In Manhattan it is hard to make the bits and pieces hold together. Things are constantly falling apart. The city is dispersing itself, jolting, juggling its parts. There is no ideal of poise in its construction, just the basting together of bits. Sometimes bits burst open, split apart, and one does not quite know how to go on. How to construct a provisional self to live by. How to make up memory.
“Return to Khartoum,” Talal Asad counseled me.
“What do you mean?”
“No, really.”
He made it sound so simple. I had gone to him wanting to know more about Khartoum, the city in which I lived off and on for more than thirteen years of my life. Talal is an anthropologist with a special interest in colonialism. He lived in Khartoum in the sixties and taught at the university in the years when I was a student there. He even had a house across the road from us in Hai el Matar, and though I do not think we were ever formally introduced, we had surely passed each other by, heard of each other. Talal was in New York City. I called him up and spoke to him. He said he would help me remember what I could of those lost years of my life.
“You should get a travel grant or something and return and it would demystify something for you.”
“Demystify? What does that mean?”
We were sitting side by side in small metal chairs in an art gallery in lower Manhattan, Art in General, that was showing an exhibit of box works by women of color. All around us were boxes of intricate artwork in glass, glue, paper, metal, stone, bone, eggshell, filaments drawn from a spider’s web.
“Demystify? Look here, in a dream I had I kept returning to Lahore but suddenly, realizing that my mother and father were no longer there, that I was no longer a boy, filled with emotion, I wept. I went back thirty years later and it was a dusty town with little streets and so much smaller than I remembered. I was utterly unmoved by it.”
He continued and listening to him it was as if his voice were a voice from within, breaking my own heart:
“It’s the imagination, really, isn’t it, working within us? Surely all exiles are like that? Surely you have those dreams too?”
There was something urgent in his voice. I stopped utterly still to listen. At the celebration for the exhibit Gale Jackson, Maritza Arrestia, and I had each read our poems on the theme of Ancestors Known and Unknown. The reading was over. It was time to leave and I was standing next to a pedestal. On it was Tomie Arai’s work of crushed glass and metal, In Memory of Hiroshima. A mushroom cloud on glass and, in front, a woman cut into metal, her hands folded, weeping. I stopped. I looked at Talal.
“Yes, of course,” I nodded quickly. For I didn’t know how to say I don’t think I dream of that at all; or if I do I don’t recall those dreams. I only have the voice that comes out in poems or in bits of prose, cries of the occasion, the voice singing against itself, against time.
Memories nearer at hand flood back. I was standing in the transit lounge at Bombay airport on the way to Trivandrum when I saw a group of men dressed in the rough brownish fabric that is sometimes used to make the garments of the very poor, baggy shirts and loose-cut trousers. They squatted in a heap in the dark alcove of the transit lounge of Bombay International Airport. The floor of the immensely long room is covered in ridged plastic, with little suction cups built in to prevent soles from slipping and they squatted right on it, at least thirty persons, their faces in shadows, propped against each other, seemingly sleeping. When one of them rose, the others stirred.
I saw a man, his face gray with exhaustion, getting up, stretching a little. From his neck hung a name written out in Hindi, in neat Devanagari script. When a few minutes later the men pushed themselves up, little knots, welts of human beings all dressed in identical clothing, I saw that each man had his name written on his chest. Some had cords around the neck to which the name tags were tied, crude postcards with lettering on them. Others had their names and destinations—Kuwait City, Dhahran, Abu Dhabi—attached onto their shirts with safety pins. Some of the pins stuck out at angles from the pockets to which they were attached.
These illiterate men from a Bihar village, like so many others before them, had sold their services to a middle man on the promise of several years of paid labor on construction sites in the region of the Persian Gulf. So there they were, resting after the long, hot ride in a lorry, after finding their way in through the overpainted lounges of the newly refurbished airport, hands sore with clutching the parcels wives and mothers and sisters had tied up with old cord. Now, in the early hours of the morning some stood rubbing their eyes, others shuffled as if an immense tiredness were welling out of them. A man in a gray safari suit, obviously the middleman’s agent, bustled about not far away.
I raced forward and pulled Svati away. How little she was then, not yet three. In order to approach the group of men in the half darkness of the lounge, she had evolved a whole system of movement. First she tossed her plastic dolly with the blonde hair and blue eyes forward, and then crawled after it, as fast as she could manage on her plump knees. When she reached the toy, she laughed with delight, only to scoop it up again and fling it away. It was by following her into the half darkness of the alcove that I came upon the bonded laborers. So I stood there, in the shadows, clutching my child’s hand, not moving. Then swiftly I pulled her away.
When next I saw the men, roughly two hours later, they were walking onto an airplane with black and green paint on its nose, bound for the Gulf. A slightly manic man I had noticed, with black glittering eyes, hand fretting nervously all over the hem of his roughly stitched shirt, walked ahead. He held his head erect as he walked. The name tag, slightly torn with all the fingering, was still fluttering on his chest. By the time they left, it was ten or eleven hours since I had first entered the transit lounge. My first feel of Indian soil, as it were, was the ridged plastic of the transit lounge in Bombay airport where I waited with Adam and Svati. The flight from New York had taken twenty-one hours and now we were all set for three more hours of flying time, south into Trivandrum, which was seventy miles south of Tiruvella. There was a go-slow strike. Plane after plane was canceled. Following the messages on the loud intercom system and the confused words of the airline people sitting by the gate, the line stirred wearily from one departure gate to another. Men and women and children thrust themselves forward as best they could from one queue into the other. Old women squatted on the ground, the younger folks leant against each other, children started to stretch out on the black plastic floor. It must have been almost five in the morning when the pale rose of the morning sun, rising over the Arabian Sea, flooded the unwashed glass windows of the transit lounge. We were still waiting for the plane that would take us to Kerala.
Exhausted by the long wait, near the front of a new queue that had formed by Gate 14, I stood as firmly as I could, holding tight to the handles of the McLaren stroller into which I had buckled Svati. She seemed content for the moment. Adam was a little to my right, watching a group of Indian children play frisbee. I could read the longing in his eyes. Once when the frisbee came near him he leapt up and caught it and held onto it for a brief instant before sending it skimming off. The frisbee-playing children were chattering away in German. Their parents, obviously Malayalees, perhaps even from the neighborhood of Tiruvella, were standing ahead of me in the queue. How oddly the German sounded on those children’s lips. But why was that any odder than English in my son’s mouth, the pristine North American sort, of the Manhattan species? He was a New York child, conceived in India, born in the city, and now I was taking him back to his grandparents, back to my ancestral soil, an old house, a large garden, a well with clear water in it. Perhaps he would learn to speak Malayalam again, I thought fondly. As a small child of three and four he had babbled phrases, after six months in India. But now all that was forgotten. Where did a language go once it was forgotten, I wondered. I often forgot Malayalam, at least little bits of it, but on my childhood returns to Kerala from Khartoum, it always revived, the deep buried roots stirring again. Why shouldn’t that happen for Adam? But I was forgetting that he never was bathed in that language as I had been. After all, as a child it was my first spoken tongue. And during the years in the Sudan my parents returned home to India for three months or sometimes my mother returned for six months and immersed her daughters in the life of buttermilk and chilied fish and more garrulous cousins than could fill two alcoves in a transit lounge.
Where were they, all my cousins now? One of them was a cardiologist, I knew. He was working in Kuwait, earning masses of money by all accounts. By now the sun’s rays were brighter, glinting on the plate glass as I stood clutching the handles of Svati’s stroller. My thoughts turned to the laborers bound for the Gulf. They could not read or write. They did not know how to speak Arabic or English, the two languages that surrounded me when I had moved as a child to North Africa. There were whole families, waiting in India, dependent on the money these men would send home. Their plane must have risen over the waters by now, over Bombay harbor, cutting its way north and west. Perhaps the men were less weary now, exhilarated even, seeing the morning sun for the first time, over the shoreline of the Arabian Sea. But what would they find on the other side?
And writing this today, sitting in a room in New York City, I wonder how many of those men are still there, stuck after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, herded into the refugee camps set up outside Amman. Was it yesterday, or the day before, that the young man with the glittering eyes ran as hard as he could towards a water truck long run dry? What will he do when he is airlifted out of the deserts in a wide-bellied Indian air force plane and flung back into Bihar or Haryana? What can he and others like him, men and women too, do with lives burnt up by the hopes of a new world? Where will they live? Who will tell their names?
Somehow all this is in my mind as I try to stitch together the life I have lived, to recall Khartoum where I spent my childhood years, a city of sandstone, brick and mud, in the heat of a North African desert I have forgotten and remember. What can I see? A white painted house with a terrace on top and lawn in front, with the prickly acacia hedge at the back. Haadia who lived next door to me racing about in her blue cotton dress. She was about a year and a half older than I, with her hair parted in the tiny braids that women wear now in America. We were about the same color and shape, except that she was somewhat heavier set and my knees stuck out more. We romped and played and raided the fridges in each of our homes for Coca-Colas and sweetmeats and hid out under the neem trees, as Abdullah Tayib, Haadia’s uncle, the Sudanese poet, called out to me from across the yard.
He knew I had newly arrived in the Sudan from India, that I was five and a half, the right age to learn a classical script:
“Come here, come here you young thing and learn the syllables of Arabic. How can you live unless you learn the syllables of Arabic?” Those were the days before Abdullah Tayib became vice-chancellor of Khartoum University and it was rumored he used to go into senate meetings in his absent-minded poet’s way, one shoe off and one shoe on.
“What should poets do? Let them stick to poems,” someone high up in the civil service laughed out over drinks as he told that story. How cruel I thought that man’s comments, and how untrue. And how I treasured the memory of Abdullah, as he sat in his chair reciting poetry to me. His old man’s voice, as he stood tall and erect on the other side of the yard, still sounds in my ears. And the voices of many old men crying out to me from many yards, on many continents, echoes in my ears:
Come, child, come and learn the great languages of the earth. Unless you learn, who will speak your name? How will you know yourself? How will you keep your face from being burnt by the sun? From bursting into filaments of pearl when the moon comes too close on full moon nights? How will you write, child, how will you read? Who will know your name, girl-child, who will know your name?
I think it is the pain of no one knowing my name that drives me to write. That, and the sense that I am living in a place where I have no history. Where all I am is surface and what is not reducible to a crude postcard dangled round the neck, a torn card with name and address pinned to the blouse, cannot exist, has no place.
In Manhattan, I am a fissured thing, a body crossed by fault lines. Where is my past? What is my past to me, here, now at the edge of Broadway? Is America a place without memory?
I observe the teenage girl in the Burger King at the corner of 110th and Broadway. She smiles at me through terribly white teeth, a sweetness visible, and hands back jangling change. She forgets what I ordered for the third time round. I think of asking her name, then forget myself. An old man, the one from the makeshift shack at the corner by the subway stop, comes in. He has a stench about him, he is crusted with dirt. Where on these sidewalks of Broadway will he find water to sweeten himself? He stretches out his hand.
We are on the upper reaches of Broadway, in Morningside Heights, just six blocks from the wrought-iron gates of Columbia University with its polished white statue of a woman with naked breasts. A few years ago they did a survey at the university and decided that Morningside Heights did not have enough gourmet restaurants to attract high-flying faculty, the kind that wear leather jackets, deconstruct with a vengeance, and eat fine foods. However, we have Dynasty.
Dynasty is Chinese fast food at the corner of Broadway and 110th, flanked by the bagel store and running slantwise, all plate glass and spindly hanging plants, down the avenue with stone houses, half a block to Burger King. The floor is done up in ridged plastic stuff, a bit like the transit lounge I have left behind, somewhere in my head. Holding my head with both my hands, I hopscotch to Dynasty where the diners sit with their bowls of swift fried food, behind unwashed glass. You can see most everything about them from the sidewalk, right down to who’s butting whom with knees or gleaming toes.
Dynasty has problems. The food isn’t so hot. It’s hard to keep up appearances at 110th and Broadway. Perhaps further downtown, in the fashionable reaches of Columbus or Amsterdam in the seventies, an enterprising restaurateur might try. But here the homeless and the doped out ones are with us, with nowhere else to go, and it’s hard to keep up appearances through glass.
Inside the Burger King where I have gone in search of a quick meal for the children, an old man approaches stretching out his hand. I stop short, quite close to him now. I have my two specials in my hand, gummy with ketchup and the sour pickles they wrap up. I decide to move away. I have what I need. The children are waiting. I last saw the old man ten minutes ago near the entrance of Dynasty, the Chinese restaurant at the mouth of the subway stop that keeps appearing in my dreams. The subway stop, I mean. Sometimes I people that underground passage with cousins I have not seen for decades, ancient aunts from Kerala, bonded workers on their way to the Persian Gulf, all of us migrants and even those settled in ancestral lands, jolted by time.
The old man doesn’t halt. He approaches, shuffling his feet. They are tied with bits of newsprint and cloth. The makeshift cord he has used looks as if it were ripped from inside a rubber tire. His clothes have been tied together with thread, a tweedy thing patched up, a yard of torn plastic, a bit of cardboard expertly bent, doubling as a crude scarf and a protective piece, a ridged carapace.
We are our outsides, I think, that’s all, skin and clothing and bits of hair poking out from under headgear. He spent the night under cardboard cover, by a bit of wall by Dynasty. Perhaps he crawled out of the subway and set up this impromptu shelter, a contraption of his own making with just enough of a breathing space, a habitat of cardboard, torn up and fitted together to make a place for a crouching man.
Walking by earlier I had noticed that the whole caboodle was shored against a bent shopping cart. It gave him some protection, broke the wind as it blew the two straight blocks from Riverside Drive where the bare trees and stout stone wall did little to curb its ferocity. I dropped a quarter in the old man’s tin. A coffee can with a man, a mule, a black poncho over the man’s hat. The can was carefully set to the right so that the Dynasty folk wouldn’t trip on it. I hurried on.
Now, I see myself, see myself seeing as the old man inches closer. I hear the orange-capped girl crying out, “Carlos, Carlos,” summoning the manager-in-training, a young lad in his twenties who hurries down, frowning. The girl behind the counter is oblivious to me now. As I move past the old man I glimpse the young lad with his manager-in-training badge. He draws himself erect. Not far from the counter, the old man looks up. His mouth is open as if he were having difficulty breathing. I open the metal door handle, step back out into the cold.
By the black wall between Dynasty and the bagel shop I avoid the cardboard shack, broken down now without a crouching man’s warmth inside. Fingering the white paper bag with the children’s dinner in it, I speed past Love Pharmacy. For an instant I stare at the neon-lit window and catch myself—a scurrying thing packed in coat and leather hat, a Gujarati shawl, white with black tie-dye dots, covering her upper body for extra warmth, face plump in a flat white light, cheeks a soft brown, hair parted and messy. The feet are covered in soft leather boots the same color as her skin, a ripe brown.
I look what I am, hastily put together, hurrying in the cold, a Broadway thing.
I live here now at the edge of Broadway. My familiars in the street, like the old pavement dweller, the girl in the Burger King, the newspaper vendor, a fine-boned lady from Saurashtra who braves the cold in a shack, piled up in front with copies of the Voice or Mirabella, none of us have a name for each other. We gather for our business in the marketplace, buying, selling, scurrying in the cold. We try to survive ourselves.
I think of a line of old monks I saw in Eritrea a lifetime ago. They walked, single file, in the streets of Asmara, their big robes torn and eaten up as if the snouts of wild animals had poked through the fabric. Bits of animal hide from buffalo and wildebeest hung over their shoulders. To an Indian child who had stepped off the plane for a brief stopover at Asmara, the old men, five of them, walking stooped and smelly, had a holy stench to them. One of them had glanced downwards at my feet, at the bright red Clarks shoes amma had bought for me from somewhere near Picadilly Circus, London. That great city, with its gray river and Big Ben and Hyde Park where men on carboard crates cried out in rough voices, was a blur in my head. All I had were the shoes, covered now in the dust of Asmara. I knew that my once bright shoes were now almost the same color as the old man’s loincloth. That is what the dust of the earth did, blurred us all over, all creatures of flesh. The old monk had glanced upwards then, and looked at me. As if seeing something there, a small person, illiterate in his ways, but of some interest. Or so I had felt with a sharp pleasure as I moved away from my mother’s swishing silks as she walked just to my right.
En route from Khartoum to Bombay, for our yearly return to Kerala, we had stopped off in Asmara and were strolling, my parents, sisters, and I, towards a famous cemetery. It was 1962 and the civil war that was to tear that country apart was just smoldering. Asmara was a lovely city, filled with light and the red soil of the Horn of Africa. “It’s filled with urns that the Italians left there. And cypresses. You’ll love it,” the woman at the little pension where we stayed for our day in town had smiled brightly. “Enjoy!”
The chauffeur in the blue car had driven us this far and then, as appa had preferred to walk, left us to our own devices and sat, nervously behind the wheel, biting at the raw end of a cigarette, staring at the young things in their knee-length skirts, tripping by on the sorts of stilettos that two years later were banned from all aircraft. The metal tips to the heels were ferocious and punched down through the fuselage.
We had come across the monks at the entrance to the cemetery. It was clear that, unlike the driver, they had no interest in the gray-walled garden filled with young mothers, breasts bulging through cotton and Lycra; lovers in frilled skirts and tight white pants. The old monks were walking farther and farther away. All the way to Addis Ababa, I thought, to their monasteries and stone houses. I would never see them again. Not even the man who had looked up at me for an instant. I could live in that gaze I thought, as he walked past, those eyes dark, hooded, rimmed with skin the very same color as my own. He was an old man, and something in his gait reminded me of my dearly loved grandfather who had recently died. As the old man turned past me, I saw his feet, bound with cloth, more naked, more open to the air than those of the old man on Broadway.
I take tea with Paula at Cafe 112 a few blocks from the discount store where I bought Adam four pairs of multicolored shorts with drawstrings. I let him pick them out. They have “Pacific Trail” written on them and, in much smaller letters at the back, “Assembled in the Dominican Republic.” Under the neon lights of the store, I shut my eyes. I imagine the small hands of girl-women bent over the cutting board, light streaming through a broken wall, the pittance that is paid in daily wages barely enough for rice and fish.
“Third World women have good hands,” a fat man once murmured on a plane, staring at me. “All the batteries in my Hong Kong factories are put together by young women.” His own hands, pale and be-ringed, lay folded on his lap.
“Meena,” Paula broke into my thoughts. “I have no idea what it is you’re complaining about.” “Complaining?” “Well, you showed me Adam’s new shorts and then you went on about the difficulty of writing. If you write the poems, and you’ve convinced me it’s a great thing you do, keep at it. Otherwise . . .”
She stopped to sip at her tea, leaving the thought unfinished. Paula has a shock of close-cut hair. Years ago she used to play the French horn. She doesn’t anymore. I am fascinated by what it might mean to make music in that way, seriously, obsessively, and then stop. Paula’s hearing is far more sensitive than mine, the buses with loud brakes, the screeching ambulances on Broadway trouble her greatly. Sometimes on summer nights the lads playing baseball at 2:00 A.M. on the broad flats of 106th near Riverside startle her awake. She travels to Pakistan as often as she can. We discuss time zones, why it is that coming by way of Kennedy International Airport, sleep vanishes the instant you hit a futon on the fourth floor of Broadway and 106th; what becomes of the faded ink on visa stamps a decade old: does it vaporize, pass into the tainted air?
I turn to Paula, shifting a little in my seat, suddenly uncomfortable:
“There’s all this stuff I’m scared off by. I don’t mean People magazine stuff, the secret sex life of Donna and Marla and the TV evangelist-of-the-week gone to seed. I don’t mean what you don’t wear on your sleeve, but fear about.”
“About what?”
“Well it’s the difference between us. You lived on Long Island all your life and so it’s not a big deal for you to pack your silk dress and make off to Hong Kong one week or Rawalpindi the next. But right from childhood I had these plane rides, train rides, back and forth, forth and back.”
I stop. She is digging into her scone with the chocolate bits on it, her perennial breakfast. Always there’s a fragment, large enough for a turtle or rabbit to eat, that she leaves over at the edge of the plate. Now she looks up.
“Well live it, tell it, that’s all I can say. Your personal life, it’s yours, not anyone else’s. I have no idea how writers speak about themselves in this way. All the musicians I know have incredibly private lives.”
She runs her hand through her hair. It’s been over three months since Ronald had a go at it. He’s been away on location cutting Isabella Rosellini’s locks, somewhere, south of a border. Paula’s been trying for years to get me to try Ronald, but I’m loyal to Mathilda, at the Bon Temps, a few blocks from here. I would miss her terribly if I left.
Under the buzz of the hair dryer Mathilda and I swap stories of things that count: how often you need to dye black hair once it’s started to gray; Asian mothers-in-law and their strictures about the right conduct of wifely duties; what happened in the internment camps during World War II, the last a subject Mathilda keeps returning to, speaking full tilt as she washes the soap out of my ears, her fingers wet, as if it’s the only time she can turn to a topic so hurtful.
“Two thousand dollars, can you imagine that, offering us two thousand dollars all these years later as restitution. Let them put it back in their own closets, I say.” She sighs deeply. “We were born in this country. Second generation, what does it take?”
Listening to her, I too wonder out loud, then add: “You know, I came here ten years ago, married, very pregnant.” “How thin you are now.” She smiles approvingly. “Mathilda, my youngest is four.” “Yes, yes I know. Straight at the back? Yes?” “Whatever you think.” She picks up her scissors and continues:
“My sister always complained. She’s very bright and beautiful. You know, perfectly manicured and shod and well able to take care of herself. Know what? In her office, when they bring in flowers, carnations, gladioli, they turn to her. She’s Asian, they say. Asian women are good at that. Let her arrange the flowers. Now my sister, not a word passes her lips. Know what? She takes the whole lot into her office and dumps them into the vase, any which way. And marches straight out. Pushes the vase onto the front desk. They like her long black hair. The fact she never opens her mouth. If it was me. . .”
It’s like that, Mathilda, I want to say, but the hair dryer is going in my ears, and Matilda runs her careful comb through my shoulder-length hair. They don’t know what to do with us, exotic, Asian, border-line black. As she stops for an instant, I lean forward and hold her sleeve. I want to explain myself to her.
“I’m a poet,” I say through the throb of the hair dryer, as if that might help. She listens closely. All sorts of people come to her, secretaries, computer whizzes, born-again folk, professors, housewives, doctors. “And sometimes I write lines about the city, rough and ready things, garbage cans, sidewalks.” She smiles a little, pushing aside a plastic box filled with curlers. Then as she picks up the heavy hair dryer I press on.
“Not so long ago, I was giving a reading, wearing a silk sari as I always do at these things. Really, what else should I wear? A man comes up to me after the reading, he was one of the poets there, and says, ‘You really took my breath away.’ I wait, back against the books. ‘Yes, really, you look so. . .’ He stops. ‘Well, you know, dressed in a sari and all that. But your words are fierce. Where do they come from?’ I laughed, Mathilda, holding onto my body with both my arms. I couldn’t stop laughing. The poet was so bewildered he started to back away.”
I did not tell Mathilda that, in dreams that night, I heard my own laughter fill the bookstore. And as I laughed the books in that tiny shop started tumbling over. More and more books, little books, fat books, thin books, tumbling over me. My body shaking with black laughter.
*
I was crossing Broadway at 112th Street. A sudden rumble and the manhole cover in front of Citibank tore loose, and burst into the air, fell with a great clatter. Small flames rushed out of the black hole. The seller of old books, the merchant of worn clothes, the winos on the bench on the island, ordinary folks crossing Broadway, all looked dazed for an instant. Who had ever seen flames burst from the ground like that? Some of the shopkeepers darted out, worried, and the man who kept the shoe shop on the side ran and called the firefighters, who arrived ten minutes later in their gleaming red machines and peered into the hole.
Later I heard that other manholes had burst open in flames, one on 114th Street, one was on 145th Street, in Marie’s neighborhood. As we sat together in Caffe Pertutti, Marie told me that a man had been blown out of his own bathroom window with the fury of the gas explosion. His neighbor downstairs was almost blinded in his kitchen. The portions of the first man’s body could not be put back together. Because it had happened in a black neighborhood, no one cared too much. What does life count for, anyway, on the other side of the invisible fault line? Marie and I wonder out loud.
With Walter, I frequently lunch at Pertutti. Our conversations help keep me going. This time round we speak of the rat man. “Walter, this guy came to visit from the Department of Infestation.”
“Rats, Meena, surely you don’t have rats?”
“No, it was a mouse really. Sometimes several little mice. The lady next door screams off-pitch at the slightest whiff of a mouse. I was worn out with all the excitement so I called up the City Bureau of Infestation. This guy came with bright blue eyes, early fifties I’d say, a gold chain round his neck. ‘I have come from the Department of Infestation,’ he said.”
Walter was listening intently now.
“I can’t bear it,” I add. “It’s all bursting in my head. The rat man.”
“You should read the Rat Man. Do you have it?”
“No, you know I’m scared of Papa Freud.”
“Well, let me bring it for you. No, I’m using it in this course I’m doing at NYU. There’s a book about Freud and the Rat Man, let me bring it to you. Okay?”
“Okay. It’s all prose. I feel so excited, like a child getting at prose. And illicit really. Don’t tell. Promise. Cross your heart, et cetera.”
“Of course I won’t tell. Who should I tell that you’re into prose these days?”
“Black leather, whips, slashes, crosses, urine.” I laugh merrily into my wine. I do not look through the glass. I do not notice the old man, cardboard tied to his thighs, who approaches. He has lost his shelter outside Dynasty. He carries himself as best he can in the sudden cold, more cardboard stacked on his back.
It is warm in the cafe. Once, for the purpose of an essay I had to write, I made believe I had met Talal at Caffe Pertutti and conducted an elaborate conversation.
I needed to make up that memory, which didn’t exist, a conversation that hadn’t occurred, for that was the only way that Khartoum could come back to me. I needed his spirit to listen to mine so the lost years might rise up again like mist between us, so I could live in the here and now of America.
The essay was for the Asian Writers Symposium at Cornell University. The topic was broad enough: Writing, Ethnicity, Being “Other” in New York. All the stuff that drives you up the wall till you realize that you are the wall you are driven up and what’s doing the driving is the world’s whip which you have taken so hard into yourself that you think it’s your own hand holding the thing that’s doing the hurting.
And perhaps it is and perhaps you have to rip the skin off. And perhaps that’s what Gandhi did, rip his skin off, faced with British colonialism, and since that couldn’t be literally done, he made a bonfire of all the clothes made with textiles from Manchester and Bristol and all those English spinning mills, a huge heap smoldering. And all the citizens of Bombay rushed out with more mill-spun clothes to burn, and everyone took to wearing khadi as my grandparents did.
O God, if we burnt our clothes, what would we be? Me and the old man down by Dynasty? What would we be who are our out-sides merely? But the whip is not only within. The world exists and the world is bloody cold.
There was blood on the old man’s lips when I saw him next, blood crusted over where the frost had bitten in.
It is warm, though, in Caffe Pertutti for an imaginary meeting, warm enough for a meditation about the bits and pieces of the world I have lived in, loved, and left, and about the multiple leave-takings that tore me apart till I turned into a skin-flicking thing, a pressure point for poetry. Sometimes I am filled with longing for Khartoum, for the rich, baroque sounds of the Arabic I used to speak. But the memory refuses to enter me.
“It is like a black hole in your head,” amma complained last summer as we stood in the kitchen in Tiruvella. Sarojini was stirring the rice pot. There were bloodred onions rolling over the floor just as there had been in Kozencheri when my grandmother Mariamma was alive, and she skinned herself thinking her finger an onion. I had stared in shock at the rich red blood.
O grandmother Mariamma, where are you now, except in me? In me and us and her—she who has your name, the little milky-skinned child I gave birth to, my Svati Mariam who will never see you, but might touch her great-grandmother at the edge of these pages, at the edge of the desire that is her mother, a woman obsessed, scraping away at memory, using the bald knife.
“Meena, be careful with the knife.” Amma was watching me like a hawk circling a wet chicken. “Why is Khartoum like that for you? I simply can’t understand it! Nothing, you remember nothing.”
“Amma, I do remember but it doesn’t feel like real memories. Do you know what I mean? Real, raw stuff. None of that. Perhaps it’s just that I’m scared, having covered it over for so long.”
“Scared?” She gazed at me with the lovely dark eyes she inherited from grandmother Kunju who died before I was born. Amma picked up the little bone-handled knife to deal with the onions. She kept her silence. “The first thing a girl should learn is when to keep her silence,” I heard her voice coming back to me from a lifetime ago. It made a black space in my ear, a savagery I could not yet decipher.
After the conference, I spoke about trying to remember Khartoum, about making up memories, about real places and how sense fragments in New York City. I flew back with my friends Kimiko Hahn and Jessica Hagedorn in a tiny twelve-seater plane, which took us from the Ithaca airport to LaGuardia. Kimiko and I had grown close to each other in the days our children were still babies and we would sit in a pile of diapers and baby food and swap poems with each other. In the plane, Kimiko was a few seats away. I sat across the aisle from Jessica, I laughed with her, saying, “Dear Jessica, here is what we are, almost sick to the teeth in this tiny plane, tossed up and down and sideways, crossing over, dressing up and down, pure postcolonial things!”
And she in her bold way, her hair sticking up over her head in straight lines, the leather jacket tight over her shoulders, laughed: “I am imagining an Asian TV program in which we are all cast. I shall set you, Meena, across from Vivan. Really, think of it!” As she spoke I clutched my hands to the sides of the seat and started to describe to her, in midair as the plane started falling and the hot fluids rose to my lips, the old man I had seen at Dynasty, the one with all the clothing tied to him, who carried his cardboard house as best he could on his back.