Queen of Dreams (6 page)

This particular morning my mother had a migraine. She’d get a blinding headache once in a rare while—though looking back, I think it was probably more often than my father or I realized. She wasn’t the complaining type. Or maybe she kept deliberately silent because she didn’t want us to realize that the headaches occurred whenever she’d had a stranger-dream.

But this morning the headache must have been really bad, because after she’d made my father his breakfast and he’d gone off to work, she lay down on the living room carpet and asked me to bring her a blanket and a bottle of aspirin. She swallowed a handful of the white pills and asked me to tuck the blanket around her. I did so uneasily—her limbs felt slack and heavy. In a raspy voice that didn’t sound like hers, she added that she wanted me to stay home from school.

This was unlike my mother, for whom school was up there next to God. It scared me. What she said next scared me more.

“I need your help,” she said.

My mother was always asking me to help—to wash vegetables, to make a bed, to mail letters, to take a bag of ripe oranges from our backyard to the Yangs, who lived down the street. When I was younger, it had made me feel indispensable, but recently I’d realized that everything I did for her, she could have done herself in half the time. She asked me only so that I’d learn what I needed to know before she launched me into my adult life.

But today, for the first time, she really did need me.

I sat there by her, wondering if I should call the doctor. But which doctor should I call? I knew only the pediatrician she took me to see. Did my mother even
have
a doctor? My heart thumped guiltily, out of rhythm, as I realized how little I knew, or had cared to know, of my mother’s life.

As though she sensed what I was thinking, my mother opened her eyes—they were veined with red—and shook her head slightly. Then she beckoned me close. “Go to the sewing room,” she whispered with effort, “and look in the closet. Under the extra pillows, there’s a plastic box with a blue lid—”

I waited for her to say more, but she’d closed her eyes again. Her breath came in gasps.

I ran to the sewing room, to the big closet that took up one of its walls. I tried to slide the door open, but it got stuck on something partway, so that I could barely wedge my body in through the opening. I’d never paid much attention to the closet before this— it was the place where household odds and ends were stored. But today as I peered in, it seemed very dark, and larger than it should be. Maybe it extended on and on, beyond my seeing? (I had read the Narnia Chronicles.) I put out a hand, my heart beating rapidly. But here was the back wall, disappointingly solid. In the living room I heard my mother cough. Abashed, I dug through the pile of pillows and found the box. It was a Tupperware box, and not very large, though it was quite heavy. I opened the lid—I couldn’t resist. It was filled with little rows of glass bottles, each the size of an index finger. The glass was a dark brown, so I couldn’t tell what was inside.

When I brought her the box, my mother gave a wan smile. I waited to see what she was going to do with the bottles, but she sent me to look up a number in the phone book. She spelled out the name I was to look for: Raghavendra, S. P. It wasn’t a name I’d heard before. By the time I located it and copied out the number, she’d finished with the box.

“Put it back exactly where it was,” she said. “And then get your shoes on. We have to go out.”

“But you aren’t well enough,” I protested.

She didn’t say anything, just pushed herself off the floor. She held on to the wall and walked with faltering steps to the shoe closet. I helped her find her chappals and locked the door behind us. The sunlight made her wince and press her hands over her eyes.

“Do we really have to go?” I asked anxiously. “You’re too sick to be driving—”

“No driving,” said my mother. She took my arm and, leaning heavily on it, started walking.

In about ten unsteady minutes, we’d reached the corner gas station. My mother walked around to the side, where the public phone was located. She gripped the telephone and asked me to dial the number I had copied down.

“Are you sure?” I asked, worried at the turn things were taking. “Do you even know this guy?”

My mother shook her head. I could hear the ringing through the receiver. A gruff voice said, “Raghavendra speaking.”

“Mr. Raghavendra,” my mother said, “I’m calling to inform you that your life is in danger. One of the people living in your house is planning to kill you.”

There was a silence at the other end. Then the voice, hissing and heavy, yet small and tinny at the same time, said, “Who is this?”

My mother didn’t say anything.

“Is this a crank call? I’m going to phone the police, have you traced—”

“Mr. Raghavendra,” my mother said, “you have to believe me. It’s probably your cousin, whom you sponsored from India six months ago. He’s been living in your house since then, right? Does his name start with the letter
H
?”

Silence again.

“I think he’s developed a—relationship—with your wife— and wants you out of the—”

“How do you know this?” He sounded oddly calm.

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Someone’s put you up to this, yes? A practical joke, yes?”

“No joke,” my mother said.

“Then you’re crazy!” He was shouting now. “Completely nuts! I’m going to have you committed. I’m going to come after you personally and—”

I found myself sobbing. I wasn’t sure what I was more scared of: that the man would somehow learn who my mother was and find her—and by extension, us—as he threatened. Or that he was right, and she
was
crazy.

“I did my best, Mr. Raghavendra,” my mother said sadly.

“Now it’s up to you.”

And while the man ranted on about what he would do to her once he found her, she replaced the phone with shaking hands. She started off blindly across the parking lot, unaware of a delivery truck that had just turned the corner.

I screamed. There was a shrieking of brakes. A large, red-faced man leaned out from the truck window and yelled. “Stupid broad! Ain’tcha got eyes in yer head? Coulda gotten killed!”

My mother didn’t seem to hear him. She made her way to the bushes on the street corner and threw up there. I’d reached her by then. I held her head as she heaved and retched. I glared at passersby who gave us distasteful looks, and wiped her face the best I could with a piece of tissue I had in my pocket. I was ready to run back to the public phone and open the yellow pages and call a doctor—any doctor—but my mother held on to my arm.

“I’m better now,” she said. And she was. I could see it from her eyes, which were clear again. Whatever had made her ill had left her, now that she had passed on her dream.

A few months later I gathered my courage and asked my mother about what had happened that morning.

She looked at me with a small frown and said, “What morning, shona? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I looked at her guileless gaze. She wasn’t lying, I could tell that much. My mouth went dry. Was that part of the dream teller’s gift, this ability to erase something once your duty to it was done? Would she erase us like this one day, my father and myself?

Or—but no. I didn’t imagine the incident. I’m sure I didn’t.

I think sometimes of how strongly a person would have to believe in herself—and the truth of her dreaming—to do what my mother did that morning. And many other mornings, I’m sure, though she never again asked for my help. I remember the thick rage in the man’s voice and think, I couldn’t have taken on such a task.

Thank God my world is simpler. Even my tragedies are simple ones, colored in commonplace hues.

But here’s what’s crazy: I’m thankful, and then, the next moment, I’m filled with regret. Because I’ll never enter my mother’s underground domain, those caves peopled with possibilities, what may or may not come to pass, where one plus one can equal one hundred—or zero.

7

Her mother’s line is still busy. Rakhi is annoyed at this, but not surprised. Her mother spends much of her day on the phone, probably because her clients prefer not to meet her. Perhaps she prefers not to meet them, too. It would be awkward, dangerous even, if they came across each other later—perhaps at the grocery store or a social event, except her mother no longer attends those. This much is definite: Rakhi has never met any of them.

She listens to the short beeps. Impatience pricks her skin like darts, enters her bloodstream. Like always, her mother’s busy with someone else, she thinks, then is ashamed at the lie. All through her childhood, her mother was careful to ensure that her dream work didn’t disrupt her family’s life. And so she slipped it into pouches, bottles, cracks in the wall not visible to her husband or her daughter. (Only once was there an exception, down by the 7-Eleven, smell of vomit and diesel fumes and crushed oleander leaves—) Maybe that is what Rakhi resents: that her mother, with such meticulous motherness, kept her out of the place she wanted most to enter. That she denied her her birthright and doomed her to the bland life of suburban America.

When Rakhi finally gets her on the line, her mother seems disoriented. “Who is it?” she asks, sounding breathless. “Who?”

“Mom, it’s Rakhi! Your one and only daughter, remember?”

“Sorry, shona,” her mother says, her voice contrite, but they both know she’s not really apologizing. “What is it?”

Rakhi feels a familiar twinge of jealousy, that suspicion of being less important than
them
that stalked her through childhood. She pushes it aside and tells her mother about the new store, attempting to speak in an efficient, adult fashion. It’s a little difficult, with Belle hyperventilating in her other ear, prompting her in loud whispers.

Her mother says nothing. She never responds to bad news the way Rakhi imagines other mothers must, with horrified exclamations or coos of sympathy. She is not sure if she should be thankful for this or resent it. Today her mother’s silence annoys her. Perhaps she’s the same way with her clients, but as her daughter, doesn’t Rakhi deserve at least an exclamation or two of dismay? How can she be so unnaturally self-possessed, so different from everyone else? Is it because she already knows what people are telling her?

Her mother is still silent, but there’s an intensity to her silence now. Rakhi pictures her standing in the kitchen, the way she’s seen her so many times. She’d be leaning against the wall, threading her fingers through her long black hair. (There’s no white in her mother’s hair, a fact that disconcerts Rakhi, who has recently plucked a few offending strands from her own head.) Her mother’s eyes are closed so she can focus better on what she’s hearing. Her face is abstracted and emotionless, like the faces of the goddess statues Rakhi remembers from her infrequent childhood visits to the Vedic Dharma Samaj. She wouldn’t answer if Rakhi happened to speak to her at such times. It’s different now, Rakhi thinks with an ironic smile. This time I’m the one getting her full attention.

She has a great relationship with her mother, she knows that. They’re happy whenever they meet, and they enjoy talking to each other. Her mother would do everything possible to help Rakhi if she were in trouble. She’d go beyond what Rakhi asked. Perhaps that’s why Rakhi is reluctant to bring her problems to her. Or perhaps it’s because her mother never talks about her own sorrows. Rakhi has no idea of what might keep her mother awake at night.

But maybe thinking that is her first mistake. Maybe dream interpreters don’t ever sleep.

She remembers something her mother said to her when she was about ten years old. It has stayed in her mind because her mother so rarely gave her advice. They’d been in the garden, planting chili peppers. Her mother lowered a seedling, its boll of hairy roots, its chilies like tiny red bird beaks, into the hole that Rakhi had dug.

“Shona,” she’d said in her burnt-sugar voice with its slight, delicious rasp, “the best way to love people is not to need them. That’s the purest love.”

Rakhi didn’t quite know what her mother meant. But for years after that, she tried to love people in that need-less way. And failed. Sometimes she wonders if those words were one reason why things broke down between Sonny and her. Was it because he’d grown accustomed to her not needing him that he couldn’t come through when she finally did require help?