Good Indian Girls: Stories (17 page)

Still, she felt no particular attachment to Arjuna except when feeding him, and those rare, sometimes erotic episodes. The dinner party troubled her now. She searched through one of the hall closets upstairs where boxes and boxes of old clothes, long out of use, were stacked. She emptied one. It was packed with kimonos, all different sizes and colors, all for different occasions. In a sudden fury, which came on her quite by surprise, she flung them to the floor, throwing them in all directions before leaving them there, a bright, disordered pile that left her with a feeling of both pride and shame, though the source of neither could she discern. Suppressing her confusion, she took to the matter at hand, which was her snake, and she slid Arjuna into the box as if she were unwinding a long, especially thick length of pasta onto a plate.

Much of the morning had already drifted by and she still hadn’t decided what she was going to cook. The light cast by the
early sun had disappeared from the living room and was now creeping to the front of the house. A trip to the shops was still required, perhaps even one along the peninsula to purchase necessary ingredients. Parvati fussed nervously in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards for a clue to the main course.

When Krishna had been posted to San Francisco, Parvati had been delighted. They were both in Indonesia then. He was discussing trade barriers and she was purchasing sarongs, learning about local dishes, watching Gamelan dances, practicing her vowels. She had never been to California. But some months after they arrived, she began to feel uncomfortable. There was not a specific manner of dress that she could adopt, there were no specific foods that she needed to learn to cook. When she asked people how she might become more Californian, they often laughed or told her to relax, to mellow out. She did not want to relax or mellow out, she wanted to become Californian.

Instead of searching out what she thought might be the essence of California, the distilled elixir of its blood, she began to think back on her days in India. They seemed so long ago, another life even. She began to think of her childhood as an earlier incarnation. She had lived in a large house, her steps always shadowed by those of servants. Sometimes, when Arjuna ranged over her naked flesh, she remembered she had never seen any snakes when she was growing up. It seemed a little absurd that she came from India and had never seen a single snake. But the servants always killed them or chased them away before they could find her, or her eyes. Sometimes, when she pushed her tongue out until it touched the scales on Arjuna’s body, she would think that she had finally caught India, its essence.

Arjuna lay curled on the kitchen table, squashed into a square spiral by the shape of the box. Parvati, pushing the box aside to lay down cookbooks, considered momentarily whether Arjuna was at peace, having entered finally the rain-washed undergrowth of some snake heaven.

Then she had the idea. Arjuna would be the night’s dinner. She quivered with excitement as she contemplated it. Was it possible? Would Krishna be angry, or even notice? Would it be bad etiquette to serve a pet to guests? She dismissed these thoughts and concentrated instead on how appropriate a finale it would be to Arjuna’s years of service to herself and her husband. What better place to end than on the tongues and in the stomachs of the couple that had fed him with such regularity, such care.

Parvati smiled to herself. She would do it. Already she felt some of that old thrill return, the intoxicating sensation of Arjuna’s thick, rounded body mounting her flesh. Goosebumps sprang up in a line along her back.

She had never cooked snake before, nor had she tasted it. She was sure it must taste like chicken. Everything unusual always did. Even if it didn’t, everyone was bound to say it did, simply out of politeness. Should she fry Arjuna like a sausage, perhaps garnished with cilantro, she wondered, or stir-fry him in small chunks in a large wok. Was snake-sushi possible? Probably not. She paged through the several weighty books she had pulled down from the shelf above the table. She searched under “snake” in the index. Nothing. The books were also barren under “Ophidia” and even under “Squamata.” There was nothing under reptile. Not a single recipe. This was ridiculous, she thought. She would write to
Good Housekeeping
.

She remembered an eggplant recipe that had turned out tremendously well. It was some Indian thing. She had been cooking Indian dishes more and more lately, having been unable to discover what was Californian in California cuisine. She was sure she still had all the ingredients to flavor the dish. She imagined Arjuna as an extended eggplant, stretched out long and thin on a vegetable torture rack. Her mouth watered at the prospect. Arjuna would be her savior.

First she had to bake him until the skin turned to a golden crispness, like leaves on a warm autumn day. She placed the snake, coiled peacefully into a spiral, on the largest oven tray she could find. Even then she had to cut off his extremities, which she did with the slow precision of a young woman combing her beloved’s hair. When baked, she pulled him out and ran her fingers along the now hot, frangible body. Her nails caught in the brittle scales, which broke off readily like dead bark chipping away from an old tree.

She skinned him next. This proved more difficult than she had expected, as if her longtime-companion was being deliberately recalcitrant. The scales came away easily enough, but much of the skin remained intact, or pulled large portions of the snake’s pulpy white meat away with it. She scraped the meat free from these sections and out onto the tiled countertop, poking gingerly from time to time at the small masses of doughy flesh. She half expected them to react, unsure whether some remnant of the life force that had inhabited Arjuna still didn’t exist. However, the meat remained motionless and numb to her prodding.

With the skin off, she began to prepare the dish in earnest. Arjuna’s insides would be suspended in a thick cream, forming the textured heart of the dish. The dish included
fried onions and green chillies, finely chopped garlic, ginger, turmeric and fenugreek seeds, some amchur and a handful of salt.

It seemed perfect. She had not thought about it until now, but having Arjuna for dinner seemed a proper consummation of her own life. She would, in a sense, be returning India to herself. She smiled at this idea. She was not pleased about going back to the real India, but the essence of it she could take. If she could eat it, eat her past in a sense, then perhaps she might start over again, she might be able to become an Indian. It seemed suddenly ludicrous. She becoming an Indian. She laughed out loud. She kissed the decapitated head of Arjuna. Everything smelled so lovely.

Parvati pulled the top from the pan, her face arched high above it so that she would get the full cloud of steam as it rose flavorfully from the cooking. The dish was simmering. It was a striking orange color, like emergency road signs, she thought.

She couldn’t resist. She plunged a finger into the almost blisteringly hot, bubbling mass and pulled it out, flinching from the heat, with a sense of—she wasn’t sure what—of victory, of having won a battle? But when she licked her finger, she almost retched and was filled from head to toe with a terrible sense of disappointment. It tasted horribly bitter, Arjuna’s stale meat having corrupted the dish, not made it.

She stepped back, staring at the simmering, orange mess. Everything was a mistake. She couldn’t remember why exactly she had wanted to cook Arjuna. He had looked so peaceful, dead. She felt tired, exhausted. Her mind felt tired. It was the same way she had felt when Krishna told her they were returning to India, and this morning, when he informed
her of the round of upcoming dinners. No difference. It was a stupid idea, she thought. She should have known.

On the table, beside Arjuna’s decapitated head, sat the now empty box, and she remembered all the kimonos thrown haphazardly on the floor of the upstairs hall. She had no idea what she would do with them in India. Perhaps she might wear one. There could be no difference, she thought, between herself in Japan and herself in India. In fact, she would wear one that night! Immediately, all the weight of disappointment vanished and she forgot Arjuna and finding him dead and cooking him and how it all turned into a beastly mistake. She would call the caterers right now, she would order platter upon platter of sushi, and she would descend the staircase when the guests arrived, dressed in a kimono. Yes, she determined fiercely, tonight she would be Japanese.

Bodies Motion Sound

I

THE MORNINGS FOUND DAD BALANCED IN A KNOT
, breathing in through one nostril and out through the other, sometimes upside down or his feet where his ears should be, and his ears, well, only he knew that. He would walk downstairs stripped to the waist, wearing baggy grey pajamas pulled tight with a cord so that his stomach, when gravity allowed it, swelled like a sack of water over his groin.

He had started yoga when he began peeing in the bed. This was soon after Mom and Dad were married. He assured her the peeing was nothing, that with their first child all would be well, and if not with the child, then with yoga for sure. His pissing was the result of the family curse, a legacy of uncontrollable bodily emissions, and one he schemed to cripple through this effort of mind on body and thought on matter. He had warned her when they married, said sooner or later it would begin; his own dad had been a sweater, his body a great cloth of endless perspiration, even in winter his pores would open up, spilling out his essences making his body a mutineer against the season, against the spin of the earth around the sun, against the very nature of bodies and
heat and sweat; his grandmother, Mumtaz, was a renowned shitter: her shits could last for hours and on such days her groans traveled all over the house and far down the street; her braying would be incorporated into the games of children, the rhythm of nearby musicians, and the bawdy humor of the young men who lay in wait in the tight alleys of Kampala so they might synchronize their punchline with her outbursts; a great great (and maybe a third great) uncle, Ali, was an endless weeper whose almost ceaseless blubbering started up at the slightest invitation: encountering a sad face, a cloud in the sky, announcements of a wedding or a baby born or dead, a buoyant tune (because it was sure to end), a mournful tune (there, you see), news of deaths in other towns, the first buds of spring: everything elicited for him, if not the immediacy of its sadness or failure, then the promise of such, the knowledge that happiness lay contingent on the dolorous face of daily woe. And there were others: vomiters (like myself), more pissers like Dad, men who ejaculated or women who orgasmed at the slightest provocation, several who lost their hair, grew it back, lost it again, and so on and on; and others: endless spitters and those whose menstrual fluids filled oil drums every month, others whose ear wax erupted in thick strands to be collected in the morning to shape candles; and one, the great and ancient matriarch of this line of shitters and pissers and spewers, evacuators extraordinaire, Razia, whose snot one bright morning, fanciful family stories told, was found perched at the end of her nose like a massive and growing fruit, each day enlarging, developing, gaining character and weight, until she could no longer hold her head up and sat with this rock of hardened mucus in her lap until finally it released itself, rolled off her thigh and along
and down the hall, rattling doors and windows, scaring animals, scuttling the servants from its path, crashing out through the doors of her zenana and into the world. Reports quickly spread through the town: Razia’s elephantine snot had escaped from purdah. Astrologers gathered around it to examine the surface, feel the bumps, smell it, taste it, consider the color and hardness, and all agreed: the family line was cursed, the snot a wandering snot and the family thus a family of wanderers and disgorgers. Every corner of the world would know them before a child came who, like Razia, produced a globe of snot and, pointing with a finger at a particular indentation, bump or ridge would announce, this is where the family would be allowed to settle in peace.

In the mornings I sat where I could watch Dad from the kitchen table. When his pants slowly darkened at the groin and urine ran down his legs or spilled over his stomach, cutting slim and transitory rivulets among his whitening chest hairs, I would tighten a fist under the table until my sharp nails pressed into the skin of my palm and turn my head away in disgust. I knew what his face would show: anger and fear. I knew he would untangle himself with an embarrassed awkwardness and stand nervously. Under his breath he would curse Idi Amin and walk to the bathroom and wash himself. Releasing my fist, I hoped my nails had cut new lines; that the past as well as the future might be changed. I was ashamed of him and hoped that in a new geography of my palm a new family might be written, a new history or a new future. But the skin always flooded with blood and the slight curves where my nails had pressed at the palm faded back into an indifferent brown.

For Dad, it was never the curse of Razia’s snot that was the
source of our troubles but Idi Amin, the Great Bastard as he called him. Amin threw all the Asians out of Uganda, my family with them. We lost everything and came to California and lived at first on the charity of distant relations. Mom says I was born two weeks premature on a plane, flying from where to where she no longer remembers. I don’t believe her. I think she made it up, a way of justifying to herself my rootlessness, the way I skip between fads and fashions, the way I have become so un-Indian.

The Great Bastard menaced my childhood. Dad told me tales of the tortures and humiliations he performed on his subjects, the endless killings and expulsions, and the man himself; no, more than a man, almost an evil god; and the presence of this evil god filled my room at night, enlarging, gorging on the dark, a mammoth and devouring presence that terrified me into performing acts of numb violence on myself: sticking pins into my hand, burning my fingernails with matches, clamping my young nipples in small woodworking vices, allowing young boys to introduce their fingers or their fists into my tender vulva.