July 2006

In July, the first reading of Rhapsody took place. On the ticked we had Andrew Boyd, Stephen Duncombe, Matty Vaz, Mark Read, Keith Miller, Lanna Joffrey, and Honor Molloy. Here is what they read, out LOUD.

MATTY VAZ:

Coney Island Beer Hustle

“We got cold Coronas! We got Cold Heineken! We got whatever you need out here! Ice cold!” is the chant that permeates the air above the sand along Coney Island and Brighton Beach. For decades, beach goers have relied on an army of beach venders to supply them with beer, water, pretzels, icees, cotton-candy, and anything else that can be carried through the sand. Unlicensed vending has recently become a controversial issue, as Manhattan retail store owners have asserted that the police must clear the sidewalks of venders. Yet on the beach at Coney Island, both shuffling venders and sun-tanning customers agree that vending on the beach is honest work, which provides a much needed service. The businesses on the boardwalk complain that the venders take away their customers, yet on the day of the Mermaid Parade, Joey Clams, the manager of Gyro Corner, cannot count fast enough to keep up with the money being shoved into his hand. Although Mr. Clams is no power broker, the beach venders are at the bottom of the Coney Island corporate ladder, and every year, the police respond to pressure, and chase after the beach venders handing out summonses and desk appearance tickets.
As major real estate interests, even more powerful than Joey Clams, line up to capitalize on the hordes of people that are heading to Coney Island on hot summer weekends, the question of how Coney Island will, and should change, over the next decade is an important one for all Brooklyn residents to consider. Fourteen year old black youths, hustling across the sand selling beer, will certainly be the first to go if the Disney-fication and corporatization of Coney Island finally takes place. But Ferrone Malone, who has been vending on the beach for decades, has no plans of stopping.
“Everybody out here knows Ferrone Malone. I love this beach. The people out here are hot and thirsty. They need drinks. They need Ferrone Malone. Just say my name and I’m comin’. Ferrone Malone! It rhymes. The police? I love the police. They’re beautiful people. I got no complaints about the police. And they got no complaints with Ferrone Malone. They know Osama Bin Laden is not out on the beach. They know Ferrone Malone is not Osama Bin Laden. I’m just a man who likes to work hard. My grandfather put me in this business. That’s why we got these beautiful young kids out here,” he explains pointing to the two teenagers vending with him. “This is a family business. You know Stephon Marbury? That’s my cousin. He’s a beautiful person. Our family works out here.”
Mr. Malone is certainly not alone in the Coney Island community in claiming to be Mr. Marbury’s cousin. Yet another vendor who introduced himself as Allan was able to confirm Mr. Malone’s assertion. “Allan. Allan Houston. You don’t see the jersey man. Number twenty,” offers Mr. Houston as he smiles showing his three gold teeth. “I been out here since I was thirteen man. I’m thirty-three now. It’s a good way to make money. I work in a warehouse the rest of the week, and then I come out here on the weekend. A lot people in the projects do it. Surfside Gardens, Marboro projects, allover C.I.. Stephon Marbury used to be out here when he was a kid. His cousin Ferrone is out here right now. A couple families started this shit back in the day. It’ s a good way to stay out of trouble. Better than selling drugs right. You can make five hundred dollars in a day if its crowded out here. But that’s if you work like a dog. All day. Eleven until six at night. Break your back man. But you get your excercise on. Take a picture? Nah man I’m parole.”
William, sixteen years old, of Lincoln high School, Mr. Marbury’s alma mater, claims that his best day was three hundred dollars. But he concedes that this is only his second summer working on the beach. John of Marine Park, one of the few white venders on the beach, claims to have made nine hundred dollars on Labor Day of 1997. “That was the best day I ever saw. Labor day 97. But that’s not gonna happen everyday pal. Plus now you got more cops out here. You got more cops everywhere. But out here especially. I got fifteen tickets in ten years. A lot of times the judge throws ‘em out because he knows I’m just tryin’ to make a buck. But the whole thing is a pain in the ass. They should leave us alone. You can write that in your little newspaper. Get off my ass. You can tell ‘em I said that. John. John Freakin Doe. From Marine Park.” Neither William or Mr. Doe were able to confirm or deny that Allan Houston is on parole.
Another white vender, Sal of Midwood, has opted for the sunglasses hustle to make his living. “Look at these man. Louis Vitton, Gucci. Its all from Chinatown. I sell a box of these, I got four hundred dollars. And people pay. You got Russian gangsters out here. You got dope pushers, you got thousand dollar hookers. People with money. People who need sunglasses. The cops? They ain’t so bad. They’re too busy checkin’ out all the tits. Besides, they usually give white guys a break. They get the blacks and Mexicans. Look how many Mexicans are on the beach. Its twice as many from last year. They don’t even have shorts yet brother. They just got here yesterday. Don’t get me wrong. When you’re in Brighton Beach you’re in Russia. These Russians are out here all day. They don’t work. I been in New York all my life, and I never seen a Russian working. A store, a restauraunt, an office, a cop, a token booth clerk, you ever seen a Russian? Hey, but they seem to be doin’ just fine. Don’t ask don’t tell right? But on that side, see, you’re in Puerto Rico. On the Coney Island side. You got whole buildings, no, whole blocks from Sunset Park. They plant the Puerto Rican flag in the sand and then they spread out as far as the eye can see.”
Rodolfo, of Puebla Mexico, was able to confirm that he does not have shorts yet, as he has only been in New York for three months. He plans to get some soon, because the work of pushing an icee cart across the sand is difficult and strenuous work. He also confirms that he is simply happy to be alive, breathing the air and making money for food. Rodolfo’s vending services are greatly appreciated by the public. Evelise Santiago of Sunset Park, with a tattoo of her name above her left breast and another of a rose on her neck, explains that the venders are nice and the beer is cheap. Her mother, Gladys, also of Sunset Park, whose bathing suit allows a view of her c-section scar and whose nail tips feature the Puerto Rican flag, agrees that the venders are nice, and adds that the lines on the boardwalk are too long and the beer is too expensive.
The boardwalk is watched closely by officers Brennon and Jacobsen of the NYPD. They were able to confirm that Osama Bin Laden is not on the beach, and that Ferrone Malone is not Osama Bin Laden. Yet they denied any allegations of checking out tits. “We’re not here to give people a hard time. We’re here to show presence. We don’t want people to get hurt. The businesses on the boardwalk want us to crackdown on the beach venders, so we crack down a little. But we’re not looking to get these kids tripped up in the system. There’s a lot worse things they could be out there doing. We’re not immigration either. We just want people to be safe and have a good time.”
On Saturday June 25th, the day of the Mermaid Parade, most people are clearly doing just that. The hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers at the beach seem to enjoy Coney Island the way it is. Yet many are talking about dramatic changes in store. The Bloomberg administration has appointed the Coney Island Development Corporation, headed by Joshua Sirefmen, to shape the future of Brooklyn’s best beach. Thor Equities, one of nation’s largest mall developers has already begun buying up many of the hot dog and concession shacks in the area, including the building that houses Gyro Corner. Not even Joey Clams is safe. Times square provides the blueprint for how New York grit and grime can be sanitized and quickly replaced with family fun for tourists. Yet crime is not what it was, and perhaps Coney Island would do best by preserving its gritty charm. Before Bloomberg breaks ground on a freedom stadium out in the ocean just past the wave break, and before powerful mall developers can round up the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers on the beach, send them to Guantanamo, and replace them with heartland families and European tourists, Brooklyn residents must make their voices heard. As developers salivate, and proclaim that Coney Island is poised for a comeback, the people who know that it has been here all along, must fight to preserve the principal function of this rare location. Coney island forever has been, and forever must be, a source of recreation for working class New Yorkers, not another opportunity for chain restauraunts and corporations to gouge tourists for their money.
Many of us like this place the way it is. We got cold Coranas. We got cold Heinekens. Ice Cold! We got Ferrone Malone, Stephon Marbury, and Allan Houston on parole. We got Lincoln High School’s finest just tryin’ to make some money out here. We got John Freakin Doe. We got Russian gangsters, dope pushers, thousand dollar hookers, whole blocks, no whole buildings from Sunset Park. We got Mexicans with long pants planning on getting shorts just happy to be alive breathing the air. We got neck tattoos, C-section scars, and nail tips with the Puerto Rican flag. We got cops checking out tits, just trying to keep everybody safe, and Osama Bin laden is nowhere in sight.
This is Russia, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Surfside Gardens, Marboro Projects. We got whatever you need out here. This is Coney Island, Brooklyn New York City.




ANDREW BOYD:

RANT — Why I love and hate Adbusters!

I love Adbusters! I hate Adbusters! I love Adbusters! I hate Adbusters! Turning the pages of the glossy Vancouver quarterly, I'm like an obsessed teenager pulling petals out of a flower. I love Adbusters! I hate Adbusters! I love how they take the sly, slick, seductive genius of Madison Avenue and turn it back upon itself. I love the perfectly captured style and lettering of the Camel cigarettes ad showing a balding Joe Chemo in a hospital bed with an IV. I love how you have to look for a moment or two at the subtle soft-focus black and white image of the naked back of the kneeling woman in the Calvin Klein Obsession ad before you realize she's leaning over a toilet bowl puking. I love Adbusters! These "subvertisements" make me sooooooo fucking happy. Just seeing them, there in print, in this high-end glossy magazine, with their perfect touch and seamless production values, makes me feel as though I've personally kicked corporate America in the nuts. Like I've bitten off the head of some slimy conscienceless 300G's-a-year ad exec. I taste his blood in my mouth and I love Adbusters! But I turn another page, pull another petal, and I hate Adbusters! I hate how Kalle Lasn thinks he is God's gift to youth rebellion. How these anti-ads feel like a joyless puritanical crusade against smoking, drinking and fucking. (Which I like to do. Well, not the smoking part, but the other two, often at the same time.) It's all so monotonously one-note. The answer is always the same: Free yourself from the brand! Be your authentic un-branded self! What authentic un-branded self? Oh, but the staff at Adbusters has one in mind, because you see: Everybody else is caught in the lock-step media trance. Everybody else has been seduced into a hypnotic web of branded moments. But the staff at Adbusters—who eat and sleep and shit just like the rest of us, and watch TV and go to the fucking supermarket and buy branded products just like the rest of us, and admire the sleek lines of motorcycles and sports cars as they drive by just like the rest of us—somehow they've got a key to some mystical epiphany of freedom, a gateway to some pure, pre-capitalist state of authenticity and original grace where we don't consume, but just live. Helloooooo?! Could you people get your ostrich heads out from up inside your butts, and come back from the land of 1968? Utopia is over. There is no longer a true consciousness and a false consciousness. All of us, from the ultra-rad Adbusters reader to that devil incarnate—the average American SUV-driving leisurewear-wearing consumer—realize that the media is trying to seduce us. And—hellloooo?—we go ahead and (selectively) let it do this to us anyway. Why? Because it's fucking erotic and we're erotic and they're so good at it, and because we're mature and savvy enough to be consumers without betraying ourselves, thank you very much All of us—whether we read Adbusters, write for Adbusters or have never heard of the damn rag—are caught, and constructed and compromised in the same media swirl of bytes and brands and manufactured moments. And it's only from within this image soup that we can try to figure out who we are and what to do about it Everyday life is irredeemably mediated, including whatever attempt we make at authenticity. That's why they fucking invented post-modernism. In fact—and I'm wonderfully reminded of this as I turn another page—that's why they invented culture jamming. I love Adbusters!

STEPHEN DUNCOMBE:

Politics in an Age of Fantasy

In the autumn of 2004, shortly before the U. S. presidential election and in the middle of a typically bloody month in Iraq, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature article on the casualty of truth in the Bush administration. Like most Times articles it was well-written, well-researched, and thoroughly predictable. That George W. Bush is ill informed, doesn’t listen to dissenting opinion, and acts upon whatever nonsense he happens to believe is hardly news. (Even the fact that he once insisted that Sweden did not have an army and none of his cabinet dared contradict him was not all that surprising.) There was, however, one valuable insight. In a soon to be (in)famous passage, the writer, Ron Suskind, recounted a conversation between himself and an unnamed senior adviser to the president. The exchange went like this:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality.” I nodded and murmured something about Enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create reality. And while you are studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

It was clear how the Times felt about this peek into the political mind of the presidency. The editors of the Gray Lady pulled out the passage and floated it over the article in an oversized, multicolored type. This was ideological gold: the Bush administration openly and arrogantly admitting that they didn’t care about reality. One could almost feel the palpable excitement generated among the Times liberal readership, an enthusiasm mirrored and amplified all down the left side of the political spectrum on computer listservs, call-in radio shows, and print editorials over the next few weeks. This proud assertion of naked disregard for reality and unbounded faith in fantasy was the most damning evidence of Bush insanity yet. He must surely lose the election now.

What worried me then, and still worries me today, is that my reaction was radically different. My politics have long been diametrically opposed to those of the Bush administration, and I’ve had a long career as a left-leaning academic and a progressive political activist. Yet I read the same words that generated so much liberal and left animosity and felt something else: excited, inspired….and jealous. Whereas the commonsense view held that Bush’s candid disregard for reality was evidence of the madness of his administration, I perceived it as a much more disturbing sign of its brilliance. I knew then that Bush, in spite of making a mess of nearly everything he had undertaken in his first presidential term, would be reelected.
How could my reaction be so different from so many of my colleagues and comrades? Maybe I was becoming a neocon, another addition to the long list of defectors whose progressive God had failed. Would I follow the path of Christopher Hitchens? A truly depressing thought. But what if, just maybe, the problem was not with me but with the main currents of progressive thinking in this country? More precisely, maybe there is something about progressive politics that has become increasingly problematic.

The problem, as I see it, comes down to reality. Progressives believe in it, Bush’s people believe in creating it. The ideological inheritors of the May ’68 protest slogan of “Take your desires for reality” were now counseling its reversal: take reality for your desires. The left and right had switched roles: the right taking on the mantle of radicalism and progressives waving the flag of conservatism. Republicans were the ones proclaiming, “I have a dream.”
Dreams often make those left-of-center nervous. Fantasy and spectacle have been the property of Fascism, totalitarian Communism, and, more recently, the unspeakable horror known as Entertainment Tonight. Traditionally we are more comfortable with those things mumbled by the Times reporter underneath his breath: “Enlightenment principles and empiricism.”

It’s not surprising that progressives feel an affinity for the Enlightenment and empiricism. It was empiricism that broke the Church’s grip on the interpretation of the world. By challenging the Church on its explanations of the physical world, the empiricists opened up an assault on its political and spiritual power as well. Likewise, the Enlightenment ideal of man as a rational, reasoning creature undermined the hierarchies of feudalism and the foundations of divine right. Traditional “common sense” held that common people could not govern themselves nor act orderly in the marketplace. Contesting these assumptions cleared the way for new forms of politics and economics. The religious festivals and entertaining spectacles mobilized by church and crown to excite or divert the masses and cement religious or royal power could now be replaced by town meetings and coffee houses where enlightened citizens debated the issues of the day. These reasonable citizens, understanding reality as it is and not as it is imagined, would guide democracy and rationalize the market, breaking forever with a reactionary past cloaked in magic, mystery, and manipulation. In other words, and more to the point, progressives throughout history embraced the Enlightenment and empiricism because historically these ideas were progressive.
But all this is history. Appeals to truth and reality, and faith in rational thought and action, are based in a fantasy of the past, or rather, past fantasy. Today’s world is linked by media systems and awash in advertising images, political policies are packaged by public relations experts and celebrity gossip is considered news. More and more of the economy is devoted to marketing and entertainment or the performance of scripted roles in the service sector. We live in a “society of the spectacle,” as the French theorist provocateur Guy Debord declared back in 1967. Yet, faced with this new world progressives are still acting out a script inherited from the past. This is a mistake, for those who put their trust in Enlightenment principles and empiricism today are doomed to political insignificance. Spectacle is our way of making sense of the world. Truth and power belongs to those who tell the better story.

Walter Lippmann, the influential writer, popular newspaper editor and informal political adviser to nearly every president from Teddy Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, argued that democratic theory has little to do with democratic practice. Democratic theory resides in the coffee houses and government buildings where enlightened men hold reasoned conversations, examine evidence, and arrive at rational decisions. Theoretical democracy is a heady process. Its practice aims a bit lower. To win elections among a large and diverse population and get the majority to agree upon policy or go along with decisions, politicians, like their commercial counterparts in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue, speak to people’s fantasies and desires through a language of images and associations. By manipulating symbols, exploiting memories, and spinning stories the political elite are able to guide the direction of public opinion. “The practice of democracy has turned a corner,” Lippmann argued in his 1922 book Public Opinion, “A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.” He called this revolution the Manufacture of Consent.

Those of us opposed to rule by a political elite learned an important lesson from Lippmann. If democracy is to be sustained, and citizens are to truly govern their lives, then the manufacture of consent must be continuously revealed and deconstructed. Political stagecraft must be relentlessly attacked with our arsenal of facts and reason.
We learned the wrong lesson. Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which give these fantasies form. A politics that understands desire and speaks to the irrational. A politics that employs symbols and associations. A politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent.

MARK READ:

Cigarillos in the Tombs

I don't know exactly how long I'd been in custody, or what time it was, when the opportunity arose. It had to have been after 2:30am because it was 1:30 when I left the 9th precinct and got taken downtown to central booking at 100 center St, and at least an hour had ticked by since then. But it could have been three hours for all I knew. At some point, time begins to sort of stretch out around you, it’s edges becoming elusive, elastic losing definition. This comes after you've yielded to the unavoidable fact that you are indeed going to be "put through the system." After you've been photographed, fingerprinted, and searched. After the police van has crawled it's way downtown and you have finally arrived at "the tombs." After you've been herded into one cell, then another, then another, all of them brightly neon-lit.

After all this you find yourself in a 12'x20' concrete room with 26 silent, blank-eyed men in various states of half-consciousness, slouching on the benches and sprawled out across a floor so littered with bodies it is difficult to even walk around, much less find your own small patch of slab to lie down on. I find mine just to the left of the door, next to a bench, actually half under the bench. I use my hat as a pillow, pull my jacket over my eyes and disappear into the nothingness of time passing incarcerated. I don't know how long I’ll be here. It’s impossible (sadistically so) to know where I am in the mysterious process of, well, being “processed.” The processing, you see, is going on without you, upstairs, where the papers are being shuffled along from room to room, hopefully efficiently, hopefully intact and in order, and the lawyers and clerks and judges are divvying up who gets who and what they’ll offer and what they’ll take and so on and so forth, it’s all happening up there, and it seems to take an awfully long time, but then again, there are a whole lot of you in those cells All I know is that I am being processed, one second at a time.

This is where I am, lying on the concrete floor, jacket over my eyes, breathing evenly: in. out. in. out. I'm not sleeping really, just sort of checking out from the whole stupid situation, as I suspect is the case with most of my cellmates (except for the very-fat-but-not-quite-obese young guy of ambiguous ethnicity lying next to me, whose snoring is as loud as it is labored, the fat in his face and throat seems to constrict his air intake to such a degree that, at times, it seems that he will not be capable of drawing breath. It is like watching someone trying to suck chocolate mousse through a swizel stick. He is DEFINITELY sleeping, and does so almost the entire time that he is in the cell- appoximately 18 hours- which, if you think about it, is, like, worthy of the Guinness book of world records or something.) Anyway, I'm half paying attention to the goings on in my cell, which isn't much, but this doesn't stop a few guys from hatching plans:

Man, you got smoke?
Nah, man, they got mine. got papers though
allright then. need spark too
think he got spark
who
that dude in the corner
hey man
huh?
yeah. you got spark?
[nods]
cool
[pause]
need smoke man, definitely need some smoke
[looking around] anybody got smoke in here?
[no responses]
man, [a little louder, looking around] ain't nobody got smoke? damn.
[a sound from across the hall. another cell.]
what?
[from across the hall, isaiah's cell] you need smoke?
yeah, man, you got it?
yeah
cigarettes?
yeah, man i got cigarettes. how many?
how much for one?

And so it begins. The wheeler-dealer in our cell, the dealmaker-broker-arbitrator-negotiator guy, puts out the call: Cigarettes. For sale. Three dollars each, Fuck yeah I am in. I sit up, and give negotiator-dude, whose name turns out to be Cardozo, a wave. “You?” he askes. I nod. "Three dollars." I reach into my wallet -the cops, while they remove any reading material from your person during intake, don't take your money, for whatever arbitrary, cryptic reason. I hand Cardozo three bucks, as do a few others. He folds up the bills into tight little packets, and, after checking to make sure that no guards are looking (in case you hadn't figured it out, central booking is a strictly non-smoking environment), and tosses them through our bars, across the hall, and neatly into the other cell, where they are gathered up and counted by Young Latino and his cohort (later in the evening, for reasons that remain difficult for me to understand, this Young Latino, is taken out of his cell, forcibly taken down the hall out of our sight, and beaten by at least three Correctional Officers. We couldn't see what was going on, but we could hear him screaming, and we could hear the blows: Flesh on Flesh. Wood on clothed back. Flesh on Floor. What was unclear about it was why they went in to get him in the first place. As far as I could tell, they were busting him for holding/smoking/selling cigarettes, the very same ones that we had smoked, but this doesn't completely make sense, 'cause the officers clearly knew that guys were smoking and they couldn't have cared less. I mean, despite our efforts, there was a lot of smoke in the air. The CO's would walk through the hall and crack jokes about it: "That shit'll kill you guys, you know that right?" It didn’t seem to be a big deal. And yet this is what seemed to precipitate Young Latino's being grabbed. I could hear the CO, the really fucking evil one, name of Betzino, saying shit like: "check his fucking pants pockets. He's got 'em. Check his fucking socks. Yeah there we go. Think you're fucking smart, huh? Think you're fucking clever? You'll see clever you fucking dipshit! Pull your fucking pants up! Now move!." And they marched the kid out of his cell, and as he was passing in front of me, Betzino pushed him in the back. The kid turned on the bastard, and Betzino took his night stick and jabbed the kid in the neck. Three other CO's then ran at the kid, and dragged him down the hall out of our view. By now everyone, in all the cells, is yelling and banging on the bars: "Hey man cut that shit out! You can't do that man! That's fucking wrong man, that's fucking abuse man, you can't do that, somebody stop them, hey officer, you stop that shit right now man, you make them stop!" We never saw that kid again. I suspect he was taken to the hospital. I suspect he will be charged with assaulting an officer.)

We get our smokes, four of them, all menthol, which would
normally put me off, but in this case, well, in this case it really
isn't about smoking at all, at least not for me. I am straight-up
bored. What's more, any sense of personal agency, of free will, has
been taken from me. I am underground in a concrete cell with no books,
no paper, no pen, no friends, I have no idea what time it is, and I am
surrounded by 26 strangers. Purchasing a cigarette and clandestinely
smoking it sounds exquisite.

And it is. Everything about it, menthol or not, from Cardozo's slipping into my hand to
grinning at my co-conspirators, to smoking it into the toilet, which
is not a private room of course, but a bowl surrounded by half-walls
about three feet high. You duck your head, light the smoke, hit it
hard as you can, stand up, wave that smoke towards the bowl, flush,
and exhale into the swirling water, which takes most of the smoke down
with it, into the sewers of New York City. Repeat. You hit it as hard
as you can, nearly finishing it off, you use the cherry to light
another, hit it, and pass it on. I stand up from the toilet and walk
back out into the cell, my head spinning. It is, as they say, a rush.

Perhaps it was the nicotine, but from here on out, time seems to move in a more normal fashion.

KEITH MILLER:

The silence of Najmalabad

A certain distance from Islamabad one comes to Najmalabad. Arriving by mule the journey may be a long day or three days, by foot the distance is even more uncertain. Najmalabad is a small city or a large town, depending upon who tells it, and has even been called a small town by some who come from further away. What is certain is that in the streets of Najmalabad there are still to be found roaming about chickens and goats, mules and turkeys, and cows. On the outskirts of this old town or city one can easily hear the women laughing as they wash clothes or look idly at the river, waxing melancholically as the sun splashes upon the water. As the men return from the fields the jokes of the children hardly disturb them and the looks of these field workers denote a seriousness that seems transparently false.
Among the women there are many who still make reference to the strange woman who came some time ago– some say long ago and some say quite recently. As to why they talk about her not even this they agree upon.
“Her sari”, whispers one authoritatively. “Yes, her sari”, seconds another, “what a beautiful tone of pink, like a virgin rose minutes after sunset”, and she smiles to herself thinking of the color. “Pink!? It was closer to yellow. And I should know. I was the closest to her,” responds another indignantly. “Yellow as only the sea can be when one has sailed for too many days.” Then all offer their opinions, all contrary to the previous. “Burnt orange, as my daughter’s sadness which she has carried since the death of her daughter.” “No, no. It was more a delirious red, like that caused by those acrobats from Kajmir.” “How silly! We all saw that it was a golden blue, azure I might say, with a depth akin to one’s happiness on days that end too soon.” In the end, none could agree.
The men say nothing about that strange woman. In fact, they often say nothing. People from far away all know if they get to Najmalabad they must talk to the women or the children because the men have long since lost the desire to talk. Their deep, dark skin and solemn eyes speak for them and they move their hands only to work, to eat and to love. The women do not try to get words out of them, and besides it hardly occurs to them that their husbands would have something to say which they do not say with nocturnal caresses, understanding glances and slow, gentle kisses.
It has been some time since she left but still the conversations of the women refer to her time and again. The children also talk of her but in a more mysterious way. Their games are peppered with gestures that only the inhabitants of Najmalabad would understand to be references to her. While playing games of hide and seek they let out a slow sussing sound and all smile as they realize that they have been found, and that in this case being found is a happy affair. When they climb the tallest tree on the edge of town they let drop a smile which hits the ground with a tingling sound or better yet hits whoever might be below, and all the children laugh while the child who felt the unsuspected smile hit him blushes proudly.
Alone at night, each in their own home, the men eat and then sit by the fire looking into it longingly and occasionally a smile comes to their moist, full lips. The men’s hands are thin and long but strong with protruding veins and somewhat stained fingernails. With the tips of these fingernails they smoke hand rolled cigarettes and listen as the mothers play with the children.
The children ask innocent questions and receive answers they accept without understanding and then run over to the silent man that is their father, thrusting a loving hug upon him, which is returned, of course, silently.
The men go to sleep first, and will wake first. Their midday meal is prepared while they sleep and they will take it as they leave in the morning without a noise. Once the man is asleep, the mother and children sit by the fire and talk of the little and big things that have happened since the night before, and all the nights before.
In one of the dimly lit houses a little boy without front teeth smiles as his mother sews.
“Mama, when she came did she say why?”
“No, she just came.”
“And when she left?”
“No, she just left.”
“But then she’ll be back?”
“Well, that is a good question. You see, I am not really sure she has left at all. There are moments when I am sure she is right next to me. I can hear her splashing as I sit by the river and when I turn I find there is nothing there. But I still feel certain that she was there, only I didn’t see her just then. But then there are other times when I am sure she has never been here at all.
“When I look in the eyes of your father on days when there has been too hot a sun and when the dusk has taken too long to come, I feel just as certain that she has never come because then I can’t remember what she looked like. “When I ask my sister she tells me her eyes were almond shaped and brown but your auntie says they were soft and grey with only a deep hint of brown. I am almost certain they were round and penetrating, caressing with a yellow golden brown light in them.
“So maybe she will come back; maybe she will come back just because she has never been here and we all have wanted her to come so that we have invited her without realizing it. We have all invited a small part of her and between all of us she has felt the need to come. We have created such a need that she can do nothing else but come.”
The little boy smiled sadly as he thought of the woman and listened to the voice of his mother. When she had finished talking he looked into the fire and said nothing, as if in rehearsal for his becoming a man.