Jasmine (12 page)

My face must have a funny look, because Mary Webb manages to say, before the waiter comes to our table, “This can’t be new or bizarre to you. Don’t you Hindus keep revisiting the world?”

The waiter has
HI, I’M DUANE
pinned on his white shirt. I order pork chops, thinking any pork sale is good for Darrel and Elsa County. Mary Webb says, “I thought you’d be vegetarian,” and orders something called Salade au Printemps. When the waiter leaves, I tell her that yes, I am sure that I have been reborn several times, and that yes, some lives I can recall vividly.

I am moved by Mary Webb’s story. What if the human soul is eternal—the swamis say of it, fires cannot burn it, water cannot drown it, winds cannot bend it—what if it is
like a giant long-playing record with millions of tracks, each of them a complete circle with only one diamond-sharp microscopic link to the next life, and the next, and only God to hear it all?

I do believe that. And I do believe that extraordinary events can jar the needle arm, jump tracks, rip across incarnations, and deposit a life into a groove that was not prepared to receive it.

I should never have been Jane Ripplemeyer of Baden, Iowa. I should have lived and died in that feudal village, perhaps making a monumental leap to modern Jullundhar. When Jyoti’s future was blocked after the death of Prakash, Lord Yama should have taken her.

“Yes,” I say, “I do believe you. We do keep revisiting the world. I have also traveled in time and space. It is possible.”

Jyoti of Hasnapur was not Jasmine, Duffs day mummy and Taylor and Wylie’s
au pair
in Manhattan;
that
Jasmine isn’t
this
Jane Ripplemeyer having lunch with Mary Webb at the University Club today. And which of us is the undetected murderer of a half-faced monster, which of us has held a dying husband, which of us was raped and raped and raped in boats and cars and motel rooms?

I found Taylor and Wylie Hayes through Lillian Gordon, a kind Quaker lady who rescued me from a dirt trail about three miles east of Fowlers Key, Florida. In my fake American jacket, salwar-kameez, and rhinestoned
Jullundhari sandals, with only a purse, Ganpati, and forged documents, I had walked out of an overpopulated, deserted motel and followed a highway headed north; that’s all I knew. In India, I would have come upon at least a village or two, but in Florida there was only the occasional country store or trailer park. I hadn’t a penny.

Honoring all prescriptions for a purified body, anticipating only release from this world, I had not eaten in two days. I had taken no water, especially not in the glass that Half-Face offered.

Around noon, I could go no farther. My swollen, festering tongue was an agony, nearly choking me. A sandy trail tunneled through a distant row of mossy trees. Battered trucks full of produce kept pulling out. More trucks, filled with laborers, turned in. It was as though I’d never left India. After a few minutes, a station wagon driven by a lone woman followed. Fields on either side of the highway were dense with tomatoes, eggplants, and okra (still aubergines and ladies’ fingers in Masterji’s English). I had traveled the world without ever leaving the familiar crops of Punjab. Thinking I was among farmers, that I might find food, water, and work, I decided to follow the trail.

Trash cans lined one edge of the clearing. So much trash in America! Bony dogs leaped and snarled at the end of short chains. Mangy hens scuttled in and out of dried-out tire ruts. Short, thick, dark-skinned men with vaguely Asian features—Nepalese, I thought at the time, Gurkhas; can this torture all be a dream? where have I come to?—
shadowed the windows and doorways of an old barracks, and a wingless parrot hopped on a rusty bar.

A boy whistled at me from behind a tree. I couldn’t tell his age. He had a child’s body: fat stomach and thin legs with crusting sores, but a wrinkled, cynical face. I had been in America nearly a day and had yet to see an “American” face. He carried a plastic Uzi, not that different from the hardware of the Khalsa Lions, and he had the Uzi pointed at me. He did impressive sound effects, too.
Kssss! Kssss!

“Water,” I tried to say. “Pump.” Blood still drained from my mouth.

The boy dropped down into a sniper’s crouch and sprayed me one more time.

I made a pumping, drinking gesture.

At the far end of the clearing, by the trash cans, a man was teaching two others to drive a low-sprung old sedan. I waved my hands over my head, then pointed to my mouth. “Wah-huh!” I shouted at them. The man behind the steering wheel got out of the sedan. He mimicked the way I talked and walked. The boy and all three men laughed.

The driver of the sedan kicked a cola can and sent it clanking toward me. “No work!” he snapped. “This Kanjobal crew. Vamoose! Fuck off! Get lost!”

At that moment, an old white lady came out of the barracks. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, dark glasses, a T-shirt, and black pants. She must have been seventy. From the doorway she called, “Carlos! How dare you speak
to a young lady in such a despicable fashion. She asked for water—well, get her water, man!”

She came to me and put her hands on my shoulders. “Child! What is it? You’re trembling.” She led me to the stairs and sat me down on the middle one. “What in God’s name is this country coming to!” She stood and clapped her hands and shouted out a series of names or commands in a rapid language. Soon, a woman appeared with food on a paper plate and a plastic fork. It was the first hot, prepared food I’d had in over a month. But when I laid a forkful of it on my tongue, I nearly passed out with pain. The woman walked me to her car.

“My name is Lillian Gordon,” she said. “I won’t ask yours because it’s probably a fake.
This
I take it—she was feeling my kameez—isn’t Guatemalan, is it? Are we talking India here? Punjab? Are you Sikh?”

I managed only to shake my head vigorously, no. “Hin—du,” I finally said.

“Lord. Well, there’s nothing we can do here, is there? And I suppose those chappies from the INS would leap at the sight of you in those sandals.” She motioned me to get in the station wagon.

Lillian Gordon took me home with her. Home was a wooden house on stilts on blackish swampy ground. But over there, she said, over the black muck and just beyond a fringe of bent Sabal palms, was the Gulf. I got her older daughter’s bedroom. Framed, amateurish photos lined the
walls. “Kate took those in high school,” Lillian said. Sunsets on the beach, a dog. Pretty, but not special. In college she’d come back one summer and shot in a migrant-worker camp. Five years later she’d done work with the Kanjobals in Florida, the basis of a book that had won a prize. Lillian showed me the book. The pictures brought back such memories of Hasnapur, I wept. That daughter now lived in New York and was a professional photographer. Another daughter was in Guatemala working with Kanjobal Indians. Three Kanjobal women slept in bunk beds in that daughters room.

I didn’t tell Mrs. Gordon what she’d rescued me from. In some fundamental way, she didn’t care. I was no threat, and I was in need. The world’s misery was a challenge to her ingenuity. She brought a doctor in to sew my tongue. The Kanjobal women in her house had all lost their husbands and children to an army massacre. She forbade all discussion of it. She had a low tolerance for reminiscence, bitterness or nostalgia. Let the past make you wary, by all means. But do not let it deform you. Had I said, “I murdered a man last night,” she might have said, “I’m sure you had an excellent reason. Next time, please, less salt in the eggplant.” If I had said, “He raped me,” she certainly would have squinted sympathetically, then said, “You’re not the first and you won’t be the last. Will you be needing an abortion?” She wasn’t a missionary dispensing new visions and stamping out the old; she was a facilitator who made possible the lives of absolute
ordinariness
that we ached for.

I was lucky, she said, that India had once been a British colony. Can you imagine being stuck with a language like Dutch or Portuguese? “Look at these poor Kanjobal—they barely speak Spanish!” Lillian, of course, had taught herself Kanjobal. She felt it was the least she could do.

She gave me her daughter’s high-school clothes: blouses with Peter Pan collars, maxi skirts, T-shirts with washed-out pictures, sweaters, cords, and loafers. But beware the shoes, she said, shoes are the biggest giveaway. Undocumented aliens wear boxy shoes with ambitious heels. She opened her thumb and index finger a good six inches, like a crocodiles mouth.

Suddenly it all came back: Jullundhar, Prakash, a day just before the end, at Bata Shoes. An image triggered the tears, the screams. The Kanjobal women left the room; Lillian stayed with me, brewing tea.

Prakash in his peach-colored bell-bottomed slacks, kicking off his chappals and asking to see their best “Western” burra sahib leather shoes. Oh, he looked so tall, so proud, lifted in those shoes that gleamed like oiled hair in their boxy brilliance.

“See how tall I am, Jasmine?
”

“Put these things away,” he said to me back in the apartment. “No more chappals for me.” I felt love like a razor slash across my eyes and tongue, and now with a touch of shame.

“My daughter calls them Third World heels,” Lillian said, laughed, after the tea had calmed me down. Walk American, she exhorted me, and she showed me how. I
worked hard on the walk and deportment. Within a week she said I’d lost my shy sidle. She said I walked like one of those Trinidad Indian girls, all thrust and cheekiness. She meant it as a compliment.

“Tone it down, girl!” She clapped as I took a turn between the kitchen and bath. I checked myself in the mirror, shocked at the transformation. Jazzy in a T-shirt, tight cords, and running shoes. I couldn’t tell if with the Hasnapuri sidle I’d also abandoned my Hasnapuri modesty.

We drove into a mall in Clearwater for the test. Time to try out my American talk and walk. Lillian called me “Jazzy.” In one of the department stores I saw my first revolving door. How could something be always open and at the same time always closed? She had me try out my first escalator. How could something be always moving and always still?

At the bottom of the escalator she said, “They pick up dark people like you who’re afraid to get on or off.” I shut my eyes and stepped forward and kept my eyes closed all the way to the top. I waited for the hairy arm of the law to haul me in. Instead, Lillian said, “You pass, Jazzy.” She gave me two dollars. “Now, how about buying me a Dairy Queen?”

I remember Dairy Queen as my first true American food. How it soothed my still-raw tongue. I thought of it as healing food.

The Kanjobal women didn’t speak any English. For them Lillians small house on stilts must have felt like a safe garrison in hostile territory. At the time I felt a little bitter, nostalgic for their locked and companionable world. They showed me how to pat grainy tortilla dough into shape, and I showed them how to roll the thinnest, roundest chapatis. And Lillian taught us all to cook hamburgers and roasts, to clean toilets with cleansers that smelled sweeter than flowers, and to scrub pots and pans with pre-soaped balls of steel wool instead of ashes and lemon rinds, so we could hire ourselves out as domestics.

At the end of a week, Lillian said in her brisk, direct way at the breakfast table, “Jazzy, you don’t strike me as a picker or a domestic.” The Kanjobal women looked at her intently, nodding their heads as if they understood. “You’re different from these others. I better put on my thinking cap and come up with something.”

I said, “I want to go to New York. I have an address there.” I showed her the back of Professor Devinder Vadhera’s aerogram.

She read off the address. “Kissena Boulevard, Flushing,” she repeated. “I suppose Queens isn’t what it used to be.”

She packed me a suitcase full of her daughter’s old clothes that evening, and two days later she put me on a Greyhound bus. At the bus station she gave me her final tips. “Now remember, if you walk and talk American,
they’ll think you were born here. Most Americans can’t imagine anything else.” She penned a Manhattan address on the back of a blank check and slipped it to me. “But just in case you get picked up at the Port Authority—you never know how the Good Lord intends to test you—call my daughter. At least she’ll be able to get you a lawyer.”

And then she gave me a hug and a kiss. “Quite uncharacteristic,” she said, “but impulsive and sincere. You’re a very special case, my dear. I’ve written that to my daughter, so don’t hesitate to call her.”

19

B
EFORE
the courts busted her for harboring undocumenteds,
exploiting
them (the prosecution said) for free cooking, cleaning, and yard work, Lillian used to send me twenty dollars and a pair of hand-knitted pink wool slippers every Christmas. She did the same for everyone she’d ever helped. They would arrive care of her daughter, Kate Gordon-Feldstein, the photographer and friend of Taylor and Wylie. Lillian made certain that my name and address never appeared in her files. I have three sets of identical slippers. Once she learned a pattern, she never varied. I treasure them as a devotee might a saint’s relics.

I couldn’t testify for her, given my own delicate status. My anonymous letter of support was ruled inadmissible. I
wrote that she saved my life, after others had tried to end it. She represented to me the best in the American experience and the American character. She went to jail for refusing to name her contacts or disclose the names and addresses of the so-called army of illegal aliens she’d helped “dump” on the welfare rolls of America. In prison she got sick, and they pardoned the contempt charge to let her die at home.

About a year ago, Wylie wrote me out here in Iowa. She was trying to get her bosses interested in
An American Kind of Saint
, the Lillian Gordon story. She wondered if I would participate. Anonymously, yes. The project looked good for a few months. As the editor, maybe even the author, Wylie had public access to Kate and confidential access to me.

“We could get a made-for-TV movie out of it. Katharine Hepburn to star,” she said. “Crusty and unvarnished, but with very good bones.” Then the project crashed. The demographics weren’t there. People were getting a little scared of immigrants and positively hostile to illegals.