Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry

VANDANA KHANNA

VANDANA KHANNA Vandana Khanna was born in New Delhi, India, and raised in the United States. She attended the University of Virginia and received her MFA from Indiana University in Bloomington, where she was a recipient of the Yellen Fellowship in poetry. Her collection of poetry, Train to Agra, won the 2000 Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize. Khanna’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in such journals as Crazyhorse, Callaloo, and the Indiana Review, as well as the anthologies Homage to Vallejo (Green house Review Press, 2006) and Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (Illinois University Press, 2004). She is currently working on her second collection of poetry, entitled The Masala of the Afternoon, which explores the connections among Indian cinema, food, and the immigrant experience. Khanna lives in Los Angeles, with her husband and three children. I’m a Punjabi Virginian who spent childhood summers in Delhi, watched Bollywood films in the suburbs of D.C., and now makes a home in Hollywood. Blackwater Fever They didn’t find it in me until months later— just like Vallejo who died on a rainy day far from the heat rising over a garden in silvers and reds—far away from the din of buses, tobacco vendors, cows that overran the streets with their holiness. Laid on the surface of the Ganges, the thin shells reflected light, clamored against the current. Far from the Atlantic, farther still from the Potomac. Same color of night, dull dawn. The fever should have churned my blood into tight fists while the sunset stretched across the sky like an open mouth. Everything was splintered heat. I’d awake to winter in D.C., find streets covered in snow, the words of some ancient language blooming 7 under my ankles like a song, a mantra called home. I could trace it like a geography of someone I had once been. How to explain the hum of mosquitoes in my ear, sensual and low, nothing like the sound of rusted-out engines, police sirens, a train’s whistle. How easily I’d lost the taste for that water, opened my legs to their hot, biting mouths. Hair Always the sound of knots tearing, the scratch of hair against metal. Those summer evenings when I’d go by Anu’s apartment on the floor above mine, #406, and watch her mother tug at her hair with a steel-toothed comb, their room smelled of coconut oil and meat left over from dinner. She can’t cut it—ever. And so, every night is a tug of war with her mother, whose brown fingers pull and rub, spreading it out like a sheet against her back. Anu’s father would laugh at my skin, telling me to drink black tea, sit in the sun, darken up, and let my hair grow beyond my nape at least, his fingers at the edge of my shirt collar. He’d never felt the edges of a scissors’ blade—his full gray beard and hair mixing in a weave of silver-black— a patchwork, a lifetime of wants, which he rolled around the perimeter of his head and chin, ending in a tight fist at the top. Her mother 8 VANDANA KHANNA whispered words into Anu’s scalp and neck, with each strand, a different story—of American boys and dances, where skin touched, hair swayed down backs, of the mythic Sita walking into fire to prove her purity. We knew about American boys— how there were none in our neighborhood, how they’d ride by on bikes, and we’d watch them from our bedroom windows and sometimes from the front steps—their clean-skinned cheekbones, smooth chests. All the while, Anu would move between her mother’s thighs like the fireflies we’d catch in pickle jars, clicking and igniting in glass. Dot Head They caught us once between the cypress trees, a block from our apartment complex where the hallways always smelled of beer and boiled rice; though I don’t remember exactly, just two boys on bikes, the flash of sunlight on steel handlebars, words sharp, and the bite of mosquitoes that burned our ankles. Something hard hit my brother in the head. A red bindi in the center of the forehead like a rose, like the one I saw my mother wear, but his bled down his...