Guardian of the Dawn, page 3
Papa gave a quick laugh of surprise, then shut his right eye tight, as he often did when I was up to no good – making believe he was afraid to see all I’d done. He put me down. “Listen to me, Ti. There’s nothing wrong in keeping some things secret from me. You need to have your own life. But you must promise me something. When you feel like tearing up more drawings, or doing some other permanent damage, you will come to me first so we can talk.”
As I gave him my word, I shivered with renewed guilt. He noticed my discomfort and added, “Look, son, your mother’s death makes me as angry as it does you. There are times when I want to tear up every memory I have of her.”
As I grew, I began to see that I’d inherited my mother’s curving lips and the soft depth in her eyes, though mine were blue and hers had been light brown – the color of almonds, my father used to say.
“More than anything else you’ve inherited all your mother’s mischief,” Papa used to tell me, groaning comically, as if I made his head throb. He’d chase me around the house afterward, growling, trying to banish our sadness with his clowning, which became his way of keeping her absence from destroying us. Sometimes he’d dance an improvised jig with me or yip like one of the barking deer who were always eating the roses in our garden. Then we’d collapse together onto the pillows of golden silk that had been part of Mama’s dowry and snooze in the sun pouring in through the windows. Our helpless laughter probably saved our sanity, and yet maybe I ought to have told him that it only left me sad in the end, as though we’d betrayed our own true feelings. But I could never have put such complex thoughts into words at that age. And I would never have willingly hurt him.
In my favorite of his drawings, which Papa hung over my bed, Mama’s long black hair was swept under the moonstone-white headscarf that my sister, Sofia, would later inherit. My mother’s hands were slender and graceful, and were gesturing toward the Archangel Gabriel as though they were dancing for him. Gabriel has wings of burgundy and yellow, the same colors as in my mother’s sari. To me, it always seemed as though Mama and the angel might be one and the same being in different form.
Sometimes I would sneak my mother’s scarf away from Sofia. Holding it as I looked up at the portrait, I would wonder about the mystery of time – because here I was growing up and Mama would never know me.
The drawing of my mother with the Archangel Gabriel was a study for a Koran my father had made for the Sultan of Bijapur. The Sultan had invited Papa to India a decade before I was born and paid him an annual stipend for his illuminated Korans and prayer books. My mother, whom Papa met and courted seven years after his arrival, became the model for Khadija, wife of the Prophet Mohammed. I never saw her pose for Papa, but in my dreams I have seen him sketching her. And though they are not even touching, it seems as if they are making love through their eyes – perhaps even conceiving me.
After I met Tejal, when I was eighteen, in our moments of intimacy I used to remember Mama’s warm, protective scent. The odd thing is, whenever I breathed in the memory of her, it was as though she were a presentiment of something in my future rather than my distant past. Maybe love cannot help but look ahead.
Mama became ill with trembling fevers and chills in early June of 1576, when I was four and a half years old. It scared me the way her teeth chattered and how she would fall asleep with her eyes wide open. Even in the moist summer heat, Papa had to cover her with heavy woolen blankets and move her bed next to the hearth, which he kept blazing day and night. Her breathing was often desperate, as though she were starved for air, and much of the time she was too frail even to whisper.
Papa hung a vellum talisman around her neck with the Jewish angels Sanoi, Sansanoi, and Samnaglof painted as long-robed wise men holding lion-headed staffs; the three angels were said to be able to protect women from Lilith, the Queen of the Demons, and all of her bloodthirsty helpers.
Watching Mama from the foot of her bed, listening to the unforgiving monsoon rains outside, I felt as though we were being swept away. The curtains of rain over our windows were so thick that we could see no life beyond them. The whole world was water, and the urgent drumming on our roof was so loud that there were times at night when I would screech like a parrot and hear my voice only as a distant scratching. The monsoon became a living thing that summer – malevolent, damning, endlessly greedy. Occasionally – at its own whim – it would retreat for half a day, backing away slowly, turning around now and again to gloat in eerie silence over the damage it had done. During these reprieves, we’d see that our garden had become a pond fringed with weeds and tiny ferns. The sudden magic of reborn sunlight would turn their drenched leaves to crystal.
I spent my days by Mama’s sickbed, playing on the floor with my shadow puppets and animal dolls. I only left the house to sit on the verandah when Papa insisted on our taking advantage of a break in the storms. If Nupi tried to lead me away, even to wash my face, I’d flail my arms and holler. She called me far too stubborn for my own good, but I could tell from the hard look in her eyes that she respected my determination. We moved my parents’ bed into the sitting room so that Papa and I could sleep together near my mother. He would curl up behind me and rub my hair to get me to fall asleep.
Mama was able to sit up sometimes, especially in the morning. Papa would spoon tea into her mouth and coax her to eat some rice. Her lips were gray and cracked, and trying to smile made them bleed. Years later, my father showed me a drawing he’d done of her during her illness and I told him it didn’t look like her. But it did; I just didn’t want to believe that the hollow-eyed, ashen-faced woman was really her.
I was sitting with Mama one afternoon at the end of that terrible June, drawing monkey faces on a piece of paper. Nupi had made her drink a tea of crushed night-jasmine leaves and ginger root to put her to sleep, and though it had worked, her breathing still came with difficulty. It was as if her lungs were flecked with rust.
When I noticed that her wheezing had stopped, I stood up. Her chest was still to my touch, and her glassy eyes were not looking at anything in our world. The room was turning slowly around me, as if I were at the center of a wheel. Far away, I could hear my father talking to Kiran – the wet nurse – while she fed my baby sister, who had been born seven months before, in December of 1575.
Nupi was scraping coconut in the kitchen; that persistent, clawing sound would forever remind me of death.
I shook my mother and called softly to try to wake her. Then I ran off for Papa.
Nothing he did could rouse her. He kissed Mama on the lips, then brushed her eyes closed and kneeled by her side with his head bowed. The rains beat down on us as he sobbed, and I was thinking that we were all more fragile than I had ever guessed, my father most of all. Did I see in the fatal curve of his back that my mother’s death would break him? If she hadn’t died, would he still have asked me for the poison so many years later?
Nupi was holding me while I stood nearby, her bony knees against my back and her strong hands on my shoulders. They pressed down on me to keep me from launching myself into Papa’s arms. I remember the feeling that a shadow – maybe mine, though I wasn’t sure – was tiptoeing away from us and would never return.
Kissing Mama’s hands, Papa finally called me to him. He placed her fingertips over my eyes, then his own, whispering the Kaddish prayer in Hebrew.
Sometimes I can feel the weight of my mother’s touch on my eyelids. It is usually a comforting memory, but it can scare me, too, as if it meant the dead would always have too much power over me.
When Papa went with Nupi to fetch my sister from Kiran, I climbed up onto the bed and pulled Mama’s limp arm around my waist, hoping for her to wake up. At length, a tremor shook me, and I could no longer hear the din of the rain, though the shutters were open a crack and it was flooding everything in sight. The silence was one of expectancy, as if my head were concealed inside a glass jar that was about to shatter. The light dimmed around me.
“Don’t worry, Berekiah,” my mother suddenly whispered, using my father’s name. “Ti and Sofia have each other.”
When I snapped my head around to look at her, I clearly saw her lips sculpt the last two words. Or had I drifted to sleep for a moment and only dreamed it? Her eyes were still closed, after all.
I leaned over her face and touched her cool cheek. I was not frightened. I expected her to open her eyes any moment. “Mama,” I whispered, “it’s me. Wake up.”
My father came back into the room, cradling my sister, and I rushed up to him to tell him what had happened.
“That’s impossible,” he said, frowning dismissively.
Shame slithered through me and I dashed away, managing to break free of Nupi’s grip at the doorway. Papa called into the garden after me, his voice fraying with desperation, but I would not return. He searched around the wet hydrangea and hibiscus bushes, letting himself be soaked, his face twisted with fear. I watched him from the edge of a rice field, shivering, my bare feet buried in the mud, the water up to my knees. I told myself I hated him.
That evening, he apologized for not believing me and begged me never to run off again.
“If I lost you or your sister now, I couldn’t go on,” he confessed.
Before he covered his eyes with his hand, I caught a chilling glimpse of his lost look, so I came to him and pressed myself into his legs.
My father was tall and strong, with large, gentle hands. When he picked me up, I held his ears. It was a game we played, his cue to give an elephant honk through his make-believe trunk. That day, however, he sat me in his lap without a sound. He told me that Jews like us, and Hindus like Nupi and Kiran, believed that the soul of a dead person could cross a bridge back to life for a brief time – if there had been something left unsaid or undone. That was what I had seen Mama do. “Do you understand?” he asked.
I said I did, but the dark, musty odor of his distress made me feel threatened, and having his arms around me was all I cared about. He pressed his lips to my brow and asked me again what Mama had said. After I told him, he stood and pondered my reply.
“Whenever we’d go for a walk, she always had to rush back to get something she’d forgotten,” he reasoned. “This time, she needed to come back to reassure us.” He smiled at me gratefully. “It was lucky you were here with her and heard what she wanted to say, Ti. It must have comforted her.”
Why do children who’ve lost a parent always seem to believe they must take on responsibility for the living? I didn’t tell Papa what I was thinking: that he was wrong and that Mama meant for me to take care of my little sister from now on. She meant that even if she had spoken to me in a dream.
CHAPTER THREE
Sofia’s deep-set eyes were dark green and moist, like shadows on a deep lake, and from very near the moment my sister was born she would gaze at everything around her as if surprised by all existence. Nupi said her look of wonder was really secret vigilance, and after forty days, when it was safe for my sister to leave our house according to Jewish tradition, the old cook brought her to Jaidev, the holy man who cleaned wax from the inside of your ears with a thin wire, to find out who she’d been in a previous life.
I adored Jaidev because he had imploded cheeks and coils of matted hair falling to his waist. He was sitting like a Buddha when we approached, his sun-baked hands cupped on his bony knees. He was covered in hard white dust, since he rolled around in dry earth like an elephant to clean himself.
When his eyes opened through all that crust, they were alive with a secret black fire. “Nupi comes with Master Ti!” he exclaimed, holding out his hands to greet us.
“And who’s this little chapatti?” he asked, sticking out his tongue at the baby, which made her kick her arms and legs.
Knowing what was wanted of him, he accepted our coins, then spread Sofia’s fingers out like a starfish. Powder shook from his hair as he gave us a startled look. “A Brahmin!” he exclaimed.
Leaning down for a closer look, then disappearing into a trance, he discovered that she’d been a Hindu princess kidnapped by a Moslem caliph more than five hundred years before. “She was beautiful and very clever, and she was able to make her way home in the end,” he told us. Holding up his hand in a pose of teaching, he added, “But that is why your little Sofia is always looking around.” Nupi was pleased with this verdict and handed him an extra copper coin.
“And everyone loved her,” he called after us.
My father snorted when Nupi told him about Jaidev’s finding. He told our cook that the little girl looked around all the time because she was learning about everything outside herself – about big things like her need for sleep and cuddling, and tiny things, too, like the stickiness of rice squeezed in her fingers and the “odd beliefs of certain members of our household.”
Nupi huffed when he directed that last remark her way, and over the years to come she made ironic reference to her “odd beliefs” whenever she was proved right about some important matter or even a trifle. But I could tell that Papa’s criticism secretly pleased her, because it meant that he considered her part of our family.
What is outside of me is everything, and yet it comes right inside me when I look at it or touch it.
That’s what I guessed Sofia was thinking when she stared at the world, because that’s what I was thinking when I watched her, and I didn’t yet know the difference between her and me – not in any adult way, with clear borders around myself.
Sometimes she’d squeal with joy at seeing a finch take wing from the wooden railing on our verandah, or a thread-legged beetle skate over a puddle in the garden, and Papa said I’d been the same way. I loved my being like her, and I hugged that knowledge to me as tight as I could when I was lonely. Both of us were children of Mama and Papa and could never be anything else.
About eighteen months after Mama died, when Sofia was two, her interest shifted, and everything she saw and heard she wanted to put in her mouth.
One balmy evening while Papa was teaching me the constellations, I told her the stars were delicious and made believe I was eating them. She reached out just like me and folded them – the captured stars – into her mouth.
The eager pleasure of being imitated for the first time made me tingle, but I also felt unsure of myself, as though I did not yet know what to do with my power over my sister and perhaps would never know. Nupi surprised me by encouraging me to play this game with her. “At least I won’t have to hunt for anything but starlight to come squeezing out her little behind,” she laughed.
So many things I made for Sofia as she grew – twigs fashioned with string into stilt houses, stones piled high into ancient fortresses that she could send crashing down, papier-mâché crowns, swords, and hats. Shadow puppets of animals became my specialty, and I was very good at cutting them out from paper by the time I was seven. I wanted her to be strong and quick – and I probably wanted her to be a boy, too. I began tossing my leather ball to her before she could even walk, and once – with Papa’s dyes and sable brushes – I painted her face blue, like Krishna’s. I thought Nupi would be overjoyed, but she told me she’d prepare me as vindaloo if I ever did such a half-witted thing again. Nupi had the most intimidating eyes of anyone I’d ever met. The rest of her looked frail, and she only had two rickety yellow teeth on bottom and another three on top, but I’m sure she cultivated a crippled, withered look to surprise her victims. Her fingers may have had knobs at the joints that put her in agony when it rained, but her hands were like vises. No one dared cross her except Papa.
I learned all my local proverbs from Nupi. “Bhaanshira zari aayla” – “the rag has suddenly got a strand of silk” – she’d say in Konkani if Sofia or I got too big for our britches. “Every grain of sand on a beach has its place,” she’d tell us whenever I dared to question the value of a seemingly meaningless chore. Or if she gave us a good piece of news, she would add, “Though we all know that Kali will have her day,” since she was of the opinion that good times only tempted the Goddess of Destruction to gather up her sword. My favorite of her expressions, however, was, “The guardians of the dawn know the night better than anyone.” Nupi used it whenever my family faced hardship, and it generally meant that hope made us feel times of darkness more deeply. In that respect, it was very much like Only those who know sadness also know joy … Yet as I grew older, I also began to understand that she could use it to mean that people who protected others often faced the most danger.
Her great enemy was constipation, and she was always eating fennel seeds to make up for what she called her “demonic” bowels. She could talk about her discomfort for hours, describing in rigorous detail her efforts to produce a satisfying result. Sofia and I learned to deflect her by begging her to tell us stories about the gandharvas and apsaras, the Hindu sprites of the forest and rivers.
In the time of Rama, a sprite was born who could see into the future, and his name was Tiago …
Nupi always put Sofia and me in her winding tales. When I was much older, I realized it was because she wanted to make sure that we survived my mother’s death intact, that our lives – and stories – would continue into the future. I was devoted to her, and I adored listening to her delicate storytelling voice, but I secretly used to fear how she kept her vigilant eyes on me.
“We seem to overlook love when it comes to us from the most obvious places,” Papa once told me when I was irritated with Nupi, but I didn’t really understand what he meant until I was nearly an adult.
Unbeknownst to Nupi and my father, I used to carry my sister up the staircase from our courtyard onto our roof after a rainstorm, and we’d look across the rice fields – liquid mirrors in an emerald valley – being worked by women and children from Ramnath, the village nearest our house. We used to make believe we could see the ocean, twelve miles to the west. I’d talk to her about how Papa had taken a sailing ship from Constantinople to India before we were born. And before that, how his family had fled Portugal because King Manuel and other bad men didn’t want them to live freely as Jews.
