Queen of Dreams (32 page)

As he rests under the tree, the king hears a sound as of many people moaning. When he looks to the side, he notices a group of dwarfish wildlings dressed in tree bark performing a primitive worship. He strides over to ask if they can lead him back to his palace, but they do not seem to comprehend him. They have set leaf bowls filled with porridge in front of a stone they have decorated with flowers—and suddenly he realizes how hungry he is. He asks for some porridge, but the men—though surely they see that he is a king, their king—pay him no attention. They continue to pray. When, angrily, he reaches for a bowl, they stop him, and in sign language indicate that the food must first be offered to the stone god. Then they will share it with him.

But the king refuses to wait. Sword in hand, he pushes them aside and takes what he wants. They do not protest. They merely watch him, eyes glinting under their matted hair. When he looks up from eating, they have melted into the trees.

The king pays them no mind. They are smaller than him and have no weapons. He sleeps, and when he wakes it is day. His horse is gone. He curses the woodsmen, who must have stolen it while he slept, and sets off on foot. An experienced tracker, he retraces his steps easily, reaching the edge of the forest by late afternoon. There is his palace, its crystal dome gleaming in the sun! He makes his way to the gate—and is stopped by the guards.

“Beggar!” one of them cries, holding up his spear in the king’s face. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Beggar?” shouts the enraged Tunga-dhwaja. “Don’t you know your king? I’ll see you buried alive within the hour, with thorns at your head and feet, as payment for that insult.”

The guard is about to strike him, but the other guard, an older man, holds him back. “Brother,” he says, “it is not proper to take offense at the words of a madman. Has God not punished him enough already?”

At this the king looks down at himself and sees that his kingly garments are gone, that he is clad in tree bark, that his hair is matted. Looking up he sees that the banner flying from the palace dome is not the familiar three green elephants on a ground of red, but a new one, silver lightning against a field of blue.

“What is the name of your king?” he whispers to the older guard.

“Why, it is Aniruddha, the righteous one,” says the guard. “All love him for his mercy. You are in luck, for today is the prince’s birthday, and the royal family will appear on the palace steps to give alms to the poor.” Seeing the stricken look on the king’s face, he adds, kindly, “I will take you there, if you like.”

Tunga-dhwaja follows the guard to the steps. He does not recognize the king, but the queen—she is his own dear wife, and in her arms she carries his son, a child of three. Surely she will know him!

He rushes toward her, calling, “Wife! Wife!” But she stares at him in distaste and without recognition. He is intercepted by guards, and it is only by the king’s command that he is spared a severe beating.

“Throw the madman out,” the king orders, “and see that he never returns.”

Sprawled in the dust outside the city gates, in a world that is and is not his own, Tunga-dhwaja realizes that this calamity has occurred because of his behavior toward the woodsmen and their deity. He returns to the forest, resolving to beg their forgiveness. But though he wanders for many days, he does not find them. Finally, filled with despair, he decides to drown himself in a forest lake. When he has waded in up to his neck, he senses a movement out of the corner of his eye. It is the white boar.

The boar leads Tunga-dhwaja back to the clearing where the wild ones—he guesses them to be sages—are performing their worship. Everything appears the same as on the fateful night when he was here last. But perhaps it
is
the same night, perhaps the boar has taken him back in time? In any case, Tunga-dhwaja knows what he must do. Weeping, he prostrates himself before the stone and, when the ceremony is concluded, humbly accepts the blessed food. He lies down beneath the same tree where he had tethered his horse a lifetime ago. At first he is too agitated to fall asleep—but sleep he must, for he knows that only through a dream can he change back to who he was. At last oblivion drops its merciful shroud over him, and in the morning he finds himself dressed once more in his royal hunting clothes, his horse grazing close by.

The king leaves the magic grove, finds his anxious companions and returns to his palace, where all is as it was before the hunt. The king, though, is a changed man. No longer arrogant, he lives out his life prayerfully, ruling his kingdom with justice and mercy. He is especially kind to beggars and madmen, and upon his death his subjects mourn the passing of Tunga-dhwaja the righteous.

34

Rakhi

The phone rings in the morning, in the middle of my efforts at painting. Efforts, because even though the photographs had showed me exciting new directions, I hadn’t internalized them yet. I still didn’t have a subject I felt passionate about. I’d started a landscape and a still life and abandoned them both. I was now trying for a portrait of Jona in an abstract style, but the colors clashed, the composition lacked energy and the figure in the center didn’t possess my daughter’s spirit. When I hear the phone, I’m so glad to be interrupted that I pick it up on the second ring.

It’s Belle. Instead of apologizing for calling during my painting hours, she tells me to turn on the TV.

“But Belle, you know I don’t like to watch—”

“Just turn it on, Rikki!”

“Which channel?”

“Doesn’t matter. Any of the main channels will do.” She sounds as though she’s coming down with a cold. “Hurry! I’ll hold on.”

I see the explosion and think I’ve caught the middle of a scifi film, or one of those gruesome disaster movies that people are so inexplicably fond of. I’m about to change the channel when there’s a rapid arc of a movement on the screen, followed by another soundless blast. It takes me a minute to process what I saw: a plane crashing into a tall building that looks familiar, looks just like the one that exploded. The scene comes on again. I become aware of the newscaster’s voice telling me that the World Trade Center has been hit by terrorist planes. As if on cue, the skyscrapers begin to crumple in on themselves. The scene changes to show the Pentagon. It has been hit, too. I see smoke, shattered walls, people screaming in terror as they run. A briefcase falls open and scatters papers all over the street. The camera zooms in on a woman’s high-heeled shoe, lying on its side.

There’s a sick feeling in my stomach. My legs are trembling so much I have to hold on to the wall as I stumble back to the phone. “Is it really real?” I whisper.

Belle gives a hiccup of a sob on the other end.

“How can something like this happen?” I say. “Who would want to do something so terrible?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know, Rikki. I’m so scared. I was getting ready to go and open up the store, but I don’t think I can manage it. There was another plane with hijackers that went down somewhere in Pennsylvania. Who knows how many more they’ve planned—” She gives another sob, sounding more like a little girl than a woman.

And with that I remember my daughter.

“I’ve got to go get Jona from school,” I cry.

“Rikki, I’m scared. I called Jespal, both at work and at home, but there was no answer. Where can he be?” She’s weeping in earnest now.

I think fast. “Belle, I want you to come over here. I’ll leave the key for you under the doormat. It’ll be better for me, too, to not have to be alone. Don’t worry about Jespal just yet. He may just have stepped out. You can call him from my phone. He can come over also.”

“You’re right,” she says in an uncharacteristically meek voice. “I’ll come over. I shouldn’t worry just yet.”

How sadly easy it is to convince people of what they want to believe.

The streets are curiously empty as I drive toward the school. Perhaps everyone’s inside, watching TV, mesmerized by those towers disintegrating in slow motion, over and over. I turn on the radio. So far, four planes have been hijacked. All four were destined for California. Flights across America have been canceled. The stock market has closed. The president, his wife, and the vice president have been moved to an undisclosed location. I peer upward nervously as I listen, though there’s nothing in the sky except a few bay gulls.

About two blocks from the school, pandemonium has broken loose: lines of cars locked in a traffic jam, drivers honking at one another as they try to find parking. A mother abandons her mini-van in the middle of the road and runs into the school building. Drivers stuck behind her begin to yell, and a man shakes his fist and shouts out an obscenity.

I finally find parking and make it to the entrance, only to be stopped by the vice principal. She entreats me not to disturb the children by pulling Jona out of class. They’re perfectly safe here, she insists. It’s more traumatic for them to see their classmates being taken away without explanation. “Most parents are too distraught to discuss what’s happened in a calm manner,” she says. “You’ll just scare the children more. And what are you going to do with them? Take them home to watch the news with you all day? They don’t need that.”

She’s probably right. The children don’t need that. It’s us, the parents, who need them with us so that we can touch their small, sturdy bodies and heft their weight in our laps, so that we can nuzzle their necks and comfort ourselves with their smell, that one familiar thing in this world turned unrecognizable.

“I’m sorry,” I say as I push past her. “I have to have my daughter.”

In the car I force myself not to turn the radio on, even though I’m anxious to hear the latest update. First I must tell Jona what has happened—how, literally, the sky has fallen since I kissed her good-bye just a few hours ago. How do you explain to a child that someone deliberately slammed a plane full of people into a building full of people, three times in three different places? That this might be the beginning of a planned terrorist attack across America? What do you say when she demands to know why people would kill themselves just so they can hurt people they don’t even know?

By the time I reach my apartment’s parking lot, I still haven’t found the words to talk about the attack. I’m thankful that Jona hasn’t asked me why I took her out of school—but I’m surprised, too. She’s been gazing out the window all this time.

“Jona,” I say. “I have to tell you about something really bad that happened today. It might upset you and scare you, but you do need to know.”

“I already know.” She says it in a flat voice without turning to me. “The buildings exploded and burned. People died. Some of them jumped from windows. They were screaming. We couldn’t help them.”

My heart pounds in agitation. I should have been the one to break this traumatic news to my daughter. “Who told you this? One of the teachers? A parent? Did they turn on the TV at your school?”

This time she does look at me. Her face is expressionless, and that frightens me more than if she were hysterical. “I saw it in my dream. Don’t you remember?”

It all comes back to me: her sweaty head pressed against mine in her fever bed, Sonny’s hand and mine, intertwined, riding the uneven rise and fall of her chest. Her restless dreaming, and my own, and how I thought, with mistaken complacence, that they were the same.

And that is how I learn two painful facts in one morning:

We’re sitting in front of the TV, Belle, my father, Jona, Jespal, Sonny and I. We know we should turn the machine off, shouldn’t watch the replays over and over, the towers flaming and crumbling, crumbling and flaming. But none of us can gather the energy to press the power button. We see clips of firefighters heading into the blaze; we see the buildings collapsing under the weight of their own rubble. Ambulances wail as though they’ll never stop. Thousands of people died in the towers. Some of them called home before they jumped. We see the ruined walls of the Pentagon through smoke. Police cars. The hijackers were armed with box cutters, we’re told. Mayor Giuliani comes on:
Stay calm and stay
indoors—unless you’re south of Canal Street.
A man in a uniform claims he’d filed reports stating airport security was too lax. President Bush comes on, vowing revenge. We look at them all, then at each other in disbelief. How could this have happened— here, at home, in a time of peace? In America?

A new broadcast is woven into the replays: a street somewhere in the Middle East where people are dancing and handing out sweets because the American devils have finally got what they deserve. Men in turbans and black beards clap their hands and chant slogans. Children are waving miniature paper flags. There are women in the crowd too, in long black burkhas, their heads covered in shawls, faces gleaming in sweaty satisfaction. One of them shouts,
Let them learn what we live with every day.
The words are translated at the bottom of the screen for our benefit.

The scenes of devastation in New York had been terrible, but this broadcast upsets me differently. It makes me want to drop a bomb on these people and end their hellish celebration. But then, as I watch it come on a second time and then a third, I start getting scared in a whole new way.