Sugar, Smoke, Song by Reema Rajbanshi

Author:Reema Rajbanshi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Hen Press

I wake like I never do, to a house flush with sun. All bone and gray hair beside me is Magic Mountain Woman, breath like a baby’s, opal hand warm against my chest. All night, she’d pressed her hand there, as if to heat up my heart, ground me in that solid bed. The precious thing about the old is their skin feels the way butterflies look. As I rub her loose skin over all her tiny joints, I feel like I’m lying under my mother’s hand. Or Anju’s.

But I’m a mover rather than a keeper, so I slip my feet to the cool earth floor. As I cross the threshold, I know I’m a lucky girl to be befriended by strangers.

Yesterday’s road pierces the hill like a lifeline headed somewhere, so I trek the way I came, whistling all my mother left me, tunes Anju had muted herself to hear. Assamese la-las about Old Man River, the first blossoming tree, a daughter returning home. No one sings back—not a peep even from the camp, bundles asleep by the smoking pyres. Except for Galego, who’s rocking and groaning under a blanket with Redhead. Good for her—and me, I guess.

I corkscrew downhill so robustly, even if it ends in a nothing-town, where folks set off for money-making vistas. Lonely cities of noise, sertões of thirsty poets, even jungles of Indians who may not look like me. I cross drying streams, I trespass rickety-gated farms, I backpack along a pink trail I hardly remember . . . this angle over the carnival plaza . . . that view of peito da moça . . . to the lowest slope of slippery terrace steps.

“Kabita!” someone says. Sneakers skid the last steps, then the grin from last night’s coffee, then a blond ponytail. José: all of him and him alone.

He pants. “Mamae said you’d either burn down the hill or yourself.”

“Fire wants water,” I say. I lift the flask strung around his neck, and he slips pão com queijo out his pocket. Plopping in mud under ten o’clock sun, we crunch and suck crumbs off finger after finger.

José rests back on his elbows. “The rains ruined the crop. Most folks left for the city.”

“She raised chickens,” I say.

He turns onto his stomach and squints at me. “Even so.”

I heave myself up into heat buzzing with birds, bees, and God knows what else. “I have to try.”

“Then why,” José says, re-climbing the terrace steps, “are you going the wrong way?”

We walk again up the hill, on the terraced pink path that seems worn now and watchful. Flanked by Bible boulders, the tiniest birds zipping between bushes, how old is this road really?

The first time I’d spotted a hummingbird, I could’ve touched the fleshed jewel, darting about a red hibiscus by my ear.

“Beija-flor,” Anju said. “Our most precious thing.”

This was the first real sentence she’d spoken, and I stood mute till the kiss-flower flashed away.

We’d hiked on, four hours for a waterfall she said she could feel.

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