Leaving Yuba City Read online

  Note

  Because of immigration restrictions, most of the original Sikhs who settled in Yuba City could not bring their families with them, or, in the case of single men, go back to get married until the 1940s. As a result, in the 1920s and 1930s several men married local women from Mexico.

  Ek Onkar Satnam; “There is one Lord and His name is Truth.”

  The Brides Come to Yuba City

  The sky is hot and yellow, filled

  with blue screaming birds. The train

  heaved us from its belly

  and vanished in shrill smoke.

  Now only the tracks

  gleam dull in the heavy air.

  a ladder to eternity, each receding rung

  cleaved from our husbands’ ribs.

  Mica-flecked, the platform dazzles, burns up

  through thin chappal soles, lurches like

  the ship’s dark hold,

  blurred month of nights, smell of vomit,

  a porthole like the bleached iris

  of a giant unseeing eye.

  Red-veiled, we lean into each other,

  press damp palms, try

  broken smiles. The man who met us at the ship

  whistles a restless Angrezi tune

  and scans the fields. Behind us,

  the black wedding trunks, sharp-edged,

  shiny, stenciled with strange men-names

  our bodies do not fit into:

  Mrs. Baldev Johl, Mrs. Kanwal Bains.

  Inside, bright salxvar-kameezes scented

  with sandalwood. For the men,

  kurtas and thin white gauze

  to wrap their long hair.

  Laddus from Jullundhur, sugar-crusted,

  six kinds of lentils, a small bag

  of bajra flour. Labeled in our mothers’ hesitant hands,

  packets of seeds—methi, karela, saag—

  to burst from this new soil

  like green stars.

  He gives a shout, waves at the men, their slow,

  uneven approach. We crease our eyes

  through the veils’ red film, cannot breathe. Thirty years

  since we saw them. Or never,

  like Harvinder, married last year at Hoshiarpur

  to her husband’s photo,

  which she clutches tight to her

  to stop the shaking. He is fifty-two,

  she sixteen. Tonight—like us all—

  she will open her legs to him.

  The platform is endless-wide.

  The men walk and walk

  without advancing. Their lined,

  wavering mouths, their eyes like drowning lights.

  We cannot recognize a single face.

  Note

  Due to immigration restrictions, the wives of many of the original Sikhs who settled in Yuba City in the 1900s had to wait in India until the 1940s, when they were finally allowed entry to the United States.

  Yuba City School

  From the black trunk I shake out

  my one American skirt, blue serge

  that smells of mothballs. Again today

  Jagjit came crying from school. All week

  the teacher has made him sit

  in the last row, next to the boy

  who drools and mumbles.

  picks at the spotted milk-blue skin

  of his face, but knows to pinch, sudden-sharp,

  when she is not looking.

  The books are full of black curves,

  dots like the eggs the boll-weevil lays

  each monsoon in furniture-cracks

  in Ludhiana. Far up in front the teacher makes word-sounds

  Jagjit does not know. They float

  from her mouth-cave, he says,

  in discs, each a different color.

  Candy-pink for the girls in their lace dresses,

  matching shiny shoes. Silk-yellow for the boys beside them,

  crisp blond hair, hands raised

  in all the right answers. Behind them

  the Mexicans, whose older brothers,

  he tells me, carry knives,

  whose catcalls and whizzing rubber bands clash, mid-air,

  with the teacher’s voice,

  its sharp purple edge.

  For him, the words are a muddy red,

  flying low and heavy.

  and always the one he has learned to understand:

  idiot idiot idiot.

  I heat the iron over the stove. Outside

  evening blurs the shivering

  in the eucalyptus. Jagjit’s shadow

  disappears into the hole he is hollowing

  all afternoon. The earth, he knows, is round,

  and if he can tunnel all the way through,

  he will end up in Punjab,

  in his grandfather’s mango orchard, his grandmother’s songs

  lighting on his head, the old words glowing

  like summer fireflies.

  In the playground, Jagjit says, invisible hands

  snatch at his turban, expose

  his uncut hair, unseen feet trip him from behind,

  and when he turns, ghost laughter

  all around his bleeding knees.

  He bites down on his lip to keep in

  the crying. They are

  waiting; for him to open his mouth,

  so they can steal his voice.

  I test the iron with little drops of water

  that sizzle and die. Press down

  on the wrinkled cloth. The room fills

  with a smell like singed flesh.

  Tomorrow in my blue skirt I will go

  to see the teacher, my tongue

  a stiff embarrassment in my mouth,

  my few English phrases. She will pluck them from me,

  nail shut my lips. My son will keep sitting

  in the last row

  among the red words that drink his voice.

  Note

  uncut hair: the boy in the poem is a Sikh immigrant, whose religion forbids the cutting of his hair.

  Leaving Yuba City

  She has been packing all night.

  It’s taking a long time because she knows she must be very quiet, mustn’t wake the family. Father and mother in the big bedroom downstairs, he sharp and angular in his ironed night-pajamas, on the bed-lamp side because he reads the Punjabi newspaper before he sleeps. Her body like a corrugation, a dark apologetic crease on her side of the wide white bed, face turned away from the light, or is it from her husband, salwar-kameez smelling faintly of sweat and dinner spices. Brother and his new wife next door, so close that all week bits of noise have been flying through the thin wall at her like sparks. Murmurs, laughter, bed-creaks, small cries, and once a sound like a slap, followed by a sharp in-drawn breath like the startled start of a sob that never found its completion. And directly beneath her bedroom, grandfather, propped up on betel-stained pillows to help him breathe, slipping in and out of nightmares where he calls out in his asthmatic voice hoarse threats in a dialect she does not understand.

  She walks on tiptoe like she imagines, from pictures seen in magazines, a ballerina would move. Actually she is more like a stork, that same awkward grace as she balances stiff-legged on the balls of her feet, her for-the-first-time painted toes curling in, then out, splaying fuchsia pink with just a hint of glitter through the crowded half-dark of her bedroom. She moves back and forth between suitcase and dresser, maneuvers her way around the heavy teak furniture that father chose for her. Armchair. Dressing table. Narrow single bed. They loom up in the sad seep of light from her closet like black icebergs. Outside, wind moves through the pepper trees, whispering her name through the humid night. Sushma, Sushma, Sushma. She has been holding her breath, not realizing it, until her chest feels like there are hands inside, hot hands with fuchsia-pink nails scraping the lining of her lungs. Now she lets it out in a rush, shaking her head with a small, embarrassed laugh.

  Two weeks back, wandering through the meager cosmetic
s section of the Golden Temple drugstore, killing time as she waited for grandfather’s prescription to be filled, she had seen the fuchsia nail polish. She hadn’t been looking for anything. What was the use when mother and especially father believed that nice girls shouldn’t wear make-up. But the bottle leaped out at her, so bright and unbelonging in that store with its dusty plastic flowers in fake crystal vases on the counter. Take me, take me, it called, a bottle from a book she had read in grade school, what was it, a girl falling through a hole in her garden into magic. But this voice was her own, the voice that cried into her pillow at night. Take me, take me. There in the store she had looked up at the faded Christmas streamers wrapped like garlands around the pictures of the gums hanging above the cash register, old holy men in beards and turbans with eyes like opaque water. Her fingers had closed around the fuchsia bottle. That’s when she knew she was leaving.

  So when at brother’s wedding all the relatives said, now it’s Sushma’s turn, and Aunt Nirmala told her mother she knew just the right boy back in Ludhiana, college graduate, good family, how about sending them Sushma’s photo, that one in the pink salwar-kameez with her hair double-braided, it was not hard to sit quietly, a smile on her face, tracing the gold-embroidery on her dupatta, letting the voices flow around her, Sushma, Sushma, Sushma, like the wind in the pepper trees. Because she had already withdrawn her savings, two years salary from working at the Guru Govind grocery, money her mother thought she was keeping for her wedding jewelry. The twenty dollar bills lay folded under her mattress, waiting like wings. Below the bed was the old suitcase she had taken down from the attic one afternoon when no one was home, taken down and dusted and torn off the old Pan Am tag from a forgotten long-ago trip to India. Even her second-hand VW Bug was filled with gas and ready.

  , Now she pauses with her arms full of satiny churidars, kurtas with tiny mirrors stitched into them, gauzy dupattas in sunset colors. What is she going to do with them in her new life in some rooming house in some downtown she hasn’t yet decided on, where she warms a can of soup over a hot plate? But she packs them anyway, because she can’t think of what else to do with them. Besides, she has only two pairs of jeans, a few sweaters, and one dress from when she was in high school that she’s not sure she can still fit into. Three nightgowns, longsleeved, modest-necked. From old habit she folds them in neat, flat, gift-box rectangles. Comb, toothbrush, paste, vitamin pills. She puts in the bottle of hair oil and lifts it out again. Nice girls never cut their hair. They let it grow long, braided meekly down their backs. That’s what father and mother had looked for when they arranged brother’s marriage. She stands in shadow in front of the mirror with its thick, bulging frame. She pouts her lips like the models on TV, narrows her eyes, imagines something wild and wicked and impossible, short hair swinging against the bare nape of her neck, a frizzy permed mass pinned up on her head. She throws in the bottle of nail polish.

  It’s time for the letter now, the one she has been writing in her head all week. I’m leaving, it says. I hate you, hate the old ways you’re always pushing onto me. Don’t look for me. I’m never coming back. Or, I’m sorry. I had to go. I was suffocating here. Please understand. Or perhaps, Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I just want to live on my own a while. Will contact you when I’m ready. She pauses, pen poised over paper. No. None of it is right. The words, the language. How can she write in English to her parents who have never spoken to her in anything but Punjabi, who will have to ask someone to translate the lines and curves, the bewildering black slashes she has left behind?

  She walks down the steps in the dark, counting them. Nineteen, twenty. The years of her life. She steps lightly on them, as though they have not been cut into her heart, as though she can so easily leave them behind. She puts her hand on the front door, steeling herself for the inevitable creak, for someone to wake and shout, kaun hai? For the pepper trees to betray her, Sushma, Sushma, Sushma. The suitcase bumps against her knee, bulky, bruising. She bites off a cry and waits. But there is only the sound of the neighbor dog barking. And she knows, suddenly, with the doorknob live and cold under her palm, that it’s going to happen, that the car will start like a dream, the engine turning over smooth, smooth, the wind rushing through her open hair, the empty night-streets taking her wherever she wants to go. No one to catch her and drag her back to her room and keep her under lock and key like they did with Pimi last year until they married her off. No one to slap her or scream curses at her or, weeping, accuse her of having smeared mud on the family name. And sometime tomorrow, or next week, or next month, when she’s far, far away where no one can ever find her, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, she’ll pick up a phone and call them. Maybe the words will come to her then, halting but clear, in the language of her parents, the language that she carries with her for it is hers too, no matter where she goes. Maybe she’ll be able to say what they’ve never said to each other all their lives because you don’t say those things even when they’re true. Maybe she’ll say, I love you.

  Note

  gurus: Sikh religious leaders

  kaun hai: “Who’s there?”

  Woman with Kite

  Meadow of crabgrass, faded dandelions,

  querulous child-voices. She takes

  from her son’s disgruntled hands the spool

  of a kite that will not fly.

  Pulls on the heavy string, ground-glass rough

  between her thumb and finger. Feels the kite,

  translucent purple square, rise in a resistant arc,

  flapping against the wind. Kicks off her chappals,

  tucks up her kurta so she can run with it,

  light flecking off her hair as when she was

  sexless-young. Up, up

  past the puff-cheeked clouds, she

  follows it, her eyes slit-smiling at the sun.

  She has forgotten her tugging children, their

  give me, give me wails. She sprints

  backwards, sure-footed, she cannot

  fall, connected to the air, she

  is flying, the wind blows through her, takes

  her red dupatta, mark of marriage.

  And she laughs like a woman should never laugh

  so the two widows on the park bench

  stare and huddle their white-veiled heads

  to gossip-whisper. The children have fallen,

  breathless, in the grass behind.

  She laughs like wild water, shaking

  her braids loose, she laughs

  like a fire, the spool a blur

  between her hands,

  the string unraveling all the way

  to release it into space, her life,

  into its bright, weightless orbit.

  Indian Movie, New Jersey

  Not like the white filmstars, all rib

  and gaunt cheekbone, the Indian sex-goddess

  smiles plumply from behind a flowery branch.

  Below her brief red skirt, her thighs

  are solid and redeeming

  as tree trunks. She swings her hips

  and the men viewers whistle. The lover-hero

  dances in to a song, his lip sync

  a little off, but no matter, we

  know the words already and sing along.

  It is safe here, the day

  golden and cool so no one sweats,

  roses on every bush and the Dal Lake

  clean again.

  The sex-goddess switches

  to thickened English to emphasize

  a joke. We laugh and clap. Here

  we need not be embarrassed

  by mispronounced phrases

  dropping like hot lead into foreign ears.

  The flickering movie light

  wipes from our faces years of America,

  sons who want mohawks and refuse

  to run the family store, daughters who date

  on the sly.

  When at the end the hero

  dies for his friend who also
<
br />   loves the sex-goddess and now can marry her,

  we weep, understanding. Even the men

  clear their throats to say, “What qurbani!

  What dosti!” After, we mill around,

  unwilling to leave, exchange greetings

  and good news: a new gold chain, a trip

  to India. We do not speak

  of motel raids, cancelled permits, stones

  thrown through glass windows, daughters and sons

  raped by Dotbusters.

  In this dim foyer

  we can pull around us the faint comforting smell

  of incense and pakoras, can arrange

  our children’s marriages with hometown boys and girls,

  open a franchise, win a million

  in the mail. We can retire in India,

  a yellow two storied house

  with wrought-iron gates, our own

  Ambassador car. Or at least

  move to a rich white suburb, Summerfield

  or Fort Lee, with neighbors that will

  talk to us. Here while the film songs still echo

  in the corridors and restrooms, we can trust

  in movie truths: sacrifice, success, love and luck,

  the America that was supposed to be.

  Note

  qurhani: sacrifice

  dosti: friendship

  Dotbusters: anti-Indian gangs

  About the Author

  Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, born in India, teaches creative writing at Foothill College, California. Her awards include a Pushcart Prize, an Allen Ginsberg Prize, two PEN syndicated fiction awards, and a PEN Josephine Miles Award and an American Book Award for her fiction collection, Arranged Marriage. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two children and is the president of MAITRI, a West Coast helpline for South Asian women.