Leaving Yuba City Read online

or yellow bullet holes in the sky? How the veiny shadows

  of the jhaus crawled through the infirmary windows

  onto the bed where they put me.

  I screamed until Sister Mary Lourdes

  bent over me with a syringe and then I stopped

  because I knew that I was going to die.

  III

  After the fever had drained away and the pus,

  after the swelling in the armpits and the groin

  had gone down, long after I was returned

  to the dormitory, to the sough of night-breaths

  and girls crying out in sleep, I would remember

  the ghosts. They came to me

  when Sister put out the light and disappeared

  into her cubicle. One by one, spirits of girls

  who had died in the infirmary, who told me

  their diseases, diphtheria or polio, cholera, typhoid,

  the whooping cough. I was not afraid. Their

  breath was cinnamon-scented, their cool fingers

  like rain on my fevered forehead. Does

  it hurt? they would whisper, bending

  to kiss me, and hush now, though

  I was quiet already. Some nights they wore

  white, some nights their hands

  glimmered like silver in the dark and smelled

  of carbolic soap. They would lie with me

  like my mother long ago,

  their breasts soft against my face. Their fingers

  wearing the Bride of Christ bands

  stroked my back until I slept.

  For a long time after I was well

  I thought of them, wept silently

  under my blankets, went sweaterless

  in the Darjeeling damp to make me sick again.

  Longed to tell someone.

  But I was afraid of questions,

  afraid of Father Malhern with the ripe red wart

  on his chin, who came to exorcise the school

  the last time a girl talked of spirits.

  Afraid for Sister Mary Lourdes. And so

  I held to myself that cool darkness,

  and rising from it, those hands and mouths and breasts

  that like grace had called me back.

  Learning to Dance

  A month before the Senior Social

  at the Boys’ School, we girls

  who didn’t know how to dance

  were herded into the music hall that smelled

  of old dust. Under the glinty horn-rimmed eye

  of Sister Mercedes, we practiced

  polka and fox-trot, while from behind the moldy curtains

  our Anglo-Indian classmates sniggered.

  How we envied

  their short curled hair, their names

  that dropped cleanly off the nuns’ lips:

  Diane, Melinda, Margaret. Our hair hung

  limp-braided down our backs

  like our mothers’, tamed by generations

  of coconut oil. Our names,

  Malabika, Basudha, Chandra,

  tangled as wild vines, caught

  on the frustrated tongues of our teachers

  until they spat them out. Brought up

  on tabla and sitar instead of Elvis, we knew

  we were the disgrace of the school. And so

  we practiced the cha-cha-cha

  as though our lives depended on it. Foreheads

  creased, we tried to remember which partner

  was the “man” and who

  the “woman,” as Sister beat steely time

  with a ruler against her palm. Thwack-two-three,

  thwack-two-three, and we waltzed

  over a worn-wood floor marked with large X’s

  to make us keep our places. Lost souls in limbo, we stumbled

  backward over heels, knocked knee

  against knobby girl-knee, while Sister rapped out

  The Blue Danube. A damp light

  fell through the thick panes

  onto our sallow faces, and Sister’s voice

  boomed down from the high slanted ceiling like God’s,

  Not so close, not so CLOSE, making us

  jump and lose count. We were to keep

  twelve inches between us

  and the bodies of boys at all times,

  or the unthinkable might occur. We knew

  this was true, from the veiled warnings

  dropped in Moral Science class

  by hairy-lipped Sister Baptista, from the True Love

  comic books we read under night-blankets

  by flashlight. We knew it from holidays at home,

  our mothers’ low-voiced conversations which stopped

  when we entered the room. Boys’ bodies,

  smelling of hockey, male soap, residual blood

  from torn knees and elbows.

  The thought filled our mouths

  with the wet metal taste of fear

  or lust. Even in that Darjeeling air, cold

  as the breath of icebergs, sweat sprouted

  between our clamped palms, our guilty fingers

  left moist streaks on the white blouses

  of our dancing partners. For years

  we had watched from dark dormitory windows

  the Senior girls filing into the bus

  that gleamed yellow as a warning through the night.

  Long after they left, we smelled their perfume

  in the hollows of our bodies. Their starched ruffles

  scratched our throats, our breasts. We heard again

  the bus start with a roar, headlights

  outlining needles of rain, tail-lights like

  smudged drops of blood

  receding into blackness. We lay sleepless,

  thinking of the slight tremble of boy-hands,

  stubbed nails, lips fuzzy with new moustaches. The dance floor

  opened like petals, the music was a wave

  in which to drown. We tossed as in fever until

  we heard them return,

  giggles and whispered secrets, the spent triumphant odor

  of sweat and hair spray. Now that moment

  was ours—or would be, if only

  we could learn to tango. So

  we practiced side-steps on aching toes

  and prayed for a Cinderella nimbleness, we

  closed our eyes and believed in the sparkling arms

  of princes, one for each of us. We sway-circled

  the room, around, around, each ring

  drawing us tighter toward the center,

  that rain-lit night when all secrets

  would be revealed, we held our breaths

  until Sisters voice disappeared

  under the red roar in our ears, we whirled

  to the future on our blood-beat.

  Going Home Day

  The early December light that burns through fog

  to turn the ice peaks of the Kanchanjangha

  into a fairytale silver is like nothing

  I have seen. This longed-for last day, it carries

  the smell of blue eucalyptus, wild jasmine,

  the smell of home. It has transformed

  the dormitory, squat and grey as prison,

  corridors the color of snot, chipped floors

  stained with the smells

  of urine and fear and dark monthly blood.

  Now it faces us, airy and innocent,

  emptied of night-memories, weeping children

  who balled the ends of blankets

  into mouths for silence. Look how its panes

  glisten in farewell, soft as filled eyes,

  how its green trim

  matches exactly the waxy shine

  of the holly below. Were we to step in

  to the dim foyer where Christ hangs

  in gilt-framed agony against a fiery sky,

  he, too, would be smiling. And the nuns,

  black-robed witches who carried

&nbs
p; poison apples in their pockets, who could turn us

  to toads or worse with a word, have become

  as ordinary as our mothers. In this light

  they are suddenly older, smaller, a little

  tired, a little looking forward

  to when we are gone. The frish-frish

  of their skirts is like the sounds

  made by our mothers’ saris as they

  rush up and down counting heads, making sure

  we have not left behind

  lunches and airplane tickets. We hear

  in their Irish brogues our mothers’ tones

  as they call to the driver to tighten

  the ropes that hold our bedding to the roof,

  to go slow on curves. They

  hug us goodbye and press holy pictures

  into our hands, and the light slants

  onto their faces so the lines

  at the edges of their eyes shine

  like cracks in ice. It shows us they believed

  they did it all for us,

  those endless church Sundays, the stained glass

  yellow as jaundice, the incense

  thick as a hand pressed over the mouth. Those ruler cuts

  on palms and backs of legs, the awkward, pained

  alphabet of their love. For it’s a hard world

  they’re sending us into, hard

  and dangerous as diamonds, aglitter

  on the other side of these protecting hills, and

  they only wanted

  us to be safe. The light tells us this

  as we wave goodbye, as we promise

  not to forget. Calm and pure

  even through the bus’s dust, it wrenches

  at our insides. This light, young

  as it never will be again. Rainbows

  on our lashes as the driveway recedes.

  the blurred gables, the tiny figures

  of the nuns. The light

  has filled us all the way, like water.

  We are clean and glowing and amazed

  with it, amazed to find that we are weeping,

  wishing we were coming back.

  The First Time

  You were four then and impeded

  by innocence. You did not know

  what the whispers meant, and adopted

  was just another sound. Your child-heart

  opened its crimson chambers like a poppy

  to the april world. Daylong

  you followed second brother, fetched, carried,

  pushed him up the gravel drive

  in his yellow wagon. Horse to his

  rider, you were happy

  to travel the length of lawn until your palms

  and knees were raw-red. So when that evening

  father’s car turned the driveway into a wall

  of orange dust and second brother

  ran, calling baba, baba, you ran too.

  Cicadas cried in the brush. Assam bamboo

  threw splintered shadows across the flash

  of your thin brown legs, your high echo.

  Now father swings second brother up,

  manik, my jewel, they are laughing

  into wind and sky, their teeth like diamonds,

  and you tug at his pant leg, pick me up, me

  too, baba, me too. He swipes at you

  backhanded, get away from me you little

  bastard, that word you don’t know bursting

  ahiss against your eardrum. You

  don’t even know to duck from his arm’s

  arc, muscle and whiplash bone

  slicing the air. Spilled on the ground,

  flat as a shadow he could step on,

  you look up,

  stunned animal eyes. And we

  each frozen in our separate frames, caught inside

  the evening’s indrawn breath: the chauffeur

  with his careful face; starched and correct,

  the houseboy carrying father’s whiskey-soda;

  mother silhouetted

  against a sky scarlet as a wound. She makes

  no sound but from behind I see

  the fists in the folds of her sari

  clenched so tight I know the white nails,

  tiny curved blades. Know

  the scars they leave. Father holds out

  his hand for his drink. The dying light

  catches the glass, its crystal curve

  blurry with moisture, catches

  a single swelling drop

  which gathers itself on his blunted nail

  and falls like a star.

  Blackout

  Calcutta, 1971

  I

  All that year our windows

  were crusted with thick inky paper

  that smelled of soot, taped and retaped

  as the glue evaporated

  in Bengal heat, and their edges curled

  like love-letters held to a flame.

  And still the war went on,

  till those who could

  left for hill towns with names like running water,

  names you could believe in,

  Mussoorie, Simla, Darjeeling. We stayed,

  lay in sweat-seeded dark, elder sister and I,

  under a mosquito net without a breeze

  to stir it, and listened

  to the heavy insect whine of bombers.

  Behind my closed lids I saw them,

  stingers poised above our cities. They released,

  from bloated bellies, poison-silver eggs

  that fell from the sky into the pictures

  of sister’s history book,

  Nagasaki, Hiroshima, a fire like a giant flower and the melted

  flesh of children’s faces.

  II

  The nights we couldn’t sleep, sister

  told me stories. They weren’t real, she said, but

  I knew. I heard them all the time,

  the shrill conch-snake whose scream

  could shatter eardrums, the fire-breathed monster

  whose step shook the earth.

  The Red Lotus prince who battles

  the Demon Queen, I knew, wore khaki

  like the Mukti-Sena and carried

  a Sten-gun. And walking skeletons

  wailed each day

  outside our blacked-out windows, a bowl of rice-water,

  little mother, just one small bowl.

  III

  In a dream, or a snapshot stapled to the brain,

  it shudders the walls, that giant blast. A jag of glass

  nicks sister’s cheek and her hand

  hovers over it, wet, unbelieving. But I can’t

  stop. The moon is climbing through the hole, a moon

  I haven’t seen in months, a huge, full moon. I reach for it

  past shard-filled flooring. Color

  and smell of fire, but cool,

  like the night air now on my face.

  And in its center, just as sister said, the old

  moon-woman with her wheel, spin, spin, spinning

  them out, like a long thread of blood, all tangled up,

  the stories of our deaths.

  Note

  Mukti-Sena: literally, liberation army, was the name of the Bangladeshi freedom fighters.

  Rajasthani

  Four poems after the photographs of Raghubir Singh. (The photographs that inspired the poems were all taken in Rajasthan, India.)

  Two Women Outside a Circus, Pushkar

  Tiger Mask Ritual

  Villagers Visiting Jodhpur Enjoy Iced Sweets

  At the Sati Temple, Bikaner

  Two Women Outside a Circus, Pushkar

  Faces pressed to the green stakes

  of the circus fence, two village women

  crouch low in the cloudy evening with their babies,

  breathing in the odors of the beasts

  painted on the canvas above:

  great black snakes with ruby eyes,

/>   tigers with stars sewn onto their skins.

  Beyond, a tent translucent with sudden light,

  bits of exotic sound: gunshots, growls,

  a woman’s raucous laugh.

  The Nepal Circus demands five rupees

  for entry to its neon world

  of bears that dance, and porcupines

  with arm-long poison quills. But five rupees

  is a sack of bajra from Ramdin’s store,

  a week’s dinner for the family. So the women

  look and look

  at the lighted sign of the lady acrobat.

  In a short pink sequined skirt

  she walks a tightrope

  over gaping crocodile-jaws, twirling

  her pink umbrella. Inside the tent,

  the crowd shrieks as Master Pinto the Boy Wonder

  is hurled from a flaming cannon. The women

  clutch each other and search the sky

  for the thunder-sound. Ecstatic applause.

  The band plays a hit from Mera Naam Joker

  and the crowd sings along.

  The women gather their babies and head home

  to the canvas of their lives: endless rounds of rotis

  rolled in smoky kitchens, whine of hungry children,

  slaps or caresses from husbands with palm-wine breaths,

  perhaps a new green skirt at harvest time.

  But each woman

  tending through burning noon the blinkered bull

  that circles, all day, the bajra-crushing stones,

  or wiping in dark the sweat

  of unwanted sex from her body, remembers

  in sparkling tights the woman acrobat

  riding a one-wheeled cycle so immense