It all started with the “dream catcher”—the day Shila thought that little thing could solve their problem. 

Standing in front of a booth with a gaping mouth, mesmerized, she watched a robust lady showing off a dreamcatcher. It was Shila’s first visit to the Oakland flea market, in fact to any flea market. Flea market?—she had never heard of this phrase before coming to America.

A belly dancer shimmied her shapely curves, dancing to an Arabian tune, shimmering a silver belt on her hips. At another corner, three African drummers were playing on enormous drums—thumping drim drim … dhadina natina … It sounds so much like the dhaker bol from back home, Shila thought. Music vibrated in the atmosphere, mixed with the shrill glee of little girls, cotton candies in their hands. Then Shila heard, “Dreamcatcher, dreamcatcher … a dreamcatcher catches your dreams.” 

Shila turned around.

The tall, burly lady hollered, “It chases away your bad dreams, your nightmares … your evil thoughts. Fill your life with light,” she said in a sing-song husky voice. Her long gnarled fingers opened and closed; silver and blue turquoise rings shone on her fingers. She shouted: “It picks up your bad dreams and chases them away.” She hoisted a circular metal frame decorated with threads and tiny seed beads. 

Shila thought it looked like a splendid spider web.

The woman sensed Shila’s enchantment. Maybe it was her long braid or her nose stud, or maybe there was something ethnic in her ways, that made the lady chuckle and she slid close. Her limp salt-and-pepper hair swayed as she hunched her way over to Shila. Lowering her husky voice, she said, “You suffer from nightmares, young lady?” Her brows furrowed.

“No,” Shila said, shaking her head.

“Your child then?” She looked at Shila’s little daughter, Jaya, who kept clutching Mommy’s skirt. 

“No. I’m thinking of my husband,” Shila said. “He’s a dream chaser.” She smiled a shy grin. “I am exhausted with his constant job changing and moving.” She lowered her gaze to the ground and started digging the dirt with her big toe.

“I see.” The lady nodded with a serious face. Then straightened up, fixing her eyes on Shila. “It’ll work.” She jerked her head. “Dream chaser, dream catcher, whatever you call it, it will solve the problem. Only twenty dollars, ma’am. All handmade. A perfect gift, for Christmas, for birthdays!” 

Shila picked one. A large heart-shaped pendant hung from a hook, a few crystals dangling from gray threads. What impressed her most was the way light reflected on the crystals and refracted, breaking into yellow, orange, and blue hues. 

Jaya, her six-year-old daughter, clapped. “Mama, see a rainbow. Rainbow on the floor!” She started playing hopscotch with the pattern on the ground. 

“But twenty dollars?” Shila puckered her lips.

“Papa’s birthday tomorrow, remember?” Jaya exclaimed with wide eyes.

“Okay, I’ll take one,” Shila said.

***

When she gifted it to her husband, Asim, he seemed unimpressed. “For me?” He looked at it and put it back in the gift bag. 

“I’ll buy your mom a nice electric saw for her birthday,” he said to Jaya, then turned to his wife,  with a smirk on his lips. But Shila felt excited and hung it over their bedroom window. 

A ray of light bounced on it. Instead of a rainbow, it cast a shadow, like a spider’s web. The pattern swirled on the floor. Shila bent down and saw a tiny bug scurrying through those lines as if it was trapped in a labyrinth. Its yellow body with brown dots resembled the tie dye bandhani on her own skirt. The bug tried to get out of the labyrinth shadow, but was perplexed. Shila stooped and tried to let it out. Silly bug! It stopped, retreating its legs in its body, as if it was paralyzed. 

Shila felt an ominous anxiety. She closed the window, and the room became dark.

***

“He has ambition. This boy will rise to the top.” This was what Shila overheard her father telling her mother before her marriage. That was years ago when they were in India. 

***

Father was right, the way Asim is thriving in his job, promoted to the executive engineer rank from assistant just in one year. She looked around their spacious house in Jharkhand, India—the quarters the Bokaro Steel company had provided them. The marble floor and the tall windows with silk drapes sparkled.

She drew herself closer to the oversized Belgian mirror, thinking about all this. Dabbing her ring finger in the silver sindur kouto, she took out a touch of the auspicious vermillion powder and placed a dot between her shapely brows; then, on the parting of her hair, she whispered a prayer for the long life of her husband. 

That’s the ritual for all Hindu Bengali married women. Your husband’s well-being and his dreams are yours. 

***

Shila loved the environment after Asim’s promotion in the Bokaro Steel Project. It was India’s pride and her husband was an important person in the engineering of this national dream. 

***

It had rained in the afternoon and the monsoon air, fragrant with bel phool, made her feel cool and fresh. It must be the bowl of jasmine the maid had placed on the glass table on the veranda.

Ambling there, her just-washed hair swaying, part of her silk sari anchal dragging like a bride’s train, she came to the veranda where Asim sat with his bare feet up on the glass table. He had moved the jasmine bowl to a corner from the center to rest his feet. His fingers were laced on his lap, his gaze was fixed far away. 

Shila found he was engrossed in some thoughts—eyes narrowed to a focus as if he would shoot a dart or something. Like that of Arjun’s—penetrative, ready to hit the eye of the golden fish with the arrow that Shila had read about in the Mahabharata book. 

Shila cleared her throat to break the spell and drew her wicker chair closer to his.

“You think a hundred and twelve people will fit in the lawn if we have a tent? Or shall we ask for the clubhouse? Another easier solution is doing it in a restaurant.”

“What? Why?” Asim shook his head, turning to her.

“For the party. Your promotion party, silly. People are pestering me. I can’t lower the number under one hundred,” Shila said, pouting her lips.

“Party? Nonsense.” He laughed out loud. “Useless.” Asim shook his head.

“You don’t throw a party to be useful, Asim. It’s a way to give thanks.” 

“Heaven’s sake … thanks to whom?” He raised his voice, focusing his eyes on Shila’s face. “What’s the big deal? What future do I have here, in this country?” 

What’s he saying? Shila shivered inside. 

Asim picked up a magazine that rested on his lap, the cover picturing a red convertible with a silver insignia of an animal. A jaguar or a leaping lynx? 

Shila bent down to see as Asim flapped the pages of the magazine—SPAN. 

The skyline of a shimmering city at dusk, illuminated in front of an ocean, and a beautiful picture of an orange bridge. The adjoining page adorned an image of a mountainous swerving road, sea foam swishing beside it. 

“This is where I belong. This is where all the great things are happening. I am an engineer, Shila, I have to go here.” He tapped on the image. 

Shila trembled. Her excitement, pride, and security shattered and crumpled like a ball of trash. She gazed at her husband’s dreamy eyes. What a strange amber color!—as if she had never noticed it before. He’ll rise to the top, she believed, and opened her book of Mahabharata.

It was the page where Arjun is abandoning Draupadi, his wife. Though Draupadi was forced to marry all the five Pandava brothers, it was only Arjun she loved, whom she considered as her lover, her proper husband. It was only Arjun she gave her heart to. 

“Why, Arjun, why do you abandon me and go to Subhadra? What does she have that I don’t?” asked Draupadi, whose beauty and charm turned many heads. Her tearful eyes searched for the answer on Arjun’s face.

“You are too bright, too perfect, too dazzling, my dear. Your beautiful eyes have fire in it. The strength in your persona sparks. It humiliates me. Threatens me, Draupadi. Subhadra is simple, soft, and shallow. Her gaze adores, soothes, worships me. Subhadra is plain, and that’s why she won.” 

Shila closed the book and walked away

***

“I did it, I did it, I made it.” Asim’s enthusiasm bubbled like an open bottle of champagne. Passport, visa, an air ticket in his right hand, a resignation letter in left, he hoisted Shila up in the air. And then gave her a passionate kiss. 

When Shila found the ground beneath her feet, and the dizzy spell subsided, she asked, “Do you have a job there, an address where to go?”

“No, so what?” Asim grinned with confidence, brushing his fingers through his dark waves of hair. 

Household things were sold, given away, packed in moving boxes to go to his parents’ home in Bolpur, a hundred miles away from Kolkata. He dumped me and Jaya too with my in-laws. 

***

Then the day came when, with a light suitcase in hand and eight dollars in pocket, he boarded the train at the Bolpur station. He’d go to Kolkata first, then to the USA by a plane, in a foreign land where no one knew him, no one had invited him and his poor motherland could only spare eight dollars from her Reserve Bank. 

The entire town seemed involved. Fifty-three friends and family members came to see him off at the station. They were impressed that a fellow like them was going to America to try something new, bring something precious. That’s inspiring indeed.

Shila stood in front of the train window also with them, a daughter on her hip. Her eyes blurred with tears, her heart filled with confusion. 

The train whistled a shrill ultimatum, hissing black smoke in the clear blue sky. The station master waved a green flag. Her beloved’s face framed in a rectangular window moved away little by little in the vast unknown. 

***

Tin tin tin, the post man came every day at four in the afternoon with his stack tied at the back of his cycle. Shila rushed to stand in front of the window, anticipating a blue aerogramme letter with a USA stamp on it. But it took at least fourteen days for her letter to reach him and fourteen days for his letter to come. So only one letter a month could be expected.  But just in case. With this expectation, she came running at the window each afternoon at four, stopping whatever she had been doing. 

Neighbors asked, “What does he write, eh?” 

Shila dropped her gaze to the ground with a coy smile, drawing the sari corner to drape around her face. Do you ever ask a bride what her husband writes to her? 

“No, I mean, when are you going to him? To America? Is he coming soon?” The nosy neighbor asked, the one who walked like a duck. The others waited to get the gossip from her. 

Sometimes they gathered and looked at her funny, turning their heads, slapping each other’s back with raw jokes, giggling. Shila was sure they were talking about her, gossiping, weaving rumors to fill the gaps of the juicy story about her married life. She saw them when she was up on the rooftop to gather the dried, laundered saris. She hid behind the saris, pretending not to see them. One day her sister-in-law, Mona, even commented, tongue in her cheek, “I don’t know what’s going on with my brother. Maybe he got tangled with some blond memsahib. Hee hee. Sorry, Boudi, just kidding.”

And when there was a letter, that night her father-in-law asked in his husky voice, “Any good news?” as he paced back and forth in the long hallway, in his silk robe. “Did he write anything about Jaya and you going?” Hands behind his back, folds on his forehead.

Really, what did he write to her? They all wondered, not knowing that he wrote about the clover leaf freeways and the sun-kissing buildings, strong and erect, from where the world beneath looked like a child’s toy land. Those were the things he wrote in a playful tone. And about the boys and girls, men and women who kissed in broad daylight in the middle of the street. That was normal there. No one ever minded or cared to turn heads.

That night Shila had a dream, or rather a nightmare. But it ended nicely. In her dream she was  lying next to her husband. Her nape on his muscular forearm, face on his bare body. She could still feel the warmth of his skin, hear the rhythm of his chest, smell his breath, like that of an unripe guava. 

Then in the morning, she opened her eyes to a terrible emptiness. Her heart ached. She felt Asim had betrayed her. It was all a lie. She was alone, and he didn’t care. 

A rage bobbed. Shila hid her face over the pillow. She hoisted it up and smashed it; punched it and threw it across the room. Tears gushed down her cheeks as she kicked it over and over, picked it up and punched it again, until it exhausted her. 

***

Someone knocked. She pretended not to hear. Shila went to the bathroom to wash away all that insult, wipe off all that helplessness and hurt. Dabbing pink lipstick on her lips, kohl kajal on her eyes, she painted a smile on her face. Straightening her back, she looked in the mirror. I am fine. 

When she came to the breakfast table, everyone was waiting to hear what Asim had written. Shila concocted a delightful story about the promising future he had chosen and the bright picture of American life. How he was dying to have his family right now, but it was Shila who begged for more time. 

“Let Jaya get a little older and spend this season with you all … with her grandparents.” I told them all these lies and my in-laws nodded, impressed. 

Her mother-in-law placed another golden puffed loochi, the delicious rolled out just-fried dough, on her plate and said, “You might have to do everything yourself. I heard there are no maids, no cooks, no help whatsoever in that country.”