clarifying the great matter of ghee
Saturday 5 July 2008 | 2 cookies in the jar
Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the
Most beautiful thing in the world,
A limited, limiting clarity
I have not and never did have any
Motive of poetry
But to achieve clarity.
—George Oppen
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In the mornings, before tar street-surfaces start to bubble, our modem light flickers green. Avec vitesse! Con brio! Post like the wind!
After a long day of assaulting cupboards and closets, the Brujo and I left many boxes and bags of castoffs at Cursie’s thrift store last night, after we ate enormously at a Punjabi dhaba place that’s opened right around the corner. Indian food still has complicated emotional effects on me, as I find myself ordering with a pretentious Hindi accent, lots of “ji”s, and too many anecdotes beginning, “There was this one time….” Fortunately it’s also devastating to my digestive system (no matter how much I plead with the waiter that the cooks tone down the spices) (the Physicist’s mother was the same way, always telling me proudly that her subzii was “very mild” and feeding rice-balls of it to my baby nephews; then of course I’d taste it and it’d be blistering) so I don’t have it very often. When I do, I must ameliorate its effects with lots of raita and as much naan as I can manage to wrap around the aloo. The B., on the other hand, who always orders his green curry “Thai hot,” has had trouble finding vindaloo which is scorching enough for his satisfaction. Last night’s apparently approached the requisite heat; anyway, he’s in the living room right now plunking contentedly on his tabla, and we both slept like the dead.
The neighborhood dhaba is a well-appointed little joint, with ceiling fans, fancy bronze-edged tableware, lime-green paper napkins and a phone book of a menu (featuring that Yiddishesque rhyming slang I find so unbearably cute, “Chit Chaat” and “Roti Shoti”—how I could never hear Rushdie until a Pakistani college friend, setting aside her normally impeccable Hong-Kong-schooled colonial British accent, read aloud to me from Haroun and the Sea of Stories, doing her best Bombay impression). Near the entrance, a lounge area with sprawling sofas and a set of tabla made us wonder if they have live music some nights. Last night, though, we were given the seat of honor: right in front of a widescreen TV featuring top-volume bhangra videos. I’m guessing they were Punjabi because I couldn’t recognize any words, and because they usually starred a handsome heavy-set sadarji (sort of like these fellows) mugging for an unimpressed young lady. The young ladies were awfully scantily clad, too, which I don’t think they could have gotten away with in Hindi. Sometimes the hero would have cropped hair and wear shiny black vinyl, but this didn’t seem to make any difference in how the young lady received him, which was still with lots of Ally McBeal eyerolls and scornful hair-flipping. Anyway the music was euphoric, the dancing was, per Mandarin, unbridled and the costumes were hi-fuckin-larious. I defy straight Western men to prance around thusly garbed, in fluorescent pajama pants and those turbans with the floppy crest on top (I think some kind of folk costume, but the effect is of unusually ebullient roosters). You can get the idea here and here, though I can’t find the exact DVD our hosts were playing.
And many hosts there were, also in keeping with my previous dhaba experiences, all tending to us solicitously (and covertly watching me eat with my fingers). The same college friend could make those tiny rice-balls with her daal; I loved to see her curl her legs up underneath herself and polish off her dinner as neatly as a cat. The papad was fresh and came with three chutneys, the mango lassi was served in bronze cups, and the kulfi was creamy and so cold it had mist curling off it. Or maybe it’s just hot in Tartarus.
But actually for once it wasn’t that hot; maybe in the high eighties, cool enough that we could stand comfortably in Gracie’s parking lot without breaking out into sweat, and watch the fireworks. Which is what we did. The fireworks are cautiously deployed over Tartarus’ vaunted town “lake,” a man-made [sic] labor involving giant rubber dams, which dams (made by Goodyear or Firestone, I believe) are already cracking due to the UNEXPECTED HIGH HEAT! dear God, we didn’t count on that—and the whole thing will probably go in the next few years, flooding our fair city with brackish boiling water. But that’s another story.
Fireworks always make me shiver, and think of strafing and tracer fire—I dunno, some weird past-life issue. The B. and I stood in a hot-weather, too-much-vindaloo approximation of having our arms around each other, as a drunk guy staggered out of the alleyway and into a nearby stand of palo verde trees, presumably to pee. We watched the coruscating spheres.
“Which do we first, see the colors or hear the booms?” [guess who's asking....]
“Well, which travels faster?”
“Oh. Light. Yeah.” [stupefying effects of kulfi]
“Welp, this is our third Fourth of July.”
“José can you see? And just think, your fellow alumnus wrote that!”
“Only the words. The melody is from an old British drinking song.”
I’d never heard this fact before but it made complete sense to me; intoxicated eighteenth-century university men, staggering from high table with interlocked elbows, pausing in the gateway to bellow the phrase we sing to and the rockets’ red glare. “Of course it is! And it has that, that bombastic ritardando at the end, bespeaking a certain degree of inebriation. It’s all, I love you, man! No really, I really do.”
As we drove the block from Cursie’s to our house, in the rearview mirror I could see Peeing Guy shuffling over to the castoffs, preparing to go through them. “There’s not really anything useful in there—he’s mostly going to find women’s clothing.”
“Maybe that’s fine with him.”
We pulled into the driveway, having deteriorated into our own tuneless version of the Monty Python lumberjack song. The B. took Finny into the backyard for her own micturations while I faced down the one box remaining. Sighed, got a knife, and slit open the tape. Finny’s nose appeared over the edge, huffling curiously.
“What’s all that, then?” asked the Brujo, locking the door for the night.
“Salwar kameez,” I answered, holding up the hand-beaded purple number, which I wore exactly once (at that last Thanksgiving dinner in Chicago, endless indigestible puris and too much eye makeup, the Physicist’s mum and auntie giggling in Punjabi like little girls, the rest of us sitting around the table smiling blankly, unable to understand a word but just happy that she was enjoying what would be her last visit to her family in the States. Her pixie haircut, which I tried to assure her was très chic, the chemo nausea, ulti alti hai, sickness rising is, does alti share the Indo-European root for altitude? Etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.). The matching purple dupatta is about twelve feet long, encrusted with tiny rainbow-colored beads that snag on everything. Mrs. Physicist (I always called his mother by her last name, never being invited to address her any other way) had them custom-made for me on her annual trips to Delhi; she called them, pragmatically, “suits,” and somehow had managed to describe my shape and size to the seamstresses in such a way that all five fit me with uncanny exactness. By “me” I mean, of course, the anorectic breastless hipless me; who knows whether they’d fit now. I wasn’t about to try them on. Underneath the yards of fabric were some smaller boxes of similarly gifted, unwearably elaborate jewelry; various polyester chiffon scarves; an organic St. Dalfour green tea bag, and a magazine article about The West Wing. And a partially torn-open packet of photographs. I could see my own face smirking out at me.
And herein, fair reader, lies the greatest peril of clarifying—that encounter with ephemera which, if you’re me, you find absolutely assaultive. Rumination cannot lance it, only time and the slow creep of stupid indifference. Pictures can be particularly deadly, worse than letters; the Physicist always photographs as the sweetest-faced innocent, his big fringed Punjabi eyes filled with plaintive bafflement, how did this happen to me? And my heart lurches in and out of my chest with a sickening swoosh that sounds like I did it, I did it, I did it. I’d meant to send this box to London, thinking Mrs. Physicist intended these things not for me but for his wife; when he remarries, hopefully someone more loyal and less likely to skip out when hyperverbal twentysomething Zen monks come along. There we are in Santa Fe the day we signed our marriage certificate, his face shuttered and twisted with aversion, mine with thwarted grasping—
Or somehow that’s what I’ve always thought, that’s been my story about the pictures—an exquisitely fragile theoretical scientist shattered by his inexplicable, fiery encounter with a pigheaded, selfish, demanding then rejecting poet. I flip through the pictures now and see that the way they’ve looked in my head aren’t actually the way they are in reality, that day up at the stupa, when we didn’t have the wedding I’d wanted. (With a lot of effort, I excise the word “petulantly” from that sentence. Is it petulant to want a wedding? It is perhaps petulant to want it so badly you ignore your future husband’s wishes in the matter, and drag him kicking and screaming into matrimony.) We don’t look at all tortured or dramatic. If anything we just look tired from staying up all night fighting; and we look freakishly young.
I think about it—if I was thirty when we married, he must have been in his late twenties. Not, in fact, that much older than the Monk. Can you “make” someone marry you if they don’t want to? Is that even possible? Can I continue to blame myself for leaving someone who wasn’t completely there in the marriage to begin with—who could only barely manage to articulate, years later when we were cleaning out the storage unit together, “I still love you, you know—I mean, in the man-woman way”? Half-laughing at himself, knowing he sounded more than ever like (his favorite self-accusation) Mr. Stevens from Remains of the Day. Breaking my heart all over again. I turned from another pile of dusty boxes and hugged him carefully, not knowing whether to laugh myself, or sob. I know, darling, I know you do—
Clarity has its price. For a time, when we were first separated, the Physicist spent his lonely evenings with the Modernists, who shared with him their pizza and sympathy. I was grateful that he had their friendship, and more than willing to remain outside our former foursome and cede the space. How could you do this, you don’t see him every night the way we do, broken at our dining table, accused the Modernist. Don’t tell me what I see and don’t see, I shot back; I have to function every day, saturated with the knowledge of what I’ve done. But how could I know what he suffered? For, contra Slick Willie, you can’t ever really feel someone else’s pain—
The Brujo pads in and interrupts this pointless train of non-thought, pleased with what he has wrought. “Search for ‘tabla’ on craigslist!”
“You’re selling them?” Suddenly I know what I should do with the remaining box. What kind of new lover wants the ex-wife’s old clothes? Would I? Why am I even bothering typing in that question?
And now I must flog some salwar kameez, before the heat goes over a hundred and teh Interwebs melts. I hear the Brujo briskly answering email in his office, efficiently percussive two-fingered typist. Our DSL goes unrepaired, the phone company doesn’t call us back, and we investigate WiFi and cable modem options, about which we are ignorant.
This post has had too many adverbs, as usual, and isn’t particularly humorous. It also doesn’t really have an ending, other than this proffered cool lima bean: my favorite cheesy-as-hell bhangra video ever, from Rang de Basanti. I’m not sure why Amir Khan philosophically addresses a cow during the middle of it, but he probably has some deeper message about political unity, though even with my patchy Hindi I can understand when his mum interrupts to tell him to milk the damn cow. Oh, and my second-favorite cheesy Amir Khan video—here amusingly translated into French—from Lagaan, a movie which will teach you the rules of cricket for once and for all, whether you want to know them or not (snice the last hour of it is a three-day match practically shot in real time).
Marchons, marchons! Or chale, chalo. And try not to look back too often.
2 cookies in the jar
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Oh, for months husband and older sons giggled and guffawed at bhangra videos which had been homophonically transcribed in English: thus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA1NoOOoaNw and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fSpI4oZoDc not to mention the Indian version of “Thriller”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtJRNyPK-lc
Surely I’ve told you that there existed in my post-divorce head for many years this narrative about my selfishness, immaturity, and the poor victim that my ex-husband was, and that one of the kindest gifts anybody ever gave me was a re-tooling of this narrative from a friend who knew me at the time of dating and dropping out of the Great Books School to marry the man, which, if it didn’t entirely absolve me reminded me that there were other versions of the story. (Reminds me to ask: Do I watch Lagaan or Rashomon tonight? )
If your DSL issues are not soon resolved, I may have to resort to drastic, telephonic measures….
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Editor: Well, Lagaan is like three and a half hours long, but it’s a hoot; whereas Rashomon just seems interminable, and interminably beautiful; and is Not a Hoot.
Or you could call my cell instead! ;o)
While still in high school I had a particularly awful break-up with my first love that involved a lot of heartbreak and an aborted teen pregnancy. About a year later, while still suffering, I decided to make a ritual bonfire of all the photos, letters, gifts and ephemera I had collected over the course of the relationship. (what a box of memories that would be to me now) Far from being the cathartic episode I had hoped it had the opposite effect of freezing in time all the memories of those events. For me, I suppose memories are like sentences in a conversation, which if not carefully attended, are usually taken out of context when reexamined. Years of tears later I finally realized that there was some possibility that, however painful those events might have been, I might be responsible for making them seem worse, and that it was time to let them go.
I don’t have to live there any more, and I can make the time and place of my revisiting them one of my own choosing. Thank you for this post.