Leaving Yuba City Read online

  The boys are gone now but you’re still on the floor. The lines coil past you. Gleaming Bruno Magli boots flash by, transparent Luisa Spagnoli stockings, a heart on a thin gold ankle-chain. Is the roof swaying, or is it your voice? I have to bend low to hear, against your thudding heart. Nobody tried to help, nobody even looked. A bruise on your forehead the color of a raincloud, the lines of your mouth smudged with disbelief. I put my arms around you and we’re both shaking, the floor and walls also, they rush by us like dark glass. The letters are falling off the welcome banner onto our heads like dying stars. They sizzle in my hair. I can’t brush off the burning. Is this what love is, this harsh need, this fear clamming our palms together, why I can’t leave you? Let’s go home, you whisper against my shoulder. Your breath is white as the alyssums that grow in our yard. Let’s go home, I reply.

  The Alley of Flowers

  When the hot din of red trams at noon

  scrapes at your nerves, and melted tar

  black and viscous as lava

  sticks to your stumbling shoes and coats the lining

  of your throat, when directly overhead

  the giant fist of the sun

  pounds at your skull and shrivels up your eyes,

  enter the alley of flowers. Here

  through a ceiling of damp rushes,

  light filters down like rain and old women

  with eyes that have seen everything you can imagine

  raise brass pichkaris

  to spray ice-water onto flowers.

  Mountains of flowers, white, all white,

  color of innocence and female sorrow,

  mingling their scents with the odor

  of wet morning earth:

  chrysanthemum, gardenia, bel,

  the snow queen, the long-stemmed honeysuckle,

  the tight buds of night-blooming jasmine twisted in garlands

  for temple-gods and brides.

  Or for the dead.

  In the alley of flowers you open

  your mouth to speak and find

  no need for sound. On your wrist

  the watch-hands (when did they stop) are frail

  as rose-thorn. You walk slowly,

  as if through water, the current cool,

  pressing up against your thighs.

  As if the alley has no end. Feel.

  On your forehead, misted air like petals.

  Like the sound of wings. Like

  the breath of the dead, a blessing.

  Note

  Hindu widows traditionally wear white.

  Skin

  I woke this morning with a tingling all over my body, not unpleasant, kind of like it feels between your teeth after you’ve poked at your gum with something for a while, and when I looked I discovered I had no skin. I was disconcerted for a moment, but not really upset, not like someone else would have been. My skin has been nothing but a source of trouble for me ever since the midwife announced to my mother that not only was it a girlchild, but it was colored like a mud road in the monsoon. Mother refused to look, and all through the weeks she had to breastfeed me she kept her head turned away, so all I remember of her is a smooth creamy earlobe with a gold hoop dangling from it.

  I spent my childhood learning to blend in with the furniture. This wasn’t difficult since the heavy mahogany was a perfect match for my skin, and after my marriage I had ample opportunity to further practice this skill. That I got married at all was a miracle, as I was a far cry from the milk-and-honey shade that in-laws are always advertising for in the matrimonial columns. Relatives ascribed my great good luck to temporary insanity on the part of my in-laws, probably brought about by something my desperate parents slipped into their rose syrup when they came to view me. Or perhaps it was the hefty dowry my father paid—not too unhappily, for as everyone knows, a grown daughter in the house is worse than a firebrand in the grainstacks. My in-laws quickly returned to normal, and the morning after the wedding I was sent to the kitchen. There, camouflaged by the smoke-streaked walls, I cooked enormous breakfasts, lunches and dinners, with tea twice in between, for the family and all their guests that I never saw. I only came to my husband’s bedroom after the lights were out so he wouldn’t have to look at me, and when he had been satisfied I returned to my quarters. So you can understand why I’m intrigued rather than dismayed as I gingerly touch my arm.

  It doesn’t hurt, not too much. There’s no mirror in the pantry where I sleep, so I can’t see my face, but I take a good look at everything else—fingers and elbows, ankles and calves, the soles of my feet. All is a delicate uniform pink, kind of like the inside of a baby’s mouth, no, paler, more like the flesh of a hilsa fish after you’ve sliced it open. I’m so fascinated I do something I’ve never done before—I remove my clothes and examine the forbidden parts—mounds, hollows, slits. I notice the veins and arteries below the surface, red and blue skeins of pulsing silk, the translucent glistening tissues along the curves.

  How beautiful I am! I can’t wait to share my new body with my family. Surely they will be proud of me, love me at last, a daughter-in-law to brag about, to show off to strangers. I try to imagine the smile on my husband’s face—a bit difficult as it’s something I’ve never seen—and on an impulse I rummage in the chest till I find my marriage sari, a lovely deep silk, purple-red. (I’d heard a wedding guest say that it made me look like a brinjal.) But now I arrange it around me with excited fingers. How my skinless body glows against it! How proudly my breasts push against the fabric!

  Ready now, I stand tall. I picture myself sweeping into the great hall, the awe on their faces, the adoration. I practice my words of forgiveness, my gracious smile. And then, with my hand stretched out to turn the knob, I notice it. The door is gone. The door to my room is gone.

  I look for it everywhere, feeling the cracked, peeling whitewash, the bricks that scrape my new fingertips raw. I move faster, searching, my breath coming in gasps. It’s a trick, a new cruel trick, the latest in the series, but I refuse to let it get to me. I throw myself against the wall, hammer at it. Shout. The sound falls back into my ears, small, like a cry from the bottom of a well-shaft. But I won’t give up. I know it’s there, somewhere, my door. I won’t be kept from it.

  Yuba City Poems

  The founding of Yuba City

  Yuba City Wedding

  The Brides Come to Yuba City

  Yuba City School

  Leaving Yuba City

  The Founding of Yuba City

  Let us suppose it a California day

  bright as the blinding sea that brought them

  across a month of nights

  branded with strange stars

  and endless coal shoveled

  into a ship’s red jaws.

  The sudden edge of an eucalyptus grove.

  the land fallow and gold to the eye, a wind

  carrying the forgotten green smell

  of the Punjab plains.

  They dropped back, five or maybe six.

  let the line straggle on. The crew’s song

  wavered, a mirage, and sank

  in the opaque air. The railroad owed them

  a month’s pay, but the red soil

  glinted light.

  Callused from pounding metal into earth,

  their farmer’s hands

  ached to plunge into its moisture.

  Each man let it run pulsing

  through his fingers,

  remembered.

  The sun fell away. Against its orange,

  three ravens, as in the old tales. Was it good luck

  or bad? They weren’t sure.

  Through the cedars, far light

  from a window on a white man’s farm.

  They untied their waistbands,

  counted coins, a few crumpled notes.

  They did not fear

  work. Tomorrow they would find jobs,

  save, buy the land soon. Innocent

  of Alien Laws, they planned their crops.
<
br />   Under the sickled moon the fields

  shone with their planting:

  wheat, spinach, the dark oval wait

  of potatoes beneath the ground, cauliflowers

  pushing up white fists toward the light.

  The men closed their eyes, turned their faces

  to the earth’s damp harvest-odor.

  In their dreams their wives’ red skirts flamed

  in the Punjab noon. Slender necked women

  who carried on their heads

  rotis and alu,

  jars of buttermilk for the farmers’ lunch.

  When they bent to whisper love

  (or was it farewell)

  their hibiscus-scented hair fell like tears

  on the faces of the husbands

  they would not see again.

  A horned owl gliding on great wings

  masked the moon. The men stroked the soil,

  its soft warm hollows. Not knowing

  how the wheels of history

  grind over the human heart, they

  smiled in their sleep.

  Note

  Yuba City, settled by Punjab farmers around 1910, is now a thriving Indian community in Northern California. Until the 1940s, the Alien Land Laws precluded nonwhite immigrants from owning land, and immigration restrictions prevented their families from joining them. A number of the original settlers were never reunited with their families.

  Yuba City Wedding

  Empty kitchen. Only a few smudges of yellow across the colorless sky, like paw-prints of a dog that’s stepped in piss. I want to be asleep, like the others, but someone is driving a nail, a huge iron one like we used to use on the railroad ties, into the top of my skull. That, and the coming wedding.

  The thin walls shiver with the snores of the five men I share the place with. A train tears through the morning, flakes of plaster fall from the ceiling to coat my hair. The floor rises and falls, uneven, with each breath. I hold tight to the coffee mug, but it’s cold now and no help, the swirling inside it thick and muddy. Like my mind.

  I close my eyes and try to picture Manuela’s face. But even that does not come.

  They took me out last night. My last taste of freedom, they joked. We went to Pepe’s Diner by the tracks. The other places—the ones owned by the white men—don’t care for us Indians even when we pay ahead for our drinks. But that’s O.K., I like Pepe’s. The packed mud floors and the smoky oil lamps remind me of the dhabas back home, and the other men, Mexicans mostly, leave us alone.

  I knew a lot of people there last night. Gurpreet was there, and Surinder, and the man who works the signals at the station house. My housemates of course, and some of the Jat farmhands who pick lettuce with me. Avtar Singh called out a toast in Punjabi, good times in bed, many sons, and we all drank tequila. It’s taken me a long time to like tequila, burn-bitter and choking in the throat, so unlike the rice-toddy we made back home with its sweet, ripe smell. But now I can drink it with the best of them, throwing back my head, then sucking the salt off my fist. Some of the Mexican pickers I knew raised their glasses, and Manuela’s cousin Roberto, who had tried to knife me when he first found out she was seeing me—it seems a long time back now—came over and gave me a beery hug. I should have been happy.

  But I couldn’t forget the ones who weren’t there. The older men, turbanned and grizzle-bearded like the fathers we had left behind, the ones who chanted every week from the Granth Sahib at the Gurdwara ceremonies I was no longer permitted to attend. Baldev Singh, who shared my coffin of a cabin through that miserable voyage to America, who held my head all those times when I threw up on the floor, too sick to make it to the toilet. Rajinder Mann, who bought me my first pair of American pants and talked to the foreman for me because I didn’t know English. I had known they wouldn’t be there, but it still hurt, looking at the empty row of stools at the bar where they usually sat.

  They hadn’t wanted me to marry Manuela, of course. It had been O.K. while we were going out. A young man needs these things, they said. But a wedding was a different matter. A Christian, a woman who speaks a different language, who eats pig’s flesh and cow’s and isn’t even white-skinned. Unclean. How can she bring your children up as good Sikhs? She will leave you for another man, one of her own kind. They always do. Look what happened to Tej. Be patient. Soon the laws will be changed and you can go back to your own village and marry. A fine girl, one who has never known a man. She’ll cook you dal and roti, bear sons who look like you. Nurse you in old age.

  I tried to believe them. I lay in bed and pictured her, my bride, in a shiny gold salwar-kameez, eyes that were black and bright and deep enough to dive in. I smelled her jasmine hair-oil. Her skin was soft as lotus petals. But one night I opened my eyes and saw whiplashes of moonlight falling through the blinds across a mattress that sagged like my heart. And I knew I couldn’t be like them, couldn’t wait and wait while time burned through my flesh and left only trembling. So I filled my lungs with the smell of Manuela’s cinnamon breath, the ripple of laughter deep in her throat, her fingers flying like wings over my body, and in the morning I told them.

  Now there is nothing left to wait for except the wedding. Late tomorrow afternoon, when the sun has grown old and breath is not like a hot soaked sponge inside the chest, we will put on the black pants and white shirts we’ve rented for this day and make our way up the hill, my friends and I, to the Iglesia Santa Maria. There will be much joking and back-clapping along the way, because they hope it will be easier, now, for them to do what I am doing. And also because the old stone church, looming up dark and domed against a bleached sky, fills us with nervousness.

  I have never been inside the church. I try to think of it now, holding the cold mug in my hands, wrinkling my forehead against the throbbing behind my eyes. Stained glass windows the color of blood, gutted candles and the dead smell of wax they leave behind, the wooden Christ with twisted limbs and tortured eyes who looks down from the Cross and sees everything. Manuela has told me all of it. The stone basin from which they will sprinkle water onto my forehead to wash away my sins. The warm red wine already turning a little sour, the week-old wafer that will crumble in my mouth, gum up my throat. The new name Padre Francisco has chosen for me, Ysidro, which sounds a little like Surdeep, so I will feel at home.

  I hear voices upstairs. Laughter, things falling over. They are talking of the party tonight, the torches, the guitars and flutes, the big roasting pits that must be started already. There’ll be lots of drinking. Chilled beer, of course, and sangria in pitchers with sliced oranges floating in them, and rum brought up special from Sacramento. And lots of dancing. Men with hair slicked back and sombreros dusted and boots polished to shining with pig’s grease, farmgirls turned senoritas for an evening, giggling behind fans decorated with black lace, hiding their chapped hands in the folds of their white gowns. My housemates have already picked out partners. Slim-hipped Margarita, Rosa of the flashing eyes, Isabella whose plump lips taste better than the rum. The names fall at me through the ceiling, along with hoarse bedroom jokes. Before the night ends, there will be a few fistfights, maybe a knifing. Or perhaps plans for another wedding or two, if my friends are lucky.

  Now I picture the end, the procession winding its way along the narrow stone path to the room in the back of Dona Inez’s tailor shop which will be our new home. More toasts and jokes about bridal nights, then the two of us left alone in a bed smelling of crushed flowers. Outside the cheers and yells rise to a crescendo, the sound of bottles breaking. Manuela opens her arms and I look down at her, but suddenly there’s nothing there, nothing except black emptiness like a crack in the earth after years of no rain.

  I stumble to the washroom. A fist pounds my heart. Red spots behind my eyes grow into a wash of blood. I plunge my head into the bucket, and water fills my nostrils like cool silver so I don’t have to think, for a little while. I hold my breath and it grows into a chanting inside my chest, the passage we always start with
from the Granth Sahib. Ek Onkar Satnam…. Each syllable is a knife turning in my chest.

  Then a scene comes to me, from a childhood story I’d long forgotten, a man who enters a magic cave in search of treasure. As he steps forward, the walls close in behind him. It is very dark—like behind my eyes—and he is afraid. Then a door opens in the rock in front, and he sees a light. He steps through, the walls close in again, again the dark, then another fissure opening, another light, brighter this time, as though shining off diamonds. I forget how the story ended. But the chanting is gone now, and in its place a quiet rustle, like trees in wind. Last week Manuela told me she felt the baby move. I open my eyes in water and imagine what he sees, the dark swirl and flow, his tiny hands opening and closing. I hear footsteps coming down the stairs. Ready, I lift my face and breathe in the bright waiting air.