Queen of Dreams by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

stay right where you are.”
    “That’s so completely superstitious,” I said, feeling angry and scared and unaccountably claustrophobic. “Are you telling me I shouldn’t leave California? How can you believe something so illogical?”
    She smiled a little. She rarely took offense at what I said (a fact that frustrated me through my teenage years). “Firstly, I didn’t mention California, did I? Secondly, logical things require no belief—they’re there for everyone to see,” she said. She put on the kettle and went to the pantry to get a packet of the Brooke Bond tea, wrapped in its thick silver foil, which she favored. It was one of the few habits she’d carried over from India. Just as I was resigning myself to the fact that our conversation was over, I heard her add, “But this one I don’t need to believe. This one I know.”
    I longed to ask her what she meant by that, but she must have regretted letting even that small crack appear in the wall behind which she hid herself. She kept me busy fielding questions about Jona’s activities until it was time for me to leave.
    In the eucalyptus grove, I take in a deep lungful of damp air. I pick up a sloughed-off piece of bark, crumble it and hold it up to my nose. I love the smell of rain, of straggly growing things. “ ‘O let them be left, wildness and wet,’ ” I quote to Belle on seriously rainy days.
    “Yeah,” she says. “And fungus and mildew and wood rot.” Some people have no romance in them.
    When I got to college, I borrowed, from the South Asian library, a tape with songs about the Bengal monsoons: how the skies grow into the color of polished steel, how the clouds advance like black armies, or spill across the horizon like the unwound hair of beautiful maidens. I loved that tape, even though I could understand only about half the words. (Fortunately, it came with a pamphlet that provided translation.) I listened to the songs over and over, until Belle threatened to inflict violence on me. For months afterward, I found myself daydreaming about the storm-whipped palm trees, the red-breasted bulbuls taking shelter among the hanging roots of the banyan. The lightning was silver combs decorating the rain maidens’ hair. The rain was warm, like human tears. One of the singers had compared her heart to a dancing peacock. Was there some truth to that, or was it merely a poetic trope? Confronted by a direct question, my mother grudgingly admitted that there were peacocks, and that from time to time they did dance. My father informed me, with gruesome glee, that Calcutta flooded with every big rain, and decades-old muck (and worse) came up out of the sewers, and people died of cholera. But I was not fooled. They were hiding things from me, beautiful, mysterious, important things, as they always had. But why? Belle had told me that her parents—and the parents of the other desis she knew—loved to go on and on about India, which in their opinion was as close to paradise as you could get.
    What cruel karma had placed me in the care of the only two Indians who never mentioned their homeland if they could help it?
    “When I was little and didn’t know any better,” Belle told me once, “my parents would give me an extra two dollars per week to go to the language class at the gurdwara.”
    I sighed. “I’d have been happy to give up my allowance for a chance to learn more Bengali—”
    “You need help,” Belle said. “You are one sick person.”
    A couple of times when I was in college, I tried to plan a trip to India. But it never worked out. The fellowship I applied for didn’t come through. The group I was going to travel with decided to go to Peru instead. My parents didn’t say anything, but it was clear they disapproved. Perhaps it was their silence that frightened me into giving up. Or perhaps the fear came from someplace inside me, as Sonny would later claim.
    I no longer yearn for travel in the same way. Jona’s birth anchored me;