| Home | Calendar | Classifieds | Back Issues | Subscribe | Contact Us |
 |
| Everything Indian in America |
|
|
|
Water TherapyBy CHAMPA BILWAKESHThird Prize Katha Fiction Contest
When she went home that night in the Green Line, Iravati looked inside her briefcase and pulled out a crumpled scrap of paper, which turned out to be an old CVS receipt. She turned it over, smoothed it out and started making a list of things she needed to pick up at the market before she reached home. Her shopping list nowadays had become very small, just the essentials-milk, bread, some sliced smoked turkey for lunch, and Taster's Choice instant coffee. Her husband, Nitin, hated instant coffee. He had always made coffee, grinding the beans fresh every morning and brewing it with spring water. This was the first thing that she missed when he left. Since then she had not been able to brew coffee for herself and had switched to instant. She had packed the Braun coffeemaker with the other items she had put away in the attic in the few weeks of furious house cleaning following his departure, and finally gave it away to the Salvation Army. With the same desperation, within months after that, she sold the house and placed half the proceeds in a trust for her son who was a graduate student at OSU. With the other half, and the early retirement payoff from Comptech Industries she had moved to Boston. Perhaps it was the way the sky had wept rain on the glass panes in July when she interviewed with Ethan-Woodside Publishers. It could have been the ocean, the hills, she was not sure which of these made her decide to come to Boston, maybe none of them, just the distance it put between her and Akron, Ohio. Boston was a cold city and that fact alone was appealing. She was content to be friendless. Because friends require explanations and she had none to give. He had left on a bright day in April when the spring sun shone foolishly through the bare trees, and lit up the kitchen like several hundred watt bulbs. He had bought himself a two bedroom flat in Pondicherry, just outside Aurobindo Ashram. They drove to the bank to sign papers, cleared out the safety deposit box, all this with a monotony that masked the deep sense of shame that sank into her stomach. Later she watched an old black and white movie while Nitin packed upstairs, and listened to the muffled thumps from above. She may not have wanted to move with him if he had asked, but he had not asked her. She had no family in India, but neither did he. His parents were dead and his only brother had moved to Australia. She had asked if this was a divorce to which he replied, benignly, that he did not care. "It makes no difference to me," he had said. "If that's what you want, less complications maybe, there is no need really unless ... , well. But there is no need, since ... I'll let you have everything, you and Ashvin." He had left by the four o'clock flight and asked to be dropped off at the curb. He bid her goodbye with a kiss on the cheek, which kiss she held on to by placing a hand on it all the way home, not because it was precious but because that was the one palpable moment in that whole day, the one moment that she would later prod and examine to see if it would yield some truth. She drove home that night in the remnants of the dying sun, in the kind of light that touches everything and lights it up and you want to hold on to it because you know the sun is going to sink and take it all down with it and so you revel in its beauty until, bit by bit, it is all gone. By the time she had pulled into the garage, grayness had descended into the evening, making it all the more cruel. She sat in the garage for a few minutes. The garage light flicked off and in the dark she thought of people who commit suicide in closed garages. There was this couple, she had read in the papers some time ago, out in Boca Raton. They had let their Benz engine run with all the windows open. They had lost all their money on some foolish scheme, maybe some mob connection, the story had hinted. The letter they left for their young son who slept in an upstairs bedroom said they did not want to face their neighbors. Inhaling poison while waiting for the blackness, can you hear your heart buckle and crack, the veins tear? She switched the engine off and went inside. There was conversation, a man and a woman's voices and music and she realized she had forgotten to turn the TV off when they left for the airport. She sat in front of the TV and watched without removing her coat, and then startled awake when the lamp next to her came on with a click of the timer. The inside of her coat felt clammy with sweat. She shrugged it off, went upstairs to the bedroom and stripped without turning on the light. She stood under the shower until it ran cool. She laid out a fresh nightie on her bed and reached for the bottle of Nivia on the dresser. The dresser top was littered with pieces of store receipts, deposit slips and coin change all emptied from Nitin's pockets. A bunch of keys, about a dozen held in a brass clip. She picked up the bunch, feeling its heft on her palm. Keys to cars long sold, the key that opened the garage door but which they never used, a whistle shaped key she never knew he had. Several other odd shaped keys in the bunch, mysterious, that opened locks, somewhere that only Nitin knew. She dropped the keys, rubbed lotion on her stomach and watched herself in the mirror in the light that fell from the bathroom. A woman looked back, with a hole where her face should be, except for the eyes. Iravati looked at those eyes, eyes that did not know how to love, that did not know all the ways in which she could have been saved, know all the mistakes, all those times she could have said it this way and not that; all the times when she should have been more giving, more loving, if only she had known how to do these things. More of everything, more than she knew how, if she could have done all these things, carefully without making mistakes, her husband would not have left. Iravati stood still. Then she grabbed the keys, swung her arm back and flung them at the mirror. It had started to drizzle slightly when Iravati stepped off the Green Line at Warren. Men and women, released from the train, scurried, carrying fatigue in their dense fall clothing, eyes straight ahead, silhouetted against the muted street noise. She avoided the big supermarkets now and shopped at a small grocery store, the Brown Bag Grocery, at the corner of Beacon and Warren, run by a Bangladeshi couple. It was right across the train station and from there she could walk to her apartment. Iravati crossed the street. She shopped at the Brown Bag because she could always find fresh coriander and green chillies and occasionally, fresh fish. Since arriving in Boston she had never bothered to scope out the Indian grocery stores, and just cooked with whatever she could find at this little store, defiantly. The wife was young and had a fine face with upturned eyes, sculpted cheekbones, and lips that always looked liked they were outlined with a pencil. She dressed in American clothes sometimes, jeans and shirt, and sometimes in salwar kameez. Today she wore a slightly faded cream colored kameez with green and gold embroidery at the neck and sleeves and had draped a green chiffon dupatta around her neck. She had made two tight braids at her ears and this made her look younger than she waswhich was probably very young. She stood behind the counter and smiled with even white teeth, under a burgundy swell of gumline. She had pinned two barrettesalternating stripes of green, pink, green, pinkto her braids. The bright colored barrettes, against the young woman's dark hair, made Iravati feel hopeful, as though everything was normal in her life. A small tape recorder was on a shelf behind the woman, among packages of cigarettes and magazines. A male voice sang, something with much sincerity and with great volumes of violins in the background, in a language Iravati did not understand but recognized as Bengali. "What's he singing about?" The woman sucked on the tip of the ballpoint pen she was holding, her lips shaped like a bow around the pen, and thought for a few seconds. "Where'd you go, oh boatman, how will I now cross this river?" One of the wheels on the cart was crooked and stuck occasionally as Iravati pushed it down the aisle. The music slowly faded as she walked, but still the oval shapes of the Bengali sounds remained. It made her think of green grass and bullock carts although she had never been to such a place, only to the maddening rush of automobile horns and monstrous buses in the streets of the city where her parents grew up. The asthma attack that the heat and dust had spurred stayed the entire three weeks they spent in India. She selected the coffee and then, impulsively, as though something about these images had impelled her, she reached for the tea in the round bags and dropped it into her cart. Not a tea drinker, once in a while she liked to make it in a pot, put lots of sugar and milk, and drink it, hot and sweet. She couldn't remember the last time she made tea. As she approached the dairy case she saw the husband, the owner of the store. He was about 32, about the same age as her own Ashvin. He was stocking the shelves from a case of milk bottles. She watched his brown hands and arms, which were surprisingly smooth and hairless, quickly working. He smiled at her, a shy sort of smile, not only because she had been coming here for the past several weeks but with, what Iravati thought, a different kind of a familiarity, which she found pleasing. She picked up a half gallon of milk, and then reached for four small containers of cherry yogurt and a carton of brown eggs, even though they were not on the list. When she paid for her things it was pouring outside. She decided to wait for a while for the rain to soften some. She bought a magazine, coffee in a foam cup, and pushed her cart toward a small table placed against the plate glass window. She hung her coat over one of the chairs, sat down and took a sip of the coffee, wishing she were home where she could wash her face of the make-up that she knew was dissolving into the creases. Her glass frames pressed against her cheeks. She pulled the magazine towards her and looked at the cover on which a young woman with a big smile and a bag of groceries promised a 110 Thanksgiving shortcuts and timesavers. Last Thanksgiving Nitin had refused to carve the turkey as he had completely given up meat, and only ate the pulav and cauliflower curry she had made. After he left, (and that was the way it had become now, always, before and after), their friends had invited her for the parties and festival celebrations, with kindness, but always with unbearable awkwardness in their furtive looks. As though they were averting their eyes from her condition of being left. The shop had suddenly emp-tied and she noticed the Bangladeshi woman watching her from the front of the store. She was afraid the young woman was going to decide that she needed company. She discouragingly looked away. Next moment she sensed the green dupatta, wafting slightly, approach her. "More coffee?" "Oh no, thanks. Can't sleep if I have any more." Iravati felt her loneliness thickly on her skin like evening grime when the young woman pulled a chair and sat down across the small table. Her name was Tina. It used to be Tahira, she told Iravati, before the sisters took her in. "Sisters from the convent, the orphanage. It was the war, you know the war?" In an avocado green kitchen in Ohio, she had watched on TV the carving of Bangladesh, the reports of women pierced with bayonets, babies in guttersshadows that left small depressions on one's soul and then got layered over. They had found Tahira at six years of age in the big wooden box that her mother used to store folded quilts. She looked at Tina who used to be Tahira, as if searching for scars. "We just opened this shop, in April. Lotsa people here, good business, the money is good in this business. I'm a friendly person, you know, I like people, so this place's always busy, people like to shop here. Should see this place in the morning!" Iravati accepted this offering of information with the keen awareness that this young woman, orphaned at six and with no visible scars, would want to know why her husband had left her. Why was she so unlovable, she would want to know, because, if he could have loved her, he would not have left her, and why did she not have that secret something that make people stay? "People come here, all kinds of people, sometimes homeless. They're homeless! Can you imagine, in America! But they always come, they talk a little, they buy day old bread or something, ask for cigarette papers. They ask me about India, they think I'm from there, they don't know where Bangladesh is, only India." Tina laughed. The skin over her nose stretched the way it does on a child, and Iravati wondered how she was able to hold inside, in the same place, the darkness of loss and the brightness of this smile. "Think of the war? Oh! Sometimes I think of it, yes, I think, sometime I'm afraid I will stop remembering her face anymore, my mother, and my two sisters, they were all killed, only me, I escaped. And then I cry, a lot, for two three days I cry, I get you know, really down. Had to take pills for a while. It's like this: all that needs to get out, all that sadness and fear and anger, the guilt, mostly the guilt, all that's gotta get out before I can put something back in, the good things, that's what my doctor said. And it happens, slowly it happens. See, people like to come here now, always, because they like it here, it's a friendly place." Iravati was a little startled at the last bit, like a jingle from a TV commercial, and wondered if she should laugh and then decided Tina meant what she said. The rain had stopped. It had turned the night black and the street lights appeared with jagged spears from inside the window. "It's difficult, when there's sadness. To get over it and get on. But you gotta do it, otherwise, you're finished. You just gotta get it all out. Let life flow back in. Like water, like the way water flows in and wets everything it touches, and overflows, like that, you gotta let life flow back in. That's what my doctor said." What a pathetic figure she must cut, for this young woman to go on this way. Why don't you just take your pink and green barrettes little girl, and go away? Not everyone can do this water business, OK? The door opened with a ping. Tina got up and walked to the front of the store, her retreating green dupatta swaying. Iravati gazed out the window, the dirty pane letting in so little of the dark street outside. People walked past the window like shadows. Nitin's face peered from a distance, and she watched the face intently, the outline, the handsome sorrowful eyes, clouded now; and then a flash of smile on a thin face which was her own, in a rose garden, captured on a faded yellow Polaroid; the angle of a sweet chubby jaw line and Ashvin's big milky grin as he suddenly drew away from her breast. Iravati jerked her head as if she had dozed off. She stared for a long time into the darkness, until her eyes adjusted to the dimness and then she saw the street, the people moving, the light from the whir of traffic. Raindrops fell like silver shots against the pane. Outside Iravati hugged the paper grocery bag, which was becoming limp from the moisture, and slipped the straps of her briefcase over her shoulder. Moist night air filled the pores, nostrils, lungs. The clouds had dispersed in a small patch above and the moon shone with shocking clarity, a perfect disk, luminescent and grinning in the black sky. The Green Line pulled in to the station. A clutch of young people, fourteen and fifteen, pulling and shoving at each other walked past. Several other people got down, briefcase in hand, bags with newspapers stuck in them, and they hurried, their eyes shining in the dark, in the direction of their cars or home. Iravati watched them, wondering if they felt the air and the moon and the bright lights against the black night as she did, the brilliance of the street life moving with precision, or noticed the way the street surfaces gleamed wet, the way drains gurgled under her feet with rain water, or the beads of water gathered on the street lamp, the way it showered down in a sudden sprinkle when a breeze shook a tree branch. Iravati raised her face towards the water. Champa Bilwakesh's first short story, Swallowing Priya, won second prize in Katha, The Indian-American Fiction Contest in 1996. |
|
|
Copyright India Currents. All rights reserved. This site is best viewed with Internet Explorer 4.0 or Netscape Communicator 4.5. |
