Centuries of June (39 page)

“Why is she crying?” I asked Harpo.

“Because of the hole in your head.”

“Because I am dead?”

A figure appeared in the doorway. Tall and thin with hair brushed straight back, he looked like a Giacometti sculpture or a young Samuel Beckett. When he saw Sita crying on the bed, he bowed his head for a moment, and as he lifted it, he revealed his identity at once. Sam. My brother, Sam. As soon as I saw him, I remembered the old man in the bathroom and realized at once that he had been an older version of my brother from some distant future who had slipped in through the
same crack of time. Now he was as young as yesterday. He walked into the room without acknowledging me and crouched next to her and said her name. “Sita.”

She smiled briefly and held out her hand, which he took and pressed to his face. She smiled again, holding his palm there a beat longer, and then she let him go. “Stay for a while,” she said. “Keep me company.”

“Everyone was wondering where you went off to.” He sat down beside her.

“I couldn’t stand another well-wisher. Another person of good intentions but little imagination. He would have wandered off, too, at his own wake. Without saying good-bye. Suddenly I just missed him and wanted to come up here and see if the bed still held his shape. His scent on the pillow.”

My brother clearly did not know what to do or say. As he searched the corners of the walls before him, he knitted his fingers together and crossed his legs at the ankles. She had always made him slightly uncomfortable. The cat leapt upon the bed and meandered to my pillow, where he curled like a dish and settled into the dent left by her head.

Sam patted her hand. “You know it was an accident. He was gone right away. Maybe the cat got underfoot, and he fell backward and hit his head. Must have been the cat.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Harpo said from the pillow.

Downstairs there was a party going on. Someone had finished a joke and the punch line released a tide of laughter that rose and fell away and left behind a deeper silence. Stories at funerals seem to me to be the surest sign of our resiliency. That we want to, and can, make each other laugh. I almost wished to be down there among my friends and relatives, to hear what might be said about me and set the record straight, but I could not bear to leave her, even in my brother’s good care. As for the cat, I could strangle him, but what’s the point? He was forever underfoot. Sita had been there with me all night, not the others,
just Sita. I must have risen from the bed, careful not to wake her, and stumbled in the darkness to the bathroom. I tripped over the cat, hit my head, and would not get up.

“I cannot believe Jack is gone,” she said.

Jack, of course, she called me Jack. That’s my name. My brother’s name is Sam. He moved out when things started getting serious between me and my girlfriend, Sita. Who was now speaking of me in the past tense.

The cat read my thoughts. “Because you are definitely not in the present, at present.”

“It’s like a bad dream,” she said. “Wouldn’t he have found some humor in the situation? Awakened from his dream only to fall out of the world. Since he was nothing but a dreamer.”

I was taken by her flat assertion. I always fancied myself a man of action.

“Come now,” said Harpo. “It’s just the two of us now. You can be honest with me.”

A debate with a cat was out of the question, but at the very least I felt I should express my gratitude. “Thank you, at least, for saving me back there. From the mad woman with the gun.”

He coughed on a hairball. “Don’t mention it, mate. Just an accident that I showed up at all.”

At last, Sam cleared his throat. “He was a dreamer, but such a serious one. When he was a little boy, he liked nothing more than to draw these elaborate designs of his own imagination on this brown paper Mother gave him. From the time Jack could draw, he would sit all day at our father’s desk, sketching out his dreams.”

I had dreams, all right. Skyscrapers and museums, whole cities, and cities connected to other cities. Or simply the perfect house.

“I often dreamt of something better for myself,” Harpo said. “Don’t be so incredulous. Cats have nine lives, you know.”

“Then there’s hope for you yet.”

“Even housecats dream of becoming tigers. As long as there’s the chance of starting all over again, there’s hope, mate.” With that, Harpo began to lick at the fur near the base of his tail, the first step in a grooming process that always seemed to last forever. I could not watch, for it made me a little sick to my stomach.

My attention strayed to the commotion going on downstairs. A man’s voice, loud with drink, began some apocryphal story to regale the house of mourning. I wondered who else had come to the funeral but knew that I should not leave the room. Part of me wished to reach out and comfort her, say a few words to my brother, but there was no way to do so from this separate plane. This whole ghostly situation—or whatever one calls it—is quite frustrating.

“When we first met,” Sita said, “he was so funny and charming and smart. I am so angry that he would leave me all alone like this. What am I to do now?”

My brother had no good answer.

She considered his silence and folded her hands, as if in prayer. “I have a story to tell you,” she said. “About your brother and me.”

Leaning back against the pillows, in a gesture I had seen before on this night, Sam settled in for the tale.

M
y father is old country. He came to America as a young man to study medicine at a time when this was a rarity for a Bengali. But he is a very smart man and hardworking and determined to make a success. The American dream, right? One day, when he was working as a young intern, a patient hobbled in with a broken foot. She smiled at the beautiful doctor. He lingered awhile at her bedside, beguiled by her accent. An immigrant who had escaped Poland, and when the cast came off, she asked him out on a date. I imagine the two of them, struggling with their own cultural differences and then the language and the strange customs of America, and it is still difficult to see what drew them together. Opposites attract and all that.

So they marry, yes. Young Indian doctor and his fair-haired wife. Understand this was a time when such combinations were not as commonplace as today, but they were in love and did not care about stares in the street or the whispers in the grocery store. He had no one at all in the big city. She had room in her heart for every possibility of love. They had each other, and what difference did it make what others might say?

Katya, that is my mother, yes, she was studying poetry of all things at the University of Chicago and Niren was happily in residence at a hospital nearby, and one fine day around Christmas, when all of the decorations are up, and it is cold, and people are bustling about with their shopping and preparations, she casually says, “I’m expecting.” “Expecting?” he asks. “What is it you’re expecting?” He had in mind a package, perhaps, for the holidays from her folks back in Gdansk, but of course, she beams at his cluelessness. “A baby, Niren,” she says, and later, when I was a little girl, he told me that moment he knew how wide the universe was, for it had filled his heart. They both were happiest, I think, in those months before the first child was born, when anticipation and joy and a little fear supersede the inevitable fatigue and reality of caring for a real infant. All the talk was of the coming event, and as such things go, they planned and prepared, found a bigger apartment, bought the necessary accoutrements. Time goes by, the matter of what to call the baby came up. Katya had told him that he was to decide upon the firstborn’s name and that she would choose the rest. A wise woman, my mother.

Now my father is not a particularly religious man, not in any formal sense, and I have no real idea what his family back in the old country believes. I’ve never been to India except once, when I was all of six months old. Nana fell so in love with me that they all moved to Chicago by the very next year. Furthermore, he had by this time adopted nearly all of my mother’s customs. There was a Christmas tree in the new apartment. We never spoke of the matter, but I am sure he thought attending the Christian church and so on was part and parcel of becoming a full-fledged American. Or maybe he just wanted to please her. But to my knowledge, his upbringing was secular, so it was a surprise he found my name in the Ramayana. Do you know this story?

•   •   •

M
y brother shook his head. In his dark suit and tie, Sam looked incongruous sitting there upon the bed. By now I was more used to him as an old man in a bathrobe, and part of me wished I could speak to him and let him know how he would turn out in the future. The cat stood with an air of mild annoyance and then found his place in the moving patch of sunshine on the floor. I was curious to hear what Sita had to say, since she so rarely spoke about this part of her life.

T
he Ramayana is the life story of Rama, the seventh incarnation of Vishnu, and I guess you’d call it one of the foundational stories of the Hindu tradition. It’s this long, multilayered epic poem about the exiled prince Rama and his wife. She gets abducted by the demon Ravana, a creature with ten heads and twenty arms, who tricks her and takes her to the kingdom of Lanka across the sea. This monkey-god, Hanuman, helps Rama rescue the girl, but Lord, it gets more complicated as it goes. But the point of me telling you this is that Rama’s wife is named Sita, incarnation of the goddess Lakshmi, and she is the epitome of beauty, virtue, and loyalty. Follower of the principles of dharma. The ideal wife. Some standard to live up to, eh? How’s that a proper name for a baby girl? What was the poor man thinking?

My father used to tell me stories from the Ramayanas—for there are many versions—at bedtime when I was just a little girl, though I don’t know how much of it was true and what he may have invented. I don’t believe he was secretly trying to make a good Hindu of me, or even much of a Bengali. The bedtime stories were as much for his sake as for putting me to sleep. He seemed to be remembering his own childhood by telling those tales to me, and I enjoyed them for what they were—scary and funny and sad. In one, the monkeys make a bridge from India to Sri Lanka by joining hand to foot and holding on to the next one’s tail, and in another, old Ravana sets the monkey-god’s tail
afire, and he just scoots through the kingdom spreading the blaze from building to building and destroying all.

Whatever the stories meant to him, they were a kind of ritual between us, a private language and a personal bond despite the fact that they’re known all around the Hindu world. In that little corner of Chicago, the Ramayana was just ours. None of the other kids had ever heard of such an elaborate myth, and for sure I wasn’t going to mention the gods to the nuns at my grammar school. But I liked being the only Sita among all the Mary Margarets and Sean Michael Patrick Francis Joseph Aloysiuses at Our Lady of Grace, the only Sita in the whole neighborhood, or in all of Chicago for all I knew. Although there was a stretch as a teenager when I wished to be Suzie or Rita, but I outgrew all that when I left home for college.

“I
t’s a beautiful name,” Sam offered, and Sita blushed at the compliment. She walked to the window and looked out upon the fair summer day. Too nice for a funeral. I was tempted to cross the room and stand behind her, put my arms around her waist, but as neither one of us could feel the gesture, it seemed pointless. In the glass of the windowpanes, her eyes stared straight ahead, not searching the exterior world, but locked upon some inner landscape far away from here.

I
began to forget my father’s stories and became instead just Sita, a girl with an unusual name. One of many strangers when I went to university in Philadelphia. A boy named Ayodeji from Nigeria. Michiko from Kyoto in my English Composition section. Josip and Baxter and a girl named Feather from Los Lunas, New Mexico. Nothing strange about me, nothing exotic. Just a girl, a little darker than some, but hardly unusual. What’s in a name? I was more American than many of these
foreign satellites landed on campus, and I became more fully American away from my funny mixed-up parents and their mélange of food and customs, stories and memories.

So in earnest I was determined to say good-bye to the past and become just American like everyone else. My boyfriends were all regular Joes. I hung around with my pixie blonde roommate and the ordinary Janes. In retrospect, it all seems a much more conscious decision, but I had no idea at the time just how much I longed to be just like everyone else. Another eighteen-year-old inventing herself. Funny story, though, I dated this guy a few times, sweet as pie, and one time we got all dolled up for a night on the town and he ends up taking me to an Indian restaurant for dinner, Bombay something or other. And we’re sitting there in the red room, the silver samovars and Ganesh and Siva duking it out on the wall, while we waited for our lamb rogan josh or whatever and I must have looked absolutely morose. “What’s the matter?” he asks. “Don’t you like Indian food?” And that cracks me up for some reason, and I just can’t stop laughing. Poor guy didn’t even know.