Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry

CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI

CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI Born in India, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni came to the United States in 1976. Her collections of poetry include Leaving Yuba City (Anchor Books, 1997), Black Candle (CALYX Press, 1991), and The Reason for Nasturtiums (The Berkeley Poets Workshop and Press, 1990). She has received both the Allen Ginsberg Prize and the Pushcart Prize for her poetry. Divakaruni has also published several novels, including Palace of Illusions (Doubleday, 2009), Sister of My Heart (Anchor, 2000) and The Mistress of Spices (Anchor, 1998). Her books for children include Shadowland (Roaring Brook Press, 2009) and The Conch Bearer (Aladdin, 2005). Divakaruni’s collection of short stories, Arranged Marriage (Anchor, 1996), won the American Book Award. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Houston, Texas. I think of myself as Bengali (through birth), Telugu (through marriage), and Indian American (through life choices). Yuba City School From the black trunk I shake out my one American skirt, blue serge that smells of mothballs. Again today Jagjit came crying from school. All week the teacher has made him sit in the last row, next to the boy who drools and mumbles, picks at the spotted milk-blue skin of his face, but knows to pinch, sudden-sharp, when she is not looking. The books are full of black curves, dots like the eggs the boll-weevil lays 54 each monsoon in furniture-cracks in Ludhiana. Far up in front the teacher makes word-sounds Jagjit does not know. They float from her mouth-cave, he says, in discs, each a different color. Candy-pink for the girls in their lace dresses, matching shiny shoes. Silk-yellow for the boys beside them, crisp blond hair, hands raised in all the right answers. Behind them the Mexicans, whose older brothers, he tells me, carry knives, whose catcalls and whizzing rubber bands clash, mid-air, with the teacher’s voice, its sharp purple edge. For him, the words are muddy red, flying low and heavy, and always the one he has learned to understand: idiot idiot idiot. I heat the iron over the stove. Outside evening blurs the shivering in the eucalyptus. Jagjit’s shadow disappears into the hole he is hollowing all afternoon. The earth, he knows, is round, and if he can tunnel all the way through, he will end up in Punjab, in his grandfather’s mango orchard, his grandmother’s songs lighting on his head, the old words glowing like summer fireflies. In the playground, Jagjit says, invisible hands snatch at his turban, expose his uncut hair, unseen feet trip him from behind, CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI 55 and when he turns, ghost laughter all around his bleeding knees. He bites down on his lip to keep in the crying. They are waiting for him to open his mouth, so they can steal his voice. I test the iron with little drops of water that sizzle and die. Press down on the wrinkled cloth. The room fills with the smell like singed flesh. Tomorrow in my blue skirt I will go to see the teacher, my tongue a stiff embarrassment in my mouth, my few English phrases. She will pluck them from me, nail shut my lips. My son will keep sitting in the last row among the red words that drink his voice. The Geography Lesson Look, says Sister Seraphina, here is the earth. And holds up, by its base, the metal globe dented from that time when Ratna, not looking, knocked it off its stand and was sent to Mother Superior. And here the axis on which it revolves, tilted around the sun. Like this, the globe a blur now, land and water sloshed into one muddy grey with the thick jab of her finger. Ratna returned to class with weal-streaked palms, the left one bleeding slightly. She held it curled in her lap so it wouldn’t 56 CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI stain her uniform as she wrote out, one hundred times, I will not damage school property again. Now each girl sits with her silent laced shoes flat on the classroom floor. I grip my chair-edge. I know, were it not for the Grace of the Holy Ghost, we would all be swept off this madly spinning world into perdition. Sometimes I feel...