Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [1]
While the children, comforted by story, curl into sleep on their bed-pallets, the Cosmic Spirit will smile on its daughter-goddess, then go back to creating, preserving, breaking and re-creating the cosmos as always.
And Devi? The Earth Mother and Warrior Goddess wipes demon blood off weapons and puts them away for the next time they are needed.
Part One
I can almost touch the diamond-hard light of stars and the silky slipperiness of leaves, almost taste smoke softer than clouds and sweeter than memory, almost feel God’s breath burn off my sins.
What have I done but what my mothers did? The one who gave me birth, and the one I am just beginning to claim. Like them, I took a god of a special time and place as my guide.
My mothers, luminous as dewdrops in dawnlight, weightless as the wings of a newborn dragonfly, float towards me from the place where I was born. I have no clear memory of my birthplace, only of the whiteness of its sun, the harshness of its hills, the raspy moan of its desert winds, the desperate suddenness of its twilight: these I see like the pattern of veins on the insides of my eyelids.
I tell myself I must have been left unattended in the sun. Maybe the sand-yellow sun was low in the morning sky and whichever Gray Sister was charged with caring for me had been detained in the fields as the sun mounted. I don’t want to believe it was an overcrowded orphanage’s scheme to rid itself of a bastard half American. One murder attempt is enough. Some days while shoveling snow off the stoop in Schenectady, I have smelled heady hibiscus-scented breezes; I have felt tropical heat and humidity.
Tonight, in the cabin of this houseboat off Sausalito as curtains of flame dance in the distance and a million flashbulbs burn and fizzle, and I sit with the head of a lover on my lap, the ferrous taste of fear invades me as though my whole body were tongue.
For all official purposes, like social security cards and unemployment benefits, I am, or was, Debby DiMartino, a fun-loving twenty-three-year-old American girl. I was adopted into a decent Italian-American family in the Hudson Valley. That’s the upside of adoption. And believe me, I’ve approached this situation, my situation, from every angle. The downside is knowing that the other two I owe my short life to were lousy people who’d considered me lousier still and who’d left me to be sniffed at by wild dogs, like a carcass in the mangy shade.
The upside and the downside of being recyclable trash don’t quite balance. Debby DiMartino is a lie. Whoever my parents intended for me to be never existed. That un-claimable part of myself is what intrigues me, the part that came to life in a desert village and had the name Baby Clear Water Iris-Daughter until it was christened in a Catholic orphanage. That’s the part I want to remember. But there’s another part I try to keep secret, the part that sings to moons and dances with stars. With everything I’ve done, I’ve tried to find a balance. It’s just that Debby DiMartino has no weight, no substance. I had to toss her out.
Cherchez le garçon. There was a boy, back when I was a stubby little thirteen-year-old. He was a twenty-two-year-old graduate student at Syracuse. I had no way of knowing there’d be a growth spurt—I was adopted—I only had my sister Angie to go by, which meant I had nothing to look forward to but getting fat and a puberty