Queen of Dreams by Divakaruni Chitra Banerjee

Author:Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee [Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T08:00:00+00:00

23

They sit at the dining table late into the night, father and daughter, compiling lists, trying out ideas. Through their excitement they are dimly aware that this is a first-ever event. Before this, all their interactions took place in the presence of the mother, through her, as it were. She was their conductor, their buffer zone, their translator. She softened the combative edges of their words and clarified their questions, even to themselves. I’ll take care of it, she whispered without words. Don’t you worry. It was like making sounds underwater, the daughter thinks. Soft, rounded, beautiful, ineffective. Now that aquatic mother-medium is gone, taking all comfort with it, and her own words startle her, arrowing through the air with their new, harsh speed.

They have decided to transform the Chai House into an Indian snack shop, a chaer dokan, as it would be called in Calcutta. They’re going to model it after the shop the father worked in so many years ago, with a few American sanitary touches thrown in. He’ll teach Belle and her to brew tea and coffee the right way, and he’ll cook the snacks himself. He lists them on a sheet of paper: pakora, singara, sandesh, jilebi, beguni, nimki, mihidana. The daughter stares at the list in fascinated misgiving. She doesn’t recognize half the names, has tasted the others only occasionally. Can her father really transform himself into a chef extraordinaire and turn out these items from the mundaneness of flour and sugar syrup, chili, eggplants, peanut oil? Is he heroic enough to take on such a metamorphosis? But she doesn’t wish to lose this brief moment of camaraderie, this floating together on the cloud of their shared dream. So she says, instead, “Tell me about the shop where you worked.” And is plunged into her first Indian story.

I was only fourteen, he says, when my father lost his job. This was a great blow for our family, for though his job as a clerk in a government office was nothing special, it was the only income we had. Added to the problem was the fact that my father had developed a hacking cough—folks feared it was tuberculosis—and it kept him from finding a new position. He was always tired. The doctor advised us to move him to a place with cool, dry weather, Deoghar maybe, or Hazaribagh.

I remember that day in the doctor’s office, my mother, embarrassed, whispering that we couldn’t afford such an expensive move. The doctor, a young man, was sympathetic. My mother was a beautiful woman. I would soon learn that most men were sympathetic to her. He told her he’d give her the medicines for free. But my father needed more: clean air and bed rest and an ongoing, expensive diet of chicken soup and fresh fruit—things the doctor couldn’t do much about. Nor could we. We could barely afford a basic meal of watery rice and chilies. Every night for a year my mother and I went to bed hungry so my father could have more to eat.

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