Leave It to Me
More praise for
Leave It to Me
“Dazzling … [A] sharp look at the 1960s’ legacy of eroded idealism and scarred kids … Mukherjee gives Devi a hip, snappy, ironic voice to describe a world in which nature—and destiny—transcend nurture and no one feels remorse or responsibility.”
—New York Daily News
“Immigration and loss of identity are provocative and abiding themes in the fiction of Bharati Mukherjee.… She brings the pieces of myth and modern story together, each enriching and deepening the other.… Mukherjee writes with power, letting her sentences roll out like wild streamers in a high wind.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A psychedelic journey through the meaner side of San Francisco’s free-loving past …
Leave It to Me
challenges us to sympathize with an angry young woman whose overwhelming sense of entitlement leads her to play judge and jury, devouring all in her quest for a new identity.”
—People
“With poignancy and wit, Mukherjee makes present-day San Francisco the setting for the age-old story of the foundling in search of her parent and herself.”
—Booklist
“Engaging.”
—Kirkus
ALSO BY BHARATI MUKHERJEE
The Holder of the World
The Tiger’s Daughter
Wife
Darkness
The Middleman and Other Stories
Jasmine
WITH CLARK BLAISE
Days and Nights in Calcutta
The Sorrow and the Terror
A Fawcett Columbine Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
Copyright © 1997 by Bharati Mukherjee
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-96385
eISBN: 978-0-307-79229-7
This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc
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v3.1
For David Fetchheimer
,
unraveler of myth and mystery
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Prologue
In Devigaon, a village a full day’s bus ride into desert country west of Delhi, old Hari tells of times before the “long ago” of fairy tale, when celestials battled demons and the Cosmic Spirit revealed itself in surprising forms to devotees. The story that children beg him to repeat at twilight—that smoky quarter hour most full of menace—is of Devi, the eight-armed, flame-bright, lion-riding dispenser of Divine Justice. They know that the Cosmic Spirit (assuming the appearance of gods) continually makes, unmakes and remakes the world they live in. They know that it also created goddess Devi and endowed her with the will to save and the strength to kill, and that it charged her with the mission of slaying the Buffalo Demon who had usurped the throne in the kingdom of heavenly beings.
And in this village, named after the serene slaughterer of a demon king, the children already know the story’s ending. Before twilight blackens, Devi will blow the conch-shell call, and brandish in her many arms a lasso, a trident, a fire-tipped spear, a demon-splitting disc, a bow and arrows, a death-dealing staff, a thunder-sparking axe, a pitcher of water and a necklace of blessed beads, and will lead her soldiers on lionback. The Buffalo Demon, inheritor of the brute strength and physical appearance of
his buffalo mother and the deceit and rage of his demon father, cunning, and magical powers, will vanquish her men. Some of Devi’s soldiers the Buffalo Demon will gore to death; others he will stomp, still more fell with the tempest blasts of his panting breath, and lacerate with the whip-crack of his tail. Then he’ll let loose the full ferocity of his bestial hate on the Earth itself. With his hooves, the Buffalo Demon will scour canyon-deep trenches; with his horns, he will shred the sky and scoop out mounds of soil as high as mountains; with his tail, he will churn the calm waves of the ocean into fatal hurricanes. And just as he is about to declare himself destroyer of gods and goddesses, Devi will muster the full powers of vengeance. She will fling her lasso around the demon neck, pierce, strike and slash the demon flesh, pin that demon bulk to the ground with her foot and cut off the usurper’s buffalo-head.
While the children, comforted by story, curl into sleep on their bed-pallets, the Cosmic Spirit will smile on its daughter-goddess, then go back to creating, preserving, breaking and re-creating the cosmos as always.
And Devi? The Earth Mother and Warrior Goddess wipes demon blood off weapons and puts them away for the next time they are needed.
Part One
I can almost touch the diamond-hard light of stars and the silky slipperiness of leaves, almost taste smoke softer than clouds and sweeter than memory, almost feel God’s breath burn off my sins.
What have I done but what my mothers did? The one who gave me birth, and the one I am just beginning to claim. Like them, I took a god of a special time and place as my guide.
My mothers, luminous as dewdrops in dawnlight, weightless as the wings of a newborn dragonfly, float towards me from the place where I was born. I have no clear memory of my birthplace, only of the whiteness of its sun, the harshness of its hills, the raspy moan of its desert winds, the desperate suddenness of its twilight: these I see like the pattern of veins on the insides of my eyelids.
I tell myself I must have been left unattended in the sun. Maybe the sand-yellow sun was low in the morning sky and whichever Gray Sister was charged with caring for me had been detained in the fields as the sun mounted. I don’t want to believe it was an overcrowded orphanage’s scheme to rid itself of a bastard half American. One murder attempt is enough. Some days while shoveling snow off the stoop in Schenectady, I have smelled heady
hibiscus-scented breezes; I have felt tropical heat and humidity.
Tonight, in the cabin of this houseboat off Sausalito as curtains of flame dance in the distance and a million flashbulbs burn and fizzle, and I sit with the head of a lover on my lap, the ferrous taste of fear invades me as though my whole body were tongue.
For all official purposes, like social security cards and unemployment benefits, I am, or was, Debby DiMartino, a fun-loving twenty-three-year-old American girl. I was adopted into a decent Italian-American family in the Hudson Valley. That’s the upside of adoption. And believe me, I’ve approached this situation,
my
situation, from every angle. The downside is knowing that the other two I owe my short life to were lousy people who’d considered me lousier still and who’d left me to be sniffed at by wild dogs, like a carcass in the mangy shade.
The upside and the downside of being recyclable trash don’t quite balance. Debby DiMartino is a lie. Whoever my parents intended for me to be never existed. That un-claimable part of myself is what intrigues me, the part that came to life in a desert village and had the name Baby Clear Water Iris-Daughter until it was christened in a Catholic orphanage. That’s the part I want to remember. But there’s another part I try to keep secret, the part that sings to moons and dances with stars. With everything I’ve done, I’ve tried to find a balance. It’s just that Debby DiMartino has no weight, no substance. I had to toss her out.
Cherchez le garçon
. There was a boy, back when I was a stubby little thirteen-year-old. He was a twenty-two-year-old
graduate student at Syracuse. I had no way of knowing there’d be a growth spurt—I was adopted—I only had my sister Angie to go by, which meant I had nothing to look forward to but getting fat and a puberty that would be a settling down, and out, and not a shooting up.
Wyatt was a lanky, crinkly-blond longhair (he had the first male ponytail I’d ever seen) getting a master’s in social work, and I was his project. He had that low, slow, soft voice that just cries out sex, sex, sex! and deep brown eyes that bathed you with attention without ever blinking. The voice, the eyes, they burned at a very low flame, they never flared, but they consumed me just the same. He also had my police file, and he had the power if he ever wanted to use it to fuck up my future, all of which made our relationship an exciting kind of power trip.
Celia Montoya and I used to hang out at the mall, and one day (actually, many days) the temptation got too much and we “liberated” a little candy, some tapes, some perfume and panties—no problem—then we pushed our luck at Radio Shack since nothing was cooler that year than a portable phone. I should have figured out Radio Shack of all places would have some kind of electronic alarm. And the total value of the loot was over a hundred dollars, which automatically sent us to court and gave us a police record, and some sort of correction.
Pappy had connections in court and with the police. Celia had connections, too, but all the wrong kind, and she was out of school and in a facility for girls two days after her appeal. I never saw her again. Me, I got Wyatt,
and a chance to erase my record. The penalty was I would do some service, I would read some books and write something about them, I’d stay in school and improve my grades, and I’d talk my problems out in a circle of troubled girls, as we were called, led by Wyatt. I got to stay in school and no one knew about the Circle, or Wyatt.