作品选读
(excerpt)
The next day, Monday, instead of getting a ride home with Fran—Fran says she likes to give rides, she needs the chance to talk, and she won’t share gas expenses, absolutely not—Maya goes to the periodicals room of the library. There are newspapers from everywhere, even from Madagascar and New Caledonia. She thinks of the periodicals room as an asylum for homesick aliens. There are two aliens already in the room, both Orientals, both absorbed in the politics and gossip of their far off homes.
She goes straight to the newspapers from India. She bunches her raincoat like a bolster to make herself more comfortable. There’s so much to catch up on. A village headman, a known Congress-Indira party worker, has been shot at by scooter-riding snipers. An Indian pugilist has won an international medal—in Nepal. A child drawing well water—the reporter calls the child “a neo-Buddhist, a convert from the now-outlawed untouchable caste”—has been stoned. An editorial explains that the story about stoning is not a story about caste but about failed idealism; a story about promises of green fields and clean, potable water broken, a story about bribes paid and wells not dug. But no, thinks Maya, it’s about caste.
Out here, in the heartland of the new world, the India of serious newspapers unsettles. Maya longs again to feel what she had felt in the Chatterjis’ living room: virtues made physical. It is a familiar feeling, a longing. Had a suitable man presented himself in the reading room at that instant, she would have seduced him. She goes on to the stack of India Abroads, reads through matrimonial columns, and steals an issue to take home.
Indian men want Indian brides. Married Indian men want Indian mistresses. All over America, “handsome, tall, fair” engineers, doctors, data processors—the new pioneers—cry their eerie love calls.
Maya runs a finger down the first column; her finger tip, dark with newsprint, stops at random.
Hello! Hi! Yes, you are the one I’m looking for. You are the new emancipated Indo-American woman. You have a zest for life. You are at ease in USA and yet your ethics are rooted in Indian tradition. The man of your dreams has come. Yours truly is handsome, ear-nose-throat specialist, well-settled in Connecticut. Age is 41 but never married, physically fit, sportsmanly, and strong. I adore idealism, poetry, beauty. I abhor smugness, passivity, caste system. Write with recent photo. Better still, call!!!
Maya calls. Hullo, hullo, hullo! She hears immigrant lovers cry in crowded shopping malls. Yes, you who are at ease in both worlds, you are the one. She feels she has a fair chance.
A man answers. “Ashoke Mehta speaking.”
She speaks quickly into the bright-red mouthpiece of her telephone. He will be in Chicago, in transit, passing through O’Hare. United counter, Saturday, two p.m. As easy as that.
“Good,” Ashoke Mehta says. “For these encounters I, too, prefer a neutral zone.”
On Saturday at exactly two o’clock the man of Maya’s dreams floats toward her as lovers used to in shampoo commercials. The United counter is a loud, harassed place but passengers and piled-up luggage fall away from him. Full-cheeked and fleshy-lipped, he is handsome. He hasn’t lied. He is serene, assured, a Hindu ... touching down in Illinois.
She can’t move. She feels ugly and unworthy. Her adult life no longer seems miraculously rebellious; it is grim, it is perverse. She has accomplished nothing. She has changed her citizenship but she hasn’t broken through into the light, the vigor, the hustle of the New World. She is stuck in dead space.
“Hullo, hullo!” Their fingers touch.
Oh, the excitement! Ashoke Mehta’s palm feels so right in the small of her back. Hullo, hullo, hullo. He pushes her out of the reach of anti-Khomeini Iranians, Hare Krishnas, American Fascists, men with fierce wants, and guides her to an empty gate. They have less than an hour.
“What would you like, Maya?”
She knows he can read her mind, she knows her thoughts are open to him. You, she’s almost giddy with the thought, with simple desire. “From the snack bar,” he says, as though to clarify. “I’m afraid I’m starved.”
Below them, where the light is strong and hurtful, a Boeing is being serviced. “Nothing,” she says.
He leans forward. She can feel the nap of his scarf—she recognizes the Cambridge colors—she can smell the wool of his Icelandic sweater. She runs her hand along the scarf, then against the flesh of his neck. “Only the impulsive ones call,” he says.
The immigrant courtship proceeds. It’s easy, he’s good with facts. He knows how to come across to a stranger who may end up a lover, a spouse. He makes over a hundred thousand. He owns a house in Hartford, and two income properties in Newark. He plays the market but he’s cautious. He’s good at badminton but plays handball to keep in shape. He watches all the sports on television. Last August he visited Copenhagen, Helsinki and Leningrad. Once upon a time he collected stamps but now he doesn’t have hobbies, except for reading. He counts himself an intellectual, he spends too much on books. Ludlum, Forsyth, Maclnnes; other names she doesn’t catch. She suppresses a smile, she’s told him only she’s a graduate student. He’s not without his vices. He’s a spender, not a saver. He’s a sensualist: good food—all foods, but easy on the Indian—good wine. Some temptations he doesn’t try to resist.
And I, she wants to ask, do I tempt?
“Now tell me about yourself, Maya.” He makes it easy for her. “Have you ever been in love?”
“No.”
“But many have loved you, I can see that.” He says it not unkindly. It is the fate of women like her, and men like him. Their karmic duty, to be loved. It is expected, not judged. She feels he can see them all, the sad parade of need and demand. This isn’t the time to reveal all.
And so the courtship enters a second phase.
When she gets back to Cedar Falls, Ted Suminski is standing on the front porch. It’s late at night, chilly. He is wearing a down vest. She’s never seen him on the porch. In fact there’s no chair to sit on. He looks chilled through. He’s waited around a while.
“Hi.” She has her keys ready. This isn’t the night to offer the sixpack in the fridge. He looks expectant, ready to pounce.
“Hi.” He looks like a man who might have aimed the dart at her. What has he done to his wife, his kids? Why isn’t there at least a dog? “Say, I left a note upstairs.”
The note is written in Magic Marker and thumb-tacked to her apartment door. DUE TO PERSONAL REASONS, NAMELY REMARRIAGE, I REQUEST THAT YOU VACATE MY PLACE AT THE END OF THE SEMESTER.
Maya takes the note down and retacks it to the kitchen wall. The whole wall is like a bulletin board, made of some new, crumbly building-material. Her kitchen, Ted Suminski had told her, was once a child’s bedroom. Suminski in love: the idea stuns her. She has misread her landlord. The dart at her window speaks of no twisted fantasy. The landlord wants the tenant out.
She gets a glass out of the kitchen cabinet, gets out a tray of ice, pours herself a shot of Fran’s bourbon. She is happy for Ted Suminski. She is. She wants to tell someone how moved she’d been by Mrs. Chatterji’s singing. How she’d felt in O’Hare, even about Dr. Rab Chatterji in the car. But Fran is not the person. No one she’s ever met is the person. She can’t talk about the dead space she lives in. She wishes Ashoke Mehta would call. Right now.
Weeks pass. Then two months. She finds a new room, signs another lease. Her new landlord calls himself Fred. He has no arms, but he helps her move her things. He drives between Ted Suminski’s place and his twice in his station wagon. He uses his toes the way Maya uses her fingers. He likes to do things. He pushes garbage sacks full of Maya’s clothes up the stairs.
“It’s all right to stare,” Fred says. “Hell, I would.”
That first afternoon in Fred’s rooming house, they share a Chianti. Fred wants to cook her pork chops but he’s a little shy about Indians and meat. Is it beef, or pork? Or any meat? She says it’s okay, any meat, but not tonight. He has an ex-wife in Des Moines, two kids in Portland, Oregon. The kids are both normal; he’s the only freak in the family. But he’s self-reliant. He shops in the supermarket like anyone else, he carries out the garbage, shovels the snow off the sidewalk. He needs Maya’s help with one thing. Just one thing. The box of Tide is a bit too heavy to manage. Could she get him the giant size every so often and leave it in the basement?
The dead space need not suffocate. Over the months, Fred and she will settle into companionship. She has never slept with a man without arms. Two wounded people, he will joke during their nightly contortions. It will shock her, this assumed equivalence with a man so strikingly deficient. She knows she is strange, and lonely, but being Indian is not the same, she would have thought, as being a freak.
One night in spring, Fred’s phone rings. “Ashoke Mehta speaking.” None of this “do you remember me?” nonsense. The ... has tracked her down. He hasn’t forgotten. “Hullo,” he says, in their special way. And because she doesn’t answer back, “Hullo, hullo, hullo.” She is aware of Fred in the back of the room. He is lighting a cigarette with his toes.
“Yes,” she says, “I remember.”
“I had to take care of a problem,” Ashoke Mehta says. “You know that I have my vices. That time at O’Hare I was honest with you.”
She is breathless.
“Who is it, May?” asks Fred.
“You also have a problem,” says the voice. His laugh echoes. “You will come to Hartford, I know.”
When she moves out, she tells herself, it will not be the end of Fred’s world.
(excerpt)
In the mind’s eye, a one-way procession of flickering oil lamps sways along the muddy shanko between rice paddies and flooded ponds, and finally disappears into a distant wall of impenetrable jungle. Banks of fog rise from warmer waters, mingle with smoke from the cooking fires, and press in a dense sooty collar, a permeable gray wall that parts, then seals, igniting a winter chorus of retching coughs and loud spitting. Tuberculosis is everywhere. The air, the water, the soil are septic. Thirty-five years is a long life. Smog obscures the moon and dims the man-made light to faintness deeper than the stars’. In such darkness perspective disappears. It is a two-dimensional world impossible to penetrate. But for the intimacy of shared discomfort, it is difficult even to estimate the space separating each traveler.
The narrow, raised trail stretches ten miles from Mishtigunj town to the jungle’s edge. In a palanquin borne by four servants sit a rich man’s three daughters, the youngest dressed in her bridal sari, her little hands painted with red lac dye, her hair oiled and set. Her arms are heavy with dowry gold; bangles ring tiny arms from wrist to shoulder. Childish voices chant a song, hands clap, gold bracelets tinkle. I cannot imagine the loneliness of this child. A Bengali girl’s happiest night is about to become her lifetime imprisonment. It seems all the sorrow of history, all that is unjust in society and cruel in religion has settled on her. Even constructing it from the merest scraps of family memory fills me with rage and bitterness.
The bride-to-be whispers the “Tush Tusli Brata,” a hymn to the sacredness of marriage, a petition for a kind and generous husband:
What do I hope for in worshipping you? That my father’s wisdom be endless. My mother’s kindness bottomless. May my husband be as powerful as a king of .... May my future son-in-law light up the royal court. Bestow on me a brother who is learned and intellectual, A son as handsome as the best-looking courtier. And a daughter who is beauteous. Let my hair-part glow red with vermilion powder, as a wife’s should. On my wrists and arms, let bangles glitter and jangle. Load down my clothes-rack with the finest saris. Fill my kitchen with scoured-shiny utensils. Reward my wifely virtue with a rice-filled granary. These are the boons that this young virgin begs of thee.
In a second, larger palki borne by four men sit the family priest and the father of the bride. Younger uncles and cousins follow in a vigilant file. Two more guards, sharp-bladed daos drawn, bring up the rear. Two servants walk ahead of the eight litter-bearers, holding naphtha lamps. No one has seen such brilliant European light, too strong to stare into, purer white than the moon. It is a town light, a rich man’s light, a light that knows English invention. If bandits are crouching in the gullies they will know to strike this reckless Hindu who announces his wealth with light and by arming his servants. What treasures lie inside, how much gold and jewels, what target ripe for kidnapping? The nearest town, where such a wealthy man must have come from, lies behind him. Only the jungle lies ahead. Even the woodcutters desert it at night, relinquishing it to goondahs and marauders, snakes and tigers.
The bride is named Tara Lata, a name we almost share. The name of the father is Jai Krishna Gangooly. Tara Lata is five years old and headed deep into the forest to marry a tree.
I have had the time, the motivation, and even the passion to undertake this history. When my friends, my child, or my sisters ask me why, I say I am exploring the making of a consciousness. Your consciousness? they tease, and I tell them, No. Yours.
On this night, flesh-and-blood emerges from the unretrievable past. I have Jai Krishna’s photo, I know the name of Jai Krishna’s father, but they have always been ghosts. But Tara Lata is not, nor will her father be, after the events of this special day. And so my history begins with a family wedding on the coldest, darkest night in the Bengali month of Paush—December/January—in a district of the Bengal Presidency that lies east of Calcutta—now Kolkata—and south of Dacca—now Dhaka—as the English year of 1879 is about to shed its final two digits, although the Hindu year of 1285 still has four months to run and the Muslim year of 1297 has barely begun.
(......)
And so, the story of the three great-granddaughters of Jai Krishna Gangooly starts on the day of a wedding, a few hours before the palki ride where fates have already been decided, in the decorated ancestral house of the Gangoolys on the river in Mishtigunj town. The decorations signify a biye-bari, a wedding house. Beggars have already camped in the alleys adjacent to the canopy under which giant copper vats of milk, stirred by professional cooks, have been boiling and thickening for sweet-meats, and where other vats, woks, and cauldrons receive the chunks of giant hilsa fish netted fresh from the river and hold the rice pilao, lamb curry, spiced lentils, and deep-fried and saucesteeped vegetables, a feast for a thousand invited guests and the small city of self-invited men, women, and children camped outside the gates.
The astrologers have spoken; the horoscopes have been compared. The match between Jai Krishna’s youngest daughter and a thirteen-year-old youth, another Kuhn Brahmin from an upright and pious family from a nearby village, has been blessed. The prewedding religious rites have been meticulously performed, and the prewedding stree-achar, married women’s rituals, boisterously observed. To protect the husband-to-be from poisonous snakebite, married women relatives and Brahmin women neighbors have propitiated ... Manasha with prescribed offerings. All of this has been undertaken at a moment in the evolution of Jai Krishna from student of Darwin and Bentham and Comte and practitioner of icy logic, to reader of the Upanishads and believer in Vedic wisdom. He had become a seeker of truth, not a synthesizer of cultures. He found himself starting arguments with pleaders and barristers, those who actually favored morning toast with marmalade, English suits, and leather shoes. Now nearing forty, he was in full flight from his younger self joining a debate that was to split bhadra lok society between progressives and traditionalists for over a century.
A Dacca barrister, Keshub Miner, teased him for behaving more like a once-rich Muslim nawab wedded to a fanciful past and visions of lost glory than an educated, middle-class Hindu lawyer. Everyone knew that the Indian past was a rubbish heap of shameful superstition. Keshub Miner’s insult would have been unforgivable if it hadn’t been delivered deftly, with a smile and a Bengali lawyer’s wit and charm. My dear Gangooly, English is but a stepping-stone to the deeper refinement of German and French. Where does our Bangla language lead you? A big frog in a small, stagnant pond. Let us leave the sweet euphony of Bangla to our poets, and the salvation-enhancement of Sanskrit to our priests. Packet boats delivered Berlin and Paris papers to the Dacca High Court, along with the venerated Times.
The cases Jai Krishna pleaded in court often cast him as the apostle of enlightenment and upholder of law against outmoded custom, or the adjudicator of outrages undefined and unimaginable under British law. The majesty of law was in conflict with Jai Krishna’s search for an uncorrupted, un-British, un-Muslim, fully Hindu consciousness. He removed his wife and children from cosmopolitan Dacca and installed them in Mishtigunj. He sought a purer life for himself, English pleader by day, Sanskrit scholar by night. He regretted the lack of a rigorous Brahminical upbringing, the years spent in Calcutta learning the superior ways of arrogant Englishmen and English laws, ingesting English contempt for his background and ridicule for babus like him. He had grown up in a secularized home with frequent Muslim visitors and the occasional wayward Englishman. In consideration of nonHindu guests, his father had made certain that his mother’s brass deities and stone lingams stayed confined in the closed-off worship-room.
On the morning of Tara Lata’s wedding, female relatives waited along the riverbank for the arrival of the groom and his all-male wedding party. The groom was Satindranath Lahiri, fifth son of Surendranath Lahiri, of the landowning Lahiri family; in his own right, a healthy youth, whose astrological signs pointed to continued wealth and many sons. Back in Dacca, Jai Krishna had defended the ancient Hindu practices, the caste consciousness, the star charts, the observance of auspicious days, the giving of a dowry, the intact integrity of his community’s rituals. His colleague, Keshub Miner, to be known two decades later as Sir Keshub, and his physician, Dr. Ashim Lai Roy, both prominent members of the most progressive, most Westernized segment of Bengali society, the Brahmo Samaj, had attempted to dissuade him. The two men had cited example after example of astrologically arranged marriages, full of astral promise, turning disastrous. The only worthwhile dowry, they’d proclaimed, is an educated bride. Child-marriage is barbarous. How could horoscopes influence lives, especially obscure lives, in dusty villages like Mishtigunj? Jai Krishna knew these men to be eaters of beef and drinkers of gin.
“I consider myself a student of modern science,” Jai Krishna had explained, “and because I am a student of modern science, I cannot reject any theory until I test it.” And so far, the tests had all turned out positive. His two older daughters, seven and nine, were successfully married and would soon be moving to their husbands’ houses and living as wives, then as mothers. They were placid and obedient daughters who would make loving and obedient wives. Tara Lata, his favorite, would be no exception.
In the wintry bright hour just before twilight blackens Mishtigunj, the decorated bajra from the Lahiri family finally sailed into view. The bride’s female relatives stood at the stone bathing-steps leading from the steep bank down to the river as servants prepared to help the groom’s party of two hundred disembark. Women began the oo-loo ululation, the almost instrumental, pitched-voice welcome. Two of Jai Krishna’s younger brothers supervised the unrolling of mats on the swampy path that connected the private dock and Jai Krishna’s two-storied brick house.
The bajra anchored, but none on board rushed to the deck railings to be ceremoniously greeted by the welcoming party of the bride’s relatives. The bridegroom’s father and uncles had a servant deliver a cruel message in an insulting tone to the bride’s father. They would not disembark on Jai Krishna’s property for Jai Krishna and his entire clan were carriers of a curse, and that curse, thanks to Jai Krishna’s home-destroying, misfortune-showering daughter, had been visited on their sinless son instead of on Jai Krishna’s flesh-and-blood. They demanded that Jai Krishna meet them in the sheltered cabin of the bajra.
Jai Krishna ordered the wedding musicians to stop their shenai playing and dhol beating. His women relatives, shocked at the tone in which the servant repeated his master’s message to Jai Krishna babu, the renowned Dacca lawyer, had given up their conch shell blowing and their ululating on their own. For several minutes, Jai Krishna stood still on the bathing-steps, trying to conceal at first his bewilderment, then his fury, that the man who was to have full patriarchal authority over his beloved daughter had called her names. Then he heard a bullying voice from inside the cabin yell instructions to the boatmen to pull up anchor.
“They’re bargaining for more dowry,” muttered one of Jai Krishna’s brothers.
“No beggar is as greedy as that Lahiri bastard!” spat another brother.
Two boatmen played at reeling in ropes and readying the bajra to sail back.
作者简介
比娜·谢里夫 (Bina Sharif,1940—),美国巴基斯坦裔作家、诗人、导演,出生于巴基斯坦的利亚尔普尔(Lyallpur)(现为费萨拉巴德,Faisalabad)。在巴基斯坦拉合尔的法蒂玛·真纳医科大学(Fatima Jinnah Medical University)获得医学学士学位。在美国约翰·霍普金斯大学(Johns Hopkins University)获得了公共卫生硕士学位,但随后结束了她的医学生涯,转向对写作和戏剧的强烈追求。
谢里夫有24部戏剧在美国、欧洲各国和巴基斯坦演出。“9·11”事件之后,她创作的剧作涉及恐怖主义和战争等主题,包括《伊斯兰教的民主》(Democracy in Islam)、《穆斯林的闪光》(Muslim Glitter)、《伊克拉共和国》(Republic of Iqra)、《为什么》(Why?)和《变化来了》(Here Comes the Change)等,这些剧作都曾在纽约新城剧院(Theatre for the New City in New York)上演。谢里夫不仅写作,而且还是演员、导演。她曾在多部电影中担任角色,如詹姆斯·艾弗里导演的《侧街》(Side Streets)和威廉·弗里德金导演的《吉普赛人之王》(King of the Gypsies)等。
谢里夫因其作品获得了众多奖项和资助,包括芝加哥古德曼剧院(Chicago’s Goodman Theatre)的约瑟夫·杰斐逊奖(Joseph Jefferson Award)提名、爱丁堡戏剧节艺穗节奖(Pick of the Fringe Award of the Edinburgh Theater Festival)以及纽约州委员会(New York State Council)艺术项目、富兰克林基金会新兴剧作家(Franklin Foundation Emerging Playwright)及杰罗姆基金会(Jerome Foundation)的资助。
《我的祖先的房子》(My Ancestor’s House,1996)是一部两幕家庭剧,收录在《有色人种女性的当代戏剧:一部选集》(Contemporary Plays by Women of Color: An Anthology,1996)中。2000年11月在美国亚裔作家工作坊(Asian American Writers’ Workshop)上演。这部剧讲述了一个解体的巴基斯坦家庭的故事。围绕移民女儿因母亲的重病而“回家”展开。选段部分出自《我的祖先的房子》的第一幕。宾迪雅(Bindia)因为母亲生病住院从美国回到了巴基斯坦,但家庭的对抗和指责让她觉得无所适从。归属感的缺失让宾迪雅觉得她没有权利在任何地方占有任何空间。