Queen of Dreams by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

strikes me suddenly that I don’t know her as fully as I thought I did. She who had come out of my body, tiny and crumpled and containable—even she now has parts to her life that I can’t enter. It doesn’t matter whether they’re real or imagined. I feel excluded all the same. Like the rest of my family—my mother, my father, Sonny—she too has become an enigma.
    Later that night, lying sleepless in bed, thinking of all the things that were going wrong in my life, I’d realize I’d included Sonny in my family list. And with chagrin I’d admit that he was still family, much as I wanted to disown him. Because only family filled you with such exasperation. Only family could irritate you like a hangnail that you couldn’t chew off, no matter how much you tried.
    When we turn into the apartment’s parking lot, Jona is singing something under her breath. They sound like nonsense words. But who knows, maybe they’re Czechoslovakian.

10
     
    She has been trying for days to complete the painting, but she hasn’t had any success. She’s pleased with the foliage, the sky, the quality of light. It’s the man that’s giving her trouble. His body seems stiff and posed; there’s something fake about the angle of his neck. And his face—she’s been unable to draw it at all. Sometimes, frustrated, she’s tempted to cover him over with a rhododendron bush. But that would mean a major defeat, and she isn’t ready for that, not yet, even though the show opens in three days.
    Things are getting worse at the Chai House. Stragglers wander in every once in a while. But it seems to her that they look around in surprise, as though taken aback at finding themselves in this place. As though they had meant to go somewhere else. They buy take-out coffee and leave as soon as they can. Even Belle’s offer of free Dietbusters (they’ve stopped stocking other snacks) isn’t enough to hold them—or to entice them back.
    Where are their regular customers, Rakhi wonders. What has happened to Mrs. Locklin? To old Professor Rogers? To the Laurel Street Book Club members, who used to come in every Wednesday and fill the corner nook with the intense electricity of their arguments? She thinks of them all with bafflement and concern—and a sense of betrayal.
    Last evening she walked into the store to find Belle poring over the accounts. Belle beckoned her over to her laptop computer and jabbed at the screen, at the column with the minus numbers. They’d been running at a loss for weeks. Now there wasn’t enough left to pay for next week’s supplies.
    “Rent’s due in two weeks,” Belle said. The skin around her eyes looked raw, as though she’d been rubbing at it. In the weak well of light from the laptop screen, her lips were blue. “Where are we going to get the money?”
    They weren’t savers; their own bank accounts were too slender to last them more than a month or so. They couldn’t go to the bank. They already had an outstanding loan. Their parents, never wealthy, had helped them as much as they could already.
    “I guess we couldn’t ask Sonny, huh?” Belle said. “He is the richest person we know. Doesn’t that nightclub pay him an obscene amount of money—?”
    “Belle!”
    “Okay, okay, forget I mentioned it.”
    “Give me a little time,” Rakhi said. “I’ll come up with something.” But all she had managed to do as she lay in bed that night, staring at the crisscrossed pattern of light and shadow thrown on her ceiling by the streetlamp, was to dislodge the rock she’d positioned so carefully over the snake hole in her memory.
    She is back in college, in the classroom with large, green-shuttered windows where she first met Sonny. It’s a literature class on modern Indo-Anglian writers, and by this she knows she’s in a dream, for the university had never offered such a class when she was there, and she’s not even sure what the term means.
    (But perhaps this is something else, a not-dream that we