In September 1979, ten years after I left Khartoum never to return again, I made another continental crossing: from Hyderabad to New York. By this time I was twenty-eight years old and I was not alone. David Lelyveld and I were married. I remember the evening we first met. It was February 21, dark, clear, so that the rounded moon and stars were visible. A cool breeze was blowing as I entered Syed’s house. David was sitting on a mura, talking to Syed. I recall something being said about the fake books in a Nawab’s library, walls filled with them, concealing liquor cabinets; the old stables in Rampur converted to a garage for antique cars.
David is a historian of India and he had come to Hyderabad to work on his ideas of nationalism and the formation of Urdu as a public language. In the daytime he would wander about the marketplace, talking to people, scholars, ancient graybeards who gave orations. He was also deep into the Hyderabad archives. After that first meeting, our friendship picked up quickly. We were lonely, each of us, deep inside and our meeting made for a sheltering space. There was a great innocence to our falling in love, a sheer sense of possibility. We felt we had each lived our separate lives and now could come together. I had just turned twenty-eight; David was ten years older. Within three weeks we decided to get married. We traveled north to spend a long summer in Chail at the foothills of the Himalayas. Already in Chail, I was filled with excitement at the thought of coming to America, a country I had read about, but never seen.
Our first stop on the route west was Paris, where we thought we could combine a holiday, part of an extended honeymoon, with some work at the Sorbonne. But after a few weeks in Paris, under the green leaves of the plane trees in late summer, I grew so dizzy I could hardly stand and was forced into the University Hospital on Boulevard Jourdain. I did not get to do any of the work on Walt Whitman that I had wanted to do. “I am fascinated by his notion of the body,” I had told Professor Roger Asselineau, “surely it is relevant even now. All that space stuck out flat, the bits and pieces added onto the body, the corpses carried out of the old house. But how?” He had listened carefully over coffee. But my own body, heated by the malarial virus that had developed during the long trip through India, overtook me, stopped my intellectual questioning. The nausea of early pregnancy coupled with the headaches and chills of acute malaria made Paris in the summer a fearful thing.
I lay in bed in the hospital, next to a young woman of eighteen, the veins in her arms swollen a jagged indigo with all the heroin she’d shot up. She was unbearably thin and her blonde hair stuck up straight in the air making her a spiky white doll. Each morning Laure painted her thin lips a brilliant shade of red. When I leant over I could catch myself in her little plastic framed mirror: a woman with one eye, face split by the glass, dazed but still curious. We chattered away in French. I was calmed a little by the quinine that was pumped into me in large doses and could refuse with seeming equanimity when Laure counseled me to take as much of the wine as possible. She was a great believer in anodynes of any kind. The spirit needed to be replenished and her poor veins were all smashed. She did not know how long she would last. Wine was offered by the nurses in delicate plastic cups. I was nauseated and refused. The bell tower I could see out of the window, the gray-blue swallows clustering there, with darker birds mixed in, tilted in the air. The two arms on the clock face were fierce, cleft apart. Something was out of joint. I looked at Laure for reassurance as she sat up in bed, hooking the intravenous tube over her scarred wrist.
She cajoled me: “Je veux y aller. New York, Los Angeles. C’est magnifique ça. On mange le biftek là bas, non?” Twisting her thin body to face me, she smiled in angelic sweetness. I was nervous about those unreal cities she mentioned. Inverness in Scotland was as far west as I had been. I would almost have traded places with her, if it weren’t for the purple scars scrawled over her arms.
The nurse from Surinam who came in was very gentle. She would find the sachemere, she assured me. They could check if the baby was all right. So, as David held my hand, they put the monitor to my belly. Under my pounding heart was another, clearer, swifter. As we listened to the tiny chop-chop-chop of the little heart under my own, I felt I might bear it all, the sickness, the anxiety of passage, even the tilting clock face outside, if the child were all right. I was doubled now, a cover, a stretched skin, an envelope of life, all buzzing inside. I was also still very sick.
Five weeks later I stood in the Boston airport behind the line of large Portuguese women dressed in black. I longed to fade into them, my difference absorbed into their warmth, their sheer substance. I recall having to step aside for the photograph for my green card. “Congratulations, welcome to America,” the man said as he took my hand. The image sticks in my mind, darkened, floating free of the plastic frame. My face with the hair tied back, tired out with the malarial attack, just about visible above the numbers printed onto the card. Then we were outside, in the sharp air of Boston.
I recall bright lights in the streets, signs in violent neon, the quivering jumble of colors cut as if from a movie I might have seen in Khartoum or Hyderabad, huge Texan hats in lights outside a taco shop, Colonel Sanders painted in black and brown and white, apple pie and see-through lingerie shining in sequins on billboards in the honky-tonk part of Boston, as Michael, my new brother-in-law, drove us through at top speed. “Your first sights of America,” he reassured me, as the car jolted and almost crashed against the fenders of another on our way to Lexington.
Then it was New York. Safe in David’s mother’s quiet apartment high on the sixth floor, I gazed out at Riverside Drive through the blur of dilated retinas. The drugs for malaria had almost driven me blind, and the autumn leaves, the tall trees by the river, blurred into each other, massed and bled into an inchoate scenery, a backdrop that trembled precariously. I watched my mother-in-law’s hands lay out the glassware for our meal and I sat and watched, hardly trusting my legs. I was trembling with the exhaustion of travel and could hardly believe I was in America or start to ponder what that might mean.
When I arrived in America I was carrying a mass of papers with me, the first draft of a novel I thought of calling “Nampally Road.” I had composed it in Chail, at the foot of the Himalayas, in a room filled with mountain light, sharp glints of ice from the rocks in the middle distance, the guttural cry of hawks. In my life that work marks a crossing, a border. Sometimes the border has barbed wire strung over it. I made a wager that almost destroyed me: the book will be done before my child happens, before he is thrust out, mouth open, gulping the air of Manhattan. I laid out sheet after sheet of paper on the floor, all my scribblings unpacked from the suitcase. I made more signs on paper to add to those and made a little moat around my growing belly with paper. Once when David’s older brother Joe and his wife Carolyn visited—their visits always pleased me, I had a sense of a larger family with them, a continuity of which David was a part, into which this new child might enter—I pointed, crying, “Look!” at all the messy paper, the unkempt pages laid out, “Look, it’s my novel.” And there was an edge to my voice as if having all that paper visible might justify me, a woman without history in this new world, a bride made pregnant, an almost mother.
But I lost my way in that morass of paper. At night I would lie by David’s side and look out the window, out across the terrace on the twenty-third floor of the Master’s Institute, at the dark sky. Racing across the black waters of the Hudson, across the jeweled lights of the George Washington Bridge, I saw the tinier, harder lights of the cars. I watched, transfixed by the minute motions of those cars with human beings in them crossing into New Jersey, metal bodies crawling between two borders, across a bridge that seemed to have no ending.
Those were the days of Chinese takeout and Häagen Dazs, Yonah Schimmel’s knishes, long walks in Central Park, several viewings of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, which was David’s way of teaching me about Manhattan life. I remember watching the movie at the old Thalia on West 96th Street with creaking fans and popcorn machines that spluttered and fumed. I was sitting in a red seat that tilted back at an odd angle, my feet propped as high as I could muster, for my body was swelling and my circulation slow. I’ll never forget the thrill I felt when I saw the scrawny hero stand in front of the very theater we sat in, trying to scrounge his way into Diane Keaton’s skirts. I knew I was in a great city, in one of the greatest cities of the world, and I wondered what it might mean to make an art, kinky, screwy, edgy, co-equal to the city. At the same time I felt myself a looker-on, a watcher. Neither Jew nor WASP, I had no way into the story that Woody Allen and Diane Keaton were playing out.
I tried, hard, though to understand a filmmaker obsessed by rabbis who stuffed pork in their mouths, a fantasy we’d seen on the screen in Paris a few weeks earlier, another Woody Allen flick—and wasn’t there something in it about a wife with a wig and black lace undies whipping the poor old white-haired man? David had buckled over with laughter, peal after peal of helpless laughter in an entirely silent theater. I could hardly see the humor in the whole affair, a poor shaved woman holding a whip in her hand, or was it a plateful of pork?
Those were the days when I kept adding to the first draft of my story, scrawling page after page of a section in Kerala, page after page about a movie in the making, a crazy theological shot in Hyderabad. And all the while I felt more and more distanced from my own life, swollen out of recognition, my body grotesque in the new world. I noticed homeless people curled up in the subway stop, bottles flung out of the high windows on 103rd Street, the young mother with two infants begging in the street by the Good Luck Deli.
David gave me Tillie Olsen’s Silences and I could not open it without feeling the tears sting my eyes. I felt my whole life was blanked out by this newness I had been thrown into, I felt I would never get to write the real stuff of my life. I knew I was one of those women, mouths taped over, choking on her own flesh. When many years later in the company of Florence Howe I met Tillie, I was struck by her small erect figure, the clear beauty of her eyes. I did not say to her, it took me so many years to read your book, your book of fragments. My own life made a mess of me when I tried. Eight years later, in the summer of ’88, two babies and two books later, I completed the novel I had begun in Chail. The pages I had added in my early days in Manhattan, my moat of paper, my counter-world, was cut so the text could lie taut, the sentences stacked against each other.
How very far it seemed from our summer honeymoon in Chail. Then, an imaginary land had enticed me as David sang me songs from Danny Kaye and Fred Astaire, told me tales of the Bronx High School of Science and summer camps in Maine. In Khartoum my childhood friend Sarra, who had returned from her stay in Washington with a cache of Superman comics, Barbie dolls, and American clothing, all frills and spots and checks, had presented me with a hardbound copy of the adventures of the Hardy Boys. That was in the back of my mind somewhere and I was curious as to how boys in America lived. I had read of bunk beds and fishing and swimming and what it was like to race around half-naked in the heat.
David told me how his hair, when he was a small child, was bleached almost white and it fascinated me, as did his discomfort at being so blonde a Jew. “I have always imagined myself as dark,” he explained to me in Chail as we wandered through the elaborate gardens the old maharajah had carved out for himself, roses and tulips and the dripping laburnam all woven through with twisting paths of crazy paving and clumps of pine trees. Surely it was such an advantage to be blonde, I thought, though of course in the Indian scheme of things a level of pallor that verged on the pink didn’t really count.
“The Jews are the chosen ones of God,” appa had told me quite clearly. Those were conversations we had during the Six-Day War, when we had returned to Khartoum from our visit to the Holy Land. “You know that surely, Meena.” Amma had pitched in, “It says so in the Bible.” And I, filled with the problems of the Palestinians, the diversion of water from the River Jordan, the Israeli propaganda that was beamed over Radio Omdurman, all of which we had discussed in heated fashion over the student union tables at Khartoum University, struggled to discuss history with him. My father always rose to the defense of Israel, but before appa got started on that, or the behavior of the Indian army in the last Indo-Chinese war, amma chipped in: “Think of all those geniuses that come from the Jewish people. There’s Einstein. There’s Yehudi Menuhin. And so many others. Count the Nobel Prize winners. We Syrian Christians don’t have that brilliance, now do we?”
Now quite apart from the fact that there was no Syrian Christian Einstein, had there been such a creature he would surely have been called GeeVarghese and inducted early into the priesthood, I felt she might have a point. The exile and the genius of the Jews, those twinned fates, troubled me. The Jews had been cast out from country and territory. They had suffered centuries of persecution and, in our own century, mass killings at the hands of the Nazis. The genius seemed a kind of compensation, at least as amma explained it to me: “There are no other peoples as gifted as the Jews,” she insisted. “They are God’s chosen. The Bible says so.”
Years later, when amma came to America to help me after Adam was born, when I had a job in New York, and David was commuting from Minneapolis, I grew somewhat anxious. What would happen when Toby and she got together? What could they possibly speak of? And Toby so elegant and well arranged. David reassured me that amma had just the style of his grandma B, Toby’s mother, but without all that iron will, and that they would manage fine together. And so they did. With the plump little Adam to share, Toby fixed apple pie and took my mother to West Side Story, and to Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue.
I thought of all this, yet felt the bitterness rise in my throat as, after an evening out with Toby, amma returned to the small apartment in Van Cortlandt Park and stood staring out at the snow that was falling, stood there clenching and unclenching her small hands. And I could not bear it, for I felt she was thinking of her own mother’s death, and her dislocation, and now alone in New York with her eldest daughter and the newborn child, what did she have, what home for herself? My father was in Somalia in those days, working for the United Nations, and amma, instead of being with him, was taking care of Kozencheri veliappechan, who in his large house on the hill was taking an awfully long time to die. Only an anxious letter to my father, for I had a new job in New York and did not know how to manage with the baby too, had released my mother for me. He cabled her to leave and come for a few months to America, to help me out. His Madras sister would take over the filial duties. So amma came and stayed with me in New York.
But what right did she have to bring her anxieties to me? I felt I could not bear the bond of blood. There was nothing stronger than it, but I was left no breathing space. I stood behind her at the window and heard the elevated subway clatter in the distance. We saw the lights turned on in the housing projects on the other side of Van Cortlandt Park. My marriage and movement here, to a small apartment in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in the Bronx, what did it all amount to? Was this what a woman’s life had to be? I watched my mother watch the snow fall in the delicacy of the first flurries then mass over treetop and roadside. And as she stood there utterly still, watching all that sweet frozen water, saying nothing, nothing at all, I felt all torn up inside and had little sense of what either of us might turn our lives to. The fact that I had married a man of my choice, come with him to another country, given birth, and found myself a university job, all in short order, none of that counted. What I felt was the burden of her on my soul, a gravitational pull, a mother-weight. What she felt inside her gave me no room, and I did not have the suppleness of spirit to speak to her, to comfort her.
Those days were difficult. My job helped a little and so did writing. In the bus on the way to and from Fordham University where I taught, I immersed myself in the madness of Edgar Poe. Somehow he touched me to the quick. Moving to the Bronx where the air was clearer; his child-wife Virginia dying of tuberculosis; his exotic belief in electricity. So when I met my friend Joel in Cambridge a year and a half later and sat with him in the half-darkness of the Harvard Club, I listened attentively as he explained the crack that ran through the house the Ushers lived in, that half-crazed brother and sister, and I listened to him explain their entombment to me. I identified with that burial, I felt my Syrian Christian past was like that. I wanted to breathe the clear air of America. But where would I find it?
Where indeed, I asked Joel. He and I had first met in Hyderabad in 1977. He had quoted lines of Emerson to me, and told me of how he loved living in Cambridge, strolling through Harvard Yard. Now I asked him where his parents lived. For I knew he had studied first at City College and had been born to a Brooklyn Jewish family. “They kept moving,” he replied, in answer to my second question. “It was cheaper to move than to have the house painted. I was born during the Depression and that was the way my parents managed.” I could not forget that story of his parents moving so often. After all, David and I had done almost that. In the first two years of our marriage we moved eleven times and after those two years I was burnt-out.
I did not understand what it meant to keep house in this inconstant fashion, to hold on, to keep going. Often I did not recognize myself. I felt I had lost my soul: that it was sucked into the vortex of an Otherness I had no words for; that all I was had contracted into being a wife, being a woman who had crossed a border to give birth in another country. Seasons of birth have stripped me, formed me afresh.
March 1980. Near midnight, Roosevelt Hospital on 59th and 10th. A slab of a building made of red brick and stone. It has swing doors that you have to push hard, especially if you have a large belly that trembles with the pressure inside it, or if you are worn to the point of blankness, a new baby in your arms.
We had just given birth, she and I. She woke me from my stupor screaming, “Why? Why?” But I could be mistaken. Who could tell what her words were, what languages she spoke? I could not shut her cries from my ears. Her child had been born with a malformed head. It would not survive two weeks. She wept and wept. The white corridors of the hospital stank with her sweat.
In my head I hear her still, green gown flapping, the white strands that should tie it in front streaming at her sides, bare breasts heavy with milk, fit to burst with all the nourishment the poor child would never suck. There had been a snowstorm two nights before, just as I had gone into labor. Waking up, looking out through a window onto the high roofs of Manhattan, in sudden sunlight I saw the fine slate-colored tiles, the precise tinge of the underside of a Sudanese dove, top feathers hot with the sand from the desert, underside gleaming with cool air currents from the Nile valley. I saw that delicate blue-green shot with gray in the irregular surface of the tiles shimmering through a dirty trickle of snow.
They must have stuck a needle in her, for when I turned from the window they had already brought her back, her face ashen but without the substance of ash, like that water trickle really, a see-through thing, her two hands limp. They pulled the covers over her, set the screen over against her bed and it was as if nothing had happened. Nothing.
That night a child was brought in to me. The nurse from Jamaica held up a screaming thing. Its hair stood on end. Black hair turned into electric needles, shock straight, each blade gleaming, face contorted purple, mouth an angry welt, each eye screwed tight, heavenwards slanted as if gashed with a blade. Out of the lips of this thing held bolt upright in its swaddling, came sore stings of breath. Then the air sucked in let the body shudder and swing as the nurse held it so that the screams, low and guttural, came out again and again, not from the mouth that seemed snapped shut, but from the whole surface of that swaddled body. I sat up in bed and stared in horror.
Nothing came out of my mouth. No words. Finally I heard a voice murmuring:
“Take it away.”
Puzzled but polite she stands there waiting.
“That’s not my child. It must be a mistake.”
I cannot take my eyes off the little mummy, only its head brutally alive. She is gentle now. Waits for me.
“It’s a mistake, a mistake.” I feel the hot tears prickle my eyes but I keep on. “You know that’s not my child. It’s someone else’s.”
Worn out with the day and a half of labor, the three hours of hot pain at the end, the small bullheaded thing butting through, the iron jab in my back, the ball of lead in the brain, I clutch the side of the bed and bite my tongue. No words come. The cut still marks my tongue.
“Look, let me show you.”
Without the slightest fear she stands and with her small brown hands, starts unpacking the bundle. The motion must reassure it, for the shuddering breaths stop. As the bands ripple off in her hands, and the little palms are set free of their cotton covers, the creature sucks in its breath.
“Look!” She points to the plastic band on the plump little wrist with the letters sealed in: “Boy Lelyveld,” it says in clear black script. “Boy Lelyveld,” she mouths for me in a delicate singsong way. As I stare at her, she sets the baby in my hands.
The pillow is behind my back. I sit up, the hair over my mouth scooped away.
In that strangeness of flesh that assaults us, making us all touch, making the very quick of our selves adhere to the surfaces of life—a metal railing, the knobby trunk of a guava tree, the lover’s wrist, his upper arm where the coarse hair curls, his thigh—in a knowledge that sweeps over the particles of sense, a grace not voiced as such, a light that does not declare itself, a true sense without cipher or prefiguration being as it is wholly of the body, I lean forward, I set my right palm to the heft of his neck, as she offers him to me.
My left hand and upper arm cradle his weight, almost nine pounds of solid muscle and bone and circling blood, twenty-three inches long and the shoulder blades so huge the mid-wife summoned in the doctor to check they were not broken in the bruising he received as he butted his way out, out of my womb and vagina, the midnight of the birth passage torn and bloodied, the skin at the vulva’s end slit clean so it would not tear, slit with metal instruments I saw, for I wanted to watch her slight hands, Nancy Cuddihy, the mid-wife who worked on me.
Out out, the blue cord wrapped tight around his neck so the veins bulged in his struggle to breathe and she leant forward, concentrating hard, the small Irish woman murmuring, “I’m going to cut the cord while he’s in you, its wrapped around his neck, we don’t want to lose him,” and I struggle half up and feel the loose bands around my feet as they are held in the stirrups.
And still it’s another twenty minutes of breathing and toiling before he’s pushed out clean, intact, dark blue, Lord Krishna’s color, my son, life of my life, and they rush him to the oxygen machine and he breathes and stirs and whimpers and roars and then is handed, still naked, to me. I set him to my right breast, the one with the small mole on the left, set his mouth there and feel the lips quaver for an instant then work for the first time in air. His strong pink mouth is so tight, the lips, the infant gums, so hard, I start to hum and hurt and stir sideways, uncontrollably so David wants to hold me, hold my shoulders, for my groins too are shaking as the afterbirth is pulled out, an iron-colored thing I scarcely see.
But now Nancy has started stitching and on and on she stitches into that numbness of my secret flesh as the sweetness fills and starts to flow out of my nipples, pale yellow colostrum the color of the first petals of the narcissius in springtime, the color of tender winter jasmine flowing into his small mouth and she stitches and stitches brown head bent into the time that needs to heal, the eruption that I am sutured, closed back by a woman’s strong hands wielding needle and thread. Shall I learn to be his mother? I cannot tell. All I feel are his lips set there and my breast beneath, and we make a being so pure.
That memory is nowhere in me as I take the child the nurse hands me. I set him to my breast. His mouth is even stronger now and sucks and sucks so hard I hurt but let it hurt as the milk slips into him and I feel his body shudder. On and on he sucks and the nurse leaning against the chair watching so carefully till then, whispers, “He was so hungry!” and walks out.
When that breast is drained I set him to the left side and when he is satiated and falls into a deep sleep, I sit up very straight and in my trembling hands take the edge of his swaddling clothes and gingerly roll off the bandages that hold him in. I stare at the soft flesh, the curve of shoulder, the belly with the angry bruise of flesh, an inch of cut cord held down with a plastic clip, the remnants of the life that fed him while he was in me, not dried yet into a pruny thing, but raw still. Further down I look at the delicate penis with the brown whorls that flesh makes as it curls and under it, upholding its slight tapering form, the great orbs of his balls that hold in the sperm sacs, his thigh, the curve of his hip, his ankle curved too, the great toe and the little ones all in their intricate order, and up on his head with the bumpy thing on his skull not quite subsided from the pressure of his birth I see the black hairs, gleaming, a gentle cap of hair now, pacific on his head.
He trembles in his sleep as I hold him to the space between my two breasts and his toes reach to my navel where I was joined to amma. But the slack worn belly after childbirth trembles with all those rushing hormones and I start to shake and shake as if a fever were in me. So after holding him there on my skin I pick up all his clothes and wrap him up again and then exhausted drop back. We are wrapped in a soft sleep all that morning and into the late afternoon.
When David comes to visit he sees us there, all worn and shiny with sleep. “He was so hungry, that is all,” I whisper in my happiness. “Look at him now!” Arms marked with all the pinpricks from the blood lettings and takings, snarled in old lace amma bought me a lifetime ago, I hold out our son.
When David leaves, when the nurse returns and takes the baby back to the nursery, I fall into a heavy sleep. I dream of the clouds, light, flaky as dried milk over the clock tower, the fragrant gray-green of the tiles, my mother’s hands so close suddenly, the heavy wedding ring visible on the worn finger. She holds out her hands to me, she comes forward.
She holds out her hands in the blue air to me.
Behind her face is a window. Is it a window? A porthole surely? A mirror? I cannot tell. The wooden frame shifts as if my eyes were a dark, unstable water that held it. Behind her face is darkness, a mirror of ink. She is going now. No, no, she is returning. She is coming and going, in and out of my eyes and I cannot bear it.
Each summer after Adam was born, we would travel to Minneapolis where David taught, to spend the warm season there. I had taken the job in New York so that I could breathe and live a little. But I had a six-month-old baby, I was relatively new in the country, and bearing the strains of a commuting marriage. Still, I was clear I did not want to be a faculty wife in Minneapolis, I did not want to be swallowed up in the cold. In the midst of that welter of Scandinavians where David with his blonde beard was often called “Sven” in bars, I stuck out like a sore black thumb, a grotesque thing.
I remember walking along a street in Minneapolis when Adam was not yet two. We were just strolling, he and I, on a lovely summer’s day, with clear blue skies that stretched for miles all around and in the flatness the scent of cut grass, the growing stalks of wheat, the buzz of summer flies. We were quite close to the university campus. There was a motorbike leaning against a tree, so we walked a little to the side to avoid it. I do not know where he stepped from, the white man in the black leather jacket and the slicked back hair. But the hate in his voice stunned me. “You black bitch!” he yelled at me, apropos of nothing except that I had almost brushed his motorcycle and he had seen it from a shop window. I held onto the little boy. Where did that man’s fury come from? I was shaken to the core.
I could not tell David. It would have hurt him far too much and there was no way he could become me, enter my skin. I did not want him to know about it at all. But when our friend Prakash from Bangalore came to visit, the words tumbled out. Prakash heard me out in silence, but somehow the fact that he listened was enough. Later that year, his Ph.D. completed, he moved to New Jersey to teach in a college there.
Did he understand that white man’s rage as he listened to me? Or figure it out better, speaking to the Indians who have lived through racist stonings and murder in Jersey City, who live in fear of the Dot-Buster skinheads. What would they tell me, I wonder, the Indian women who are forced to give up their saris and wear western clothes lest they lose their jobs, or the Asian children in the city schools, or the black youths who strayed into Bensonhurst, or the brown youths, or the Asian youths who pack our city streets? What does it mean to be Unwhite in America? Can I make lines supple enough to figure out violence, vent it, and pass beyond?
We went to Puerto Rico the spring Adam turned two. We lay on the delicate white sands on Loquillo Beach to sun ourselves. I carried Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with me to read. At night after David and I made love, I dreamt I was carrying the pages of the novel I had laid out two years before on the floor, all around my pregnant belly. In my dream I was carrying the parts all tenderly wrapped up in the Pashmina shawl Toby had presented me with when I first arrived in America.
I treasured the shawl woven in the mountains of Kashmir, with its fine embroidery of bird’s beak, mango leaf, and vine, and saved it to wear on special occasions. In the dream, which consumed me as I lay on the flat bed in the Parador Martorell with the hibiscus blossoming outside and the cry of birds crossing the shore at dawn, a landscape so much like the west coast of Kerala, I stooped, I picked up the shawl. Quite tenderly I used it to wrap the pound load of paper I had written. My feet were possessed with a life of their own and carried me out of the orange painted door of the Bronx apartment, down the narrow corridor to the small metal hatch set into the wall. Pull the hatch down and shove it in, my own voice said. As I shoved the shawl down the incinerator the scent of burning tissue filled my nostrils. Back in New York City, it was many weeks before I could pass by the corridor without a burning scent rushing up my nostrils.
Svati Mariam was born in New York City, late at night, on May 12, 1986, almost born in the taxi cab. I will never forget the full moon behind the Guggenheim, a pale lemony color as the cab raced down Fifth Avenue. David didn’t know I was fully dilated, nor the cab driver, whistling through his teeth. I bit into my lips to stop the pain. One red light, I thought, and that will be that and the child will be born here, now. But we got into the emergency room and I was on the stretcher, and in another half minute she shot out all blue and gray and mottled, my little one, and I trembled and laughed, all at the same time, an experienced mother now. “What is her name, her name,” Dr. Wolf asked, when he got there. “Here she is, she must have a name.” I took the strength of speech into my own lips and said, “Svati, Svati Mariam is her name.”
She was all mottled and discolored then.
“That was before you became a beauty,” I tell her, when she asks me what color she was when she was born. “I am varnish now,” she replies or sometimes she fixes herself a color change: “peach.” And then continues: “You are brown mama, papa is blond papa, Adam is brown Adam, and I am peach Svati.”
What shall I be for her, my little one? I push her each day towards Broadway. The days pass. She is still so young, packing in her years, one, two, three, four. Sometimes I worry for her, a little Indian-American girl-child. Whenever I can I hold onto the reality of mechi and mechan, her grandmother and grandfather in Kerala, her aunts, her cousins. Another soil, another earth. But what might she wish to be, that other soil cast into invisibility years down the road, when her small breasts flower and boys line up for her? What will she make of me, her South Indian mother? Will she recall I loved her, loved her brother too, throwing my arms around them, trembling at the sound of trucks roaring past, ambulances that halt to the stench of burning rubber at Saint Luke’s emergency room?
In a dream Adam comes to me, as he did when he was a little child. “Mama, I am losting,” he cries out, making me blindfold him and then twirl him around. His little arms stick out, he wanders around the room, relying on me to steer him away from tables and chairs and books lying in heaps, all the while singing out in his deep little voice, “Losting, Mama, losting,” and when he signals, flapping his arms up and down like a pigeon might, I know he’s had enough and I hug him to me, shower kisses on his cheeks. With my free hand I tug off the blindfold and watch him, pleased and anxious all the same time, rubbing his eyes, staring at me, once again, as if we had just met, he and I, for the very first time. He used to play that game all the time when he was three, even four. Was it to repair a memory he could not bear?
I cannot forget Adam just before he turned three. He lay on the airport floor at Trivandrum. Words tumbled out of his mouth, mixed in with the tears. He beat at the cold floor. “No. No. Don’t take me away, no, no.” He was a well-built child with rosy cheeks. His tears made a mess on the floor. He could not bear to leave Kerala and his grandmother and grandfather and the rough and tumble of all that love, scents of cows and chickens and goats, the safety of so many arms to hold him.
I bent to pick him up, preparing for the passage through the metal detectors and body searches, then over the tarmac into the plane, all ready for the first step, in long return to New York. But as I stooped I felt myself dissolving, a sheer bodily memory I have no words for. I was all tears. I cupped his struggling little form to my breasts and looked at my mother’s face. Through her tears, she looked back at me quite steadily.
A few days after Adam returned to New York, he lay on the floor in his American grandmother’s house and drew a little picture: his map of the world. On the brown paper there were squiggles running up and down and a square shape somewhat at an angle to the up and down lines.
“Kozencheri, Delhi,” he explained, reading his map to us, “India, sixth floor.”
“What’s the sixth floor?” We peered over his shoulder.
“Grandma’s house, right here.”
He beamed in delight at his own creation, the hereness, the honey of life included in it. Looking at him, I learnt to forget the little clenched form on the airport floor, the pain, the refusal. How close to danger we so often are, I think to myself, how little the present reveals the complicated amassing discord out of which alone our words can rise to music. In the little kitchen behind us, Toby was warming up a zucchini preparation she had cooked for our homecoming. That tangy, alien fragrance, and the sweetness of bread pudding steaming on the stove top distanced me from those thoughts and I shifted my weight in the new shoes I had bought for our return to this island city by the Hudson.
A little over a year later, when Adam was four, the doorman at Toby’s building on Riverside Drive leant over and engaged him in conversation.
“What are you?” asked the lean black man from the South, bending towards my child. A few days earlier Frank had complained bitterly to me about white people and how all they thought was that blacks chewed watermelon. He had grimaced, elegantly spat out the bit of tobacco he had chewed into a bit of silver foil, and folded the whole caboodle up into a triangle, tossing it into the bin at the foot of the marble fireplace in the foyer.
“So what you, child?”
Adam, shy as ever, had just looked at him.
“You American, child?”
“No,” said my son very boldly.
“Indian then. You Indian, child?”
Adam shifted his weight “No.” He stuck his fist into his little mouth as he sometimes did. I was growing tense. What did my firstborn wish for himself? Some nothingness, some transitory zone where dreams roamed, a border country without passport or language?
“What you, then?” Frank insisted, his old man’s voice growing tetchy as he waited.
Raising himself to his full height Adam replied, “Jedi, I’m a Jedi knight!” His head filled with Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader and the citadel of Death Stars, planets of lost origins, Adam knew exactly what he was talking about. Perhaps Frank knew what the child was saying, perhaps he didn’t. But his face creased in smiles and he pressed a silver nickel into Adam’s grubby little hand. The next time I saw Frank was several months later. He had moved to another apartment building. He was limping now and visibly aged. His cough was worse too. “How’s the Jedi knight?” he asked me in a hoarse whisper. “How’s the little knight?” “He’s fine,” I replied, “growing taller by the minute.”
Svati too is growing taller. Born six years after her brother, she is now the age he was when he thought of himself as a Jedi knight. Just the other day she came home from preschool with a picture she had made of her Indian grandparents: mechi, mechan and her aunts Anna and Elsa and the dog and cat, all in the Tiruvella house. Her grandparents had round bodies and round eyes. Her grandfather and her two aunts had short crisp hair colored in with crayon strokes, all dark. Mechi had a sari, her hair drawn back in a bun. But through her bun, poised on top of her round head, ran a stick. At least that’s what I took it to be.
“Svati, what’s that?” I pointed.
“Bone.”
“Bone?”
“She’s my bone-and-arrow mechi, you know that. Bone-and-arrow Indians, mama.”
Her voice rose in the utter certainty that sometimes grips her. I bent down and picked her up
“Darling, mechi and I and you are a different sort of Indian. She doesn’t have a bow and arrow running through her hair like that. Who told you?”
I carried my child into the living room and turned my palm as I often do, into a map of India.
“Look, Svati, India is here—America there.” I pointed a little to the right of my palm, somewhere near my ribs. “And Native Americans live all over this country. They were here first.”
“And mechi?”
“Mechi lives in India. You know where she lives in Tiruvella.”
“And Mechan?”
“Yes, he too.”
“And the well?”
“Yes, the well and the guava trees and your aunts. And know something else? Native Americans don’t wear their hair like that.”
The next day I went into school and spoke to the teacher, an attractive young woman, filled with good projects for the children. Had she really thought I was Indian from the plains somewhere west of Manhattan? “I am Indian,” I said, “from Asia. Heard of Columbus?” “Sure.” I spoke about Columbus and his obsession with finding India. How he thought when he landed in America that he had struck the Indian coast. And then I mentioned Vasco da Gama, searching out the spice trade in the ancient kingdoms on the west coast of India. A child like Svati I added, was caught in the crossfire of the white man’s naming patterns. All of this took about a minute as children entered the classroom.
“Come and tell a story to the children, will you?” she invited. I promised I would. A week later I went back to tell the children a tale of India. I opened up my palm once again and drew invisible pictures on it. Two weeks after that the teacher invited a Native American from the Community House, and he came with a peace pipe and pictures of herbs and headdresses and ancient rites and talked to the children of his people who had once inhabited Turtle Island. That sacred geography all built over, bits and pieces of it burning, I thought to myself as Svati told me of the visitor to her school.
Who are we? What selves can we construct to live by? How shall we mark out space? How shall we cross the street? How shall we live yet another day?
A vivid scent almost as of paper burning, a bitter, meaty smell, fills my nostrils. In the kitchen something left over is actually burning. I pick it out of the oven. I pick up a knife to cut up scallions for a salad. I am alone at home now but we have to eat tonight, all four of us together, and I may as well make the salad a few hours early. I am going to do tomatoes and lettuce next. The radio is on loud, louder with the whine and roar of winds in telegraph poles, winds tearing off rooftops, smashing up walls, destroying kitchens, bedchambers, writing machines, small salad bowls. Hurricane Hugo hits Puerto Rico, causing enormous damage to life and property. No deaths are mentioned as yet. The excited voice on the radio describes a fifteen-foot wall of water smashing into fences, walls, school buses, trees, the lot. Charleston, South Carolina could be next, the voice predicts.
Listening to the male voice describe the hurricane, something thrashes in my head. I feel I cannot bear to slice tomatoes for the salad, tear up the lettuce with my fingers after draining out all that cool tap water. At the pit of my stomach something crashes, as if water were churning into milky chaos. I pick up the phone to call a friend I have not seen for many months. Perhaps he will understand what I am going through.
“Sometimes I cannot even cross the street,” I said to him many months ago when we met last. “I look at the trees on the far side of the hill past Saint Luke’s Hospital and I can’t put one foot in front of the other to cross the road, get to the other side.” He seemed to understand. We were speaking about being Indian and living in the United States. Just now I needed that sense of something shared, a special displacement, an exile.
My fingers were all wet with tomato juice when I picked up the phone. From the courtyard below a child was crying, over and over, “My ball, my, my ball.” The super’s grandchild. He’d come from Miami to visit his grandparents in Manhattan.
I got the connection I was searching for. “Yes, yes,” the voice listening on the phone replied, “But why assume living and writing will be easier in India? Might it not be harder even, with kerosene and gas out of stock, with lines for sugar?” “But I could just stay home and write, someone else would do that for me,” I replied quite crassly. “Yes but you’d have to supervise the someone else!” I laughed, in enormous relief, at the sheer fantasy of return to a life I had never led. “I live here because I can work here, Meena. But you writers are different. I think you’re pushed from inside. Something tugs, pushes you hard.”
That night several New York City writers who had published poems or prose pieces with Red Dust were to read. Joanna Gunderson had arranged the reading. She had invited Robert Pinget to read and he was there too, just arrived from Paris. Pinget with his leather tie and balding head was spry, dour even in his humor as he read out the paragraphs of M. Songe. Going ahead of him, reading her bit first, was his English translator, Barbara Wright. Her pleasure at his lines couched in her English was infectious. As she threw back her head of bobbed black hair, and raised her voice, we were captivated by the lightness of her mood. I was freed of myself, and the intensity of having read lines from “The Storm” about warfare. Reading the elegy of names—“Khartoum and Cairo, Columbo and New Delhi, Jaffna, Ahmedabad and Meerut”—had hurt my throat, made me catch my breath. Now in the delicate refinement, the plainness even of Pinget’s nouveau roman style, I found a solace, an exit from the self. I loved the savor of the French language I had not used for so long. It was some time after ten-thirty at night, after the words, after the peanuts and wine, the banter of a literary evening, that I walked briskly, the wind in my leather coat, down Broadway, towards 113th Street.
On the traffic island right in the center of the street, I confronted a friend. She rose out of the darkness with her long dark hair, her dark scarf, her books clutched to her. There were bushes behind her, magnolia and the newly planted holly. So at first I could not tell her from that blur. But soon we recognized each other. There was an empty bench prepared for us and we sat there in the darkness on a traffic island on Broadway, two displaced creatures greeting each other. She spoke of her loneliness on returning from Madras, on the harshness of the city. And I replied, “Sometimes, Gauri, I cannot cross the street, for I look down and see the trees, way over there, beyond Saint Luke’s Hospital and I wonder to myself, Where am I? When am I? And there is no point in crossing the street. None at all.” I went on to explain how one morning I had gone out to get some bagels for breakfast from Mama Joy’s. But I could not bring myself to cross the street, to return home. I will remain stuck here, I thought, fighting back tears, staring at the trees all the way beyond Saint Luke’s Hospital, stuck here at the edge of 113th Street for the rest of my life.
People were passing us on the traffic island and giving us little stares. But I felt it was all right to be there, a New York City housewife on a bench after dark, chatting to her friend. But I needed to explain something to Gauri. “You know, I don’t think I could survive if I didn’t write. Just now reading the poem set in the Tiruvella of my childhood, and in Kozencheri too, standing in a small bookshop on the Upper West Side, I felt I was breathing again. But it stings me to write all this. In India, I rest, I just am, like a stone, a bone, a child born again.” Then I added hastily, “If my husband saw us he’d think us bag ladies.”
“That’s all right, Meena.” She was very gentle with me. “We have the right to change our identities.” I think we were happy in that moment, Gauri and I, on a city bench in Manhattan, the great island city where the poor cry out of tunnels, and the rich frolic in their limos and luxury penthouses, where just as in my birthplace children hunt for scraps of food in waste heaps.