Leaving Yuba City Read online

  For Abhay, Anand and Murthy,

  who bring poetry into my life each day

  I wish to thank the following individuals for their encouragement of my work:

  Martha Levin, marvelous editor, delightful friend

  Sandra Dijkstra, the best of agents and readers

  Phil Levine, poet and teacher extraordinaire,

  and

  Gurumayi, light of lights

  Parts of this manuscript won a Pushcart Prize and an Allen Ginsberg Prize.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the journals and anthologies in which some of the poems originally appeared.

  The author wishes to thank the Gerbode Foundation and the Santa Clara Arts Council for awards that helped make this book possible.

  Contents

  How I Became a Writer

  The Nishi

  GROWING UP IN DARJEELING

  The Walk

  The Geography Lesson

  The Infirmary

  Learning to Dance

  Going Home Day

  The First Time

  Blackout

  RAJASTHANI

  Two Women Outside a Circus, Pushkar

  Tiger Mash Ritual

  Villagers Visiting Jodhpur Enjoy Iced Sweets

  At the Sati Temple, Bikaner

  THE BABIES: I

  THE BABIES: II

  INDIAN MINIATURES

  The Maimed Dancing Men

  After Death: A Landscape

  The Bee-Keeper Discusses His Charges

  The River

  The World Tree

  Arjun

  Cutting the Sun

  INDIGO

  TRAIN

  MOVING PICTURES

  The Rat Trap

  To Mrinal Sen, on Seeing Bhuvan Shome

  The Tea Boy

  I, Manju

  The Makers of Chili Paste

  The Widow at Dawn

  Storm at Point Sur

  The Lost Love Words

  VIA ROMANA

  The Drive

  The Tourists

  Outside Pisa

  Termini

  The Alley of Flowers

  Skin

  YUBA CITY POEMS

  The Founding of Yuba City

  Yuba City Wedding

  The Brides Come to Yuba City

  Yuba City School

  Leaving Yuba City

  Woman with Kite

  Indian Movie, New Jersey

  How I Became a Writer

  I peel off the sweaty dank of dawn bedclothes.

  tiptoe to the door, soft, soft,

  so the gorilla with iron fingers that waits

  in the next room won’t hear me.

  Sidle out. Then I’m

  running, but lightly, still on my toes.

  glancing back until I reach

  the kitchen, thin cement strip where mother

  sits at her steel bonti slicing bitter gourd

  into exact circles for lunch. She has bathed already

  and her damp hair covers her back

  like smoke, the wisped ends

  curling a little. She smiles and hands me

  chalk. Under the grease-dimmed bulb

  her shadow dips toward me, velvets

  the bare ground. “Write shosha” she says

  and shows me a cucumber, green light

  sliding off its skin. “Write mulo.” Now

  a daikon radish, white and gnarled, sprouting little hairs

  as on an old lady’s chin. I make shapes

  on the cement. It’s hard.

  The tight circles of the lo

  cramp up my fingers. Around us the household sleeps,

  limbs gathered in, snout buried in stiff fur,

  but restless, dreaming of onslaught.

  Rasp of a snore, a cough,

  the almost-mute fall of a pillow kicked away.

  “Write mo-cha” Her cool fingers

  petal over mine like the layered red plantain flower

  we are writing. “Curl the mo like this.” Her voice

  pours into me like syrup of palm,

  amber, unbroken. On the street, sudden

  angry yells. Perhaps a fish-seller or a neighbor

  servant. Behind us, a clatter.

  Her hand stiffens over mine, stops.

  We’re both listening for that heavy stumble,

  metallic hiss of pee against toilet pan, that shout

  arcing through the house like a rock, her name. But

  it’s only the mynah, beating black wings against the ribs

  of the cage, crying Krishna, Krishna.

  We suck in

  the safe air, we’re smiling, I’ve completed the cha

  which hangs from its stem, perfect, ripe

  as a summer mango. She pulls me to her,

  hugs me. Her arms like river water, her throat

  smelling of sandalwood. Her skin

  like light, so lovely I almost do not see

  the bruise

  spreading its yellow over the bone. “That’s

  wonderful,” she breathes into my hair

  as the sun steps over the sill

  and turns the room to rainbow. And I, my heart

  a magenta balloon thrown up

  into the sky, away

  from iron fisted gorillas, from the stench of piss,

  I know I’m going to be

  the best, the happiest writer in the world.

  Note

  bonti: curved steel blade attached to a piece of wood. It is placed on the floor and used to cut vegetables, fish, etc.

  Krishna: The name of a Hindu deity symbolizing love. Pet birds are often taught to repeat the names of gods in the belief that it will bring luck to the household.

  The Nishi

  I

  Sometimes I wake up suddenly with the blood hammering in my chest and hear it, a voice I can’t quite place, deep inside the tunnel of my ear, tiny, calling my name, pulling out the syllables like threads of spun-sugar, Chit-ra, Chit-ra.

  II

  When I was very little, my mother used to sing me to sleep. Or tell me stories. A jewel was stitched to the end of each, and when her voice reached that place, it took on a shivering, like moonlit water.

  III

  Some nights I woke to hear her through the thin bedroom wall. Not tonight, please, not tonight. Shuffles, thuds, panting, then a sharp cry, like a caught bird’s. I would burrow into the pillow that smelled of stale lint and hair oil, squinch shut my eyes so red slashes appeared, hold my breath till all I heard was the roaring in my ears.

  IV

  After father left her she rarely spoke above a whisper. Go to the closet under the stairs, she would say, very soft. I don’t want to see your face. Her voice was a black well. If I fell into it, I would never find my way out. So the closet, with its dry, raspy sounds, a light papery feel like fingers brushing against my leg, making me pee in my pants.

  V

  What do you do when the dark presses against your mouth, a huge clammy hand to stop your crying? What do you do when the voice has filled the insides of your skull like a soaked sponge?

  VI

  Late at night she would come and get me, pick up my dazed body and hug me to her, pee and all. I’m sorry, baby, so sorry, so sorry. Feather kisses down the tracks of dried tears. But perhaps I am dreaming this. Even in the dream she doesn’t say This won’t ever happen again.

  VII

  I will never have children. Because I have no dark closets in my house, because I don’t sing, because I cannot remember any of my mother’s stories. Except one.

  VIII

  That night she took out the harmonium, the first time since father left. It was cove
red in cobwebs, but she didn’t dust them away. They clung to her fingers as she played. She let me stay and listen. Outside, a storm. When the thunder came, she let me hide my face in her lap. She was singing love songs. She sang for hours, till her voice cracked. Then she told me the tale of the Nishi. She held me till I slept, and when she put me to bed, she locked me in. It was an act of kindness, I think, so I would not be the first to discover her body hanging from the ceiling of the bedroom that was now hers alone.

  IX

  The Nishi, said my mother, are the spirits of those who die violent deaths. They come to you at night and call your name in the voice you love most. But you must never answer them, for if you do, they suck away your soul.

  X

  Sometimes I wake up, blood hammering, hear it, a voice, deep inside a tunnel, tiny, pulling out the syllables, Chit-ra, Chit-ra. I squinch shut my eyes and answer, calling her back, wanting to be taken. But when I open them I am still here, webbed in by the sound of her name, its unbearable sweetness, its unbreakable threads of spun-sugar.

  Growing Up in Darjeeling

  Five Poems

  The Walk

  The Geography Lesson

  The Infirmary

  Learning to Dance

  Going Home Day

  The Walk

  Each Sunday evening the nuns took us

  for a walk. We climbed carefully

  in our patent-leather shoes up hillsides looped

  with trails the color of earthworms. Below,

  the school fell away, the sad green roofs

  of the dormitories, the angled classrooms,

  the refectory where we learned to cut

  buttered bread into polite squares,

  to eat bland stews and puddings. The sharp

  metallic thrust of the church spire, small, then smaller,

  and around it the town: bazaar, post office, the scab

  coated donkeys. Straggle of huts

  with hesitant woodfires in the yards. All

  at a respectful distance, like the local children we passed,

  tattered pants and swollen chilblained fingers

  color of the torn sky, color of the Sacred Heart

  in the painting of Jesus that hung above our beds

  with his chest open.

  We were trained not to talk to them,

  runny-nosed kids with who-knew-what diseases, not even

  to wave back, and of course it was improper

  to stare. The nuns walked so fast,

  already we were passing the plantation, the shrubs

  lined up neatly, the thick glossy green

  giving out a faint wild odor like our bodies

  in bed after lights-out. Passing the pickers,

  hill women with branch-scarred arms, bent

  under huge baskets strapped to shoulder and head.

  the cords in their thin necks

  pulling like wires. Back at school

  though Sister Dolores cracked the refectory ruler

  down on our knuckles, we could not drink

  our tea. It tasted salty as the bitten inside

  of the mouth, its brown like the women’s necks,

  that same tense color.

  But now we walk quicker because

  it is drizzling. Drops fall on us from pipul leaves

  shaped like eyes. We pull on

  our grey rainhoods and step in time,

  soldiers of Christ squelching through vales

  of mud. We are singing, as always on walks,

  the nuns leading us with choir-boy voices.

  O Kindly Light, and then a song

  about the Emerald Isle. Ireland, where they grew up,

  these two Sisters not much older

  than us. Mountain fog thickens like a cataract

  over the sun’s pale eye, it is stumbling-dark,

  we must take a shortcut

  through the upper town. The nuns

  motion us, faster, faster, an oval blur of hands

  in long black sleeves.

  Honeysuckle over a gate, lanterns

  in front windows. In one, a woman in a blue sari

  holds a baby, his fuzzy backlit head

  against the curve of her shoulder. Smell of food

  in the air, real food, onion pakoras, like our mothers

  once made. Rain in our eyes, our mouths. Salt, salt.

  A sudden streetlamp lights the nuns’ faces, damp,

  splotched with red like frostbitten

  camellias. It prickles the backs of our throats.

  The woman watches, wonder-eyed, as we pass

  in our wet, determined shoes, singing

  Beautiful Killarney, a long line of girls, all of us

  so far from home.

  The Geography Lesson

  Look, says Sister Seraphina. here is

  the earth. And holds up, by its base, the metal globe

  dented from that time when Ratna, not looking.

  knocked it off its stand and was sent

  to Mother Superior. And here

  the axis on which it revolves, tilted

  around the sun. Like this, the globe a blur now.

  land and water sloshed

  into one muddy grey with the thick jab

  of her finger.

  Ratna returned to class with weal-streaked

  palms, the left one bleeding slightly. She held it curled

  in her lap so it wouldn’t

  stain her uniform as she wrote out,

  one hundred times, I will not damage

  school property again.

  Now each girl sits with her silent laced shoes

  flat on the classroom floor. I grip

  my chair-edge. I know, were it not for the Grace

  of the Holy Ghost, we would all

  be swept off this madly spinning world

  into perdition. Sometimes I feel it

  at morning mass, six a.m. and the ground

  under my knees sliding away, hot press

  of air on the eardrum and the blue sleeves

  of the Virgin opening

  into tunnels.

  Ratna didn’t cry, so Sister Seraphina

  pinned to her chest a placard that said,

  in large black letters, WICKED. She

  was to wear it till she repented, and no one

  could speak to her.

  This is the way the moon

  travels around the earth, Sister

  says, her fist circling the globe, solid,

  tight-knuckled, pink nails

  clipped back to the skin. I know

  the moon, dense stone

  suspended in the sky’s chest,

  which makes flood and madness happen and has

  no light of its own. As our heathen souls

  unless redeemed by Christ’s blood.

  That night in the moon-flecked dormitory

  we woke to Ratna thrashing around in bed,

  calling for Sultan, her dog back home. She

  would not quiet when told,

  and when the night nun tried

  to give her water, she knocked the glass

  away with a swollen hand. All

  over that floor, shards, glittering

  like broken eyes, and against the bed-rail

  the flailing sound of her bones. Until they took her

  somewhere downstairs.

  On this chart, points Sister, you see

  the major planets of the Solar System.

  Copy them carefully into your notebooks. Smudges,

  and you’ll do them over. I outline

  red Mars, ringed Saturn, the far cold gleam

  of Uranus, their perfect, captive turning

  around a blank center which flames out

  like the face of God in dreams. I will my hand

  not to shake. We never saw Ratna again, and knew

  not to ask.

  Tomorrow we will be tested

  on the various properties of
the heavenly bodies,

  their distance, in light years, from the sun.

  The Infirmary

  I

  I’d seen it only in daylight, once each month

  when we were sent down

  to be dosed with Enos Salts. Regularity,

  the Sisters said, was the root of health.

  A nun in front and one behind, we filed

  across the compound to the low brown building

  crouched among jhau trees. And at the door, waiting,

  Sister Mary Lourdes, her habit

  stiff as pages in a new book, her hard white hands

  smelling of carbolic soap.

  Mixed with warm water, the Enos

  turned a pale yellow, bitter and bubbly,

  burning the nose. Like champagne, said Yvonne

  whose parents were Goan Christians

  and drank. Cheers, dears, she’d say,

  the plastic infirmary tumbler raised, breasts thrust out,

  one eyebrow lifted, a black-haired

  Marilyn Monroe, while we Hindu girls

  from bland teetotalling families

  watched open-mouthed. Until the day

  Sister caught her at it. And made her bend over

  and whacked the backs of her thighs

  till the ruler left strips of raised flesh.

  We watched the silent light

  glint on her Bride of Christ wedding band

  each time she slashed the air.

  II

  So it was strange to come to it in dark, alone,

  wrapped in a blanket that prickled my skin.

  The night nun’s name wavered in my brain

  like a flame in wind. Her hands

  held me too tightly, made me stumble. Or was it

  the rippling shift of ground? The air was fire,

  then ice, I could not swallow, and were those stars