Priya
Right away, I ask the eighth floor nurse for the body.
They've stored Ma in a hall of corpses, the city's dead washed into this antiseptic room and lined under circular lights: nameless, waiting. When the nurse pulls off the sheet, Ma stays still, her palms pressed to her thighs, where they never went in public, her face as smooth as a mannequin's, as if life had never creased it in lines we'd liked to read.
"You can touch her," the nurse says.
And I do, though I'd rather put eleven days between me and my mother's meat, a television set between me and all these dead. I press my finger to her hand, soft in spots where the flesh swells up like overripe fruit. I ruffle the down along her arm, circle the jut of shoulder bone. I press a blue line down her chest to her used, sideways breast. Ma, I think, your powder and Ponds cream smell's gone. When I pull my finger back, her skin flakes into ash under my nail.
The nurse ruffles through her clipboard pages, and I wonder if they tell how Ma slipped into sea. If she'd missed the Assamese she and Baba had shared, so looked to water for words? If she'd tired of haunting the house alone, had wandered into city thinking, this is relief.
"When you're ready," the nurse says, "there are others waiting to look."
Freckled Irish faces wait on the threshold, firefighter buttons pinned to coats. The lady, too shaken in her handkerchief, won't look up, but the old man touches his hat, lets me pass.
I find what's left of my family in Biallo's office, an empty chair between them both. My brothers hug me, Dilip rod-straight like Ma, Roy hunched and dark like Baba and me. Biallo pushes up his owl-frame glasses and says, "she didn't just drown. She popped some pills, then dunked herself."
Roy puts his arm around my shoulders.
"Which brings me to my next question," Biallo says. "How you want to handle this."
"She wanted to be cremated," I say.
"We should bury her with Baba," Dilip says.
"If you'd asked her," Roy says, "you woulda known she wanted a cremation."
"Priya," Dilip says, "tell him I wasn't talking to him."
"We're not your banking boys," Roy says. "We're not gonna roll over and fetch."
"Dilip," I say, "We could always bury her ashes with Baba."
Dilip shoves back his chair. "How come you always take his side?"
"You're the reason she did this," Roy says.
"Roy," I say.
"After Baba died," Roy tells me, "he didn't come to the house no more. He didn't make time in his shitty bougie life for us."
Biallo clears his throat, taps some papers together, but Dilip answers back. "Stop talking like you're black."
"What?" Roy says. "You want me to turn into a little white boy like you?"
"My job paid for Baba's funeral. Yours doesn't pay at all. Which means I'll be paying for whatever we do with Ma."
"You're right. Working with people doesn't pay as much as playing with numbers. Wait-you remember what people are? Or they just scenery to you now?"
"At least I don't work with fucking Puerto Ricans. I know who my people are."
"What's that supposed to mean?" I say. Dilip doesn't know I'm back again with Manni.
"Ask him," Dilip says. "Who beat up the Pakistanis on our block? Who clubbed the Sikh man in Queens? That's the kind of scum his group works with."
"Hold up, Uncle Tom," Roy says. "The Puerto Ricans we work with aren't going after Desis."
"Dilip," I say. "Some of the attackers were kids."
Dilip pulls on his trench coat. "I can't believe you two are defending this shit."
I grab his wrist. "Please don't go."
As Dilip strides out, Roy scrapes his chair close, where I'm crying into my palms.
"Come on," he says. "We'll have lunch at my place."
No other arm to take, I take his, and Biallo calls after us. "No problem. You kids take your time. Let me know when you've decided."
But already, the clicks and murmurs of people in waiting rooms, at reception desks, over the telephone, people looking for their lives to be handed back with holes, already they drown Biallo out.
Angana
In blue room, four men hunch at desk, two so young boys. Tall one shakes leg up-down, small one slumps into shell. Black cop sits on desk, hands folded, nameclip McQueen.
He say, "53 year old South Asian woman. Recently widowed, clerk in law office. No drinking, no drugs. No history of mental illness. So why'd she do it?" He play with Rubix cube, as if boys will suddenly answer own question, but tall one rub head, small one look out window. At brown apartments, trees on gray streets.
"I gotta go," McQueen say, and pats desk. "Let me know when you've thought it out."
And there is trade, black cop leaving, brown girl coming in. Now boys talk, like cello and bass playing over each other, rising-sitting like game of musical chair. Brother-sister, the way they touch skin like their own, read gestures even before they come. But I can only watch, no mouth to speak, no hand to reach. Again, I must wait.
Still, too soon my children split, room and hospital, Marisol following Dilip, me Priya and Roy. They drive down blocks I have not seen eleven days-not since city's big buildings fall-stores and highrises I must have known. Roy keeps car on Lydig, where he and Priya wind through crowd: bodies smoking at meter, waiting on line at plastic-curtain grocery, by apple mound, carnation tub, sipping coffee at Kosovar club, Rainbow deli. All around, from Laundromat to library, words ring like coin on concrete: Chinese, Urdu, Yiddish, Spanish, Italian while white-hair lady say doesn't anybody speak English? And here, in middle of bodies-Pakistani women in salwar pushing stroller across street, baby-face Puerto Rican girls laughing in tight jean, gold hoop ring, old Jewish men plodding in long black coat, pretty Russian boys in wifebeater, smoking on car hood-here I lose them. I lose my children.
Priya
I wait till Monday lunch to ask the Boss if he can bend the rules a little, so I can cremate Ma at the beach. The sky's smoky behind him, and he squints at me as if he's not sure how I got near his computer, his emails about debris.
I start again. "I've been working for the Parks Department two years."
"Two years, three months," he says. "Law says, go through a funeral director. Though no one's gonna get permission so fast from the city."
"Especially at this time," I say, like the good girl Ma raised me to be, though what use is it now?
At my cubicle, I call Manni with the receiver under my desk. "Fucking bureaucracy. They'll make me comb the beach for out-of-towners too scared to visit the Bronx. But I can't take her there."
"Cut work and go home," Manni says. "I'll meet you at the house and we'll figure something out."
The house, though, is neat, as if Ma vacuumed and plumped pillows, knowing I'd come looking for clues. Only on the kitchen wall, she left dust prints of pictures she'd stacked on the dining table. I spread the pictures like I'm reading my fortune, the Saikia family story from A to Z. First frame: Ma and Baba kneel under their wedding canopy, white mekhla draped over Ma's cheek, a marigold headdress on Baba's bent head. Second frame: Ma and Baba pose before the green lady, Dilip, a baby in a beribboned cap, sandwiched between them, their first American for their first American month. Third frame: Dilip and Roy, munchkins in yellow shirts, Dilip licking ice cream before the Bronx Zoo lions, Roy holding Dilip's pocket and staring up at him. Then frame after frame of me, the only girl, in lacy dresses Ma had stitched at nights on her machine. And the last, a picture I hadn't known she'd hung, of her and Baba on the sofa of their last party, Ma leaning forward with her glass, Baba lounging back, a skeleton with shining eyes.
I'm weeping when Manni steps into the hall, his lean bronze form holding a Styrofoam carton. "Priya," he says, and bustles out yellow rice, red beans, charred chicken on plates, fills the kitchen with the dingy scent of the train up from Harlem, where he works with thirty-five kids. "Most of the students are mixed," he says. "Half devil, half sweet."
"I don't get it," I say, pushing the frames at him.
"Yes you do. You knew it was coming."
"Not like this. She left me alone."
"You got people," he says, and food smoking, we walk to my room.
Ma kept it as I did when I was a girl, curtains blue and frilly, videos alphabetized on the bookshelf. But on my bed, I lie in ways I never did, Manni séancing his hands over me. And as I move up over him, I watch the moon slant onto the sharp bones of his face, the way his lush lips part for words, how his half-shut eyes pool with black milk, and I think, how good it is to possess, to show the world something so fine, say, look, look at what I have, but know sweetly too, that you alone can see this, that this alone is yours.
When I roll away breathless, Manni cups my bum and draws me close. His breath on my neck warms me from my chill, the quiet of the next room, where Ma and Baba slept. No whispering, no rustling there, no more of the night they first weighed each other's limbs, the evenings they learned each other's pauses, those caresses that lost luster as others grew dearer. Did Ma and Baba listen for me after I'd left, and imagine me back on such a night?
"Why," I say, "won't they let us use the beach?"
"Track down the girl who found her," Manni says. "I know a brother in the station who'll move his beat there if we need him."
"Manni?"
"Hmm."
"You think we go blank when we die?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
"So nothing lasts?"
But my man rolls over to sleep, and I hold him tonight, the twelfth night the Assamese call sopondi, when food should be placed by water for the souls of the dead. I hold him until the grandfather clock chimes nine, then slip from bed. I fill a basin with soaked rice, chickpeas, and bananas. I walk down the damp street for the number twelve bus. I don't know why I wait-Manni seems to think the dead forget the living, and who knows if a soul will be at Orchard Beach-but I board the twelve anyway. I'm the sort of soul that can't leave her dead behind.