Delight
- Nov 22, 2019
- 4 min read
by K Dulai
I have money, but I have been transient for quite some time. Moving readily from town to town, in search of the best view from a park bench, the warmest library, the prettiest river. Early on, I found my way to Monterey Bay, searching for the most glorious fish, of course. I met an Indian woman there. She was living homeless on the street. You don’t see many of us like that, but she was with some white man. I gave them my corned beef hash and they ate it with a rapture I had not felt since I was their age, maybe twenty years before. It gave me pleasure to share a corner of delight with them, some light conversation over a post-meal coffee. We exchanged email addresses, but I never heard from them again. They had been in search of something, too. I hope they found it. Well, I hope she found it. I didn’t really care much for him. I hope she found the bluest sea and when she did, she left him on the dull and drying shore.
I spend a lot of time in coffeeshops, most of them chains because that’s just the way things have been for quite some time now. I would say the music inside is always grim, but there are moments when the official selections let a conch shell or tabla in. It happens rarely, though, and I rejoice when it does. But joy is the sound of one hand clapping. The thing about sitting alone in a coffeeshop when a nice beat comes on is that if you move, if you smile, if you let your shoulders roll to the music — people just think you’re crazy. I have had enough of that.
Once when I was abroad—this was when I was not alone—I lost my wallet at a Turkish Delight store. We were not far from the Grand Bazaar and I had just picked up my favorite possession of all time. It was a pencil box with a scene of Mongol horsemen lacquered on; they looked like my grandfather, majestic and focused. My wallet was bright yellow, but I have always been forgetful. I put it down on the counter as I drank my çay and I didn’t notice it was gone until we went out that night with a man we had met on our trip to Cappadocia. My husband was out of cash and, like paupers, we had to tell the near stranger we were with that we had no money. The gentleman paid for everything that night, but refused to give us his mailing address so that we could pay him back. It was Istanbul and the trolleys and ferries reminded me of San Francisco, not far from where I am now. The man, he was Californian with parents from Oaxaca, tawny skin like mine. We stopped for coffee, sat sock-footed at a low table on waves of deep red Turkish carpets. We told about our lives, the way you do with strangers abroad. You talk about your great loves until the end of the night—fine chocolate, languages, central Asian textiles. And when you’re with a spouse, you convey the aching duty of monogamy in every gesture and glance. You keep your head low, marveling at the coffee sets, marveling at the sugar in your demitasse looking like a little dune waiting to be flattened by a dark tide.
He was in Turkey, after spending five months in Greece, on a public health study. He was trying his best to immerse himself in the culture, but with faces like ours — wide and dusky as the ancestors who brought us through Siberia — his over the Bering Strait and mine through the Hindu Kush — it was hard to blend in. Still, he found his way to a few clandestine spots that mostly only locals knew. He took us inside a nightclub with only dull blue moonglow and candles for light, where members of a Romani family played music. There was one woman dancing, our temporary friend made sure to tell us, who was just a pleasure to watch. She was. I wanted to be like her. Able to sway my hips, tambourine in hand, wearing red lipstick. But I shirked away to a corner while my husband nodded his head and bandied his body about to the music, like it was his own.
That way of making things belong to you, things foreign and distant, is what split us up in the end. I was foreign in his family — dark, short, brooding. And I never quite belonged to him. I was always up too close, talking my heart out. Crying about loss, about what I thought love should be, about wanting a child.
One night recently, I wandered into a bar in Oakland near the Lake. I thought I saw the man who’d paid for our last night in Istanbul, but it wasn’t him. Whoever he was, I bought him a drink. “Yes, tell me about your novel,” I told him. “Tell me about the dreams that you once had.”
K Dulai lives in the Bay Area. Her work has appeared in Pretty Owl Poetry, The Eastern Iowa Review, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. She is a fiction editor at Periwinkle Literary Magazine.
