rests there, in that ordinary house at Berkeley, California where, under the light of the holy promise I made to Shifu, to my dead mother and the gods of Wudang, I walk away. Alone, victorious. In spite of the fact that inside me, it was feeling like free fall.