Neel Taal: Meena Arora Nayak

A blue moon. A blue moon again. And blue eyes. How much blue can a body take without capitulating to its blueness?

Here we are, sitting under the Bradford pear side by side on the garden bench, its planked wood still warm with the memory of a spring day’s sun, and its wrought iron back articulating the clumps of primroses. Just sitting side by side, with me in the middle, flanked by an age-old security on one side and a tingling new warmth on the other, talking about the phenomenon of a double blue moon, the stars, music, and lottery tickets.

“It’s the randomness of it all. Like the stars…you know…no pattern. They just seem to pop up whenever they please,” I say.

“Actually, it happens only when all the elements are just right,” Ray says. He looks away at the moon, then at me with a blue so intense it could have been the first color of creation. It is hard to inhale-that color. I have no more breath left. What little remains trapped in my heart sounds like the heartbeat of a fetus-focused, loud.

“Music. There has to be a rhythm. Compositions. Rhythms. Not possible without a rhythm of some sort,” Dev says. He’s a percussionist with aspirations of composing a rhythm so intricate, yet so simple that the very firmament will be utterly explained. “The numbers, too, will naturally follow the rhythm of the stars-you know a distinct method to the apparent randomness.”

“We could start by laying down the last five years’ winning numbers. I could buy a copy of the lottery gazette,” Ray says.

“I think we can do this.” Dev suddenly reaches across me and snatches the crumpled pack of Camels from Ray’s breast pocket. “Yes,” he mut­ters through lips clenched over the cigarette, as Ray reaches over me to light it. “I think we can crack this open.” He draws quick puffs. “If this is at all logical, as it must be, all you’d have to do is find the pattern in the numbers. I’ll create the music. You come up with the next logical sequence in numbers, and I’ll do the same with the notes. Then we’ll match them. If we both come up with the same sequence, we’ll know those are our numbers-the winning numbers. What do you say? You’re with me?”

“Yes…” Ray sits up a little and shifts his weight; the curve of his elbow draws away from mine, and the nip of the spring evening immediately seizes upon the warmth that has been there. He takes the pack of Camels from Dev’s hand and, straightening its edges, retrieves a wrinkled, filter­less cigarette and lights it. His very first puff drifts away in concentric circles.

When the moonlight sits like a halo around the pinky-white blossoms of the Bradford in my yard, it transforms it into a nest of fairies. I spread out a palm to catch a blossom fairy fluttering down through the smoke, its petal wings crumbling the smoky heart of a circle.

*

Dev believes we draw circles around us-circles of relationships, circles of feelings, circles of intensity, circles of how much we will live and how much die-circles of rhythms, but all within a structured circumference. We start at a point and allow ourselves freedom within the circumfer­ence. But we must arrive back at the point to complete the circle. How big a circle we draw all depends on how we define fulfillment. For Dev I could be anything from his wife in seven births to a pampered child to the goddess Sarasvati inspiring centuries of tradition in music. For me Dev is my own patch of terra firma, allowing me to lift off and explore new rhythms, allowing my heart to wander away from home. But his gravity keeps me facing home, like a stripling bee who flies backwards to remember the way back to the hive. How can I love him less for allow­ing me to love more? It is the extension of the same love. Sometimes I wonder what will happen if our rhythms begin to seek totalities that cannot be contained within circles.

“The five numbers should be easy. They will fall within the cycle. It’s the Power Ball I’m worried about,” Dev says.

*

The lunch tables in Teaism are only ten in number. At noon, people play musical chairs. The prize is a sun-window, a view of Washington, D.C., from the fifth floor, and Teaism’s famous vegetarian platter, but the establishment allows the winners only a half-hour to savor their victory. I have about ten minutes left. I try to raise myself above the cackle of voices, to absorb the sun, the city, myself.

“Have you ever placed your palm against railroad tracks just before the arrival of a train?”

He is reflected in the glass of the sun-window. I lift a hand and place it against the glass, my palm flat, covering his lips, his nose, my fingers reaching toward his eyes.

“The train trembles through your whole body.”

“Hi,” I say, turning to look at him.

“Do you mind if I share your table?”

I absorb the trembling of the world for the next half-hour. His eyes, his porous blue eyes, absorb my trembling.

Teaism at noon becomes a breathless game we play every day.

*

My house begins to reverberate with new rhythms. Dev creates composi­tions for each of the year’s winning number sequences to test his theory. I sit among his tablas, giddy with the wonder of new rhythms.

“What’ll you do with the money if you win?” I ask him one eve­ning.

He looks at me puzzled, as though I have introduced a new variable into the equation. “The whole point is to crack this lottery thing wide open, to find the logical rhythm,” he finally says. “The money will figure itself out.”

“What’s Ray going to do with his share?”

“He’s got plans,” he says. “He won’t say what.”

*

“Leave him. Marry me.” Ray is sitting in a pile of computer paper in his apartment, each sheet a chronological tale of numbers-five years of lottery history.

“I love him,” I say.

“Then what is this?”

I shake my head.

“I keep thinking it’s just physical. I keep thinking if I can make love to you one time-one time only, it’ll be over.”

I shake my head again. “I’ll have to kill myself then. Because for me it won’t be over. And I’ll have broken all the rules.”

“Do me a favor, will you? Before you die, call me. Give me what I want.” He laughs.

I laugh with him. “I’ll have killed myself after the fact.”

“If I win the lottery, will you marry me then? I’ll be rich.”

“You’ll only be half rich. The other half of the riches will be Dev’s. Either way I’m a winner.”

*

I am a good wife-the epitome of a perfect Indian wife. My house is clean and tastefully decorated. I like to watch the proud satisfaction on Dev’s face when visitors to our house stop in mid-visit to exclaim, “What a beautiful house.” My refrigerator is always stacked with Dev’s favorite food. I have learnt to cook his favorite dish: carp, fried and spiced, the signature dish of Bengal, exactly like his mother makes, exactly like all Bengali girls learn to make to define prosperity in their house. I make sure I’m home before he gets back from work, so I can greet him at the door, wearing a fresh coat of makeup and a smile. “Forces of gravity.” My mother taught me the lesson on the morning of my marriage. “A beautiful wife who is happy to see her husband is a gravitational pull that will prevent him from straying.” At night I make sure all our differences are resolved. I never let him sleep with an issue weighing on his mind. At the end of the day if the apologies are all mine, so be it. “The night is treacherous.” Another lesson learnt from my mother. “It whispers betrayals in his ear. Don’t give him reasons.” Every time he reaches for me, I make myself available. But Dev is a considerate lover, attuned to my moods, knowing instinctively when I’m really willing. Never once have I had to bear him in bed. Every time we’ve made love, it has been when I’m not only willing, but also wanting.

*

Ray and I sit drenched in sweat in the Sculpture Garden, letting the sun pour into our skin. At this time we are nothing except receptacles of the sun. Ray’s pure white linen shirt stains with the golden of his chest hair. I trace a finger down the curve of his chin over his throat into the hollow at the base and stop there. Perspiration trickles like a leaky faucet between my breasts.

“What is this in me?” Ray says, his voice floundering. “You’re a mar­ried woman.”

“Happily married,” I add.

“Why doesn’t this feel wrong?”

“We owe each other something from a past birth.”

“What? One day? One night? A whole lifetime? How do we know how much?”

“We’ll know,” I say. The sculptures in the Sculpture Garden are all immense. I hadn’t realized the paucity in my world till Ray had become a part of it. I have never been a taker; I only knew how to give. Now I want to take everything he owes me. If it is one day or one night, I’ll receive it like a beggar in the cupped palms of my hands.

*

Every night I cremate the day with meticulous rituals: remove its valuables and set them aside-legacies for posterity; bathe it-the orifices purged of earthly impurities; inhale its death-smell before I dress it-its wantonness clothed to meet the lover’s sobriety. The bed is a pier.

*

Dev is stretched across the bed; his limbs spread out in a free fall like a parachutist jumping out of an airplane, bracing the air with his pressure-flattened body. I free the comforter from under his leg and arm from my side of the bed and slip in, my back towards him. He turns on his side, his face toward me, and slips an arm around my waist.

“Do you ever think of death?” he says, his voice simply a deep breath between sleep and wakefulness.

“Every night,” I whisper.

“Sometimes, I grow afraid.”

I pull his arm around me tighter and gather myself back into the scoop of his lap. In India women used to commit Sati, throwing themselves into their husband’s pyre to die with them rather than live without them.

*

Ray is sitting at a cement chess table in Lafayette Park sketching the ancestor oak across from him. Behind him American Israelis and Ameri­can Palestinians demonstrate ten feet away from each other. Violence has broken out in Palestine again. The Israelis made a special visit to claim the Temple Mount, and the Palestinians protested the violation of their Noble Enclosure. Twenty-eight Palestinians and four Israelis are dead.

A squirrel scampers up a branch of the oak and disappears into a hol­lowed nest.

“It’s like a refuge,” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “Like a sprawling development-each new resident adding an apartment there, a condominium here, without any thought to design. And the branches keep spreading out like streets to accom­modate more. All are welcome.”

“It’s good,” I say, looking over his shoulder at the sketch.

He shakes his head. “The branches look like precarious perches rather than streets in a safe neighborhood. I’ll have to draw it again.” He looks up. His eyes are the skies, the oceans-unceasing blue. “This world is too insular. I want to live in this tree,” he says.

I get up and walk to the oak, laying my palm flat against its wooded benignity, needing to be absorbed in its secular culture. I will him to look into my eyes, to see the revelations of blue in them. His eyes are scrunched up against the sun’s rays slanting through the branches of the oak, his ridiculously long blonde eyelashes almost touching his eyebrows. Ray has the eyebrows of a little boy. They haven’t learnt their own machinations. They say whatever his eyes do.

“Don’t,” he says. “It’ll kill me. It’ll kill us all.”

Ray picks up his sketchpad and pencils and walks away, cutting through the demonstrators-now he’s a Palestinian, now an Israeli; now he’s lost in the lunch-hour crowds of 15th Street. The Palestinians and the Israelis continue to demonstrate peacefully in Lafayette Park ten feet from each other, the violence in their soil surrendering to their harvests of American dreams.

*

I seek blue in lunch-hour streets, errand stores, sun parks, Teaism’s sun- windows-places of chance meetings that we had explored by design before.

The air, the light, the shadows whisper rumors of his being to me-a gait, an angle of shoulders, a curl of hair touching a collar, the sound of a voice. Following the rumors, I step into “Don’t Walk” signs.

The sky is pervious, its blue only that of osmosis. It filters through my eyes. I want blue to define my life. Every morning I instinctively reach in my wardrobe for clothes with blue definitions. Walking down the street at lunchtime one day, I step into the corner flower shop and buy blue hydrangeas. At my ophthalmologist’s, testing for new contact lenses, I try on blue.

“It suits you-the color blue,” Dev says one evening.

A sob convulses in my throat. When Dev reaches for me that night, I am a shy Indian bride covered from head to toe in bridal finery. It takes him all night to disrobe me. Then I tremble at every whisper of love. He is my first lover. He is my last. I am frenzy. Then I am death. The color of love that night is blue.

*

At the beginning of time the primeval waters were quiescent. But in order for creation to occur, chaos was necessary. The serenity had to be disrupted and the forces of good and evil had to engage in a creative conflict. Thus the serene waters were churned, and the neutrality was transmuted into the elixirs of life: milk, butter, ambrosia, and the rever­sal of elixirs-poison-an extract so powerful in its destructive power, it paralyzed the three worlds. Shiva, the god of destruction, the only one capable of battling the venom, took the shape of a sacred chant and held the poison in his throat like an incantation. From that time on Shiva assumed the name of Neel Kantha (blue-throated). Thus it was, the color of the poison was revealed.

*

I banish blue. I pull out all clothes with blue definitions in my closet and fold them meticulously to put away in a drawer with clothes I have chosen to forget. I remove the blue contact lenses and make a note in my planner to call the ophthalmologist to get a pair of clear ones. At work, I carry the pot of hydrangeas to the receptionist’s desk.

I sit and watch television in the evenings now-witty sitcoms with young couples alluding to love, lover’s beds, lover’s games with circular rules. Dev’s rhythms still steal in from under the basement door. He has received the final tally of numbers from Ray. They met in a coffee shop near Dev’s work. I’ve stopped waiting for crows to crow in my yard-Indian birds announcing intimations of visits from loved ones. There are no crows in the skies of my neighborhood. Ray has sworn off my streets.

There’s a discordant note in Dev’s final rhythm-a syllable falling down-a star dislodged from its orbit, hurtling into the black hole.

“Why don’t you come and listen to me anymore?” Dev is standing beside me. “I can’t get it right. There’s a note I keep missing.”

I shake my head.

“It’s Ray, isn’t it?”

I look at him. His eyes plead for a denial.

“I’m lost,” I whisper. I can’t find the beginning of the circle anymore. I reach out a hand to him. “Help me.”

A calm settles on his face, like the silence after a slaying. He shakes his head. “I can’t. You have to find your own way back.”

*

The jackpot is a hundred and sixty-two million dollars. The lines outside lottery ticket stores stretch all the way into hope. The odds of winning this lottery are 1:1,000,000. Ray has checked his tally numerous times, but Dev’s numbers still have a note that doesn’t fit. I can hear him in the basement, repeating the rhythm like a child learning his math tables over and over again with a pause at the multiple that constantly eludes memory. He, too, has lost the point in the circle that makes the circle absolute.

It’s a myth; I want to scream at him, like the myth of Moksha, of Nirvana, the Absolute, formulated only to keep us striving. Life is ran­dom-a random beginning and a random end. There are no patterns to follow, and those we design for ourselves veer off into randomness at the slightest hint of a blue.

When I was younger I used to say I’m waiting to experience that one moment of the absolute-absolute sorrow or absolute joy.

I was so wise when I was younger.

I pick up my car keys and step out of the house.

By the time I reach Ray’s apartment, I’m soaked in blue.

*

Later that night, the phone in Ray’s apartment rings. It’s Dev. “Put me on the speaker phone,” he says. Despite the static distances of telephone lines, the tabla bol drums into the room with the clarity of inevitability.

DHA DHA DHIN DHIN / TREKE DHIN NA /
TETEKATAGADIGHENE / TREKE DHIN NA /
DHAGE DHIN DHIN TETE / KATA GADI GHENE /

“Twenty-one beats,” he says. “That’s the Power Ball-twenty-one.”

GHARAN DHAGE-TETE TAGE-TETE KARAN /
KITE-TAGE TAGE-TITE KARAN /
KAT-GHARAN KATE DHA-KITE TAKA DHUMA /
KITE-TAK TAK-GHARARLE TAK-GHARANE /
DHA KITE-TAK TAK-GHARANE DHA /
KITE-TAK TAK-GHARANE TAK-GHRANE / DHA
DHETE DHETE TAGE TETE / DHUMA KETE DHUM
DHUMA KETE TAGE TETE / KREDHE TETE DHUM
TAGE NANAKETE DHUM TETE / KATA GADI GHENE

“Twelve, seven, nineteen, and twenty-six beats. Those are the num­bers,” he says. “Go buy your ticket, Ray. It’s yours. All of it.”

*

When Parvati, Shiva’s wife, playfully covered his three eyes with her hands, darkness fell upon the three worlds, for Shiva’s eyes are the sun, the moon, and fire. A sweat bead of passion fell from Shiva’s forehead and flowed into his third eye-fire. From the heat of the eye, and the seed of the sweat, a terrible child was born-Andhak-blind, for he had been born in darkness, and blue, for he had been born from passion. Parvati wished to claim him as her own, because his blueness was from the pas­sion she aroused, and his blindness was from the darkness she invoked. And Andhak, being blind from passion and darkness, desired Parvati as soon as he was born. So Shiva, the god of doomsday, impaled Andhak on the tip of his trident and danced the Tandava-the dance of death-the dance with a rhythm as vibrant as a beginning, as terrible as an end-a rhythm of the seed of life transfixed in death.

*

The winner of the multi-state lottery jackpot of hundred and sixty-two million dollars is an eighty-two-year-old grandmother in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In an interview she says she let the computer pick out her numbers-the winning numbers-twelve, seven, nineteen, twenty-six; Power Ball-twenty-one.