Close Too Close (7 page)

And what magic she made them more.

I recall, months later, how even walking up the spiral stairs outside the apartment building was done in quiet, and yet my heart pounded louder than our feet on the steel steps. I’d feel the thuds in my throat, an excitement for that alone time with her. The force of those heartbeats aiding me in getting up the stairs, while my Batas did me a disservice, feeling like flats of magnets.

I remember us lit like actors on set, but it was just that this village never slept.

It seemed like it could never get dark enough, so I hid my feelings within myself.

She watched me most at this time and shared deep, as our bottle of arrack became empty.

I could understand how it was easy for her to talk to me

I wasn’t special, I was foreign

And she assumed that my homeland allowed me to be open to her secrets.

She had none, really.

Well, none that I would call secrets.

She might’ve fallen in love before, made passionate love and gotten her heart broken badly, she might’ve stabbed a man for attempting to rape her best friend, she might’ve walked and talked more brashly than Vizag would’ve liked. The shock factor was lower to someone like me – an American Transgender Queer.

To me, she was the big-hearted fish in a sea of hustling guppies and her swimming children were where she deposited her desires. She hoped they would sleep peacefully, in this village that never slept and she hoped that they would dream fantastically, the world beyond their village.

Sometimes, if we had a full bottle to start the night with, she sat on the low ledge of the balcony and would two-puff a beedi.

A simple pleasure for a
seemingly
simple woman.

She reclined with her complex thoughts and didn’t mind when I –

What are you thinking, ma?

Oh, nothing. Just that times are changing.

The western world has poked his head out here enough and in different places.

The village sees a little, but wants it all – and doesn’t even know the extent of modernity. and they don’t know the price.

Yet, the desire is large enough to mask the downfall and this is yet another British Imperialism done American but psychologically.

The question remains, how do I get my people to think for themselves and not with the mob?

How do I show them the side that is not in neon offerings.

I resign.

I can only infiltrate their minds through their children’s desires.

and I can only plant in the children, the desire to think.

I remember thinking to tell her that I said her very same words in America.

That I, too, wanted my village to think.

Sometimes I think back to the buildings with planes stuck in them. I remember hasty threats. Ignorance in Bed Stuy, in Park Slope, in every place I biked to get away from it. Sometimes I wonder why the world has forgotten American children. And I wonder, when American Powers die of old age, if their white children will be apt to carry on hatred, or if the children I teach, brown, black, yellow and white, will desire to be loved whole, so that hatred doesn’t have a chance in the hundreds of growing bodies as they become who they need to be.

I remember looking at her and feeling her exhaustion as mine, but the streets had shown her how to have boundaries – she still burned bright and I remembered that burning out is what brought me there.

She loved her work, her people, herself. She didn’t see any hope in it all, but she didn’t need to. She saw potential through her faith, and that’s the fuel she chose to run off of.

Sometimes she would begin to nod off on the ledge and I would tell her that she was scaring me; that she would fall accidentally. She would laugh and say that she was meant to go that way then, or that it would be just as well, to kill her rampant thoughts.

I remember her saying that if she fell, nothing would be missed. She knew damn well that everything in a tenkilometre radius would be affected, or if not, fall to pieces.

She was not a fixture to me, not the horrendous painting in the hallway, the one of abstract flowers in pastels that no one paid attention to. She was the kettle I used to make tea for a relaxed morning of meditation and mindfulness. I needed her there, to forewarn me of the ways of this homeland of my ancestry. I needed her there, outside a homeland not secure for me. I needed her to keep me from running. From the paranoia of getting jumped from behind, from remembering the sound my left incisor made when it popped out as my face hit the concrete. The nurses over me saying, ‘He’s in a comatic state’ and hearing the doctors refer to me as a girl. I needed a calm place while I sorted through the nights I don’t remember when I barely made it home, after drinking deuce after deuce, knocking on friends’ doors or sleeping outside of them. I needed to stop and breathe and remember how my loved ones, the ones I chose as family, saw their own pain in my self-hatred. I needed her and India to remind me what strength is.

Sometimes, after the local brew and roll-up cigs could be passed no more, I would scoop her droopy body up in my arms, and while she protested against being carried, she never did it with much resistance.

I wanted to be the one to carry her revolutionary thoughts. And if I could, I wanted to lift her up above the chaos and set her on the platform to share in all the things she loved.

I remember that one night, after carrying her and settling her in her bed, I asked if she wanted to change out of her sari. She always made a sound that said she couldn’t be bothered but then always pointed to her pins in her sari’s pleats. I undid them, as I had done many times before . . . That particular night, she touched my wrists sweetly and sleepily.

The next night, we were in our own play. We made small talk to kill time. I waited for her to feign sleep, she waited for me to scoop her up off the ledge. She waited for me to ask her if she needed me to loosen up her sari, and I almost didn’t wait until she pointed to her pins. That night, however, I struggled for a minute or two and finally when undone, I looked to see if I had awakened her from her half-sleep. She was looking at me with fully-open brown eyes.

I became terrified, but instinctively knew to appease the tension by covering her up, turning to shut off the light, and slipping into my bed.

Sometimes it took me a long time to fall asleep.

The next morning, thankfully a weekend morning, I tiredly woke up to the kettle whistling. She, fresh out the bath with damp hair, boiled water for both my tea and her coffee. She must’ve been struggling with sleep too, because while all else was in silver steel glasses, she reached for the ceramic mug from Ohio and it came crashing down. The cracked handle cut her ever so lightly on the top of her foot. She cursed a ‘shit’ and hopped to the chair to examine her injury.

I offered my assistance and knelt to help diagnose the next action to be taken for the wound. She kicked me with her good foot. I told her I wasn’t going to hurt her, went to the bathroom and returned with alcohol and a band-aid. I had already seen that the cut was small, yet the kick I received to my shoulder would have to be nursed further. After losing both my patience and kindness, to my own surprise, I sternly and American-ly told her to ‘calm the fuck down’ and didn’t mind that I cursed at her, about her, to her for the first time. I guess I hadn’t fully dissipated the tension from last night.

She sat quietly. I cleaned her wound, anticipating a scream or some violent reaction to the alcohol swab. I braced for another kick. Instead, she grabbed her calf as if to stop the pain from shooting up her leg. I continued cleaning the area around the wound and looked up. Her forehead had sweat. To balance both of us out, I picked up her leg and steadied it on my knee to place the band-aid. And this final action was my death to thinking clearly any further.

I smelled her, through the pleats and the cotton folds of her sari as the shift in her seat sent air through her legs. I nearly turned beast. I wanted to stay there, even after my trance-like placement of the band-aid. I wanted to stay kneeling in front of her spread, lightheaded with a scent that triggered pleasure-filled emotions.

I took her hand from her calf, replaced it with mine and a massage, pulling her sari back to safety, over her legs while rethinking the action. My heart would not let me behave human. It pulsed the desire of an animal in heat and I instinctively kissed her knee, disguising it as giving blessings for a quick recovery when all I really wanted to do was pull her into me and inhale deeply the aroma through her sari. And so I did.

Sometimes I wonder if she knew at that instant.

If she’d wanted to allow herself, she could’ve slapped me at the sight of my head inhaling between her legs. She didn’t. Though I remember, seconds before, she was about to turn the tension switch to off: make light of her silly reaction to a small cut. She was about to get up off the chair and continue making tea and coffee. She grabbed my head to say thankyou.

I was already taken by another spirit.

I wasn’t afraid of looking at her now.

And now, she knew.

We stared at each other. I saw her smile turn to fear. My hand rose up to hold her wrist, while her palm still held my head. And I kissed that place, the inside of a delicate wrist, those two veins touched both my lips, I kissed her wrist.