My to-be father Bill, seven years ago, at thirty-four: He’s marching down San Francisco’s Market Street, carried along by the largest crowd he’s ever seen. There are people swarming around him, thronging pavements, filling windows of buildings above, even swinging from lampposts. There are flags and banners and placards everywhere: Not In My Name. Drop Bush Not Bombs. No Blood For Oil. The air is feverish with the sound of chants, throbbing with the sound of drums.
It is February 2003. Earlier that weekend, millions had poured out onto the streets in other cities across the world—London, Madrid, Rome, Paris, New York, Baghdad, Sydney, Tokyo, Calcutta—to protest the proposed U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Bill, at that time, heads a Bay Area start-up with his friend Josh, developing software to make medical records available across hospital networks. The work has been especially demanding the last year, after the tech bubble collapsed and investor funding dried up. In its struggle to remain afloat, the company needed to downsize, and Bill is now its entire legal team, as well as its chief operating officer. He should be working today, to put together a presentation for a prospective client that could underwrite the costs of future development. Instead he’s here, chanting with the group he’s fallen in with, shouting his throat hoarse.
Bill has never taken part in such demonstrations before. There are blue-uniformed riot police everywhere—on foot, mounted on horseback, seated on motorbikes—all armed with lethal-looking batons, geared in shields and helmets. Placing himself in any situation that invited the attention of the police was high on the list of activities that displeased his grandmother. He can almost feel Mame’s fingernails pinching into his earlobes, showing her disapproval.
But he’d chosen to march after all.
Bill doesn’t consider himself a pacifist—he supported the first Gulf War, the rooting out of the Taliban from Afghanistan, and the broad outlines of “The War on Terror”—or an activist. Until now, he’s never joined any political or politically inclined organization, not even the Black Student Union at Stanford, where he got his undergraduate and law degrees.
Bill has always believed what his grandparents spent their life impressing on him—that his life is what he makes of it. That if he stays out of trouble and works hard, he’s bound to succeed. That there’s nothing stopping him, not the color of his skin, not his race, not his background, only the powers he lets control him.
His life has borne this out. Years of hard work in a mostly White and Asian high school pay off. He graduates from Stanford with distinction, and without debt, cobbling together a slew of scholarships. A phenomenal LSAT score enables him to enroll in Stanford Law School, allowing him to remain close to Mame after his grandfather’s death during his sophomore year. His success at his first job, at a large firm in San Francisco, allows him to quickly clear his law school loans. This positions him well to make the switch when the dot-com boom takes off, joining his best friend, Josh, also from Stanford, to start a company that angel investors salivate over as a probable emerging market leader in healthcare software.
But when the dot-com bubble bursts, it also unfairly devastates their start-up. The last two years have been a series of setbacks, with their VCs pulling out and their flagship product floundering, despite all their efforts to turn the tide.
Bill, for the first time in his life, is facing the certainty of failure, of all his hard work of the past few years coming to nought. Many of his friends cashed out before the bust, selling their half-baked start-ups at the first opportunity, as though they understood something he didn’t—that knowing how to ride the wave and knowing when to get off was more important than hard work.
Now the purveyors of the war are setting in motion another wave, one they intend to ride to wealth and fortune, a wave that will destroy another country in its wake. Even to someone as politically uninclined as Bill, it seems obvious that the proposed war is a cynical misuse of 9/11, initiated by oil companies and their Washington enablers seeking access to Iraq’s oil fields. The ever-changing rationales for the war—Saddam Hussein’s purported links to 9/11; next, his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction; finally, freedom and democracy in the Middle East—strike Bill as similar to the ever-changing explanations that Wall Street had spouted to justify its exuberant evaluations of the dot-com start-ups before the bust. Wall Street had claimed that the market was no longer constrained by outdated laws or history, just like the proponents of the war are now claiming the right to preemptive strikes and expressing an optimism not supported by past misadventures.
There seems to be hope in the air, though, as Bill marches down Market Street. Surely such a massive demonstration of the people’s will cannot be ignored. The moment is pregnant with possibility, as if this march were not only about preventing a war but also about reclaiming strengths left unused, about rediscovering kinship long forgotten. Bill, whose only experiences of comparable crowds were football matches in Stanford’s stadium, is jolted awake to a boisterous, almost joyous new world bursting all around him.
Someone hands him a placard. Peace, it says simply, a sentiment he can get behind wholeheartedly, something Mame could have no objection to. He thrusts it in the air in time to the drumming and the ringing of a temple bell somewhere ahead, as do the others marching beside him.
By Powell Street, near the cable-car turntable, there’s a sudden commotion. A minute ago the march was proceeding peacefully, but now a section in front charges to the left into the Nordstrom mall. Bill stands rooted as he sees figures dressed in black jeans and black long-sleeved T-shirts emerge from the group ahead. They have black ski masks pulled down to cover their faces, and armed with skateboards, they pound away at the display windows. Chants turn to hoots and shouts; the sound of breaking glass replaces the drumming.
Soon the air is rent with screams as the riot police swoop in from both sides of the road, their batons raised, their bikes careening toward the mall to seal off the entrance. Bill’s section of the march is in disarray. The street flashes with the chaos of batons, placards, and banners caught in sunlight, the black of the vandals, the blue of the riot police, the gleam of motorbikes, the glitter of glass shields.
A policeman on a motorbike chases a vandal running in Bill’s direction. Bill is convinced that underneath the black attire the vandal is black-skinned like him, despite glimpses of fair hands and fair rings around the eyes visible through the ski mask. Mame was right, he should have listened. He backs away, fearful now, without looking behind him, and stumbles against someone, bringing them both down, even as the vandal veers away and the motorbike follows.
He’s unhurt, but he has landed on a woman, who has twisted her ankle.
Bill, as a fifteen-year-old: he’s in his room in Oakland, the sheets pulled around him, shielding him from the lonely dark of the attic and the darkness beyond, the night sounds of the world muted, the city silenced.
He hears Mame and Grandpa in muffled conversation downstairs—Mame moving from room to room, Grandpa following her around in his creaking wheelchair, asking her what she’s looking for, growing crosser as she continues to ignore him. His chest clenching, Bill slips out of his room to the staircase landing to keep watch.
He hadn’t expected Mame to discover the loss so quickly. It’s too late now to slip downstairs and replace the note where he found it. Mame wouldn’t believe she hadn’t looked there already.
Her face grim, her glasses high on the bridge of her nose, she’s done looking. She finally says to Grandpa: She’s missing a hundred-dollar bill. She dropped it while counting money she withdrew from the bank, had found it later and placed it—where? she’s losing her memory—intending to return it to her purse. And Grandpa says he’d have saved her the trouble if she’d told him earlier. He came across it and put it away but forgot to tell her about it—he’s growing old too. A minute later he returns from the bedroom with a bill.
Mame must know, or at least suspect—even if Grandpa has handed her a spanking new bill—but she accepts it without demur. Bill spends a sorry sleepless night, dreading the inevitable interrogation in the morning. Why had he so easily succumbed to temptation, with no clear idea what to do with the money? And Mame was never one to overlook his misdeeds—This is for your own good!—even the ones Grandpa sometimes took the fall for, like pilfering cookies from the pantry.
And yet, the next morning Mame says nothing, handing him his lunch with only a soft look of reproach. Still he cannot work up the courage to confess. He must seek out his grandfather and return the money to him.
It’s not much easier confessing to Grandpa. I can’t believe you would let her down this way, Grandpa says. How hard Mame worked, two jobs, and sometimes weekends too, to keep this house running, to make sure Bill would have a future. She’s beyond sad, and discouraged.
Bill hangs his head and promises then, the weight of the world on his tongue, never again to let Mame down, never again to take for himself the fruits of someone else’s labor.
That February morning at the protest, Bill is smitten. The woman is dressed to draw eyes—a spaghetti-strap scarlet dress, matched with scarlet lipstick, shocking like freshly spilled blood—and he is indeed transfixed. He gives her a ride to an urgent care center and waits with her, solicitous and apologetic, his face an echo of empathy at her grimaces of pain. Afterward, her foot braced and bound, he procures a crutch for her, and when she expresses a desire to return to the rally, he offers to accompany her.
Seema is thirty-three and by now used to such attention from men. She’s amused by Bill’s bashful solicitude, and since her current plight is his fault, she doesn’t think twice about making use of him.
The march has emptied out in the Civic Center Plaza, and they stand under a tree at the back, Seema leaning against him for support, the lawn in front of them rippling with shoulders and heads, banners and placards.
Beside them stands a group of protestors dressed like Iraqi mothers, in black hijabs and abayas, wearing mournful masks and holding rag dolls that resemble dead children. They mime grief, raising hands to lips in slow motion as though to stifle a cry or beg for a reprieve. Seema notes that Bill is shaken. He can’t take his eyes off the group of mourning mothers, as if only now becoming conscious of the human toll of the war.
“The imagery is very effective,” she comments, to which he nods mutely.
He’s also clearly discomfited by the speeches—standard vehement denunciations of the war, peppered with words like hegemony, subjugation, colonialism, racism—and squirms at the violent invective directed against Bush and Cheney, Wall Street, Israel, America. He tries to hide his discomfort from her, though, by cheering and clapping with the crowd, especially during the songs.
“That’s Joan Baez singing,” she points out.
“Who’s Joan Baez?”
She opens her eyes wide at him. “She marched with Martin Luther King Jr.? She sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ at the March on Washington, the one where he delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech?”
Seema is a veteran of such protests, a little disillusioned. She knows what to expect: a parade of minority speakers before a self-congratulatory liberal White crowd that will afterward return to its safe White slice of the world, while the rest of them will still have to deal with whatever is transpiring.
Seema is also a little bitter. She’d moved to Boston two years ago to join her girlfriend Ann after four years of a long-distance relationship. Just months later, Al-Qaeda strikes on 9/11, and what starts as heated arguments—in response to Seema calling Ann’s and America’s reaction to the collapse of the Twin Towers “White hysteria at the loss of its privileged security”—ends in acrimonious fights and a breakup a year later. Seema had returned to San Francisco earlier this month, while Ann was now moving to a safe White suburb with her new, more suitable White lover.
An Iraqi duo begins an Arabic version of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and the crowd accompanies the refrain lustily in English. Bill has a comforting baritone, and he sings with sweet conviction, swaying to the music, clearly a ploy to have their bodies touch. But she sways along with him, eyes closed, her head now and then resting on his chest as she leans back for support—she’s a foot shorter, barely making it to his shoulders. It’s a new experience, having a man stand this close to her.
It’s also weirdly exciting. Bill reminds her of her first girlfriend, Chloe, with the same tawny skin, the same frizzy close-cut hair, even the same lips, and only a little taller. With his glasses he looks more like an academic than the lawyer he claims to be.
What would her old friends think if they saw her like this? Few even know she’s returned to San Francisco, for that would be admitting failure. She should claim Ann made her straight! At least that is worth a laugh.
After the rally, Bill insists on dropping her off at her apartment in Bernal Heights.
“Can I see you again?” he stammers, as he helps her up the stairs.
“There should be another protest soon,” she replies, smiling.
“Well, call me if you need any help before then. I feel awful about your ankle.”
They exchange numbers, though she expects never to see him again.
My to-be mother Seema at twenty-one, twelve years earlier: Riding through the streets of London in a red double-decker bus, a banner emblazoned on its sides, Visibly Lesbian. The bus is packed with women, all dressed in black T-shirts, a bomb with a lit fuse printed on the front, with the name of their group inscribed around it: The Lesbian Avengers.
It’s a raucous bus, the women are whistling, clapping, stomping, hanging out of windows, flashing breasts, snogging, calling out through megaphones to pedestrians and drivers, to shoppers and tourists, even to the traffic police and bobbies: Hey you, in the brown coat, in the blue jacket, in the high heels, in the uniform, in that absurd hat, yes, you, we’re talking to you, hello, we’re lesbians, we’re dykes, we’re butch, we’re femme, we can smell your homophobia.
And though it’s a gray day in London, with clouds threatening to rain on their parade, nothing can bring Seema down, for standing next to her in the bus, her hand threaded around Seema’s waist, her chin resting on Seema’s head, is Chloe, lithe muscular Chloe, buzz-cut Chloe, Chloe whose smile can burn through Seema, whose whisper can make Seema tremble at her knees, whose touch can make the hair on Seema’s skin stand on end, whose hands and lips can reduce Seema’s body to feeble quivering flesh. Chloe, Seema’s first lover, if not her first love.
What a day it is! They hoot and toot their way around early 1990s London. They scatter leaflets over bewildered disapproving crowds. They descend on Marks & Spencer on Oxford Street and pose with mannequins clad in lacy underwear in the lingerie department. They take over squares and circle fountains chanting, “We’re here, we’re lesbians, get used to it.”
For the pièce de résistance, they head to the Tate, and in front of Rodin’s The Kiss, they stage a kiss-in.
“Babe, shall we?” Chloe murmurs, her tongue in Seema’s ear.
Seema hesitates only for a moment. She’s come a long way in the few months since she’s been recruited—We recruit! screams the Lesbian Avengers’ tagline—and taken under Chloe’s wing.
Chloe is twenty-five, a graduate student in women’s studies at Oxford, a core member of the Avengers. It’s with her that Seema attended her first Avenger meetings and her first protests: for the immigration rights of gay partners and against Clause 28, which declared illegal actions that could be considered as promoting homosexuality in schools. It’s with Chloe that she shared her first kiss, in Chloe’s darkened flat, after returning from one of those events.
And it’s with Chloe that she will now kiss for the first time in public. Look at them as they pose on a stool in front of Rodin’s sculpture of Dante’s embracing errant couple! Chloe has rolled her sleeves up to expose her sculpted arms. Seema sits in Chloe’s lap, their legs entwined. Chloe’s hand rests on Seema’s thigh, Seema’s hand is around Chloe’s neck.
They make a passable imitation of Rodin’s sculpture, but there’s one major difference: whereas the marble lovers are frozen with their lips apart, as if punished for eternity, the lips of these flesh-and-blood lovers are locked, their supple tongues free to seek each other.
Bill calls Seema twice over the next few days to check on her foot. She politely declines his renewed offers of help. The following weeks go by in a desperate haze of meetings, presentations, and strategy sessions, work made all the more dissatisfying now because Seema keeps intruding in his thoughts. The few hours he spends every night at his apartment feel even more desolate than before. He moved to San Francisco after Mame’s death last summer, from the condo in Oakland where they’d lived together. He misses Mame all the more now.
He broods over Seema and begins to follow the news on Iraq closely, reading everything he can lay his hands on. He fantasizes about wowing Seema with his newly acquired knowledge at some anti-war meeting in the city. Josh urges him to call her, even threatens to call her on Bill’s behalf.
In mid-March, Bush issues an ultimatum: Saddam and his family have two days to leave Iraq. And two days later, as promised, missiles rain over Baghdad. Bill watches the coverage on TV as the assault begins. As predawn skies flare into light, and cloud clusters bloom soft and pink, like roses, he plucks up the courage to call Seema.
She’s surprised to hear from him but not displeased to have someone to rant to. She savages Bush’s announcement—We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization, and their religious faiths. We have no ambitions in Iraq!—and speaks of herself ravaging Bush: “I’d like to tear his eyes out from his dumb face and scratch more furrows into his forehead.”
He’s both startled and bemused by the intensity of her anger, as if the assault on Iraq were somehow personal. Mame has drilled into him that anger is never the answer: you kept your head down, you worked hard till you reached a place where you couldn’t be touched.
He suggests meeting up for drinks, to help take her mind off the matter.
She makes a counterproposal. There are to be protests downtown in the morning, in front of businesses profiting from the war—does he want to join her? “We have to do something, even if it will have no effect. They want us to feel too powerless to even protest.”
He hesitates. The run-in with the police during the march unnerved him, and tomorrow will surely be worse; besides, he has work. But he can’t let this opportunity to meet Seema slip away. He agrees to pick her up at eight in the morning.
Josh gives his blessings: “You don’t believe all that leftist crap, do you? But if it’s for a girl—what the hell. The company is going down the drain anyway. Just don’t get arrested.”
Bill is at her doorstep at eight sharp, nervous from the sleepless night, not knowing what to expect. She comes out wearing a khaki trenchcoat and knee-high black boots. Her hair is pulled back tightly, not a single strand straying, and she’s lined her eyelids black, so her eyes appear to flash. There’s a hard glitter about her—buttons, belt, zippers—as if she’s armored.
“Yowza!” he says. “Are you planning to take the city hostage?”
“That’s the idea,” she replies, climbing into the car.
An intoxicating joy wells in him as they drive downtown. Already the city feels different—with Seema beside him—burgeoning in its chaos. Some streets appear cordoned off, and side streets are jammed with cars nosing their way around blindly, diverted from the main thoroughfares. A few intersections are blocked by crowds seizing the center, with no one to stop them, as if the police have abandoned the city. Bill and Seema park and make the rest of their way on foot.
Downtown clamors with the honks of cars and the din of protestors. The mystery of the missing police is soon solved. The crowd at Embarcadero is much smaller than on the Sunday of the march, but the city’s entire police force seems to have gathered here. At one intersection, a group of eight protestors, in orange overalls, have chained themselves together to newspaper racks dragged to the center. To prevent their circle from being broken, they hold hands through thick pipes, and iron chains run between bicycle locks around their necks. Almost two dozen policemen surround them, with glass shields and three-foot wooden clubs. The sidewalks are lined with more police, preventing supporters on the pavements from breaking free and going to the aid of the group in the center. An officer with a bullhorn screams, “If you don’t disperse we’ll arrest all of you.”
The supporters don’t obey but instead chant, “Stay strong, this war is long.”
Seema pushes her way through the crowd toward the front, beckoning Bill to follow with one backward glance. This is more confrontational than he’d expected, but he plunges in behind her. They come face-to-face with an impassive policeman, his arms outstretched and linked to policemen on either side in an attempt to contain the crowd, as firemen in goggles, armed with circular saws and chain cutters, approach the group in the center. The supporters grow louder as it seems more and more likely that the firemen will succeed. They thrust themselves forward trying to break the cordon, only to be shoved back.
Tiny in front of the huge policeman, Seema is a spark of fire—skipping, darting, hissing, throwing herself at the policeman as though she means to bust through. Bill hovers protectively by her, ready at any moment to interpose himself between her and the policeman. He feels compelled to provide a foil for her, shaking his fist and screaming full-throated with the rest.
A cry goes out, “Don’t let them be arrested!” The firemen have cut through, and the police are closing in on the eight protestors. The supporters surge in a concerted push, the cordon is broken, and the crowd floods the intersection.
In the confusion Bill loses Seema. He looks around frantically—she’s darting toward the center. He races after her and grabs hold of her hand, having no idea what he’s doing, or what she or the crowd intends to do now.
The next few minutes are a blur. He follows Seema, running this way, then that, through the disarray of uniforms and batons and shields, forming a ring of protection first around one orange-clad protestor then around another. He doesn’t think this will work—how long can the crowd protect the protestors before the police start arresting everybody? But then the strategy becomes clear: to hamper the police enough, giving the protestors time to melt away. Already some of them have shed their overalls and pipes and chains and merged with the others. Before he knows it, another shout goes up: “All clear!”
The crowd disperses rapidly, and he sprints after Seema toward an unguarded stretch of pavement. People lining it pull apart to let them through. He leaps through the opening, over the edge of the sidewalk as though clearing a high hurdle, and the opening closes up again behind him.
He doubles up, gasping for breath. Seema leans against the wall, a hand on his shoulder. She appears to be shaking, her face contorted. Is she hurt?
But she’s actually laughing, a silent laughter that wracks her entire body, and he finds himself joining her, his eyes watering. When they both recover sufficiently to totter, supporting each other, to check on the road, there are only policemen and firemen in the intersection, picking up the discarded pipes and chains and orange overalls, dragging away the abandoned newspaper racks.
Bill intended to spend only a couple of hours at the protest, but Seema’s company is exhilarating, the excitement addictive. They join crowds blockading the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue. They shout chants in front of the Transamerica Pyramid against the military-industrial complex fronted by the Carlyle Group, to the accompaniment of drumming and dancing. They have lunch and spirited discussions with other protestors they’ve befriended, and their group swells as the day advances. Traffic has been wrestled to a standstill. Cars and buses are abandoned everywhere, and intersections continue to be blocked by sitters and bicyclists. The police arrest protestors where they can, but their group manages to free quite a few by surrounding the officers and harassing them into letting the arrested go.
By afternoon, Bill is inured to the sight of protestors in handcuffs, though still shrinking from encounters with the police himself, Mame’s censures continuing to prick. Seema seems unafraid of being arrested, though she celebrates every protestor freed as a small victory.
In the evening, people pour onto Market Street, and an impromptu march wends it way toward the Civic Center Plaza. Darkness descends over the city, and the plaza is lit by the soft halo of candles as the marchers settle into a vigil.
But seated now on the lawn with candles in their hands, Bill is disquieted by Seema’s transformation. Wearied lines appear on her face. In the hush of the flickering light, the fire and fury of the day have given way to resignation and despair.
He asks, “Are you okay?”
She says, “None of this matters, of course. We can march all we want, we can fight all we want, it’s no better than sitting here kumbayaing with these candles. Nothing will really change. Whatever progress we make will be because they’ve already figured out how to use it to their advantage. They’ll throw scraps at us to distract us from what we’re about to lose. Even these protests are just to keep us distracted and occupied. Don’t you feel that way too?”
Bill knows what her question alludes to—the color of his skin, his experiences as a Black American. He’s avoided such conversations even with friends, and were he to find himself embroiled in one, he has managed to maintain a noncommittal silence before changing the topic. But he’s aware of something pressing against the boundaries that had been his self a month ago. And he can’t ignore Seema’s appeal, although he doesn’t know what she expects.
“My father died in prison,” he says, the words sticking in his throat. “He’d joined the Black Panther Party while he was in college.”
She sits up. “Wow! I wouldn’t have guessed.”
“He was arrested a few months before I was born. I’ve only seen photos of him. His parents brought me up. They always used to say you beat them by being better than them. And that’s what they brought me up to do.”
“Why was he arrested?”
“I don’t know. Mame—my grandmother—rarely spoke about him.” He regrets now that he didn’t pressure her. Mame had always maintained a tight-lipped silence about his father, though his presence hung over Bill all through his childhood in the yellowing photos hanging in her bedroom. What little she told Bill was when he was leaving for college, and then just the bare facts.
“He died of a ruptured appendix—at least that’s what they told Mame. He was only twenty-five, and he’d been in prison for four years. Mame didn’t want me ending up like him.”
“Your grandmother must have been through a lot.” Seema’s face is gold from the candle flames, softer now if more remote. He’s hypnotized by the play of light on her cheeks and lips, eyelids and earlobes. “What about your mother?” she asks.
“Mame spoke even less about her. Maybe she belonged to the party too. I don’t think they were married. She stayed with Mame for the delivery. But a few months after I was born she left us and disappeared. No one knew where.”
“I’m sorry.” Seema strokes his hand.
He hesitates, overcomes his anxiety that perhaps he’s moving too fast, and puts an arm around her, drawing her toward him, something he’d wanted to do all day.
She doesn’t pull back and even rests her head on his shoulder briefly. “I’d love to see some photos of your father,” she says.
“Mame’s things are still in boxes. Come home, and you can go through them, while I make us some dinner.”
“Are you sure?”
Yes, he’s sure, he says. A dinner with Seema would cap a most incredible day, though he feels guilty using his father this way, having forgotten him all these years.
Bill decides on a simple shrimp and grits, and collard greens, picking up a few groceries on the way.
The smell of crisping bacon reaches her in his spartan bedroom, where she rummages in the box he’s placed on the bed. She doesn’t ordinarily eat bacon, a vestigial unease from her Muslim upbringing, but she tells Bill, “I’ll have it the way your grandmother made it.”
She has found photos of Bill’s father—black and white, some framed, some loose, all fading—from toddler to youth. She can see Bill in his father at his oldest, in what seems to be a high school yearbook photo, posed in a white jacket and shirt, with a bow tie, and a rose clipped to his lapel. Bill’s father is spectacled too, his eyes through the glass presenting a brooding studiousness. She’s a little disappointed: the photos seem innocuous—tame, almost—not what she expected of someone who joined the Panthers. “Are there any more? Any later photos?”
They sift through the box, through old church circulars and scrapbooks of clippings on gardening tips. They finally find another photo, tucked away in a brown-paper cover in Mame’s Bible. Untouched for many years, this one is very well preserved, startling in its clarity.
Bill’s father is older here, though he still looks very young. His spectacles glint so fiercely his eyes can barely be made out. But still the brooding mouth. He wears a black jacket and a white turtleneck. On his head—his hair now an Afro—is a black beret. On the jacket’s lapel is pinned a white badge, though Seema can’t tell what’s on it. It takes her a moment longer to notice, in the shadows, the rifle slung across the shoulder.
“He’s beautiful,” she says, envying the resoluteness stamped on his bearing.
“I never saw this one before.” Bill takes the photo from her. “I can see why Mame kept it hidden from me.”
He studies the two photos side by side, this and the yearbook photo, one washed out to a placid yellow paleness, the other fierce in its intense black-and-whiteness. “Night and day,” he says. “You looked like this in the morning, in your trenchcoat and boots.”
She laughs. “He’s the real deal. I’m only playacting. I wonder what he went to jail for.”
They sip wine, then dine on the creamy grits, the juicy shrimp, the bacon adding a crunch to the collard greens and a smokiness she savors. She’s impressed by his culinary skills—she has none—and impressed, too, by his exhaustive knowledge about the events leading up to the war.
When he asks about her family, she says, “I don’t like talking about them.”
“Why?”
All she needs to say is My father cut me off when I came out as a lesbian. The day is beyond date territory now, and she should have clarified earlier. But she’d ignored many openings, reluctant to bring the day to an end. Bill’s eager and anxious willingness to please her, to accommodate her wishes while protecting her from their consequences, is a novel experience—a princely masculine courting, almost a revival of the princess days of her girlhood. And his father is the real deal. She takes a deep breath. “I really like you, Bill.”
He notes the implicit but and freezes, fork-speared shrimp midair. His face falls. “You’re married. You have a boyfriend.”
She shakes her head.
“Your family wants you to marry an Indian—a Muslim. Or—you don’t date Black men.”
She snaps her fingers. “You’re right on both counts.”
He throws down his fork. “You know—Indian women and racism, what’s up with that?”
“I don’t date any men. Period.” She speaks sharply, upset by his accusation of being racist, though it’s her fault for making a joke about it.
He stares as if he doesn’t understand her, then as if he doesn’t believe her. Her continued silence and unflinching gaze must have convinced him, for finally he says, dully, “You don’t look like a lesbian.”
“I don’t know what you think a lesbian looks like. Ever seen the Dyke March? We’re all kinds.”
“You’d have gotten tired of me soon, anyway. I’m only a boring lawyer, I don’t even look interesting, unlike my father.” He chuckles resignedly. “And Mame would definitely have not approved of you.”
“Bill, I really do like you. I wish we could be friends.”
He clears away the dishes. When she’s leaving, he swears that he won’t hold on to hope of things changing between them. But yes, he doesn’t regret the day at the protests, and he’d like to remain friends.
Though there’s little hope of it happening, Seema thirsts for Saddam Hussein to teach America a humiliating lesson, for supporting him as long as he remained compliant, only to disown him when he asserted his independence. Anything less than humiliation would spur American imperialism, she thinks, becoming another feather in the cap for American exceptionalism.
She remains outspoken about her sentiments, despite alienating many of her American friends—even Fiaz, who, while decrying the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes, supports getting rid of the tyrant and, now that the war has been launched, desires a quick, successful end to it.
“Thank God I’m not an American citizen,” Seema says. “I wouldn’t be able to live with the hypocrisy.”
“You are living here and enjoying its freedoms,” Fiaz points out.
They’re colleagues as well now, since Seema’s return from Boston. These discussions have strained their earlier companionship.
“I can always go back to India.”
“But will you?”
Yes, she enjoys her freedoms here, including being out and proud, and cannot conceive what her life would be like in Iraq under Saddam or even in India, were she to return to it. But her point is that America cannot be allowed to value the lives of others any less than the lives of its own citizens. For when she watches the TV coverage she sees only rabid cheerleading from the American newscasters—predominantly White men and women, but also a few persons of color, who should know better, given the history of their own oppression and exploitation in America. From the front lines the journalists all report gushingly, from the point of view of the armed forces they’ve been “embedded” in, inflating victories and slavering over stories of coalition forces saving Iraqi babies and being welcomed as liberators. And liberal America seems to have fallen in line, extolling what seems to be the swift and decisive campaign Bush had promised.
The lone source she holds on to desperately is Al Jazeera reporting from Baghdad, with its pictures of a city in fiery ruins, of bloodied dead and dying, of resistance, of captured coalition servicemen. She even takes solace in its English website’s periods of mysterious unavailability, suspecting American censorship of unflattering news. But there’s no denying that within three weeks of the start of the war, Baghdad is in American hands, and Saddam Hussein has fled underground. In three more weeks, Bush lands on an aircraft carrier and disembarks in a military-green flight suit and prominent codpiece, cockily proclaiming to the cameras and the world: Mission Accomplished.
Seema is depressed. The defeat feels personal. She feels increasingly powerless, increasingly useless, as San Francisco settles back into business as usual, as if the war were a distant memory. Iraq, meanwhile, has descended into an insurgency tending toward civil war. The Bush administration is widely panned for having no plan to secure Iraq in the aftermath of Saddam’s expulsion, but the satisfaction of “told you so” is fleeting.
If nothing else, Seema vows, she must at least fight to prevent Bush from being reelected for a second term, to avenge Saddam’s ignominious dismissal and defeat.
Bill, by then, is one of the few friends still willing to listen as she rants about how pissed off she is that many of the Democratic challengers to Bush supported him in the lead-up to the war. It is he who suggests she look into volunteering for Howard Dean, one of the few Democrats willing to take on his own party for its support of Bush’s policies and the Iraq War. He’s a fighter, with a wagging finger and beetling eyebrows. The more Seema learns about him the more she likes: he’s a doctor, not a politician; he’s never lost an election; he’s the first governor of any state to sign a same-sex civil-union bill into law. And if he’s White, he’s partly redeemed by having requested to be roomed with a Black student while at Yale.
She’s sold on Dean when she hears him speak: “The great unspoken political lie is Elect me and I’ll solve all your problems. The great unspoken truth is that the future of the country rests in your hands, not mine. You have the power to rise up and take this country back.”
The internet is beginning to make its power felt, providing Dean supporters with new tools to connect online. Seema, fueled by a renewed sense of control, throws herself into organizing meet-ups and fundraisers through the summer and fall of 2003, maintaining a blog highlighting Dean’s policy positions, and creating posters and presentations to be shared with other volunteer groups around the country.
In these efforts she finds in Bill a willing assistant. Any hopes of reviving his start-up have been dashed over the summer, and he has plenty of time on his hands now. He helps set up her Dean website, drives her to meetings, takes over planning her events, and even shops for them and cleans up afterward.
“He’s in love with you,” Fiaz tells her. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
They are at a Dean for President meet-up at Bill’s apartment. This is Fiaz’s first time encountering Bill, though he’s heard about him for a couple of months now. Fiaz is the only one from her queer circle who has met Bill.
“Bill knows what we’re doing—we’re volunteering for the Dean campaign.”
“And you’re not falling for him?”
“Of course not. He wants to help, and he’s super useful.”
“He’s super sexy, too, in a straight-professor kind of way.” Fiaz eyes Bill appreciatively. Bill, talking to a woman volunteer at the other end of the room, glances in their direction. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
She’s noticed, of course, the way women at the meet-ups navigate toward Bill. She’s joked to Bill about it: he’s the draw, not Dean! She’s even encouraged him to ask some of the interested women out on dates. But she has to admit—to herself at least—the unexpected pangs of possessiveness whenever Bill returns their interest.
“This is new,” Bill says. “They’ve always ignored me before. Having you by my side has increased my cachet.”
What’s also new is Seema’s experience having Bill around. She hasn’t started dating again in San Francisco. She tells herself she can’t be preoccupied with love while Iraq is disintegrating—there are more important matters.
Bill’s solicitude, of course, goes beyond favors. He’s remarkably detail oriented, great at logistics and organization. With his assistance, she gets to concentrate on what she does best—preparing and delivering the message—and the Dean campaign has begun to notice.
And having a man around makes her feel safer, more supported. She derides this as heterosexual conditioning, just as she complains about heterosexual privilege—as a couple she and Bill are taken more seriously, even treated better, like being seated quicker and served faster in restaurants, for example. But she can’t avoid pondering the what if.
Sometimes she imagines herself sleeping with him. A charge has developed between them, like static electricity. She’s never been with a man before, and the idea takes on the thrill of a taboo to be broken. She’ll lose her gold-star status, of course—she can already sense her lesbian friends pulling away from her, some rudely and resentfully, as rumors of her “dating” a man begin to invade her queer circles—but fuck them. Isn’t true equality about being able to sleep with whomever she wants to?
At least the Dean campaign, working on a shoestring budget, is appreciative of her contributions. Over the summer, the efforts of the snowballing number of volunteers bear fruit, and Howard Dean is catapulted into the front-runner slot for the Democratic nomination. As fall turns to winter Seema is in regular touch with the headquarters in Vermont. Her blog posts are highlighted on the campaign’s website, her suggestions are incorporated in press releases, her PowerPoint presentations and posters make their way into the hands of every volunteer group around the country. Come December, she receives an offer to move to Burlington and join the campaign officially.
Seema considers the offer seriously. Accepting it would change the trajectory of her life. Her “activism” until now has been on the fringes, with little chance of having any real effect. Perhaps she could be like her ex Ann, who is now on the brink of what could be victory—the Massachusetts Supreme Court has just decided that it’s unconstitutional for only opposite-sex couples to be able to marry in the state. Ann must surely be feeling triumphant—Seema can picture her in a white tuxedo, as though stepping out of a wedding magazine, a white-gowned bride in tow, all lip gloss and blond highlights.
But the ruling would definitely be used by the Republicans in the next elections—declaring it the end of marriage and civil society—to scare conservative America into turning out to reelect Bush. Once again, the need of a privileged few would trump the necessity of protecting the rest of the world from disastrous policies. The world wouldn’t be able to survive another four years of Bush, who despite the chaos in Iraq, could claim victory: mid-December, the U.S. forces succeed in capturing a bedraggled Saddam Hussein, hiding in a spider hole on a deserted farm. If Bush smirks occasionally during the news conference announcing Saddam’s capture, she can’t really fault him, though it does stoke her fire to deny him further successes.
Another reason to accept the Dean offer: it would provide a natural ending point to her relationship with Bill. She’s definitely not “in love” with Bill, though in half a year she’s let herself become dependent on him like she’s never allowed herself to depend on anyone else before, not even lovers.
A part of her regrets that she’d be giving up a chance to experiment being with a man, while another part is relieved: What if she likes it after all? It would give lie to her life until then, making her suffering and sacrifice—the rift with her father, the exile—meaningless. And is she then to sell out and settle down to a complacent conventional life with Bill, housed and hitched like Ann?
There’s really nothing conventional about her relationship with Bill, though, and Bill is the opposite of Ann in every way—a Black man, from an underprivileged background, the awakening son of a Black Panther, a rising descendant of an oppressed race. There would always be battles to be fought. And it needn’t last forever—nothing lasts forever.
She keeps the offer a secret and decides she doesn’t need to decide yet. She could join the campaign after they win Iowa, which will be the first test of Dean’s strength for the presidential nomination, kicking off the primary season in less than a month. Meanwhile, there’s a lot that needs to be done, and she can’t do it without Bill’s help.
Josh warns Bill: “Be careful, she’s a lesbian, and a Hussein. She’ll dance on your heart in her boots and stomp it to bits.”
But Bill remains hopeful, perhaps because Seema never talks about dating anyone. The two people in his life could, of course, get along better—Seema calls Josh a Zionist, and Josh has labeled Seema a terrorism apologist—but at least they rarely encounter each other. What remained of the company was finally sold in November to a more successful competitor—for pennies on the dollar—and Josh is already on to his next venture. Bill has decided to take a few months off. For the first time in his life, he can devote himself to something other than his school, or job, or career. He’s chosen to devote himself to Seema.
And to remedying his ignorance of his past. Discovering the photo of his father in Black Panther uniform has awakened something in him that mere acquaintance with the fact hadn’t. When he’s not helping Seema with one of her Dean-related projects, he reads with a lawyerly assiduity foundational Black texts he should have read earlier, maintaining careful notes as if doing research. He can’t read enough about the Black Panthers, especially autobiographies and writings of its lead members. The world they describe—the hunger, the anger; the intelligence, the hysteria; the resistance, the militancy; the hideouts and shootouts; the fear, the hubris—seems completely removed from his world growing up with Mame and Grandpa, though only a few years apart and on the other side of town. He can’t imagine his father in that other world, not the bow-tied student, not even the bereted soldier.
Searching for further clues about his father, he methodically sifts through Mame’s unopened boxes. He’d hired movers to pack them, too drained after Mame’s death to deal with the remains of her life. He finds a few of his father’s yearbooks but little else. Even in death Mame has made sure he wouldn’t stumble on anything that could become a distraction. At times he feels he’s disrespecting Mame by going through her belongings, like he’s raiding her grave. But surely it had to be done.
And it becomes a thing to do with Seema, who is keenly interested. After a meal at his place, they open another of Mame’s boxes, sipping a glass of sherry, Mame’s favorite. Those nights are rewarding, even if they learn nothing new about his father, even if the night ends as it always does with him driving Seema back to her apartment and then returning to decide what to do with the contents uncovered.
Memories of living with Mame are evoked and shared—first in the blue-shingled house, his room in the attic overlooking the garden with its pride of Mame’s roses, and after Grandpa’s death, in a small apartment whose only charms were a spacious kitchen and a partial view of Lake Merritt—both spaces fragrant with the after-scent of summer roses all year long, which still persists faintly in many of Mame’s belongings. Seema listens eager and rapt as he speaks about his youth, something intimate settling between them. His only regret is that she continues to share little about her own childhood, her own life, even when asked directly.
When they’re done with the boxes, they go through Mame’s clothes. Seema helps sort them, exclaiming over the dresses and jackets and scarves, holding them up against herself: “Your Mame sure was stylish.”
They come across a locked jewel box that Bill can’t find the key for, and which Seema pries open with a knife. It doesn’t contain any jewelry but does contain what they’d been searching for all along. There’s a paperback book, the cover missing, its pages marked with water stains, and a sheaf of yellowing letters, the ink fading but still legible, each dated and addressed Dear Mother and Father in a fluid graceful cursive.
Seema is thrilled. “Your father’s handwriting is lovely, just like my sister’s.”
But Bill is torn between sharp guilt and dread. Should he be reading what Mame sought to keep hidden? And what if he finds in them something disquieting or worse?
He hands Seema the letters, unsteady, the way he’d felt months earlier finding the Black Panther photo. “You read them first.”
“Are you sure? We don’t have to read them now.” But she’s already scanning through the top letter. She looks up. “This is written in prison.”
He nods, having realized that from the dates on the letters. He flips through the warped pages of the book he’s still holding. It’s a beat-up copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. His father’s name is inscribed on the title page in the same distinct handwriting. Had his father been reading this in prison or earlier? Would his father have even been allowed it in prison? Bill has read it recently but without imagining his father holding the same book in his hands. The second half—after Malcolm X claimed to be saved—has many passages underlined. Bill browses through some of them, passages his father must have returned to more than once, for they bear the marks of various pencils and pens.
Reading his father’s notes in the margins, Bill perceives a glimmer of what Mame must have dreaded all the years she was bringing him up. He can sense it again now, his own self constricting in response to Mame’s unvoiced anxiety outside home, her hand tight around his wrist even in his teens, as though she were afraid to let him wander away, as though she couldn’t be at ease until she’d dragged him back up the stairs of their stoop.
He becomes aware that Seema has stopped reading, the letters in a heap on her lap. She’s cracking her knuckles, the sound of popping joints painful to his ears. Her face is pinched with the effort to control herself.
“What do the letters say?” His own distress is overshadowed: What could possibly be in the letters to upset Seema so much?
As if she hasn’t heard him, she says, “Bill, can you take me home, please? Now?”
She doesn’t wait for him to reply but sweeps the letters off her lap, gathers her jacket and handbag, and heads to the door. He knows she won’t reply to his questions in this state. He puts the book back in the jewel box, but the letters must be folded before they can be returned. He picks up his car keys, pulls his shoes on, and follows her out.
They drive in silence to her apartment, a brittleness between them that could shatter if he so much as makes a move toward her. At her doorway she says, “I’m sorry, but I just need some space. I’ll call you.”
Back at his apartment, Seema’s absence is palpable. But Mame’s presence is strong in the living room, as if she’s there disapproving of the ransacking of her possessions, her clothes in stacks on the sofa and chairs, her jewel box open. And there’s another presence—elusive, indeterminate—the specter of his father hovering restively in the room.
Bill first sets about repacking everything but the jewel box and its contents. There are a few letters left unread in the box; the remaining are in Seema’s messy pile. He goes through them, identifying the sheets of each letter, and folding them back together as they were. Seema must have been reading the top letter last.
It’s an exhortation, echoing Malcolm X. To Mame and Grandpa to renounce Christianity and embrace Islam. To raise his son as a Muslim. It praises Islam for its inclusion, it condemns Christianity as criminality. The Christian God is a false god, who’d made them believe that everything white is good, to be admired, respected, and loved, and that everything black is ugly, a curse, to be hated and loathed. But there is only one true God, Allah, with Muhammad as His prophet. In Islam, all the colors are united, the White man stands equal with the others before Allah. Only Islam can save the Black man by giving him the dignity he needs to live his life as a whole person, only Islam can save America from the malignancy of its racist cancer. La ilaha ill’Allah Muhammadur rasulallah. The letter is signed Abdul Jabbar.
Bill picks up the box. It’s carved walnut with a crimson velvet lining, dried rose petals from Mame’s garden at the bottom. Mame’s fragrance is strongest here, stubbornly clinging to the velvet and the petals: the box must have remained locked for years.
One whiff and Bill is enfolded in Mame’s embrace, in the pink chiffon of her Sunday dress, a rose pinned to its pleated lapel, the mesh of her matching hat grazing his face, as she gives him a hug before leaving for church—“Be a good boy now, and take care of Grandpa”—the fragrance lingering as he reluctantly waves her goodbye—“Why can’t I come with you to church?”—his hand tight in Grandpa’s hand. And after that, from Grandpa’s colostomy bag the odor of shit returning as Mame’s fragrance fades. His resentment grinds: he’d rather have gone with Mame. He wheels Grandpa back to the parlor in the grip of that odor, the dread—he can feel it rising within him, the puke—that he may be called upon to empty the bag before Mame returns. He’s almost dizzy with nausea. He takes another deep whiff of the box’s crimson interior before he shuts the lid.
Over the next few days he gives in to temptation and reads all the letters. A sense of betrayal unsettles even his sleeping hours. But who has been betrayed—he himself, his father, Grandpa and Mame, or even Seema? And who has betrayed whom?
He thinks he understands now why Mame always left him behind with Grandpa when she went to church, thinks he understands, too, Seema’s reaction, knowing her severed relationship with her religion.
He waits for Seema to call, respecting her wish for space but desperately craving her return.
Reading Bill Sr.’s letters immediately recalls to Seema’s mind Tahera—the same controlled grace in penmanship concealing the same force of passion. But had their handwritings been totally unlike, the contents of his letters would still have triggered a memory of the last letter Seema received from her sister.
It was in response to Seema’s overture to Tahera after her marriage. Seema, of course, hadn’t been invited to the wedding. In fact, her mother had only informed Seema of the event after the fact. Remembering the weddings of their childhood, the glitter and gold, the frolic and festivities, Seema’s sense of loss at the belated news of Tahera’s wedding had been acute and unexpected. The much-anticipated biryani cooked by bawarchis in enormous dekshas that could fit both sisters comfortably, with a taste and aroma unmatched by even their mother’s most delicious version. Her yearnings as she and Tahera insinuated their way to the bride’s side, so they could hold up the translucent gold- or silver-trimmed red maizar and the strings of jasmine and roses that veiled her, a ringside view of the shy bride’s face as the nervous groom bent down to take a peek after the nikah and, later, of the bride’s tears as her family gave her away during the jalwa.
Still, she accepted the distress and regret in her mother’s voice as apology enough. She wasn’t entitled to much more, anyway.
When she’d left home without saying anything to her mother or sister, she’d assumed the parting was temporary. Her father’s implacability and her ensuing fall from grace shocked her into stunned shame and despair. The star of the family, and her light so swiftly snuffed out.
Her despair was misplaced in Tahera’s case at least—her sister’s letters clearly showed she wasn’t aware of the real reason behind the excommunication. But Seema couldn’t bring herself to come out to Tahera, to open herself up to the humiliation of further rejection, from someone who’d looked up to her all her life. Their father, who always supported Seema, had forsaken her. Their mother seemed more interested in having her return to the fold than in supporting her. How could Tahera come to understand? Especially when Tahera was poised to supplant her as their father’s favorite.
Seema didn’t reply to any of Tahera’s letters. In time, Tahera’s letters ceased.
A year after Tahera joined her husband in Irvine, their mother gave Seema Tahera’s phone number and address, expressing a forlorn wish that the sisters look out for each other, both dwelling apart on a distant continent.
Seema was thrilled: far from their past in Chennai, thousands of miles away from their father, perhaps it was possible to reconnect, to reclaim their past sisterhood. But what was she to say about her precipitous disappearance and silence and the subsequent life she’s carved for herself, now with Ann by her side? She knew through her mother that Tahera was no longer in the dark about her sexuality, yet it took Seema weeks to gather the courage to call.
The phone was answered by Tahera’s husband, and she was forced to wait, ruing the mischance—she’d counted on the tide of surprise to carry the conversation through. When Tahera finally came on the line, her voice was a studied formal monotone: “Assalamu Alaikum?”
“It’s me, Seema.”
“I know.”
“Ammi gave me your number.”
“She gave me yours too.”
“You’re in Texas. You’re married.”
“Yes, his name is Ismail. He works for a computer hardware company.”
“I heard the nikah was grand.”
“Alhamdulillah, it went well.”
“Congratulations. And celebrations!”
But not even the reference to the Cliff Richard song they used to sing together at weddings elicited an echo of the sister she knew.
“Thank you. It’s as Allah wishes.”
The exchange couldn’t last much longer. Tahera had transformed into an impassive stranger. Even more shocking, she was now mouthing religious phrases with no apparent irony, phrases they would mock particularly sanctimonious elders with, behind their backs. She wielded these like charms to ward off Seema, to prevent her from even thinking about sharing the details of her scandalous life. Seema ended the call without mentioning Ann.
She’d been more disappointed than she cared to admit. Somewhere in the depths of her consciousness, she’d already picked up the snapped threads of their relationship. But how could Tahera have changed so much? Was it the husband’s influence? And why had their father chosen such a husband?
Later, Seema learned from her mother that Tahera had taken to praying five times a day even while living at home in Chennai, and she insisted on marrying a committed practicing Muslim, adamant against their father’s wishes. Seema found this hard to believe, even envisioning strategies to rescue her sister, until the day—a few weeks later—she received a letter.
In her sister’s elegant handwriting, flowing yet precise: Seema is living in sin and must beg Allah’s forgiveness for her dissolute past. Seema has neglected namaz and has pursued illicit desires, and she’s bound to Jahannam unless she repents, believes, and practices righteousness. Allah is most merciful, and He would surely forgive and accept Seema back. Tahera is available to help only if Seema acknowledges the error of her ways and with true repentance intends to follow the ways of the Prophet.
Seema read the letter with the shock of betrayal, for there’s no mistaking the conviction in the words. Reading Bill’s father’s letters, the betrayal felt raw again. She’d cheered his unequivocal condemnation of White America, but the letters ultimately recalled the rhetoric her sister had used.
Islam alone can save the Black community, Islam alone can reform their people’s morals and protect them from the evils that blight them—lawlessness, drug addiction, alcoholism, fornication, adultery, degeneracy. His parents are misguided in remaining faithful to a religion that keeps them enslaved.
After reading the letters, Seema insisted Bill take her home. It was only afterward that she felt ashamed for not considering the effect of his father’s letters on him. But Bill doesn’t call, and with each passing day it becomes harder to reach out to him.
Perhaps this is the sign she’s been waiting for, about whether to end it with Bill, and when, for she knows she’s pretty much set on the offer to join the Dean campaign and move to Vermont. She’d been clinging to fantasies of mutual comfort and support, even a kind of love, concentrating on Bill’s many virtues and attractions—including having a revolutionary for a father, except that the father had turned out to be not a martyr but a fundamentalist like her sister.
But later that week, in the run-up to the Iowa caucus, Howard Dean’s lead in the polls shrinks considerably. There’s a panicked call for an all hands to help stem the bleed. With a relief that she doesn’t pause to examine, Seema rings Bill up to ask if he’ll fly with her to Des Moines.
January 2004, Iowa: Seema, with Bill in tow, is immediately pressed into supervising sundry initiatives—volunteer training, phone-bank shifts, door-to-door canvassing. She’s a natural at this. Her allure is immediate, her enthusiasm infectious, and she projects assurance and authority.
From the very first day, they put in long hours—returning at night to the twin room they share at a motel on the outskirts, only to sleep, shower, and change. Bill is familiar with this pace from his long workdays at the start-up, but Seema shows surprising stamina. She’s up before him, as fresh as the day before, and he rarely sees her flagging.
He marvels at the effect she has on the other volunteers and campaign workers, reviving their energy and spirits. By the end of the first week she’s made herself essential to the Des Moines operations.
This is Bill’s first experience of winter and wide white landscapes, and his first time in the heartland, in an overwhelmingly White state. Everywhere they go, he and Seema stand out. They are confronted with looks of surprise, bemusement, and even overt distrust. Bill has never felt more self-conscious, the awareness sharpened by everything he’s discovered over the last year. It forces him to question, as he’s never done before, every interaction. Is it wariness he encounters, or calculation, forbearance, impatience, evaluation, condescension? The strain is wearying.
Seema has adapted well to this scene, suppressing talk of her usual grievances. “Do you see anyone else around who can defeat Bush? I’ve got to work with what I have.”
And what she has, an exotic glamour, she plays up subtly. Bill can’t say exactly what’s different about her in Iowa, but whatever it is, it’s working. The newer campaign workers, young and barely out of college, vie with each other for her attention, readily submitting to her leadership. Media events and interviews are enlivened, Seema bringing to them the feisty vitality of a hothouse flower. The senior campaign staff, overworked as they are, are grateful, even if they sometimes resent being crowded out of the picture. It usually falls to Bill to soothe their ruffled feelings, a task he’s good at.
“Remind me again what’s in this for me?” he asks Seema.
A joking voice but a nagging question since he allowed himself to be persuaded to join Seema on this trip. She’s taken three weeks off from work, feigning a family emergency. He has no one to answer to, and no job lined up yet, but he’s not the driven supporter of Howard Dean she is, nor is unseating George W. Bush his most burning desire. What’s he doing here then? To say he’s here for Seema, to say he can’t abandon Seema: how foolish, how foolhardy.
His last relationship—which ended a year and a half ago—was with Vanessa, a tax attorney, a Black Latina whom Josh had set him up with. And then had come Mame’s death, driving out any thoughts of dating, until he’d met Seema. Since then, Bill can count on one hand the number of times he’s had sex, each time with women from the neighborhood sports bar that he sometimes visited late Saturday nights when he was too wound up to sleep. And each time he’d felt guilty; whether Seema was sleeping with anyone, he didn’t, couldn’t, ask.
Just as he can’t ask about what he’s hearing now from the campaign staff, that Seema is likely to join the national headquarters in Vermont after the Iowa caucus. If that were true, the days of Seema’s withdrawal following the discovery of his father’s letters will have been a mere taste of the days to come.
But there’s little time for repining. If Seema had been pushing herself and Bill hard before, with caucus day approaching they’re working almost without rest. The overextended days are a refuge: he has little time to wallow in the guilty hope that a Dean loss in Iowa would somehow secure him Seema. For, in the days immediately before the caucus, Dean’s popularity takes a further dive. His opposition to the Iraq War has been turned around to paint him as inexperienced in foreign policy and incapable of keeping America strong. Seema dismisses the polls. Dean will win, if only by the smallest of margins—surely the passionate labor of the thousands who’ve followed Dean here from all over the country can ensure that. But Bill has his doubts. Iowans appear weary of their pervasive presence, considering them outsiders interfering in their state: the orange beanie that constitutes their uniform has become a target of ridicule in local papers. And the headquarters has become increasingly disorganized and dysfunctional, riven with indecisiveness and internal disputes.
Caucus day whizzes by with the surreality of a time-lapse video. It’s morning, it’s noon, it’s evening, time lurching forward, each new assignment so clamorous in its importance and urgency as to displace all memory of the assignment just completed. Bill and Seema step out only after the caucus commences, and there’s nothing more that anyone can do. They’re famished, they bolt down an untasted meal, and still bruised from the day’s battering, they make their way to the ballroom rented for the after-party to await results.
The ballroom is swarming with a thousand exhausted but exhilarated troopers. But the mood soon turns somber as the results begin to trickle in. Dean has slipped to third place, and a distant third at that. Bill senses the struggle with which Seema controls herself, but he doesn’t presume to offer comfort or hope: she has retreated to the remote self he knows to leave alone, though they sit side by side. To have worked so hard, and fallen so short—he aches to console Seema, to assure her that the effort is not all wasted, but of this he’s not sure.
He takes her hands in his to massage them to warmth, even as a slow chill steals into him. Had the results been closer, he could have expected Seema to double down, convinced the defeat could be reversed. But with little chance of recovering from this debacle, Dean will be forced to end his campaign, perhaps even tonight. Seema would surely take this as further proof of her—and Bill’s—insignificance. And she could withdraw completely, shunning anything that reminds her of today—including him.
When Dean comes out on the podium, the ballroom is still grieving. But Dean knows how to fight: he rolls up his sleeves and gives an impassioned speech, promising his followers that he’s not giving up, that he’ll lead them to victory through every remaining state primary to the White House.
He ends with a scream—“Yeah!”—from somewhere deep within him and electrifying, his fist smashing through the air as if he were crushing every obstacle in his path—opposition, destiny.
The speech revives the entire ballroom, as it does Seema. She’s restored to some measure of her customary animation, making plans for the future. Bill, too, is almost persuaded to believe in Dean’s continuing viability.
But the flame that Dean has reignited wavers as soon as they leave the ballroom. They crawl back to their motel in silence, undress in silence, get into their respective beds, turn the lights off.
Bill has never been back in the room this early before and with no concrete plans for tomorrow. Despite his exhaustion, he can’t sleep, unable to dull the consciousness of some inevitable change that day must bring. He lies staring at the window, at the icy white light leaking in through the curtains, ushering a desolate winter into the room.
“Bill, I can’t sleep,” Seema whispers. “I’m cold.”
“Me too,” he says, turning toward her.
“Can I join you?” she asks.
Should he have replied that it isn’t a good idea? That she might regret it the next morning? All he knows in that moment is his need. He’s able to stutter, “If you want to.”
And in reply, Seema slips out of her bed and into his, under his comforter.
How awkward that first coupling is, as if he’s never kissed before, never touched a breast, never gone down on a woman. His hands tremble. He’s never felt clumsier, all thumbs. His tongue seems swollen, his breathing is a wheeze.
“Relax,” she says. “I should be more nervous than you—I’ve never slept with a man before.”
But that only leaves him more shaken, as if he’s been given this one chance, and he’s squandering it.
“It’s okay,” she says. “Just hold me.”
Despite having desired this for so long, having dreamed of this the three weeks he’s spent with her in this room, he can find little comfort in Seema’s warm breath on his chest, the length of her body smoldering against his. All night—after she’s gone back to her own bed—he rehearses apologies, excuses. He alternates between blaming himself and blaming Seema for succumbing to the folly. He shames himself for performing so inadequately.
He wakes up no closer to knowing what to say to her. He goes for a walk to clear his mind, while she’s still asleep. The only sensible solution is to claim that the night was a mistake, that he shouldn’t have taken advantage of her vulnerability. Perhaps their friendship would survive it. He returns with coffee and a prepared speech.
She accepts the coffee but, before he can speak, offers, “Maybe I shouldn’t have sprung it on you like that last night. Maybe we can give it another try. That is, if you want to—”
And yes, my yet-to-be father wants to, wants to so badly that he suppresses all doubts that would have saved them both so much grief.
Here’s what happens next: Dean’s defiant speech is reduced, by a media gloating at his Iowa drubbing, to the final ten seconds of his roused red-faced scream. Overnight, Dean becomes fodder for late-night TV hosts and comedians—portrayed as too angry and pilloried as unpresidential. The clips go viral on the web, and Dean cannot survive the assault, falling victim to the very internet that had elevated him. Within a month, he drops out of the race.
Seema is furious and dejected; she’s back in San Francisco, having lost not only her lone champion against Bush but her ticket out of her current life.
Meanwhile, as if to rub salt into her wounds, San Francisco has erupted in jubilation: its ambitious new mayor, Gavin Newsom, beating Massachusetts to the punch, has ordered the city to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, in defiance of Proposition 22. The city cheers as gay and lesbian couples queue in front of the county clerk’s office in lines that stretch around the block. Champagne flows on the steps of the city hall as newlyweds exit lip-locked and teary-eyed. The Castro transforms itself into a twenty-four-hour street party.
Seema rants to Bill: How is she to celebrate while America turns a blind eye to the pain and suffering of the Brown peoples it has invaded illegally and is dooming itself to four more years of a war criminal? The CIA had finally admitted, just the week before, that there had been no imminent threat from Saddam’s WMDs. How could queer America justify rejoicing at what is simply fuller participation in the imperialistic American Dream, while Iraq is rapidly sinking into further chaos, with car bombs ripping through Baghdad practically every single day?
Bill is the only person she can say this to. Her queer friends are all too ecstatic and will be too defensive: they’ll disparage her, insinuating that she’s capable of saying this only because she’s now dating a man, a fact she can no longer deny, even if her mind still abounds with ambivalences.
She doesn’t question the night in Iowa—it had to happen, if only so she can have tried it. If only the experience had been more conclusive. But what had indeed been wonderful was the warm succor of Bill’s body after the cold failure of the night. She hadn’t been held that intimately by anyone since Ann, and never with that protective embrace. Had she actually been relieved that the sexual act itself hadn’t progressed far, so she needn’t make a decision that very night? Had a part of her been envisioning their future together in Vermont?
Now with the campaign dead, and with the marriages in San Francisco’s “Winter of Love” thrust in her face, she can’t help but question: What are she and Bill doing?
The answer is they’re “dating.” They’re taking things slowly, sex can wait; they’ve advanced to holding hands, to quick kisses on cheeks, to back rubs and shoulder massages, to holding each other in bed. The answer merely raises more questions: of betrayal, of hypocrisy, of fraud. If there is a bright spot, it’s that Bill, wary about the effect of the ongoing marriages on her, rarely brings the topic up himself, and at least with him she can ignore the entire hoopla roiling San Francisco.
But this, too, happens: A couple of weeks after returning from Iowa, Seema sits up in Bill’s bed with a gasp—of terror, a nightmarish vision of her body in the coils of carnivorous tendrils; of pain, as if her insides were being wrenched out. She kicks the comforter out of her way. The hour is just past four in the morning.
It’s a damp February, and the air in the room is heavy and clammy around her nightgowned self, like childhood memories of monsoon. Other memories impinge, of the indignities her body is capable of inflicting on her: she still suffers occasionally from her pubescent ailment of traumatic irregular periods, though their frequency and intensity have much reduced over the years. But what’s happening now cannot be that, surely not without the usual warning symptoms—she presumes she knows her body well enough by now, although she has been puzzled by a strange tiredness the previous week, which she attributed to depression and despair from Dean’s loss.
She scrambles out of bed, evading Bill’s pacifying arms, and heads toward the bathroom.
“Seema, are you okay?” he asks.
Even in her urgency she recognizes that his voice is alert, slumber-free, as if he’s been lying awake the entire time. She feels both bolstered and badgered.
He turns on the night lamp.
Simultaneously, she feels the floor give way, as if the light has brought the roof and room of her caving inward. She squeezes her thighs and knees tight together, against the knife-edged pain, but the flow is not to be contained: the warm gush streams down her legs to a spreading pool around her feet, to the Berber beige of the bedroom carpeting. Any move to the bathroom now would only leave a trail, and she lowers herself to a clenching squat, hoping to minimize the damage, pressing her nightdress into use as a pad. The fabric soaks and turns crimson.
Bill is beside her, his arms around her, seeking to help her up.
“Don’t! Leave me alone—” She pushes him away, too embarrassed to have him looking at her.
Another piercing pang—its ferocity is unfamiliar to her: what exactly is this?—another tingling spurt, almost scouring on its way out, viscous, clotted. She is too faint to fight Bill off now, one hand on her back and another reaching under her, and then a flick upward, and she’s in his arms, the length of her curled up by his chest, one palm supporting her there, where he’s been allowed only recently, a gentle alleviating pressure.
“Where?” Bill asks, his voice still steady, though his arms strain, and he pivots as if to carry her back to the bed, which is closer.
“No, silly—the bathroom.” A weak laugh, despite herself; her gown has surely soaked through and soiled his hands.
Bill sets her down on the toilet seat, letting her slip from him a little hastily, clumsily, when she grimaces with the knowledge of another impending attack.
He backs away, turning to wash his hands at the sink as she scrunches down into herself over the bowl. He’s careful to avert his gaze.
“I’m okay, I’ll be okay, go—” she says.
Although she wouldn’t mind Bill staying, for a coiling dread tightens with each additional spasm: what’s happening to her, inside her, cannot be the usual disruption. But Bill takes her at her word and leaves, while she continues to strain over the toilet bowl, trying to empty out as quickly as possible whatever is writhing within her, even as she prays it’s merely her period, one more vicious than usual.
Bill has left the bathroom door ajar, and she focuses on his movements to still her anxiety. First, his measured footsteps as he goes to the kitchen and returns with a roll of paper towels, then as he blots the blood-soaked areas of the carpet, then as he crisscrosses the bedroom covering up with white squares the trail she has left behind. Now he sits on the edge of the bed, the side closest to the bathroom, elbow on knee, his chin resting on a fisted hand—not Rodin’s Thinker but Worrier—and now he paces up and down the width of the bedroom, between the bed and the wall, the reassuring sliver of him visible each time past the bathroom door. As time stretches, she hears him pause longer and longer by the door, until he’s a fixed presence on the other side, a guardian spirit breathing.
A timid knock on the door. “Seema, should we go to the ER?” Bill sounds apologetic about his ignorance, his lack of experience.
She’s been in here for the better part of an hour, and the bleeding has nearly stopped, only slight spotting left. “I’ll be out soon. Can you get me my handbag, please?”
She wants her menstrual cup, though she’s certain now it’s not her period. She discards her stained nightgown, washes herself slowly in the shower, the water so abrasively scalding that her body barely registers the softness of the towel afterward. She inserts the cup and wraps the towel around herself but is reluctant to leave the security of the bathroom.
Bill is waiting. “I was worried.” He holds out the flannel shirt he’s lent her before and his softest corded pajama pants, the ones she has much admired. “Here—you can roll the legs up.”
But one further glance at her face, pallid and drooping, and he latches on to her apprehension. “What is it?” he whispers.
She shakes her head—I don’t know—as she debates whether to accept the clothes he’s offering or to get dressed and leave.
“I can take you to the ER.” He’s observed her glance in the direction of her dress hanging by the door, and is doubly alarmed now, alarmed on her account and alarmed she might withdraw.
She does not withdraw. She can’t be alone. And the prospect of the ER is both daunting and demoralizing, to be subject to the mercy of doctors who don’t know her body. Besides, she feels exhausted suddenly, enfeebled, and only wants to crawl back into bed. “The bleeding has stopped. I prefer to be checked by my own doctor.”
It’s Sunday morning, and that means at least a day, if she manages to get an appointment for Monday. She takes the shirt from him, but her fumbling fingers are stumped by the buttons, and he does them for her, helps her pull on the pajama pants, and crouches by her feet rolling up the bottoms, while she supports herself pressing down on his head. He leads her back to bed.
As she dozes back to sleep, her body curled toward his, her head halfway on his shoulder, she knows he can’t be entirely comfortable, but he doesn’t complain, and she accepts his offering, too drained even to be grateful, knowing that he’s probably going to lie awake next to her the entire time.
When she wakes up later there’s been little to no further bleeding. The day passes in a haze of drowsiness and lethargy. She’s grown leaden with her anxiety about the outcome of the upcoming appointment, her body somehow grown too weak to bear its own weight, ready to give up its responsibility to something or someone else—the bed, Bill. She lets him help her sit up in bed, fluffing the pillows behind her, lets him spoon her the moong dal and rice ganji he’s made from her descriptions of her mother’s sickbed recipes, lets him distract her with poems from the collected works of Audre Lorde he’s picked up based on a suggestion she once made long ago, his reading voice quite expressive for someone unused to reciting poetry, and wholly earnest, like Tahera’s. She naps, soothed by the signals of his presence around her, his sounds from the living room, his shadow in the bedroom. She could almost be home in Chennai.
Bill accompanies her to her appointment the next day. There she learns, to her immense relief, that unlike in the past, her latest episode of bleeding was due to chemical pregnancy and a miscarriage, resulting from their first and only occasion of unprotected sex, frustrated and abbreviated as it was, the night of the caucus. Astonishing to think that Bill’s sperm could be so virile and so numerous as to prevail even in his precum, with little penetration. Her doctor’s suggestion of birth control with a hormonal IUD has an added benefit: it has been shown to reduce the intensity of menstrual bleeding. Another demon from her Chennai days could simultaneously be laid to rest.
Two other things happen in the first six months of my to-be parents getting together—one that stokes their anger and one that offers them hope.
In April, stories of torture and rape of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers are reported by the national media. The photos emerging from the Abu Ghraib prison horrify: of naked Brown men in barred prison cells and dimly lit corridors, some hooded, some shackled, some dragged around on dog leashes, some posed in sexual positions, some heaped like carcasses, while American soldiers—White, and in uniform!—stand around them, over them, straddling them, flashing triumphant smiles and thumbs-ups. Seema is outraged, though not surprised; Bill is especially haunted by one photo: a detainee hooded and robed in black, the lines reminiscent of the white regalia of the Ku Klux Klan, a savage irony, for he’s precariously poised on a cardboard box, arms to the sides, wires running from his fingers to electrical connections behind him. It’s his father’s face Bill imagines under the hood, a father who’d died in prison purportedly of a ruptured appendix.
Seema has never seen Bill this shaken, his anger shining through his attempts to repress it—she welcomes it, even as she comforts him. He is as riled as she that the Democratic nominee to challenge Bush is to be Senator John Kerry, who’d voted to authorize the Iraq War, only lately coming out against it, professing to have been misled about Iraq’s WMDs. Kerry’s vice-presidential pick is slick-haired senator John Edwards, who had also voted in support of the war.
At the Democratic convention in July, Kerry accepts the nomination with a salute, touting his military credentials and Purple Heart—which Bill and Seema watch with disgust. But at the same convention, a young state senator from Illinois, running for the U.S. senate, gives a keynote speech that electrifies them. He is fresh-faced but confident, he is Black, and his words soar.
He speaks of hope. Not blind optimism, not willful ignorance, but the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores, the hope of slaves sitting around fires singing freedom songs. What is this audacious hope—a belief in things not seen, a belief that there lie better days ahead—based on?
It’s only in America, Barack Obama says, that such things are possible, with its faith in simple dreams and insistence on small miracles, in hard work and perseverance, summed up in a declaration made more than two hundred years ago: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Isn’t his presence on this stage improbable enough that it constitutes proof?
It’s the messenger, of course, as much as the message. My to-be father is immediately smitten. A prophet in his own image, living and preaching a message of belonging and flourishing in America. There seems to be no anger in Obama, his face soft, open, solemn, creasing to sweetness whenever he smiles, so different from the man in the photo Mame had kept hidden, with the gun and the hard set to his jawline.
My to-be mother is at first a little skeptical, with the wariness of the recently burned, made uneasy precisely by Obama’s lack of anger. But Bill channels Obama with the single-mindedness of an evangelist, and he succeeds in persuading Seema to join him in his faith, her last reservations suspended when he reads to her Obama’s speech denouncing the Iraq War from two years earlier, even before Howard Dean.
No sooner does the Kerry-Edwards ticket lose in November than a buzz begins to build around Obama, even though he has just won his first term to the U.S. Senate and has denied any presidential ambitions. Bill and Seema become early acolytes. And two years later, when Obama publicly announces his candidacy, they will be joined by a growing multitude ready to follow him.
And along the way, Bill and Seema become lovers, get married, and move in together into a house on the top of a hill, with spectacular views of a peninsular city and sparkling bay, visible when the fog permits.
Are our endings foretold in our beginnings?
Consider my parents’ wedding. Bill and Seema had agreed they’d get married on the day Barack Obama officially kicked off his presidential campaign. In February 2007, three years after they first got together, Obama finally does so: addressing a freezing rally in Springfield, Illinois, in front of the state capitol, where a century and a half ago Abraham Lincoln called on a house divided to stand together, he issues his own call, for people to come together for the purpose of perfecting the union and building a better America.
But that happens on a Saturday, and the San Francisco City Hall doesn’t perform civil ceremonies over the weekend. When Bill and Seema show up, with Fiaz and Pierre in tow, the following Monday, they are confronted by another rally: it’s also the three-year anniversary of the day same-sex marriages had first been performed in San Francisco, marriages that had been voided within a few months by the California Supreme Court, citing Proposition 22. A crowd of gay and lesbian couples and supporters throng city hall to hear Mayor Newsom reiterate his commitment to win them the right to marry and reinstate their voided marriages. City hall echoes with applause and cheers, praise and gratitude.
“I didn’t know this was happening today,” Bill whispers to Seema.
He is disappointed that the main hall is occupied by the rally—their wedding would now be held in a small chamber instead of under the rotunda’s spectacular dome—but the disappointment is overshadowed by the fear that the rally might change Seema’s mind.
The rally does give Seema pause. There are many couples in the hall dressed in wedding attire, like the lesbians in the white tuxedo and the white dress. She finds herself scanning the crowd for a particular pair—of all the images of a euphoric San Francisco celebrating in the wake of Newsom’s order three years ago, this is the one imprinted indelibly in her mind: The first couple to be married, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, founders of America’s first lesbian rights group fifty years earlier. In the photo, the then eighty-three- and seventy-nine-year-olds, dressed in lavender and turquoise suits, hold each other in their frail arms, their wrinkled foreheads touching, bashful as teenagers.
But there’s no sign in the hall today of Del’s unruly mop of silvery hair beside Phyllis’s sedate gray-brown. Were they still alive? If so, they’d been together for close to fifty-five years, married for less than six months.
They have to skirt the crowd. Bill takes Seema by the hand, searching her face for signs of doubt. Seema has, in the three years they’ve been together, never shown any regret about the community she’d left behind. Fiaz is the only remaining connection she maintains to her queer past.
Their sex life, too, after that disastrous start in Iowa, has more than righted itself, with some patient instruction from Seema. There’s no reason to fear himself inadequate or her unfulfilled, if that morning’s frenzied lovemaking is anything to go by. She’d awakened charged and aroused, with a rapaciousness that had inflamed him too. They’d fucked feverishly, Bill crying out in long tremulous sobs as he came, the shock of his orgasm coursing through him. And then he’d pleasured her to a protracted climax, tongue and fingers flicking and stroking slowly, deliberately, the way she liked.
“Bill, slow down.” Seema stumbles in her high heels. “I know we decided to dress like the day we met, but repeating the ER part is going too far.” She has on the scarlet dress she’d worn for the anti–Iraq War march, and Bill his blue shirt and pigeon-gray slacks.
Bill stops in contrition, and she kisses him on the cheek, whispering, “Relax, I’m not going to pull a runaway bride.”
But she’s glad she’d insisted on everyday clothes for their party. She’d warned Fiaz and Pierre against wearing anything fancy or bringing any wedding accessories: bouquets, balloons. She’d have felt too awkward, too guilty. Now they could be at city hall on some trivial business.
Her mother called earlier that morning, when they were dressing for the ceremony. Ammi had asked, “Will you wear a saree today?”
“No, I don’t even own one anymore.”
“Do you remember—how you and Tahera fought over my wedding saree?”
How she’d coveted Ammi’s wedding saree, with its elaborate vines and flowers of gold zarr covering every inch of the silk, a luscious dual-toned crimson-peach, unlike the more modest dark reds that brides in their family usually wore on their weddings. She’d badgered Ammi until she’d been promised that saree for her own wedding. Tahera had to be placated, of course, so she’d offered Tahera her first three choices among the other sarees Ammi was setting aside for them, in the bottom shelf of her almirah. All those sarees that Ammi kept adding to regularly each year of their girlhood—and all the jewelry, too, the gold necklaces, earrings, and bangles, that Abba periodically brought home to enchant his two daughters with—they must have all been used for Tahera’s wedding.
But Ammi said, “I still have the saree. I saved it for you, for whenever you wanted it.”
The heft of Ammi’s gift, like the saree’s weight which belied its delicate Banarasi weave, settled like a rock in her heart. It was a more precious gift than she’d any right to expect. Ammi had accepted news of her impending marriage quietly, as if too grateful to ask questions. Since then, their conversations have become more frequent, almost weekly, though her mother still calls from outside the home, either from Halima Aunty’s or from an ISD booth. Ammi’s call today had been reassuring. She’d have been disappointed, even distressed, if Ammi hadn’t.
“I’m just happy you called,” she’d said. “Do you want to speak to Bill?”
Ammi first demurred but then asked to be put on the speakerphone. “I wish you both a long and happy married life.” Then to Bill: “Please take care of my daughter.”
And Bill took her hands in his and raised them to his lips as if for Ammi to see. “I will, Seema’s mother.”
I don’t need anyone to take care of me, she’d wanted to object. But she was silenced by the memory of all those times she’d witnessed—with anguished longing—mothers enfolding their daughter’s hands into the groom’s with the same tear-strained phrase.
Now waiting in the ceremony room, a pang of bitterness: if only it had been possible for her to be seated here, decked in Ammi’s saree, with her groom beside her, resplendent in a sherwani—why does the gender of the groom matter?—and flanked by her parents. She’s suddenly reminded of Reshmi, Prince Salim to her Anarkali, the day of the play—the closest she has come to such a configuration. Wherever Reshmi is now she is surely married and probably already burdened with several kids.
In the confines of this small bare chamber she casts the other occupants—the brides in white, carrying bouquets of demure calla lilies—in a pallor. All light in the room is drawn to her. Her scarlet dress seems to swell and pulsate, a flame of a flower, more brilliant than mehndi on any bride’s hands, more fierce than any red wedding saree she could drape herself in. The registrar’s gaze keeps reverting to her, even as he officiates for the couple ahead, as if no eye can resist her, no will can ignore her. She can almost imagine that Bill’s tight hold on one hand and Fiaz’s arm threaded about her waist are both needed to keep her seated, to stop her from whirling around the room, the scarlet swirling and flaring, even as the marriage-equality rally outside cheers, still audible over the registrar’s spiel—
Do you, Seema . . . ?
I do. Qabool.
When Seema is fifteen, she tapes the first telecast of the movie Mughal-E-Azam on the only channel—Doordarshan—then available on TV. My grandfather has just bought his first VCR and is excited to put it to the test, while his eldest daughter is excited to acquire her own copy of the movie. She’ll finally be able to summon at her pleasure Anarkali, or rather the actress Madhubala who portrays Anarkali with such tragic glory.
For Seema, Madhubala rules the movie, as the dancing servant girl. “Why be afraid when I merely love?” Anarkali challenges Akbar—Pyar kiya toh darna kya?—when he orders her to forget Salim under threat of imprisonment and death. “I’m not veiling my love from the Lord, why then veil for mere mortals?” she sings, her skirts swirling, her eyes snapping. Madhubala’s lissome figure whirls in the thousand mirrors of the Sheesh Mahal, her lips curling in a mocking smile as the emperor sits frozen, only jowls shaking in anger. The scene is one of the few shot in Technicolor in the otherwise black-and-white movie.
When the movie ends, Naeemullah says, “No one can ever match Madhubala. What beauty, what grace. There will be no one like her again.” Madhubala died young, succumbing to a congenital hole in her heart that brought her soaring career to a halt.
Does my mother, at fifteen, question her fascination with the movie and its heroine? Consider the complications: there’s the legend of Anarkali and the legend of Madhubala; there’s her father’s stamp of approval on both the movie and its heroine. How easy it is, then, to confuse desire for Anarkali with desire to be Anarkali, desire for Madhubala with desire to be Madhubala, to be Madhubala portraying Anarkali.
Some instinct warns her that she risks rebuke from her mother if she indulges further her preoccupation with Anarkali-Madhubala. To persuade her mother to permit further viewings of the movie, Seema announces a plan to write a play based on it, for her school’s Annual Day celebrations. And, in a shrewd move, she disarms her family by inviting them to participate in the effort.
Naeemullah pronounces it a capital idea. Father and daughter watch parts of the movie many times—with Tahera crouched by the VCR, operating it at their command—translating as best they can the poetry of the movie from Urdu to English. But the Urdu they speak at home, the Dakkani dialect, cannot compare to the purity of the courtly Urdu spoken in the movie. Urdu, Naeemullah proclaims, must be the language of love’s rituals: English, even under the Romantic poets, cannot match Urdu’s intricacy and intimacy. “Ask your mother,” he says.
By then Nafeesa has lost her fluency in chaste Urdu. Her initial translations are feeble and hesitant, so mother and daughter pour over a dusty Urdu-to-English dictionary they find in Naeemullah’s library, a relic dating from Nafeesa’s college years.
The play slowly takes root, sprouts, and flowers, tended to and watched over by the entire Hussein family. Anarkali is pomegranate blossom.
When the play is done, and typed up by Naeemullah, with carbon copies for good measure, Seema and Tahera succeed in cajoling their parents into staging a reading at home. There’s no need to discuss roles—Seema will obviously be Anarkali, Naeemullah is Akbar, Nafeesa is the queen mother Jodha Bai, trapped between loyalty to her husband and love for her son, and Tahera gets to play Salim and other minor characters.
The evening begins lightheartedly, with laughter and fits of giggling, none of them, not even Naeemullah, able to keep a straight face at first. The dialogue, dramatic in Urdu, appears overly florid in English. But as they respond to Naeemullah’s coaching, something surprising happens.
“Say it like this,” Naeemullah urges, lending nimble voice to the words, transforming himself from a fiery Akbar to a dulcet Jodha Bai, from an unwavering Prince Salim to a passionate Anarkali, and the words no longer seem extravagant. His wife and daughters are forced to concede the truth in his tales of excelling in amateur theater during his years of medical college. His zeal rubs off on them. Laughter is forgotten.
Seema herself is an ecstatic Anarkali.
“Not the rose, but its thorns—” she exclaims, in something approaching rapture. “Yet I do not fear the pain, for my love cannot wither.”
The next step is to convince Sister Agnes, her eleventh-standard class teacher and English teacher for three years, to agree to produce the play for the school Annual Day. But after reading the typed manuscript, Sister Agnes says, “This is beautifully written, very poetic, Seema. But it’s not appropriate for a class play.”
Seema has thought of herself as Sister Agnes’s favorite student. Two years earlier, Sister Agnes cast Seema in the lead role of Portia in a twenty-minute adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, a privilege that should have gone to some girl in the eleventh standard.
But Seema holds a trump card: next year she’ll be in the twelfth standard and can’t participate in the Annual Day play since she’ll be preparing for her final public exams. She says, in her most wistful voice, “Sister, this is the last play I can take part in for Annual Day.”
Her voice quavers with a quiet distress, perfected under her father’s training. But to her surprise, her throat actually catches and her eyes prickle. This will be her last year with Sister Agnes; next year, she’ll have the headmistress as her English teacher. Sister Agnes has been her champion these many years, and her merry eyes, wimpled face, and the long steeple-shaped mole by her upper lip have been a source of almost daily communion. The loss signals many forthcoming changes.
She sniffles and turns away from Sister Agnes, who catches her hand and says, “Come, child, don’t cry. What’s there to cry about?”
Seema’s face is glassy-eyed and trembling. For a fleeting moment she unconsciously mirrors Anarkali-Madhubala, her eyes pooling with unshed tears, tragically brave and lovely.
Who can resist that look? Sister Agnes’s eyes moisten in their turn. She promises to reconsider and later returns the manuscript with a few changes and cuts.
Soon the rehearsals start. The parts have been cast. Seema is Anarkali, of course. Akbar is to be played by Madhavi, an eleventh grader from a different section, with her shot-putter’s build and strapping voice and the beginnings of a mustache. Plump, voluble Preethi is the queen mother, Jodha Bai.
As for Prince Salim: Who better to play that part than Seema’s best friend, Reshmi, lanky, reserved Reshmi, taller than anyone else in class, fleet flat-chested Reshmi, faster than any other girl in school, her face angular, ascetic, noble, with knife-edge cheekbones, her hair so soft and weightless it appears molded to her skull, her voice—
It’s a voice that Naeemullah has wished for his daughters! It’s a voice trained in the Hindustani vocal tradition, robust yet agile, capable of both sonorous lows and ringing highs. It’s a voice Seema never tires of hearing, that sends Seema’s heart tripping, especially when it’s inflected with the giddiness that is reserved for her alone.
Seema has given this voice only a few lines in her play. But there are benefits to this—what else does Reshmi have to do now while Anarkali spars with Akbar but hold her hand? Reshmi has little to do but gaze into Anarkali’s eyes while Anarkali recites couplets of love. When soldiers are ordered to seize a vocal, unrepentant Anarkali, they first have to tear her away from Reshmi’s arms. It’s as if Seema, though herself prepared to play the part of the doomed Anarkali, would rather Reshmi play no other part than herself.
The next year my mother will finish her higher-secondary schooling and will leave for Bangalore to do her bachelor’s in English at St. Joseph’s College. She’ll have chosen a college in a different city so she can stay away from home. Three years later she will leave for even farther away, to Oxford, England, for a master’s. And from there to New York, abandoned by her family and leaving her first lover behind, for a fellowship at Columbia University in communication. She’ll jump at the chance of staying in the United States a year later, accepting a fortuitous offer of a marketing job in a Silicon Valley just beginning to bubble up then, midnineties, excited and anxious to leave her past completely behind, seeking once again a new beginning.
The newlyweds have agreed that Seema should quit her current job and work for the Obama campaign. Bill will continue at the health insurance company he’d joined and will maintain their finances and benefits while volunteering on the side, at least until the fortunes of the campaign became more apparent.
Seema hopes that the contacts she made while volunteering for Dean will give her an in and lead to a job handling public relations or new media for the campaign. She writes to everyone she knows, and many promise to pass on her inquiries. She waits to hear back, spending spring and summer 2007 holding house parties and fundraisers, like she did for Dean.
Obama is the underdog in the battle for the Democratic nomination. He’s deployed to crisscross the nation, speaking wherever he can, whipping up visibility and enthusiasm, his speeches at turns funny, self-deprecating, earnest, moving, inspiring, galvanizing. He’s always charming and effortlessly likable. Obama fever catches on and spreads like wildfire through the progressive corners of the country.
But as summer advances, Seema has yet to hear back about a job. She complains that the campaign is closed off and unapproachable.
Bill consoles her: Obama must be flooded with applications from more experienced professionals.
Seema has other suspicions. The inner circle of staff Obama has hired is very White.
She’d been accepted by the Dean campaign, Bill scoffs, which was as White, if not more. Obama must hire the best if he’s to have any chance of victory. Isn’t she aware of the political landscape?
“But Obama is Black. And he’s supposed to be different.”
“He hasn’t even started, for God’s sake. Give him a chance.”
This is the first argument in some time that Bill is unwilling to end, let alone concede, even when Seema throws up her hands together as if in prayer—a gesture that Bill usually uses to give in when Seema gets very heated, picked up for its absurdity from watching the occasional Indian movie.
Thankfully, there’s soon news that there are to be camps to recruit and train volunteers to create field organizations in each state. They attend Camp Obama in San Francisco, led by a team of experienced organizers, including a professor from Harvard, over a weekend of communion with other like-minded activists. Bill and Seema are assigned to a leadership team for their congressional district, tasked with recruiting more volunteers and building capacity for voter registration, phone banking, canvassing, and getting out the vote in the California primary that February, less than six months away. Bill is to be their team coordinator, and Seema will be in charge of volunteer recruitment.
Raring to get started after a summer of passivity, Seema immediately hands in her resignation at her firm and embarks upon a grueling schedule of recruitment meetings wherever she can hold them, in cafés, in libraries and bookshops, in bars, in community spaces.
She has rehearsed her story of the self, taking naturally to the technique the Obama camp has promoted as a means to convey personal values and build connections to potential volunteers and voters, by appealing to emotion through the story of her life and why she feels called to volunteer. She declaims about being a Hussein in America, a Muslim, an object of suspicion and derision, an outsider who has to prove herself loyal all the time. A win for Obama—the skinny kid with a funny name, with a Hussein in it as well!—would mean there is a place for her, and every outsider like her, in America. Her story resonates among the immigrants and the new arrivals to San Francisco, appeals to its liberal and progressive base.
She has also begun conducting her own training sessions. Word spreads, and she’s quickly in demand, invited to coach new volunteers all over the Bay Area. Between her frequent trips crisscrossing the bay and Bill’s day job and evenings spent coordinating the team’s activities, they sometimes see each other only in passing during the week, or at team meetings.
Meanwhile, the roller coaster that is the primary season starts. To Seema’s great relief, Obama opens the year with an upset, besting Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus, astounding America—she’d feared he’d be snuffed out like Dean in the white winter of Iowa. But he promptly loses in New Hampshire and Nevada, only regaining momentum by trouncing Clinton in South Carolina, with only days left to the California primary.
The approaching Super Tuesday takes on the frenzied excitement of a dream. The nation is at fever pitch: more than twenty states will be voting in a few days, perhaps determining the presidential nominees of both parties. Obama and Clinton, and their surrogates, jet around the country holding huge rallies to energize their bases. Yes we can! has become the rallying cry of the Obama supporters: “When we’ve been told we’re not ready or that we shouldn’t try or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can,” Obama had declared in a speech to motivate his supporters after losing the New Hampshire primary. “It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.” This has gone viral; a black-and-white music video featuring clips of this speech has become an internet sensation, Obama’s words echoed, repeated, and riffed on by celebrity singers, both Black and White.
Yes we can! Heads down, their team shifts from organizing and building capacity to getting out the vote to capitalize on the late surge of support for Obama after the South Carolina victory. Come Super Tuesday, Seema casts her vote for Obama with a sense of accomplishment—it’s the first vote of her life: she’d been too young to vote while in India and had naturalized only the year before in the United States.
But the results turn out mixed. Their work pays off in San Francisco, which Obama carries comfortably, but Clinton still wins California. Nationwide, wins are offset by other losses.
Still, the Obama campaign claims victory: they’ve picked up more delegates than Clinton, establishing their lead, and they’ve managed to disrupt the media narrative of Clinton’s inevitability. The media declares Obama the front-runner. The San Francisco teams celebrate, having helped limit Clinton’s haul of California delegates. But at the after-party, Seema is unable to join in wholeheartedly: she’d have preferred the vindication conferred by an outright win. Despite Bill’s reassurances, she cannot shake off the feeling of being let down, as on that dismal evening in Iowa four years ago.
She’s beginning to fret that the campaign is not doing enough to refute the conspiracy theories intensifying on the internet: that Obama is Kenyan and not eligible to be president; he’s a secret Muslim, a member of the Nation of Islam; his real father is Malcolm X; he considers himself the Black messiah; he’s a socialist, dedicated to expanding the welfare state and adding to entitlements to enrich his people; he’s an unqualified affirmative-action candidate. With its own nominee anointed—John McCain—the Right has begun its offensive to discredit the likely Democratic candidate. The allegations first crop up in minor right-wing sites and then are amplified in the echo chambers of conservative media. Some rumors are even given credibility by desperate Clinton supporters.
“We’re not taking the threat seriously,” Seema fumes. “We need to have a rapid-response media team to kill the rumors before they start spreading. Has it occurred to the campaign this is why Obama is unable to clinch the nomination?”
But Bill is dismissive, heartened by the campaign’s recent gains: “No one really believes this junk.”
“Oh, so you’re the communications expert. People are capable of believing anything, if it’s repeated often enough.”
She spends a few weeks appealing to her campaign contacts to refer her for a job on the PR team. Her efforts again go nowhere, this time purportedly because she’s too valuable as a trainer: they would like her to continue training volunteers in states they haven’t started actively organizing in yet. Reluctantly Seema gives in and packs her bags for Pittsburgh, for the Pennsylvania primary in April.
It’s a gray wintry March in Pennsylvania. TV channels are saturated with videos of Reverend Wright, Obama’s Black pastor from Chicago, railing against America and Obama’s opponents: Not God bless America, but God damn America! and We have supported state terrorism against Palestinians—America’s chickens are coming home to roost! and Hillary has never had a people defined as a non-person! The right wing chants: Obama hates America, Obama is an Angry Black Man.
When not conducting training sessions, Seema drives to half-shuttered malls and neglected downtowns around Pittsburgh to register voters and check out for herself the effects of the uproar. Tensions rise perceptibly wherever she shows up with her Obama affiliation visible. Pedestrians stare with hostility, brusquely turning down her overtures. After trips to the restroom, she finds her table messed up, forms missing, placards torn up, with nobody having witnessed the vandalism. Posters circulating on the internet one day appear the next day on lampposts and shop fronts: Obama with his arm around Reverend Wright—The Audacity of Hate. Obama in an Arab headdress—Anti-Semite. Obama with horns and pitchfork—Anti-Christ.
“See what I said?” Seema rants to Bill. “They’ve no trouble believing Obama is a radical Black Christian and an Islamic jihadist at the same time. They can even believe he’s a Muslim pretending to be a Christian so he can win. They call it ‘taqiyya’—read up about it.”
Obama is to address the nation the next day, in what is publicized as his first major speech on race, to try to stem the slide in the polls resulting from his relationship with Reverend Wright. The Pittsburgh office, Seema included, gathers that morning to watch the live broadcast. Speaking at a hastily arranged assembly at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, against a backdrop of American flags, Obama begins by reciting the opening words of the Constitution, across the street from where it was drafted and signed.
The room that starts out tense, anxious—this speech could decide the campaign’s fate—is left teary-eyed, inspired. Reverend Wright is correct that the union is not perfect yet, but he is wrong that there has been no progress, that America cannot change. This campaign—the campaign of the son of a Black man from Kenya and a White woman from Kansas, building a powerful coalition of African Americans and White Americans—is proof of that. One of the organizers in the room, the youngest, openly sobs: Obama cites her story as reason for further hope in the next generation—a young White woman, who’d battled childhood poverty when her mother got sick and lost healthcare, now organizing in Black communities, seeking out allies in her fight against injustice. This is how the union grows stronger, toward perfection.
Obama is confident and authoritative, but prosaic and detached, and determined to be evenhanded: yes, Black people have been wronged in the past and continue to be wronged, but White people have their legitimate grievances too, and both sides must work together to heal the racial divide.
“Did you hear that?” Bill texts Seema even before Obama is done speaking. “This is why he deserves to be president.”
Seema agrees that the speech is masterly. Obama has delivered as they’d hoped and prayed: almost immediately the media hails it as one of the most profound speeches on race since King’s “I Have a Dream.” What she doesn’t admit to Bill is that she feels somehow disappointed, even disquieted.
For even as she accepts that it was perhaps the only strategy Obama could have adopted to blunt the Wright controversy, she can’t help but wish that Obama had shown some emotion, some anger, while speaking about the wrongs suffered by his people. What if the Obama who’d given the speech today is the real Obama—passionate perhaps, but not angry, as Bill maintains, and therefore unprepared to fight back as a partisan, as would be needed, perhaps even reluctant to appear as one? What if Obama were not the fiery crusader she’d convinced herself of, but merely a cautious technocrat who prided himself on being perceived as objective, impartial, methodical? He’d promised progress as a gradual evolution for the benefit of some future generation.
In the workshops she conducts over the next days, she finds herself curiously disengaged. She’s listless, too, in her interactions with her colleagues and companions. She continues to canvass and register voters but no longer outside the city. She manages to score a seat onstage with Obama for the kickoff rally on his Pennsylvania tour, to Bill’s envy, but instead of excitement—this is maybe the closest she’ll ever get to Obama!—all she feels is a nameless dread, as if awaiting further disillusionment.
Long lines snake outside the stately facade of the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial before the rally, despite the drizzle and gray chill of that morning. The hall is packed, center and sides, mostly students from the two neighboring universities. Mostly young, and White, and earnest but clueless, Seema thinks. She is seated with the audience onstage, on tiered risers arranged behind the lectern, in the third row. In the row in front of her sits a trio of enthusiastic older Black women, eager for Obama to appear on stage. Above her, a banner in red, white, and blue: Change We Can Believe In.
During the introduction, Obama stands with his arms crossed and his head bowed pensively, as if oblivious to the extravagant praise the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania uses to endorse him: the promise of the nation. What could be tracking through Obama’s mind as he listens? So too would her father hold himself, to hide his gratification, at the events he’d been invited to preside over. Obama’s stance of modesty vanishes as soon as he gains the lectern and launches into his speech. The transformation to an easy charm and affable authority is immediate, and familiar—she’s struck again by the similarities to her father. Her senses quicken, as if alive to his slightest movement, even to the expressions on his face, though only imagined, since she’s presented only his back and profile as he speaks.
But what had she hoped for in coming today? This is no more than Obama’s stump speech: the invocation of Dr. King, a laundry list of the nation’s problems, inspiring stories of individuals achieving their goals despite all odds, a laundry list of proposed solutions and campaign promises, ending with the appeal to hope. Obama has continued to tweak the speech—addressing issues of the day, interjecting humorous asides, sharpening well-received lines—but many passages remain unchanged. She can repeat these word for word, as if she’d memorized them for some elocution competition.
The crowd, too, must have heard some version of the speech before, though it appears not to care. It cheers frenetically at all the appropriate places, rising frequently in standing ovation. Being on stage, Seema feels pressured to rise with the others. She submits, but more and more reluctantly as the speech progresses, for even the delivery is disappointing: Obama is less fluent today, tentative at times, fumbling for words at others, defensive in the face of polls showing him trailing Clinton in Pennsylvania. He struggles to hit the highs of some of his previous speeches, his usual assurance flagging. His promises sound hollow to her ears today, for even he doesn’t seem to believe them. She can imagine her father shaking his head, tut-tutting, as during one of their elocution practice sessions. If she’d come hoping for renewal, reinvigoration, she’s not going to find it here.
Bill would have given anything to be here. She feels guilty for paying so little regard to Obama, mere feet away, while she is wrapped up in herself, only aware of the thunderous moments of applause, automatically joining in with the rest, standing up and sitting down in ritualized unison, like the times she’d prayed namaz in Chennai, usually during Eid, forced to by Halima Aunty—
They’d pray together, the womenfolk at home, the two girls, she and Tahera, and the two women, Halima Aunty and her mother, while their men were away at the mosque for the Eid namaz. She’d protest: Why isn’t she allowed into the mosque? Why pray to a god that denies the world to her?
She could resist Ammi’s bidding but not Halima Aunty’s cajoling. She’d go through the prayers impatiently, mindlessly following Halima Aunty, standing up, sitting down, and then she’d wait for the men to return, restless, for everything pleasurable about Eid came afterward—Ammi’s biryani, the visits of friends and relatives, the sweets, the gift of eidi that supplemented her pocket money, the chance to model her new Eid clothes. She hasn’t celebrated Eid in almost two decades. The last time was before she went to England, before everything went wrong.
Obama finishes his speech to prolonged applause. He turns to shake hands with the people behind him on the risers. From Seema’s vantage point, he seems less commanding now than when his face fills the TV screen. His handshakes are perfunctory—he is tired, only flitting a smile to a Black woman behind him, in response to the woman’s beaming face. But that doesn’t stop the thicket of hands thrust out toward him—hands thrust out as if seeking sanctification, a blessing.
Simultaneously, a recollection: At the airport in Chennai, preparing to board the flight to London that first time, they’d all come to see her off—Tahera sobbing uncontrollably, Halima Aunty consoling her, her mother discreetly wiping her eyes with her pallu, even her father cloaking distress in an exuberance of speech and laughter.
She’s checked her luggage, and stands with them one last time, clutching her passport tightly like a talisman. As she turns to pass through immigration and finally onward to the long-awaited boarding gate, something unexpected comes over her.
For this is the other part of Eid she used to chafe against, when all the waiting womenfolk, including her mother, in the custom of touching their elders’ feet on special occasions, bend down to touch her father’s feet and receive his blessings, a gesture of almost veneration, which Tahera waited for eagerly every time, throwing herself at Abba’s feet as soon as he returned from the mosque, and which Seema dreaded. But some obscure instinct prompts her to avail herself of that gesture now, to stoop before Abba in the airport, till her fingers and passport lightly brush his shoes. Bowed in front of him, his looming figure casting a shadow over her, she holds her breath until he gives his blessing: Jeeti raho, Beti. He raises her to standing, kissing her forehead, whispering: I know you’ll make me proud.
His voice cracks, that one time, despite his efforts to control himself, and sudden relief, grief, gratitude washes through her.
Then, a recognition: She doesn’t need to add to all the worshipful hands held out to Obama. Obama himself has little power to grant anything—he is here after all to seek the blessing of the White people in the crowd, a blessing that would be given only conditionally, like her father’s, to be revoked any time they were displeased with him, as he himself knows well from the deference he gave them in his speech on race.
Yes, Obama could win the nomination, and perhaps even the election, but what would that change? Obama claims hope, but there is always a reality that won’t budge.
Change you can believe in. What if you didn’t—couldn’t—believe in change? Change as something that took you someplace new, and lasting, not something that brought you back to where you’ve already been: three continents, three countries, six cities, multiple homes, myriad loves, the ceaseless struggle, but still the same inescapable tragedy of her self: still seeking approval, still seeking some way to make her father proud of her again.
My mother Seema as a thirteen-year-old: Sitting up in the gulmohar tree in their compound in Chennai, hiding from the world amid its fiery blossoms. It’s a Saturday, the month is July, the tree is on fire, the canopy of green bipinnate leaves overshadowed by a blaze of scarlet flames. Not for nothing is the tree also called the Flame of the Forest. Seema hides here, cradled in a nook the tree has carved out for her, her back against the trunk, legs supported on branches running fused together before they separate and disappear into the kaleidoscope of red and yellow, green and brown.
She reaches to pluck the largest unopened bud from the cluster hanging beside her head, she runs a fingernail along the pale yellow ridges of the calyx, she peels the still clinging sepals to reveal the petals—the outermost, large and white and blotched with red and yellow, and curled up inside it are the others, red and wrinkled like a baby’s fingers. Within them, the coiled stamens—the filaments, curved necks so fragile it is a wonder they can support the weight of the heads, the anthers mossed with soft golden-yellow pollen. And somewhere, oh here it is, is the pistil—a hairy ovule, and a long and slender style, so completely unremarkable.
She dissects the bud and chews each detached part methodically before swallowing.
Who’s she hiding from?
First, her mother. Seema knows she’ll be reprimanded if Nafeesa catches her up in the tree. She’s on her fifth-ever menstrual period, which arrived unexpectedly today, two months after the last one, bloodier and stronger than any previous time, so unstanchable that Seema had been scared. She’d spent the morning locked up with her mother, sobbing in her lap, drenching Nafeesa’s saree with her tears.
Never had she felt so betrayed by her body before, not even that first time. Now a few hours later, secured with a pad, flouting her mother’s admonitions to remain in bed, she’s perched high in the gulmohar tree, chewing on crimped buds. Their pungent tartness is addictive and satisfying.
Next, she’s hiding from her sister, who had stood outside their parents’ room bawling as though it were her body bleeding. Tahera had pounded on the door, begging to be let in, then continued banging her head against wood until their mother opened the door. She’d refused to be sent away, lying on the floor clutching at Nafeesa’s ankles, screaming as their father finally managed to lead her away: “Is she going to die? Let me go, let me go to Seema.”
And last, Seema is hiding from her father.
Previously whenever Naeemullah has tended to her, it’s her father she’s always seen, his loving eyes, his soothing voice, not the trained professional who held office in his clinic downstairs. And always in her own room. But today, for the first time, she was summoned to his consulting room.
When she knocks, he tells her to take a seat in the tone he uses with his patients, public, practiced. She’d wanted him to hold her, to comfort her, to kiss her forehead. Instead, she has to sit down across from him, in a chair his patients use, her hands in her lap, waiting for him to look up from a book.
After a long minute, he says, eyes still on the book, “Your mother tells me you’re suffering from some disorder.”
It’s that word disorder that gets to her, before anything else. Is it a disorder what’s happening to her? Is she somehow abnormal? He’s talking about the human body—her body—and tripping effortlessly from his lips are words, only some she’s learned in biology: ovary, uterus, uterine wall, placenta, endometrium, menarche, menorrhagia, dysmenorrhea. He reads aloud passages from the book, explaining as he goes along, in his familiar lecturing manner that has until today been thrilling.
“Do you understand?” he asks.
No, she does not understand.
“I want it to stop,” Seema cries. “Make it go away.”
She wants to be told that nothing has changed, that she’s still his daughter, that she’s still the same person she was before, that they will continue on as they’ve always done, father and daughter, friends, confidants.
“It may just be temporary. It may correct itself eventually. It can always be contained,” her father says. He continues reading to her from the book, elaborating on tests, procedures, treatments. Does she understand?
What she understands is that her body isn’t hers anymore. She doesn’t control it, it controls her. What she understands is that, overwhelmed by her disorder, her father has chosen to hide his paternal self behind his clinical self. In his voice she senses doctorly frustration masking fatherly disappointment, even distaste. She has become a problem to be fixed. What she begins to understand is that they are on different sides of a fissure that will only grow wider.
Her father closes the book and sets it aside. “Come. Your mother will be waiting for us. Lunch will be getting cold.”
She doesn’t want lunch. Her mother urges her to eat something but lets her go to her room.
Instead, Seema slips back downstairs and into the garden and climbs up the gulmohar tree, her pad an inconvenience to be ignored. She doesn’t stop at her usual perch but continues climbing farther. She is determined to climb higher than ever before, determined to ignore the ache in her limbs, but she is forced to stop when the cramps in her abdomen become unbearable. But, although she hasn’t beaten her own record, she has managed to get far enough up that she’s completely hidden from view, tucked away in a fork in the trunk, cloaked by scarlet blossoms.
As she plucks petals and drops them one by one, as she plucks buds to dissect and consume, she promises herself for the first time what she’ll later promise herself over and over again, in clearer and more direct terms: not to let her body decide for her what she should do, not to let her life be dictated by forces she doesn’t understand or accept.
The evening Obama clinches the Democratic nomination, Bill picks up Indian takeout on his way home and sets to chill a bottle of champagne he’s splurged on—vintage 2004, the year he and Seema started dating, the year Obama came into their lives. They’re preparing to watch the broadcast of Obama’s speech kicking off the general election campaign against Republican nominee John McCain.
Seema has been withdrawn ever since her return, retiring early each night, pleading jet lag and later continued exhaustion, rejecting his advances for company, intimacy. She’d become tight-lipped over the phone the last many weeks away—the tense, unexpectedly long primary season must have taken its toll—but he hopes that tonight’s celebration will serve to reinvigorate her.
Barack and Michelle Obama come onstage holding hands. They wave at the crowd, its blue sea of Change placards. Bill waves back, lump in throat. Before Michelle leaves, she and Obama bump fists, Michelle initiating, which Bill finds strangely moving. He turns to Seema in imitation, his fist out, but Seema hasn’t been paying attention to the unfolding scene, lost in some abstraction. When she eventually responds, the gesture feels forced.
He has experienced enough of Seema’s periods of withdrawal to know there’s little he can do but wait them out. His elation dulled, he listens to the speech distracted and irritated by Seema’s inattention. Obama thanks his grandmother, and an intense yearning for Mame sweeps through Bill. If only she were by his side tonight—his lips tremble, his eyes prick with the prelude to tears, but he’s stalled by Seema’s apparent disinterest. He even sees her rolling her eyes at some of Obama’s more obvious rhetorical flourishes.
When the speech is over, Bill picks up the champagne bottle. The cork pops with an anticlimactic whimper, the champagne fizzing onto the carpet, an acrid smell of mown grass. Seema hurries toward him with wineglasses.
They toast: “To the next president of the United States.” They clink glasses, they kiss.
But it’s not the evening Bill had hoped for. The one consolation: Obama and Michelle are immediately surrounded by a posse of close-cut rugged men in black suits that follow them as they mingle with the crowd—at last the secret service, prominently protective.
Seema reheats the takeout, and they sit down to dinner, the pungent spices of bhuna ghosht and achaar chicken washed down with the champagne. She’s preoccupied, even as she inquires about the day’s events.
They’d decided last year that if Obama won the nomination Bill would take a leave of absence, or quit if he couldn’t, and they’d volunteer together in some swing state, like Florida or Ohio, for the general election. Now that the moment has arrived, Bill has to admit to some misgivings about quitting his job: he’s never taken such risks before. Mame, if she were alive, would surely declare it irresponsible.
Midbite, as if Seema had been about to broach the topic herself, she says, “Bill, I’ve been offered a director post at my old job.”
Her news, though startling, doesn’t surprise him. “How come you didn’t tell me about this before?”
“I’m telling you now. I start on Monday.”
This confirmation of Seema’s failing commitment, after the evening’s apathy, is beyond vexing. “So I have to go to Florida or Ohio by myself. You’re bailing on me.”
“I’m exhausted, Bill,” Seema says.
“But not too exhausted to take on a new job. Something’s changed—Seema, what is it?”
She flares up. “Well, if you really want to know—I’ve lost faith in your candidate.”
He sighs wearily: shoring up her confidence in the campaign has been the substance of their interactions the last couple of months.
“The state supreme court has struck down Prop 22, reaffirming marriage as a basic civil right, and what does Obama have to say?” She proceeds to imitate Obama, contorting her face into a look of sincerity and concern: “I respect the decision of the California Supreme Court and continue to believe that states should make their own decisions when it comes to the issue of marriage.” Her mimicry is atrocious—her Obama sounds upper-class British—but she has got Obama’s inflections and pauses right, though exaggerated to prissiness.
The court’s judgment was handed down three weeks ago in mid-May, before her return, and she hadn’t mentioned the matter till now. Had she been tracking the case? But, of course, with San Francisco getting ready again for gay marriages, she would have learned soon enough anyway. “Obama supports civil unions,” he replies lamely.
“You know this—separate is not equal.”
“Clinton’s no better. At least Obama has made it clear he’s against constitutional amendments.”
“Clinton is a career politician. But Obama—couldn’t he have at least acknowledged how important the ruling is?”
“If he says anything more, it will only become a distraction. Republicans will use it to increase evangelical turnout in November.”
“So, equality is only a distraction? Overturning antimiscegenation laws was only a distraction?”
The dinner forgotten, the argument escalates so swiftly that Bill is blindsided. How could he suggest that gay marriages and interracial marriages are not exactly equivalent? She flings quotes at him from landmark Supreme Court decisions—Sharp v. Perez, Loving v. Virginia—she’s evidently read up on them. She accuses Obama of hypocrisy and expediency: “He wouldn’t even be here today if it had been illegal in his state for his parents to marry.”
When he defends Obama’s stance as pragmatic, she tears into Obama with a fury he’s never seen before, in all their quarrels of four years or all her tirades against Bush and Cheney and America. Obama, too, is a lying politician. A conservative in progressive clothing. A White man in a Black body. Obama would betray everyone hoping for change. Consider the way he threw his Black pastor under the bus. Consider all the money he’s accepting from the rich. Consider the inner circle of White staff and advisors he’s surrounded himself with. Obama is too beholden to his White supporters to risk angering them. Obama is too infatuated with his image of uniter to fight for his people. Obama is too cowardly to force big changes. Obama is a smoke screen erected by the rich and privileged to maintain the status quo. Obama is a con man peddling empty hope to the rest.
It’s a fury Bill has never experienced before. He’s dumbfounded, as he watches Seema, a stranger now, her voice and features and form almost unrecognizable. He can do nothing but let her rave, the tumult within him pinning him to his chair, as he swills down the bitter champagne to fill some hole that’s opened up in him.
He feels anger at her words, of course, but it’s buried under everything else churning through him. There’s shock at witnessing a side of Seema he’s never seen before. There’s bafflement at the cause for its emergence now. There’s hope that Seema doesn’t mean what she’s saying. There’s fear that she does. There’s anguish that this could be the beginning of the end of everything between them.
She’s spent as suddenly as she’d erupted. “So you’ve nothing to say?”
“We made a promise,” he says. “Now this gay marriage issue has become more important to you than getting Obama elected—”
He picks at the congealed meat on his plate. He can feel the sting of her eyes on him. His heart thuds as she pushes her chair back, picks up her plate, and dumps it in the sink before leaving the dining room.
He tracks her up the stairs to their bedroom and down the stairs again to the garage; the garage door grinds open, the car throbs out. He clears the table while drinking the remaining champagne directly from the bottle. As always, her presence continues to vibrate in the air, an aroused agitated thrumming this time.
Yet he prefers that to the dull heartache of her absence in the house. He knows he should be angry with her for ruining this night. But all he feels is the relief of resignation. His guilt from earlier about quitting his job is overrun by the conviction that were he to leave for Florida or Ohio by himself, for another sustained period of separation, Seema would certainly be lost to him. He sleeps fitfully in an alcohol-induced lifelessness—their king bed is a vast desolate feathertop—only vaguely aware that Seema hasn’t returned yet even as the hours stretch toward dawn.
He wakes to a pounding headache and the dream sound of rain. It’s seven in the morning; Seema is in the shower. Her side of the bed is not slept in. “Did you just get in?”
“I slept on the sofa downstairs. I needed some space. I’m sorry I ruined last night for you. But we can’t go on pretending like my life before you didn’t exist. Like I’ve nothing at stake in this election.”
He doesn’t ask her where she was or whom she’d been with. He’s too glad she’s willing to discuss the previous night to hold it against her too long. He admits that Obama’s stand on gay marriage is at the very least politically calculated. She accepts that her allegations against Obama are otherwise (mostly) baseless. She promises she will take some time before the election to volunteer elsewhere, since it would be unprofessional to un-accept her directorship now; he surmises there’ll be enough for them to do for the general election in adjacent Nevada. They both agree to forgive and forget.
But Bill cannot completely forget all that has been awakened: the anxieties and insecurities of their early days together; the memory of her at dinner, raging, a woman possessed.
A few Sundays later, end of June, Seema is at the San Francisco Pride parade with Fiaz. This year’s parade is to be a celebration of the recent court victory and the marriages that have resumed since then; for the second time, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were the first couple to be (re-)married, and Seema hopes to see them ride in the parade today—probably her last and only chance, for Del is in her late eighties now and wheelchair bound.
Seema is here at Fiaz’s pleading. Fiaz has been despondent lately, he and Pierre caught up in constant arguments. “I didn’t say anything about getting married,” he complains, as he and Seema wait under the rainbow flags of Market Street for the parade to start. “I only wanted us to march together in this year’s parade. But—”
He quotes Pierre morosely, mimicking his scholarly tone and French accent perfectly, as if he has internalized Pierre’s comments: “Parades and marriages are products of authoritarianism. I’d rather be at Mack Folsom Prison, hooded and handcuffed, partaking of homosexual delights, than marching with assimilationists and exhibitionists and look-but-don’t-touch queens.”
Pierre has taken off somewhere, and while Fiaz can’t face the repeated questioning were he to march with his South Asian friends in Trikone—“Why didn’t you bring your partner? Are you still with that French professor? Why aren’t you getting married?”—he’s determined to at least watch the parade.
The theme for the year is “United by Pride, Bound for Equality.” Kicking off the parade are the usual Dykes on Bikes. The crowd goes delirious as dyke couples blast down Market Street on motorbikes. Today, in addition to their usual black leather or blue denim, some are attired in whites and pinks, wedding dresses straddling the gleam of their bikes, veils snapping behind them in the wind; others are suited and gowned; and yet others ride as everyday brides holding Just Married signs in their newlywed hands.
This is Seema’s first time attending Pride in a decade. She’d grown blasé about it, limiting herself to the Dyke March, held the evening before on Pride weekend; for the last several years, with Bill, she’s not even been aware when Pride came around. She feels a little like an imposter today: Does she even deserve to be here? She claps her hands to her ears against the deafening din, but the euphoria shocking the air is irresistible, the crowds larger and more exuberant than she’s experienced in the past. Even Fiaz, mournful a minute ago, joins in, bouncing up and down, dragging her with him, easily overcoming her token protest.
“Any desi dykes on the bikes?” She strains to get a good view through the thronging crowd. “Any dressed like a desi bride?”
“I can’t see any—” Fiaz scrambles up a lamppost base. “Anyway, it’ll only be the boys dressed as brides, not the dykes. You’ll see them on the Trikone float, dolled up in sarees and ghagra-cholis.”
Next are the bicyclists, the AIDS Life Cycle riders, and then an outpouring of color: a surge of rainbow balloons flooding the street, as if to wash it of any lingering staidness, any straightness, and carried in by it, a swarm of multicolored anemones and jellyfish, tendrils ballooned and tethered to beautiful men and women gyrating in skimpy underwear. Bare flesh flashes, and thongs and bikinis and star-spangled breasts bob and jiggle, amid twirling streams of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. The very light shimmies, shimmers.
“My eyes are getting drunk,” Fiaz says.
The Pride theme float that follows is a giant wedding cake, and behind it are the various agencies and individuals instrumental in overturning Prop 22, all met with lusty thank-yous and applause. Signs of Vote No On Prop 8 are also being toted—Proposition 8 being the Right’s redoing of the overturned Proposition 22, a constitutional amendment to force a ban on same-sex marriage that it successfully added to the ballot for the upcoming November election. But the crowd doesn’t let that diminish its enthusiasm. Mayor Newsom, White and straight and well coiffed, cruises by in an open-topped jeep in an open-collared white shirt, accompanied by his fiancée, and receives a homecoming hero’s welcome. Seema had considered Newsom’s defiance of Prop 22 a self-serving political stunt four years ago, but who is she to still argue that, in the face of this positive outcome?
“You cut social services for AIDS patients and the homeless,” some voice screams at Newsom, though nobody seems to pay it any attention.
Bringing up the rear are newly married gay and lesbian couples walking hand in hand, almost sedately, the very picture of normalcy, escorting the plaintiff couples in the case against Prop 22, whom Seema has been waiting for. They ride in roofless cars decorated as wedding getaway vehicles trailing cans and streamers, waving and blowing kisses at the cheering crowd. Seema searches among them, nudging through the throng.
But no Del and Phyllis, no lavender and turquoise of their wedding suits, no wheelchair and companion. The morning’s exhilaration ebbs as swiftly as it had swollen.
“Fiaz, I want to go,” she says. “I’m getting a headache.”
Fiaz is still hanging off the lamppost, watching intently a young man in a rainbow leotard, who’d clambered over the security fence and is running to each car, kissing each seated couple in turn and posing for selfies with them, evading the parade monitors chasing after him.
Fiaz has not heard her, and she drags him down from his perch by his jacket sleeve. “Stop drooling at the boy. He’s too young for you.”
“I was not drooling.” Fiaz straightens his jacket with exaggerated dignity. “Not that there’s anything wrong with drooling. If Pierre only limits himself to that—”
“Why do you stay with Pierre, then, if it bothers you so much?”
“He says it’s only sex.” Fiaz shrugs. “The way we’re fighting, we may not be staying together much longer.”
The light turns off in Fiaz’s eyes, and Seema feels sorry for him.
“Ten years together,” he says. “Even my mother is now asking when Pierre and I are getting married.”
“You’re lucky,” Seema says. “At least she’s accepting.”
Seema has met Fiaz’s mother during the times she has come to stay with him and Pierre: a smart, always stylish, pixie-like woman in slim tops and loose printed pants, a long narrow shawl usually wrapped around her shoulder-length bob, never missing her namaz or the thirty fasts of Ramadan.
“Next she’ll want grandkids.” Fiaz laughs hollowly. “Not sure, though, how much she’d approve if she found out how many dicks her favorite son-in-law sucks in his free time. You know, the only thing I asked of Pierre? Not today. Today let’s march together. I want to feel pride.”
Fiaz still wishes to stick around for the Trikone float, and she consents. They both watch the plodding parade with a joyless, even jaundiced eye: elected officeholders and political aspirants, various community organizations, and commercial concerns like banks and nightclubs and radio stations that have muscled in on Pride. The ethnic contingents bring up the distant tail, and more than an hour and a half later, the Trikone float comes by, a small garden of giant metallic red-pink flowers and parrot-green slotted leaves. There’s only space for a few people on the float, and it’s occupied by three men and two women, all dressed traditionally, the men in kurta-pajamas, the women in salwar-kameezes.
“What, no drag queens in sarees?” Fiaz is shocked. The other desis following behind are also conventionally dressed, many in jeans and T-shirts. “I thought there’d be more dhoom-dhaam today. Where’s the baraat?”
Though there is music playing—Ishq ki galiyon mein aake ghoom, dhoom machaale dhoom machaale dhoom—appropriately from the movie Dhoom, the dancing, a mix of Bollywood twerking and bhangra, is energy-deprived, as Fiaz comments, from the wait to get started and the long march in the noon sun. “Nobody’s even trying anymore.”
He calls out to one of the dancers who signals him to join them. He looks to Seema for permission, sheepish and guilty.
“Go, you know you want to,” Seema says. “I’ll just go home.”
Fiaz hesitates, but she pushes him toward the float, and he doesn’t need a second urging. He climbs over the fence with a nimble hop, and with one backward wave—“Fuck Pierre!”—he races toward the already moving Trikone contingent, falling in with the dancers.
Seema watches until his graceful form passes from sight, twirling and skipping down the road blithely, his hips circle-shaking expertly in tight eights, his arms snaking to the music, the morning’s despair seemingly dispelled. Fiaz, she assumes, would just as easily get through his current patch of misery, he and Pierre patching up their differences like they usually do. If it were only as easy for her.
She leaves the parade, but instead of returning home, she wanders toward the assembly at the Civic Center. At Powell Square there is a small contingent of antigay protestors with megaphones. They boo, they chant, they bellow, as if to drown out the cheers from the parade, brandishing their banners and posters: God Hates Fags. Homosex Is Sin. Faggots Are Meant For Burning. Dykes Can Be Cured By Rape. America Is Doomed. A few paraders engage with them, and the two sides shout past each other, shaking fists and pumping placards in each other’s faces. One Brown protestor, in a white robe and lace cap—Turn To Islam (before it’s too late)—is harangued by both sides; Seema feels a bitter sympathy toward him.
Some gay couples deliberately provoke the protestors by sucking face in front of them. They remind Seema of her first kiss-in with Chloe. The memory stings: the old her from a decade ago would have joined them gleefully.
The crowd at the Civic Center is bigger than any Pride she’s seen. They seemed to have arrived from everywhere in the country, all sizes, all shapes, all colors, milling around, as if on a pilgrimage. There are the usual naked men and topless women, the wispy Radical Faeries and bearded Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the glowing and glitter-studded muscular bodies, but she’s surprised by how tame the others look, as if the normal and the boring have all decided to come out finally. And unlike the earlier years, the area is overrun with couples. She’s never seen so many gay and lesbian couples before at Pride.
Everywhere she looks she sees dyke couples smiling, holding Just Married signs. The coming threat of Prop 8 isn’t stopping them.
The joke should be rewritten: What do lesbians bring to a second date? A marriage license.
There is actually a wedding in progress in one relatively empty corner of the lawn, away from the main stage: two dykes in short white dresses and long white flounces, one brunette and one blonde, a crown of daisies on each head, are being married by a pastor in a black robe and rainbow stole, surrounded by a small circle of friends. Seema wanders in their direction, stands watching for a while: the women are exchanging vows, turned laugh-crying toward each other, but she’s too far away to hear what’s being said over the music from the stage. She and Bill had decided to do without vows—at her insistence, of course—and were married only a short distance away.
Throughout the ceremony a South Asian woman in the circle keeps glancing at Seema. Someone from the old Trikone crowd, Seema thinks, pretending not to notice. But later, when their eyes accidentally meet again, the woman smiles and, excusing herself from her group, makes her way toward Seema.
It’s too late for Seema to draw back. She braces herself, turning over in her memory faces and names. Late twenties, she guesses, as the woman approaches—she must have been a teenager if Seema had met her at a Trikone potluck when she used to frequent them.
“Hi, I’m Divya. Remember me?” A graduated bob with red-brown highlights, expertly lined eyes and lips, not too much taller than Seema, dimples. An off-the-shoulder dress in silk, sapphire. “I attended one of your training camps in the South Bay last year?”
Seema is relieved, and ashamed to find herself excusing her presence here: she’d come with a gay friend who’d since abandoned her for a bunch of guys.
“Men would do that,” Divya says.
The conversation moves safely away, Divya voluble about the South Asians for Obama group she started last year. Divya’s had some success fundraising in the South Bay. Actually, she’s being modest—the response has been fabulous. She’s been recognized by the campaign as one of Obama’s top fundraisers in Silicon Valley. And Seema deserves some of the credit—Seema’s camp was one of the most instructive and inspiring trainings she’s been to.
Divya is chirpy, confident, upbeat. She flashes her dimples often, as if secure in presumed camaraderie. But her enthusiasm on meeting Seema doesn’t seem all an act. Seema thaws—at least Divya is not twenty-two, naive, and White.
What is Seema doing for the rest of the election season? Divya is clearly disappointed when Seema admits she’s not officially employed by the campaign in any capacity. Seema finds it even harder to add she has no fixed plans for the fall. She becomes defensive: “Work’s very busy, I’ve just been promoted. I may do something in Nevada on the weekends.”
Divya rallies: Would Seema consider coming down to the South Bay and doing a minisession at one of her fundraisers? Not really training volunteers, since most of the big-shot donors have no time for volunteering, but it would make them feel more involved in the campaign, and perhaps more generous. She is matter-of-fact: money doesn’t buy votes but does buy staff, organizers, airtime, office space, and equipment, in more states, so they can expand the electoral map. And while small donors are important, what she does—maximizing contributions of those capable of giving more—is what will make a difference. It’s the reason why Obama declined taxpayer financing, breaking his promise.
At least Divya, unlike Bill, is clear-eyed about the campaign’s gyrations. Seema says she’ll think about it, and Divya takes her number.
“I’ve got to get back. My ex just got married.” Divya rolls her eyes, as if she’d prefer to have stayed out here, then the dimple again, a look and smile held an instant too long, eyelashes lowered. Her voice drops into intimacy, conspiracy, as she turns to leave: “I’ll be calling you.”
Seema can’t help but admire the finesse. She’s not surprised Divya is successful. The girl is a smooth operator, the flattery and the flirting and the networking meshed so effortlessly, only a hardened cynic would think to call her out. And the information conveyed subtly at the end about her queer ex and the signaling of her interest and availability—does Divya know about Seema’s past?
It’s a bitter pill to swallow, to see Divya now and be reminded of her self from a decade ago. What happened to all that pride and promise? The belief that she had all the power, all the answers, and all the fire and beauty to pull it off? She’d taken a wrong turn somewhere.
Why had she once thought this day impossible? She’s missed being part of something momentous while she’d turned her attention elsewhere. And now she’s too late to the party and not even invited.
She’d been considering volunteering for the No-On-Prop-8 campaign, another reason for rejoining her firm in San Francisco. But now she feels she neither belongs nor is needed there. “Come in and get engaged!” the campaign’s tent screams, with a steady flow of Pride-goers bustling in and out.
Later, she doesn’t tell Bill where they met—he had sulked at the mere mention of her plan to attend Pride with Fiaz—only that she’d been introduced to Divya and is considering joining in her South Bay fundraising activities. Bill is encouraging, assuaged, she suspects, that she’s found something to get involved in other than No-On-Prop-8. If he’s curious about Divya, he hides it pretty well.
One major benefit of fundraising with Divya: Seema no longer has to deal with the Obamabots—the young, enthusiastic, mostly college-educated, mostly White Americans who’ve been jumping onto the bandwagon as summer progressed, all believing Obama to be their savior, a source of redemption.
The South Bay South Asian entrepreneurs, technocrats, and engineers that Seema encounters at Divya’s fundraising events, on the other hand, are primarily first-generation immigrants, like her. And like her, ambivalent about the candidate. Many are confounded by Obama’s upset over Clinton, having considered her predestined to be the Democratic nominee on account of her credentials. Many are skeptical that Americans would vote for a Black candidate, many question whether Obama has the necessary experience to govern, many are worried he may not be the best candidate for Silicon Valley, with taxes, immigration, regulations on the line. And many possess only green cards, so while they can make political donations, they can’t vote in the election and are not excessively invested in it.
And while quite a few are willing to be convinced otherwise, even willing to buy into the Obama fantasy, many still possess the immigrant’s reluctance to part with money, especially when there’s no tangible return to be had, when the odds of success hover near fifty-fifty, and political donations are not tax deductible.
Despite all this, Divya has been successful. But she’s set herself ambitious targets for fall, and Seema is lured in deeper. She is better than Divya at reading the facial and vocal cues of their prospects, Divya being second-generation. Also, Seema can affect rapport in Hindi and Urdu and Tamil, she can converse about current events in the Indian subcontinent and reminisce about “those days” with the long-immigrated, and her PR and publicity work with technology firms allows her to participate intelligently in the industry gossip that permeates the fundraising events.
The events—promoted as part technical, part political, and part networking—are held in the mansion of some new convert delighted to offer up his home and contacts as the price of initiation, the catering as in-kind contribution. All this keeps Seema occupied, and if she’s disappointed that winning the election may come down to money, she’s not surprised and is even a little relieved. It supports her hardening perception of Obama as too enmeshed in the existing power structure. Also, she doesn’t need to feel guilty for not joining Bill in Nevada, driving there Friday nights, returning drained late Sunday nights after mindless door-to-door canvassing, since many of the fundraisers she organizes with Divya happen on weekends.
There’s little doubt Divya is attracted to her, as she’d signaled the very day they’d met. Divya makes a game of it, flirting with her as if she believed Seema was straight and unavailable, although she must know—a casual web search would have revealed Seema’s past. Seema plays along, never contradicting Divya while never lying outright either. Divya’s interest in her is flattering, and equalizing, a counterbalance to playing second fiddle to someone a decade younger than her at the events. And playing a straight woman resisting seduction is amusing, even arousing at times.
The arrangement is mutually beneficial. She and Divya have a good working relationship, and their events frequently exceed their targets. Also, Seema’s new intimacy with the who’s who of the South Bay tech world raises her profile at her firm, adding to the success of her budding directorship.
She should have felt optimistic as summer turned to fall. Bill, too, has found his groove in Nevada, pressed into cleaning up and maintaining the state’s precinct lists, a data-mining skill he’d developed working with patchy patient records at his old start-up. Obama leads McCain in the national polls, and she needn’t pay much attention to the campaign itself. Even Prop 8 seems poised to fail. Support for the ban on gay marriage is polling in the low forties, according to Fiaz who’s begun volunteering for No-On-Prop-8.
And yet Seema can’t deny her own swelling malaise.
“I know there are differences on same-sex marriage,” Obama says, accepting his nomination at the Democratic convention at the end of August. “But surely we can agree that our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve to visit the person they love in the hospital and to live lives free of discrimination.”
“No nominee has probably even dared to speak so openly in their acceptance speech before,” Bill says. “Why are you so upset?”
Only the previous day Del Martin had died at eighty-eight. The campaign issued a statement commending Del’s “lifelong commitment to promoting equality” and offering condolences to her “spouse,” and Fiaz had ignited a hope in her that Obama was perhaps ready to come out in favor of gay marriage. But clearly Obama is still too much of a cautious politician for that.
She’s agitated: If she’s so upset, why doesn’t she stop fundraising? If polls are to be believed, Obama is expected to trounce a hapless McCain anyway. Why can’t she join Fiaz in volunteering for No-On-Prop-8?
She’s railroaded, however, by unfolding events: McCain startles America by selecting the virtually unknown governor of Alaska as his running mate. At first it seems a desperate but futile choice, pandering to small-town America and the evangelical Right. Sarah Palin has clearly been chosen less for her credentials in governance or foreign policy and more for her anti-abortion and anti-gay-marriage stances and her rifle-toting hunting prowess.
But at the Republican Convention, Palin manages to single-handedly revive the comatose McCain campaign with an electrifying performance that leaves Seema openmouthed with disbelief. Dressed in a stylish beige jacket, pearls, and rimless glasses, her figure accentuated by her black pencil skirt and frilly peep-toe high heels—“Hot mama!” Seema murmurs—Palin plays the hockey mom and pit bull equally and exceptionally, reassuring with her folksy command and guileless delivery, while snapping and tearing at Obama with a smile and a sneer. America needs more than dramatic speeches before devoted followers, Palin swears, and more than promises to turn back the waters and heal the planet—America needs someone who can be counted on to serve and defend it, someone who can inspire with a lifetime of deeds and not just a season of speeches, and that person is not Obama.
The evangelical Republican base, which had until then rejected McCain’s tepid appeals, is galvanized. Overnight, the polls that had so far been trending toward Obama immediately swing in McCain’s favor, causing everyone around Seema to panic. Bill, too, is shaken, though he won’t admit it, maintaining an outwardly stubborn faith in Obama’s resilience, quoting campaign missives urging patience and perseverance, while his nights are restless, interrupted by bouts of sleep talking.
As she’d suspected all along, Obama’s strategy of appeasing White America isn’t working. She feels vindicated and shocked out of her vacillation. McCain and Palin cannot be allowed to win without a fight. Her previous doubts and misgivings now seem irrelevant.
She decides to join Bill on his trips to Nevada. In this climate of impending doom, fundraising feels too abstract and too remote from the actual work of getting voters to the polls. The advantage from all that money Obama has raised so far is illusory, easily nullified by an energized Republican base.
When Bill learns of her intention, he casts aside his impassivity gratefully, voluble now in discussing his fears, his hopes that the setback is somehow only temporary. This apprehensive Bill is new to her, needing her in a way he hasn’t before.
But Divya bursts into tears when Seema informs her of her decision. At the bar where they’re having drinks after work, all eyes are immediately drawn to them in sympathy: Is Seema dumping her? It doesn’t help that Divya is dressed with customary stylishness—a smoky emerald-green dress, her lips pale dusk rose, eyes lined—as if out on a date. Divya takes the tissue Seema extends her, but seems unable to control herself until Seema says in a gentle voice, “Divya, my decision has nothing to do with you.”
Seema waits until Divya’s sobs subside. She hadn’t expected such an overt display, since Divya has never given her any sign of wanting more than amusing flirtation. “This isn’t about fundraising, is it?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me. It’s just that—”
Seema decides to be direct. “You know I’m married. Besides, believe me, we won’t suit. We’re too alike.”
Divya smiles wanly. She is not yet out to her parents; it’s been hard dating women in the South Bay, living with her parents as she is. They’re liberal in many ways for Brahmins from Pune—they didn’t mind her dating boys in school and have even met a boyfriend or two, but it would be so much easier to come out if she had an eligible girlfriend to point to, in case they ask her how she’s sure.
“And you are very eligible!” Divya’s pouty smile and dimples are out again.
“No more flirting if we continue to work together,” Seema admonishes, though she is pleased and moved by Divya’s admissions. Perhaps Divya is right, but having Chloe hadn’t helped her, though that was a decade and a half ago. “I can’t do any more weekend events—I’ve promised Bill already—but I may still be able to squeeze in something on a weekday.”
“Do you mind if I ask—do you identify as bisexual now?”
“I do mind,” Seema snaps. “Does it matter what I identify as? Do I even have to?”
She remembers the bitter arguments that led to estrangements when she began dating Bill. Thankfully, Divya apologizes immediately, profusely, and Seema can relax. She doesn’t want to have to forswear Divya too.
They work together even more closely than before, a new sense of shared endeavor and private intimacy taking root, especially as their fundraising turns more successful, the shocking possibility of Palin succeeding a seventy-two-year-old president considerably loosening the pocketbooks of their prospects. If Bill has concerns about her time spent with Divya, they seem allayed by her accounts of their fundraising triumphs.
On the weekends, Seema accompanies him on the four-hour drive to Nevada, leaving immediately after work on Friday. The days are long and tiring—she knocks on doors armed with the annotated lists that Bill has helped produce, urging supporters to vote early, and attempting to persuade the undecided—but there’s benefit to not having time to think except to follow directions, to not brood in exhausting circles. She’s making up for the months of doubts and distrust and disinterest, and bruised feet and exhausted trips back to San Francisco on Sunday evenings are a small penance.
She doesn’t slow down, not even after Sarah Palin crashes and burns as spectacularly as she’d risen, not even when the polls once again show Obama in the lead as he emerges victorious on the debate stage, and more presidential on the national stage with his cool-headed response to the banking crisis that rocks the country in the second half of September. Bill’s dread that some conspiracy could bring down Obama before election day has infected her too.
The intensity of anger and vitriol she observes on the right reaches new heights. Palin draws record crowds everywhere she goes, her supporters matching and even overtaking the loyalty and adoration that Obama inspires in his. With her trademark smiling sneer, Palin fires up her supporters, lending a benign face to the abuse and threats shouted at Obama at her rallies: Traitor! Terrorist! Bomb Obama! Kill him!
Nevada is the first state to shift from leaning McCain toward Obama, which is encouraging and gratifying. At Bill’s urging, they’ve agreed not to discuss election outcomes or their hopes and doubts. But as November approaches, and nationwide polls predict a blowout for Obama, it’s Bill who starts talking about post-November plans on their drives back from Reno.
“Would you mind moving here?” he says as they drive through Oakland, the lights of San Francisco twinkling across the bay.
He describes biking in his childhood neighborhood, down its potholed streets and past its stunted houses, with their stoops and small gardens and their multihued facades of burgundy, peacock blue, chocolate. “I’d like to buy a house here, before they all get torn down and replaced by huge-ass condos for yuppies from SF.”
Seema recalls the flaming-scarlet gulmohar tree in their compound in Chennai that she loved to climb. Would it grow in Oakland?
Bill says, “I never imagined that someday I might want a house with a garden. Or that one day I’d want children who’ll climb the trees in my backyard.”
Bill has been dropping hints all fall about children, which she has been ignoring. This is the first time he’s come out with it explicitly, and she knows she can’t ignore him much longer. “Whoa, children—in the plural, Bill? We haven’t talked about having one child yet!”
“We’re talking now. What do you say, Mama Seema?”
“I’m not sure this world is ready for our children, Bill. I’m not even sure I am ready.”
“Nobody thought America would be ready for a Black president. I never thought any of this would ever happen to me. As Obama says, we must learn to hope, and we must learn to trust.”
“Let’s not jinx the election, okay? Anything can happen in the next ten days. We agreed—you insisted—not to discuss these things until afterward.”
“Fair enough.”
Their conversation falters. A mile-long glow of red taillights greets them as they enter the Bay Bridge, and she’s reminded—a trail of blood petals—of the day she’d hidden in the gulmohar tree.
She sees it in Bill’s rigid grip on the steering wheel as the car swerves off the Bay Bridge onto the exit to their home: Bill is family, their home is her home, but as she well knows, even family is family only conditionally, a home may be home only temporarily. Is a child the next concession she must make?
But a child, unlike any previous compromise, is irreversible. A child is for life. The concession is a commitment for life.
A knot tightens within her, entangling her insides until even her voice sounds knotted as they drive up the dark hill toward their unlit home, indiscernible against the dark of the hillside.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008: Election day is a welcome lightening of the skies, after a tormenting night. Waking up in Reno alone, Bill sits glued to the TV until he sees Obama, accompanied by his wife and daughters, casting a ballot for himself in Chicago. Only then does the day begin to feel real.
The newscasters note how remarkably cool and detached Obama appears, despite the enormity of the stakes and his grandmother’s death the previous day. Bill wants to scream at them: Didn’t Obama shed tears while speaking about his grandmother at his rally last night? Obama had Bill sobbing like a baby. But now that it’s overwhelmingly clear that Obama is poised to win, everyone seems to have heightened their scrutiny, as if already no longer willing to give Obama any benefit of the doubt.
As had Seema. The memory of their previous evening’s fight clouds Bill’s morning. They had originally planned to return to San Francisco Sunday night as usual. But Bill couldn’t shake off the fear of some last-minute Republican shenanigans that would deliver the election to McCain. He has promised precinct captains that he’ll help clean up the final get-out-the-vote lists, targeting those who hadn’t voted yet—and he intends to stay, to see it through. Even if Seema must leave.
Besides, he wants to be able to observe in person the fruits of Obama’s (and his) labor and savor the moment of truth as America goes to the polls. Coffee and a list of polling stations in hand, he drives around Reno as voting begins at seven, stopping first at the one closest to the campaign headquarters, in the Latino section of Reno. The line circles the block, animated chatter reaching him as he pulls up and rolls down the windows.
He’d spent the night dreading that the expected Latino turnout, key to Obama’s victory in Nevada, would fail to turn up. He drives around the block relieved, exercising his meager Spanish in excited greetings and felicitations, until a policeman warns him against loitering. He flashes high fives and thumbs-ups at the campaign’s election monitors. The other polling stations, too, have decent turnouts, though some seem less than busy, to his returning anxiety. But that is surely expected, given the successful push for early voting that the surge of volunteers into Nevada enabled—what Seema has been doing the past few weekends.
He wishes Seema were with him now, as he’d been there for her in Iowa. But she’s decided that volunteering for No-On-Prop-8 is more important to her. She’d taken a flight back last night.
“What can you do about it in one day?” he’d asked.
“You know I wanted to stay in SF this weekend, Bill. You begged me, as if Obama would lose Nevada otherwise. You said we’d return Sunday night, that’s why I agreed. But if Prop 8 passes, your Obama will surely bear some of the blame.”
She’d been complaining about the missteps of the No-On-Prop-8 campaign that had made the referendum a toss-up in the last couple of weeks. The gays couldn’t pull their act together, and Obama is to blame. How can Obama risk coming out in support of same-sex marriages now, when it could cost him the election?
The campaign headquarters feels strangely empty and desolate—the volunteers are in the streets getting the vote out. He’d wanted to be here, rather than stewing at home, but there’s little for him to do. By midmorning there’s news of record turnout all over the country. There are some rumors of voting machines not working properly in poor and Black neighborhoods, of people waiting in line for hours to cast their vote, of some voters not being given provisional ballots, but no major disruption materializes. He should be able to breathe easier. But Seema has not been returning his calls or replying to his texts.
“You never intended to return on Sunday, did you? That’s why you wanted us to vote absentee,” Seema had said, her bags packed, waiting for the taxi to take her to the airport. “You do what you need to do, Bill. I’ll do what I need to do—”
“Why, you’ve become a lesbian again?”
“I—never—stopped—being—a—lesbian.” Each word sharp, distinct, as if challenging him to disagree with any part of her statement.
“So what are we doing together?” The two of them in a hotel room, the campaign office a mile away, the hills ringing the town.
“I never said I’d stop being lesbian. I married you, but that doesn’t change everything—”
“Have you slept with any woman since? Are you having an affair?” Both questions carry scorn, revulsion—he cannot make up his mind which one is more damning. “With Divya? Is that it?”
“No! I don’t need to sleep with anyone else to remember who I am.” She’s gone still now, watching him warily. “Bill, you know: I love you—”
“You’re a lesbian again.” He yanks the door of the room open, sending it slamming against the wall. “Just leave, Seema.”
Seema cringes, startled. They stare at each other for a few moments. Then she pulls out the handle of her suitcase and steps out into the corridor. He watches until she disappears into the elevator. He’s still shaking, as if he’d been impacted by the door.
Thankfully, something does come up to justify his having remained here. An unexpected setback: the national hotline that the volunteers are to call, to update the database with the people confirmed to have voted, is unable to handle the deluge and goes offline. This data has to be entered manually now, and the office scrambles as calls and text messages with voter codes begin to pour in. Bill is frenetic, trying to keep up with the incoming barrage of data.
But it’s joyless labor—this was to have been their day, a day together, a day of victory and celebration; he plods on, but soon he doesn’t have recourse to even that as the afternoon advances and voting slows down.
It’ll be four soon. He can still make it home tonight, to be there with Seema when the election is called. He looks around the office: it won’t be the same here. He feels foolish. He hands over the list to a staff member, hurrying through his instructions. “Go, we’ve got this, go,” he’s told.
He pumps the accelerator as he noses it through Reno, swearing at the late-afternoon traffic like he’s never done before, only the election coverage on the radio providing relief as voting closes in the eastern states. The first states are called, Kentucky for McCain and Vermont for Obama, and exit polls are trickling in.
He’s just gotten through the ragged mountain slopes of the Sierras when—Oh. My. God!—Pennsylvania is called for Obama, not thirty minutes after the polls closed there. They’d been expecting the swing state to be hard fought, called only after a long, nail-biting night. Obama must be doing much better than even they’d expected. Bill rolls down the glass and screams out the window, the screams whisked away by the wind, so he can barely hear himself. Still he continues to scream, to the air, to the countryside, to the road, to Seema: “Seema, we won Pennsylvania!”
Her empty seat beside him is a reproach. He recalls the tone of her voice—Bill, I love you—so different from their frequent casual affirmations, apprehensively solemn like their earliest declarations. How could he have doubted her?
He hunts around for news on Prop 8 but can’t find any radio coverage. He assumes she’s probably volunteering somewhere with Fiaz and gives him a call.
She isn’t. Fiaz doesn’t even know she’s back from Reno. He and Pierre have been knocking on doors in neighboring Alameda all day. He is despondent: turning out every “no” vote in the Bay Area has now become necessary, to counter their opponents’ lead in the rural parts of the state. There’s some fear that if an Obama win becomes inevitable too soon, many voters in San Francisco may not even bother to vote.
A sense of anxiety, of urgency, grips Bill. As if he needs to reach Seema now before polls close in California, to show her he is standing with her. She’d asked him: How is she to believe in all this “hopey-changey stuff”—as Palin calls it—when even Obama is still unwilling or unable—or both—to stand with everybody standing with him? He increases his speed, first seventy-five, then eighty, approaching even ninety in spots. Ordinarily he’d be worried about being stopped by cops, even when he’s driving just five over the limit, which is his max.
Ohio is called for Obama when Bill’s still an hour away from San Francisco. And with that, McCain effectively has no path to an electoral college majority, and the race is over even while California is still voting.
“Damn,” he swears. He’d hoped to be there with Seema for this. His initial disappointment pivots to uncontainable euphoria. He finds some release leaning on the horn and switching lanes, the car shrieking as he swerves from one lane to the other and back, amid a cacophony of blared warnings. He pictures Mame’s censures, Seema’s alarm. He laughs and whoops, ceasing the zigzagging, but continuing to pound on the horn.
Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!
Nobody else is going to get it, he thinks. But they do: first one car honks in reply, then another, and soon the entire stretch of highway slowing down through Fairfield becomes one long chorus, a rolling chant against the little town’s disbelief, its dazed lights blinking—
Yes! We! Can!
So Nevada didn’t matter. A twinge of regret: he should have gone to volunteer in Ohio after all. But who could have predicted such a blowout?
The evening deepens as he crosses into East Bay but seems brighter as the skies clear. I-80 swings toward the water, and he can finally see the faint lights of San Francisco beckoning across the bay. Already the landscape is rosier, dusk but also dawn. Only last week he and Seema were driving this same way, discussing what they’d do if Obama—if they—won:
A house. A tree. A child. The parameters of each are clearer: a house in Piedmont, not Oakland, if they’re going to give their child the best education, as Mame would have wanted; and it must be a girl—he pictures Obama’s younger daughter—with Seema’s eyes and smile; and the tree must be ready to bloom a canopy of scarlet by the time their daughter is old enough to climb it.
The traffic slows to a crawl near the Bay Bridge. Is it an accident? No, it’s the chaos of a street fair, a celebration anticipating the coming declaration: windows rolled down, the air rent with honks and shouts and thumping music, passengers whooping it up through open sunroofs, cars stranded empty, drivers dancing on hoods, leaping about, and exchanging high fives. The vehicles trying to get through are confounded, like lost ants, not the orderly crawl he’d been confident he’d make it through. He’s on the bridge nearing his exit when voting closes in California, and seconds later the election is called for Obama.
He drives home through a city that has poured out into the streets in ecstasy: thronging, dancing, music, firecrackers, whistles. He receives texts and calls from his friends in Reno, all jubilant and boisterous. He joins in their remote celebration, though unable to silence the little voice that keeps pointing out his screwup. He calls Seema, hoping she’ll at least pick up this time.
Their home stands dark. Seema’s car is not in the garage. The only other sign of her return is her suitcase in the bedroom. He switches on all the lights on the lower floor, then the lights upstairs as well, some semblance of brightness to match the festivity on TV.
Fiaz doesn’t know where Seema is either. He and Pierre are going to Union Square to join in the revelry and await the results of Prop 8. Does Bill want to join them?
No, he’ll wait at home for Seema. He stands on the balcony chilled, watching the city, streams of gamboling headlights jolting through its streets. He can hear the distant din of triumphant horns. He remembers their first night in the house officially living together, standing huddled here, awed by the view. He calls Seema’s phone periodically, checks his messages instantly—congratulations, felicitations—but none from her.
The president-elect is to make an address to the nation in a few minutes. On the screen, the tumultuous crowd gathered in Grant Park, Chicago, a block from the headquarters, anxiously awaits Obama, amid a sea of rippling red, white, and blue, a sparkle of flashes. Bill wishes he were there, or in the Reno headquarters, or even downtown with Fiaz and Pierre, where the moment would seem less unreal, less surreal, less virtual by virtue of the company of others who’d dreamed and labored for this moment.
The wait for Obama to take the stage in Grant Park seems interminable, and at the same time he wishes for Obama to be delayed till Seema comes home. He has poured out two glasses of sherry, he’s microwaved the two frozen slices of cake they’d saved from their wedding party.
A hush: Ladies and gentlemen, the next first family of the United States of America—
Barack Obama steps out from the wings, sober and dignified, leading his younger daughter by the hand, followed by his wife and elder daughter. They are dressed in shades of red and black, the white of Obama’s shirt dazzling in the blue haze of the stage. Obama’s smile, when he first smiles, is almost self-conscious, without his usual confidence. His wife and daughters, too, seem shy, suddenly unsure of themselves. How tiny and defenseless they look as they walk toward the front of the stage and stand there, holding hands, waving at the enormous crowd lapping hungrily at their feet.
Bill’s first instinct is to gather them in a huddle, form a protective shield around them. His second is to reach for Seema, except she isn’t here. When Obama bends down and whispers something in his younger daughter’s ear, and she laughs and skips, it catches Bill by surprise: the sudden collapse of his chest, as if he’ll never breathe again, as if all the air in the room were insufficient to ease the strain on his lungs. The room is a blur, for there are tears in his eyes, of what seems almost like pain, and the noise from the TV is a befuddling roar in his ears.
Obama kisses both his daughters on their foreheads, then kisses his wife. His family turns and walks away, leaving him alone to face the crowd. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible—” he begins. “Tonight is your answer.”
“Mame, this is for you,” Bill toasts, raising his glass of sherry. Forgive me, he texts Seema, please come home.
He downs the sherry but will put away the cake after the speech. For the rest of the night he will remain awake, watching the election results till the early hours of the morning, alert to every buzz or ring on his cell phone, the whine of every car winding its way up the dark and desolate road past their house.
At a private party in downtown San Francisco, Seema watches Obama speak, a glass of champagne in her hand.
“Because of what we did, on this date,” Obama says, “change has come to America.”
The on-screen audience, hungry for a line to applaud, laps it up. Seema wonders briefly what Bill is feeling—he surely must be watching somewhere—but she’s still too mad to dwell on him.
She’d been standing all day on the exit ramps of Highway 101, south of the city, with a straggling band of volunteers flashing reminders to commuters to not only vote for Obama but to vote no on Prop 8 as well. What can you do in one day? Bill had jeered, and he was right. She’d felt too ashamed, too guilty, to appeal to Fiaz for something to do that last day; instead, returning from Reno, she’d signed up to join others like her, last-minute actors jolted out of their complacency as Prop 8’s fortunes reversed.
The previous weeks, proponents of Prop 8 had sunk enormous sums of money into scare tactics: gay marriage would force the state’s churches to participate in sin and its schools to teach homosexuality to children. California would be devastated by earthquakes and droughts. They’d even sent out mailers using Obama’s own words—marriage is the union between a man and a woman, with God in the mix—and the Obama campaign did nothing to challenge them, beyond reiterating that it doesn’t support Prop 8.
The day felt humiliating: the desperate attempts to draw the attention of preoccupied drivers, the forced cheer when one of them honked in response. Even the most optimistic of their group exclaimed as the day drew to a close, “Flinging glitter to the winds—it’s just to make us feel good we’re doing something.”
Tired and hungry, they were shivering as the sun set, when they were asked to head back, the ramps too dangerous in the fading light. People had begun celebrating Obama’s win already, but it felt to Seema, returning to an empty home, like she was participating in an ending, not a beginning. She hadn’t wanted to wait for Bill, though she knew he was on his way back, furious still with his obstruction, his accusations. Nor did she want to spend the evening with Fiaz, awaiting the results of Prop 8. Divya’s call was a relief, the invitation to the party an escape.
The party is in a penthouse suite, glass walls overlooking the city, the cheers and cries of celebration from the streets below only faintly audible. The 360-degree view of San Francisco is impressive, immersive—unlike the view from her home—and she feels like she’s floating midair, encircled by resplendent towers, the landscape and sky a mute, remote background. The interior is dazzling as well: white marble floors, blazing chandeliers, scattered furniture imposing like sculpture, a glossy grand piano, majestic and white. The TV, despite its huge screen, cannot compete with this glitz, and Obama appears washed out, outshone, even his voice sounding thin and tame.
Divya is giddy. She’s on her third glass of champagne, prattling away as she weaves through the crowd, dimpling as she greets the Silicon Valley movers and shakers. There are few Asians here, few technocrats, few women—the assembled are mostly venture capitalists and angel investors, the majority White, and almost all men. And Divya moves among them—in her midnight-blue mesh gown, with its silver-threaded spider web and its plunging V-neck—like a princess. No, a courtesan.
Seema had been in no mood to dress up in anything more fancy than a teal flared dress, and initially she’d felt self-conscious arriving at the party, although Divya assured her she looked gorgeous. Still, under the champagne’s influence, she finds herself slipping again into old habits of performing charm—easy laughter, rapt attention, the occasional admiring glance—as if competing with Divya for the approval of these men. If nothing else, the performance serves to take her mind off what awaits her in her own life.
She’d turned her cell phone off, vowing not to check her messages or the internet until she’s in a calmer frame of mind. But there’s a buzz building in the room that she can’t avoid hearing. Originating from the cluster of men by the piano, well-groomed and obviously gay, the bitter murmurs ripple through:
Prop 8 appears likely to pass, though the votes in urban areas like San Francisco have yet to be fully counted, and the result may not be known till the morning. The expanded turnout for Obama is surely to blame, for exit polls show that a majority of Black voters in California supported the ban on same-sex marriage.
What swirls through her?
It is cloying, vindicated disappointment: she’d expected this, had reason to expect this—to be disavowed and abandoned, like Prop 22 had done eight years earlier, like her father had done in the decade before that.
It is vindictive, expanding anger: Against Obama’s feckless expediency, Bill’s half-hearted support. The Black community’s betrayal, if that truly was the clincher—surely Blacks must know what it means to be discriminated against. The No-On-Prop-8’s myopic White leadership, fearful of airing ads with loving gay or lesbian couples in order to allay the fears of straight White people, while ignoring input from minority organizations and shunning outreach in minority communities. The whining gay White men here, conveniently forgetting the much larger numbers of Whites who must too have voted in favor of Prop 8 for it to pass.
And herself, for she’s been such a sellout, with nothing to show for it—
What swirls about her? The dazzling constellations of lights, the glass windows, the glowing marble floor. Or is it she who’s swirling, champagne-flushed, in this brilliant hall of glass and mirrors, with its thousand reflections, refractions, distortions, sipping Bollinger from crystal flutes, waited on by earnest tuxedoed attendants roving with platters of hors d’oeuvres? A veritable Sheesh Mahal—a flash of recollection—and she’s performing for their entertainment but without Anarkali’s audacity to challenge and subvert.
A quartet of men surround her and Divya, leaning in under guise of appreciation, corralling the two women in. Divya doesn’t seem to mind, intoxicated by the night and her successes.
Seema grips her by the shoulders. “Divya, chal,” she says, rough and urgent. “Bas, kahin aur chalen.”
“Chal?” Divya struggles to refocus attention on her. Her accent even on that simple word is Americanized. “Where to?”
The men around are nonplussed, eyes darting from one woman to the other and back.
Seema ignores them. “Hum in goray aadmiyon ke khilone nahin.” She’s quoting—or misquoting—some long-forgotten movie dialogue, echoing its outraged intonation accurately. The men boxing them in draw back instinctively, to her satisfaction.
Divya seems unsure how to respond. It’s even unclear if she’s comprehended what Seema means—they’ve never conversed in Hindi or Urdu before. She chuckles tentatively, seeking clarification from Seema, indulgence from the others.
Seema is unrelenting. “Aati ho kya, ya main jaoon?” Divya must leave with her, a victory snatched from these men. Her gaze holds Divya’s, boring into Divya as if to impel her to acquiescence.
Something in her gaze—some entreaty, some promise, some threat—makes Divya drop her eyes and nod yes.
Seema takes her by the hand, flits a quick kiss on her cheek—a first—a reward. “Excuse us, gentlemen,” she says, a triumphant smile further subduing the circling men, “but we have to go.”
She leads Divya out of the circle, who follows her meekly, her previous light-headedness replaced by a nervous tripping across the room. Seema steadies her, conscious of all the eyes in the room on them. She holds on to Divya’s hand while they wait for their coats: trophy, security.
“Seema, what’s going on?” Divya asks, when the elevator doors close, leaving them alone together. Her voice rasps, breaks.
In reply, Seema takes Divya in her arms, tilts her face toward hers in preparation for a kiss. Divya pulls back, pointing to the security camera at the upper right corner, but there’s no mistaking her trembling hand, her shallow breathing, her quivering body.
Seema thrills: between the security camera’s silvered lens and the elevator’s gilded mirror, here too are more reflected visions, like the trick cinematography so beloved of Indian movies. She pulls Divya toward herself, presses her lips to Divya’s ear in a whisper—Pyar kiya toh darna kya?—then plants them on Divya’s lips. Whether Divya recognizes the allusion to Anarkali or not, she sighs, allowing her lips to open, Seema’s tongue to find hers.
She should have dared to kiss Divya upstairs, in the penthouse, in full view of all its entitled men, this same way, if only to suck the air out of that ponderous room.
In the lobby Divya asks, “What now?” She suggests—diffidently still—that she spend the night at Seema’s place, since she’s too drunk to drive back home to the South Bay.
Seema recalls she’d told Divya earlier that Bill had chosen to remain in Reno, to explain why she accepted the invitation to the party. A momentary hesitation, confusion, thinking of Bill waiting at home for her, then she says, “No, let’s get a room nearby.”
It takes Seema another year to decide to separate from Bill. During that time Bill’s desire for a child hardens to a demand. Seema asks for some time apart to ponder the matter, away from the charged context of their home, and Bill agrees.
But is it merely chance, or fate, that when they get together on the eve of a more final dissolution they come to conceive me?
Consider: Before returning one last time to her home with Bill, Seema has chosen to have her IUD removed, despite its considerable alleviation of her menstrual suffering, despite the protection it provided from the consequences of unplanned nights like the one in Iowa that resulted in her miscarriage. And that final coupling in the fog—
Had some part of my not-to-be mother come willing after all to concede to a lifelong commitment? Had she come searching for some new beginning in that ending?
Just like I must search for a way past her ending, lying silenced on an operating table, toward my own beginning.